How to run a good fire-fight

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How to run a good fire-fight
« on: March 03, 2014, 12:08:03 PM »
A fine good morning to all of you.

I've been into t-tops for many years, and after hearing about AW I realized it was the game I had been looking for after years of D&D-alikes. The rules (imho) are much easier to follow and lead to much better storytelling and more relevant action.

I just ran my third session last night with a group of friends and, while everything is going pretty well from a narrative standpoint, I'm almost at a complete loss when it comes to a good fire-fight.

Specifically, I've got 5 PCs against a group of about 10 individuals. Since the 'gang' mechanics weren't clear to me, I tried running with psuedo-turns (a-la D&D), and given that there's no 'initiative' in AW, I found my PCs coming back at me with thing's like 'When is it my turn?' and 'Why did he get another action?'. And they were absolutely right. How the hell do I manage a nice, medium size gun battle?

A good example was, in the session, there was a big armored fucker with an M60 and a giant ammo cache strapped to his back (think Vulcan Raven from MGS2). I decided to myself he had 2 armor and his big-fuck-off-gun did 3 harm. Cool, right? Wrong...at least in practice. One of my PCs would say 'I jump up from cover and shoot at him with my 9mm.' With this guy having 2 armor, that shot didn't do any actual harm, but maybe it stunned him a bit. That's all well and good, but should I have made my PC roll to seize by force? Not to mention it seems to me that this guy would want to respond to that, but my other PCs want their turn and want to kill this guy...nevermind this guys crew of 9 or 10 other crazies with guns...Since this was already a situation where everyone is shooting at everyone, I didn't think so, however with no rolling taking place how am I ever supposed to manage who takes damage, who hits, who misses, what rolls they may or may not be taking, etc.! I want this battle to be epic!

Sorry if this is a total noob question; I've read almost the entire book and, at least as my immediate memory serves, I cannot recall a section where it tells me how to manage a gun fight, and it seems like this is a really important bit that I should have nailed down, as I've got a violent group who loves shooting...

Thanks!
T

Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #1 on: March 03, 2014, 02:16:56 PM »
Best thing is to slow down and go step by step.

So, right, there's a guy who's armored and armed. He's just standing out there firing away?
Various PCs and NPCs are positioned around the battlefield, sure.

Someone speaks up, says "I pop up for cover, fire off a few shots, and then duck back down.".
I can do a few things here, depending on the situation, my principles, etc.

"Hey, sure thing! He's focusing most of your fire elsewhere right now, but if you keep your head up too long, he'll turn the barrel on you. You'll need to move damn fast.", and then your player's like "Sure thing! I pop up, bang bang, drop down.", and then you're all "Sure thing! His armor soaks most of the hits, but... {roll and describe harm move here}. Alas, he's on to you now and he's spraying suppressing fire right over your head!" and then you turn to another PC and say "Hey, so-and-so is under a hail of bullets right now, and so-and-so-other-player is surrounded by goons. What do you do?".

"Sure, but as soon as you're up he'll swing his barrel around to you. It'll be seizing by force, so you should probably also figure out a solid objective." (Resolve SBF here)

"Well, sure, but your gun'll probably just bounce off his armor. If you can get a distraction, though, you can get a shot in at his soft, unprotected side and do straight harm." turn to another player, say "Hey, so-and-so, you're holding a grenade right now, right?" and so-and-so says "Hey, shit, yeah... but those fuckers are pricey.", and you say "Well, yep, but you send it off, you'll knock the big guy off guard, let other-player get in a solid shot, and probably scare off a few goons to boot. What do you do?". And then the first guy, other-player, is like "Well, what if there's no distraction?" and I'm like "Well, most of his attention is elsewhere, so it'd probably be you going aggro against him, which might or might not go in your favor.".

Anyhow, just go step-by-step, follow the flow, and swing the spotlight around.
Does that help any?
Do you have more questions?

I'd be glad to follow up!
- Alex

Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #2 on: March 03, 2014, 02:35:37 PM »
Awesome, Alex, thank you so much for the quick follow up!

The three scenarios you described make a hell of a lot of sense. I think my biggest problem was that I was trying to micro-manage waaaay too much (that, and my very D&D-centric thinking). I would be trying to think of everything at once rather than letting the battle actually flow from person to person, PC to NPC, etc. The way I was doing things wasn't organic, if that makes any sense; I was trying to make this AW battle into a turn-based RPG.

We may be playing again tonight, I'll update if/when all goes well!

