Re: Scenes,augmentation and ranks

From: David Cake <dave_at_...>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 02:14:40 +0800


At 2:59 PM +0100 10/2/02, <zero-c_at_...> scribbled:
>I donīt know if anybody knows the manga-comic book"Eden"by Hiroki Endo.
>Its a cyberpunk setting with lots of action but actually very brutal
>for western taste.
>Often,i think about,how to resolve the scenes with HeroWars and
>everytime its possible,without any special rules,thats really so
>great about these rules!
>There is one scene where a character called Kenji,a one man
>slaughterhouse(he surely has a W3 fighting ability,or higher),fights
>against three heavy armoured troopers with guns.He has only two,very
>big,military knives and some really advanced acrobatic skills.
>The troopers are distracted and Kenji jumps of a rooftop(maybe 2,5 m
>high)on the first trooper,slamming the knife right through the
>helmet into his head.Then sommersaulting off his shoulders to the
>next trooper and cutting his throat[thats kind of super ninja-i
>admit :-)]
>How would you resolve that?this is an extended contest.The attack is
>surely augmented by the extra force that comes from the "falling
>off" the rooftop and the Ap bid should be very high,because of the
>risky nature of the maneuvre.But as i see it,this is an augment the
>narrator decides-you dont really roll for this,do you?So how much
>edge would you give for that attack?

        One of the secrets of HW is that exactly how you handle something within the rules has a lot to do with how important it is to your narrative. If, in a comic, it all takes place in one frame, then, it might even be a simple contest.

        But I would treat the manouver you describe actually two actions. An acrobatic action, with a large number of APs at stake, then a combat action, with a large number of APs at stake. Remember, an action in an extended contest does not have to actually be an attack, just something that give you a big advantage.

        (as an aside, running it this way means that his acrobatics ability is the one used to determine how many APs he has, not combat ability. An alternative way to run it would be to use acrobatics as an augment - what better suits the story? )

>I would actually say,its not very probable to be able to slam a
>knife through a military helmet into someones head and kill him.I
>mean a helmet is designed to stop bullets and thus knifes as well.In
>RQ you had definite armourpoints against definite damage points,so
>with the exception of criticals you could say,you can penetrate or
>you cant.This is not the case in HW.

        And you just quoted us a story where that happens in the narrative - so obviously, it SHOULD be able to happen in a game that wants to simulate that sort of narrative. If you want to run a different, more 'realist' (whatever that means) narrative, run it differently - which can be as simple as just describing what happens differently.

>So has the narrator the last word,when it comes to possibilities?

        Don't they always?

>Are there cases where there is a simple no-go.Like you canīt
>penetrate the wall with your arrow and kill the one whoīs standing
>behind it ?Or is it all a matter of what you like and whats dramatic
>and nice for the flow of the story?

        Its pretty much up to the flow of the story. If you wanted to make it very difficult to shoot through a wall, you could give it some enormous number of armour ranks - if they get enough augments to overcome it, there is probably a good reason why they can shoot through the wall.

	Cheers
		David

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