Barf Forth Apocalyptica
barf forth apocalyptica => Apocalypse World => Topic started by: Radu on December 16, 2010, 01:50:31 PM
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I just started my first Apocalypse World game last weekend, and it is fantastic! I'm playing Bishop, a Gunlugger with a heart of depleted uranium and chronic trigger finger itch. In the backstory, he was the son of a hold comprised mostly of a marooned Australian Special Forces unit (how exactly they got marooned in the middle of the USA has not come up and neither Bishop nor I know yet).
Bishop's job is to hurt people, plain and simple, but it goes much deeper than that. Just like a Savvyhead with their array of tools, there's a lot more to putting the hurt on someone than the uninitiated realize. Bishop isn't just another thug for hire: He's an artist, whose chosen medium is violence. He is, in other words, a Goddamned Combat Picasso.
New Move:
Goddamned Combat Picasso: whenever you inflict harm, you may deal -1 harm and choose 1 of the following:
- your enemy looses their footing.
- your enemy looses their grip on whatever they're holding.
- your enemy looses track of someone or something they're attending to.
You may deal -2 harm and choose 1 of the following
- add or subtract the area tag from your weapon.
- add or subtract the messy tag from your weapon.
- increase or decrease the range of your weapon by 1 increment. (intimate<->hand<->close<->far.)
- add ap to your weapon
You can trade more than 1 harm this way, up to a maximum of the total harm your attack inflicts- you can't inflict less than 0 harm. Each option can only be chosen once.
Design Logic:
This move is intended to simulate shooting the gun out of someone's hand, pinning their arm to the wall with a thrown knife, cutting buttons off of their shirt with a sword, and any other display of skill and control with a weapon.
Cinematic examples of this include the scene in Robocop 2 where Robocop's been reprogrammed to be all sweetness and light and he comes on a guy smoking a cigarette. Robocop whips out his automatic pistol and blasts away, making a bullet hole outline of the guy's body and blasting the cigarette from his mouth.
Does this do what it's intended to do? Is it balanced? Is it distinctive? Would you ever take it?