Thanks,
T


Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #3 on: March 03, 2014, 03:03:29 PM »
Biggest tip I forgot is to reread the very start, where it says the game is a conversation!
Thinking of it that way goes a long way towards helping things.

- Alex

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Munin

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #4 on: March 03, 2014, 03:50:44 PM »
Alex's feedback is a good place to start.  And if you want to get a little bit deeper into the weeds, AW offers you plenty of interesting options.

First thing first, if you have that many people involved, I'd say go ahead and use the peripheral battle moves.  They are totally appropriate for a firefight of that size.

In order to facilitate a good firefight, take advantage of one of the other bits of AW advice, which is "draw maps like crazy."  Map out the landscape/terrain/setting where the firefight is taking place, and do so in a way that is interesting and lends itself to setting up later moves.  As an example, maybe the firefight is taking place in the manufactory, where there's an assembly line where molten metal is being stamped.  Crossing from one side of that line to the other might require someone to act under fire, for instance.  Or there's heavy smoke coming from a pile of burning tires, so spotting a target without exposing yourself requires you to read a sitch before you can engage.  Or access to the storm drains running under the complex lets you move unseen and go aggro on someone the first time you emerge in a new location.  Or shooting at anyone taking cover behind the diesel distillation lines requires you to spend one of your hold from any sieze by force roll to "take definite hold of it" to keep from blowing the place sky-high.

Similarly, you can assign armor to certain areas of the map if it's appropriate (i.e. taking cover behind a pile of rubble is armor 2, but climbing up on the gantry leaves you exposed and provides no armor).

Once you've mapped out the setting, determine the locations of the various PCs and NPCs within it.  If you're running this using the peripheral battle moves, decide where you are in the countdown.  Then just let things unfold as they will.

The battle moves are nice because there is the assumption that everyone is getting shot at pretty much all the time after 9:00.  Unless a PC opts to stay the fuck down and manages to pull it off successfully, they are going to end up taking plenty of Harm along the way, which will motivate them.  And speaking of Harm, it is important to establish what the PCs are dishing out and what they are facing, as well as how you're going to be tracking it.  Are you going to treat all of the NPCs as individuals, or are you going to amalgamate them as a gang?  The gang rules mostly deal with how to offset the damage based on the engagement of groups of differing sizes.  If your NPC baddies have the kind of 2:1 numerical advantage you mentioned in your previous post, I might offset the damage by a step (meaning they inflict +1 Harm and take -1 Harm).  But more important, it means you don't need to track Harm on individual NPCs.  Just keep track of how much Harm the PCs inflict collectively and translate that into casualties as you go based on what's happening (more on this in a sec).  It is important to keep in mind, however, that "inflicting harm" will usually require a PC to either go aggro or seize by force.  Enforcing the rule of "to do it, do it" is important.

When it comes to applying casualties in a gang situation, let's say for sake of argument that the NPCs count as "2-harm small gang 1-armor" and that your PCs are outnumbered 2:1 or more.  As such, the NPCs now count as inflicting 3-harm because there are more of them.  Further, the NPCs will be taking 1 fewer Harm every time the PCs inflict it.  At first blush this seems sort of weird - after all, why should my pistol do less damage if I'm shooting it at a guy who is part of a gang versus shooting it at a guy on his own?  The answer, of course, is that 2-harm to a gang is different than 2-harm to a person.  2-harm will kill most unarmored NPCs.  2-harm to a gang is "many injuries, several serious, some fatalities."  The reason this is important is because it is up to you as the MC to describe things narratively.  The PC who unloads with a 3-harm assault rifle might only be inflicting a single point of Harm to the NPC gang on their action, but if that single point of Harm might take things from "a few injuries, one or two serious, no fatalities" to "many injuries, several serious, some fatalities" it can be a significant contribution.  So while the PC is only inflicting 1-harm to the gang, in reality they are injuring and/or killing multiple NPCs with their action.  This needs to be narrated appropriately such that the situation unfolds naturally.

Similarly, taking Harm from a gang will be more dangerous if the damage stages up due to size difference.  This is reflected by the idea that fire is coming from multiple different sources, it's hard to take cover, and any time you poke your head out someone takes a potshot at it.  Make sure to narrate this as well.

Once you have the terrain determined and you know how you're going to track the Harm, the next step is to let the combat unfold naturally through the use of the players 'moves.  Most of the time, they'll just be using the basic moves and you will narrate accordingly.  So for instance, say that the Gunlugger wants to move from where she is to new position that offers an elevation advantage over the enemy (negating any armor benefit they get from the terrain, for instance).  To do so, the MC looks at th map and deems that she must cross open ground, which is acting under fire.

Also keep in mind that the basic moves are used in conjunction with the battle moves.  Say that it's 9:00 in the battle countdown and now the PCs are taking concentrated fire.  The Gunlugger is again going to make a break for the elevated position, and this time the Battlebabe is going to provide covering fire.  All the rolls are made simultaneously, so the Gunlugger doesn't know if the covering fire is successful before she runs out into the open.  But the Battlebabe is Cool+3, so chances are good.  In this case, both players roll+Cool (the Gunlugger for acting under fire, the Battlebabe for providing covering fire).  The Battlebabe gets an 11, which means she is successful - the net result of which is that the Gunlugger only takes incidental fire as she crosses open ground.  The Gunlugger gets a 7, and the MC decides that as a "worse outcome" the Gunlugger makes it to the elevated position, but that that position is itself an untenable one (meaning she'll take concentrated fire next turn if she stays there).  The MC narrates what the various NPCs are doing and the battle clock advances to 10:00.

Now the Gunlugger is in kind of a shitty position, but she's Hard, so she elects to maintain an untenable position.  She easily nets a 10, meaning that for 3 ticks (which is the reso of the battle), this position will only come under incidental fire.  The MC narrates this as the Gunlugger putting out such a heinous volume of fire from the elevated position that the NPCs are busier scrambling to find cover than they are shooting back.  Meanwhile the Battlebabe sees an opportunity and elects to follow through on the Gunlugger's move.  To do this she rolls+Hx with the Gunlugger.  These two fight together a lot, so maybe that's +2.  She gets a 7, meaning she has created an opportunity, but hasn't followed through on it yet.  The MC provides a couple of options, and the player decides that the Battlebabe is taking advantage of the NPCs heads being down to break contact and sneak up behind two of the distracted gangers (though she'll still take incidental fire, some of which might actually be coming from the Gunlugger's wild spraying).  The MC narrates what the various NPCs are doing and the battle clock advances to 11:00.

Now that her position is secure, the Gunlugger decides that it's time to straight up blast people, classic seize by force.  Note that of the rounds I've described, this is the first time that the PCs will have actually inflicted any actual Harm on the NPCs.  She rolls+Hard and nets a 9.  She chooses to inflict terrible harm and impress dismay or frighten the enemy.  She's using an assault rifle that would ordinarily do 3-harm, +1 for inflicting terrible harm, -1 for gang size offset, -1 for the gang's personal armor - they get no benefit from any terrain-based armor because the Gunlugger is firing from an elevated position, for a total of 2-harm.  That means in this tick alone, the Gunlugger has inflicted "many injuries, several serious, some fatalities."  A veritable firehose of bullets!  If only she'd taken "NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH!"

For her part, the Battlebabe has yet to capitalize on her opportunity, so the MC gives her the following option - make a successful act under fire to cover ground quickly and quietly and if successful make an immediate go aggro roll.  Rolling+Cool she gets only a 7, so the MC narrates that she has stepped on a half-buried piece of sheet-metal that makes a loud noise, alerting her would-be targets.  He offers her this ugly choice - freeze where she is (out of line of sight) and forfeit any chance to do damage this tick, or go balls-to-the-wall, cover the remaining ground as fast as she can, and exchange fire in seize by force.  She's Hard-2 and unlikely to come out on top of that exchange, so she opts to stay put (though she's still subject to taking incidental fire).

The clock advances to 12:00, which is the end of the battle.  Because the Gunlugger has inflicted significant casualties and frightened the enemy, the MC narrates that the NPC gang starts to withdraw, ceding the battlefield to the PCs.  Depending on the presence/absence of the NPC gang's leader and how much total harm has been inflicted on the gang, that withdrawal might be relatively orderly or it might be a rout.

When it's your turn as MC to talk about what the NPCs are doing, it's mostly going to be things that change their position relative to the PCs or that change what's going on in the battlefield.  So think of it not so much in terms of "NPCs A and D are shooting at you, take X-harm," because the battle moves dictate that incidental or concentrated fire is happening regardless.  Instead, think of it in terms of "NPCs A and D are scrambling up to the top of the junk pile.  That's going to give them clear line-of-sight to the loading dock, making the Driver's position untenable next tick."  Or "NPCs A and D are laying down withering suppressive fire on your position.  Anything you do besides stay the fuck down is going to be acting under fire."

But as always, the key is in the narration.  Translate the raw rolls into something meaningful in the fiction, and when you describe things do it in a visceral way.  Play on all of the senses - the boom of explosions, the rattling vibration of bullets hitting your cover, the acrid smells of burning tires and cordite, the tinkling of spent brass as it falls through the grating of the catwalk, the thick red smear left behind on the wall by a combatant as he slumps lifelessly to the ground.
« Last Edit: March 03, 2014, 04:21:25 PM by Munin »

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Scrape

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #5 on: March 04, 2014, 07:35:31 AM »
Yeah, make the firefight about the game fiction, with movement and goals and sudden changes. Remember that there's no "to hit" roll. A player can accomplish much more than "I shoot" on their turn. If you read the rulebook, one of the play examples has a player Seizing a bunker with a single roll. Not trading shot by shot with each enemy, but making one Seize by Force that encapsulates several minutes of battle by asking "what do you want? Oh, you want the bunker? Well, roll +Hard..."

As players, they can demand bigger rewards by setting the stakes higher than a single gunshot. Try pushing for a slightly bigger scale, like "okay, you're shooting and ducking, what's the ultimate goal here? You want him to back off the car, it seems like?" Or "...so you're trying to get him out of cover?"

If you just go through the battle trading blows, the system isn't the most exciting. Make Harm less mechanical and more scary. Make them realize that they are fighting for a reason, not just because. Have the battlefield shift and move and make their rolls consequential in ways that Harm is not, like cutting off escape routes or destroying nice things.

That's what I try to do when my players get into a fight. To me, it's not a great tactical blow-by-blow system. It's great for cinematic fights, so that's what I go with: lots of jump-cuts and zooming in and out.

Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #6 on: March 05, 2014, 12:09:13 PM »
Wow, thank you guys for all the fantastic ideas! This is truly an awesome forum where people actually read the questions and give a shit about the fiction.

I'm going to try and incorporate this into my next session (my group is gearing up to take a fortress) and hopefully the fight will be much more epic!

Thanks everyone!!

T

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Munin

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #7 on: March 05, 2014, 05:36:55 PM »
Sounds like a cool opportunity for mayhem.  Please let us know how it goes!

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Ebok

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #8 on: March 07, 2014, 07:12:29 PM »
Another thing you can keep in mind is asking everyone involved, What are you doing? after describing the situation. Don't resolve any of the declarations until everyone has had the chance to respond. In this way you can have them all roll at once and use that to inclusively describe the action. Its kind of neat when one person's success bundles together with another person's failure. Also, you can choose to resolve them one at a time as well, but keep in mind that if you change the sitch too much, they're certainly able to alter their approach to things (before the roll). Anyway, I found using collective declarations a good way to handle the lack of "turns" and the organization gave my crew my they wanted in terms of "whose turn is it".
« Last Edit: March 07, 2014, 11:46:07 PM by Ebok »

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Munin

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #9 on: March 08, 2014, 08:58:38 AM »
Yes, Ebok's point is a good one.  The peripheral battle moves are designed this way (everyone says what they're doing up front and then everyone rolls at the same time), but there's no reason you couldn't do it this way even if you aren't using the peripheral move.  Just be aware that if everyone's rolling simultaneously, there's no potential to help or interfere.  That's actually why follow through on someone else's move is in the battle moves - it's a way to preserve the idea of helping or interfering in a framework where everything's happening simultaneously.

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Ebok

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #10 on: March 09, 2014, 12:29:39 AM »
I hadn't noticed that myself. When a member of the group was doing something really daring or risky, others would actually make it their bid to help them accomplish the task. Even outside of peripheral battle moves, which are sweet, someone doing a really daring seize by force while acting under fire could use two other players both using aid another to help him accomplish both the first and the second roll. Of course, HOW they do this is where the cinematic come into play.

Because aid another already explains the 7-9 and the 10+ you just have them share the complications of part of the original daring move.

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Scrape

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #11 on: March 09, 2014, 02:05:48 PM »
The book doesn't make it clear, but Vincent has said that when he runs battles (or other tense situations), he goes around the table asking for actions and then has everyone roll and resolve simultaneously. My group doesn't often get in fights together, and when they do I often ignore this advice out of habit. When it comes to announcing simultaneously...

Pros: everything is maybe more visceral, reactions are based on instinct and motive, it preserves the unpredictability of combat

Cons: players can't react to a success or failure until next "round," it could make a player feel like they're "giving up an action" if they Aid, it could lead to weird timing questions (though both methods run into this)

It's all preference, I think.

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Ebok

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Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #12 on: March 10, 2014, 01:20:44 AM »
You can help combat the feeling of "wasting" an action by truly immersing them in their roll. Here is a brief example:

Gruff (heroic angel) sees the girl being dragged through the street by the gang of fifteen or so firepower tooting goons. He's going after her, that's not even a question–though he really isn't all that cool or hard. He doesn't ask for help, but... His buds, Max (bomb-toting savvy-head) and Nora (sneaky battle-babe) know that's what he's about to do, they can see it. Yet the only fast way there is straight through the middle of them, and they've got good positions–and are using her as bait anyway. Nora whispers to Max, "I'm going to head up and around sneaking through the back alleyways, just looking for a better position to open up with some gunfire. Cover Gruff's charge as best as you can."

Gruff starts barreling down the road towards the girl. He's going to be acting under the fire of the guys with guns waiting for him, and probably making a seize by force roll against the goons holding the dame down. Max has circled around and rolls+Hx, making his to set off a massive explosion on another street, somewhere away from where Gruff is coming. Nora sneaking through the back streets is looking for the enemies, rolling a read a sitch. She hits on a 13, so she's learning what she needs to know and easily staying under the radar. Gruff dashes down the alley rolling+cool (under threat of detection and gunfire) hits on a 9. Max hits with a 7–9, raising Gruff up to a 10 so a few of the guys that gruff was heading past never saw him coming–they right-quick left their post and start running towards the source of the explosion. Since Max hit a 7–9 they're now baring down on him–but there's only a few of them... and Max can handle a few of them. Nora spends her holds: where are they? and figures out the positioning, where's she got to be to help Gruff? and sees a way to hold up half the reinforcements, what's her best escape from there? she spots a backdoor in nearby structure which'll give her access to a sewer grate. She opens that up before moving into position.

So Gruff gets all the way through the alley, into the street while everyone's off looking at the smoke rising and yelling orders into radios. It's pretty clear he's coming when he starts opening fire, and as soon as he starts, Nora opens fire from across the street–forcing the reinforcement that way to deal with her instead. Gruff rolls+hard in a seize by force, hits a 7. Nora rolls+Hx to help and hits a 10 with a nice bonus from the read a sitch and perfect instincts. She manages to keep those guys completely pinned down, giving Gruff only a few guys left with the girl to handle. He chooses to take definite hold of her and to traumatize the hell out of those guys, grabbing the girl right out of the middle of them, shooting a couple right-then but mostly forcing them to keep their heads down while he scoops up the girl and runs the hell away. They'll exchange some harm, but he's probably got that under control. He gets out of there lickity-spilt since all of the gang is either keeping their heads down or fighting elsewhere. Meanwhile... Max is acting like he's not part of this at all, scrapping on some junked car that's been so totally roasted by his bombs that he's pretending that it used to be his... and that it used to work. He's using his strange multiclassed charisma to manipulate the onrushing goons into believing his story, rolling+weird and hitting with an 8, promising to help them fix up one of their trucks later... excepting the part where it explodes on the side of the road.

Now you'd roll back and to the last of the fighting going on at Nora's location. In this case, Nora's booking it with her pre-planned escape route, getting a +2 from Perfect Instincts and using her multiclassed Eye on the Door move. Rolling+5 means she's just gone, maybe with a few scratches but probably not. She rolls and hits something stupid high.. like a 17. The Goons lifting their heads out of cover won't see any sign of her.

Then you just see the conflict winded down nice and quick and move on to the touching scene between Gruff and his freshly rescued lass. I'm sure this hasn't stopped snow-balling, there is still an angry gang of goons that just got shot up some and had their plan foiled. They'll be making a hard move here shortly, time to get the party all back together, give them a breathing moment and drop the hammer by announcing the badness of what's going to be baring down on them soon.

–––––––––

Anyway, what I'm showcasing above is the use of Help Another to change the environment of the battlefield, to open up the possibility of Gruff being successful. I mean, without the help, Gruff would've been running under fire the whole way, opening himself up to a whole shit load of bullets when he hit the street, and even IF he got the girl, his escapes would be cut off on all sides. Instead, aid another was used to cover "how do the NPCs react to the pressure of his aid", and made everything not only possible but smooth, too.

You can handle this partly with the optional battle moves, using cover fire, untenable courses, and what-have-yous. However, whether or not a smash and grab constitutes a full of battle in this case seems a bit iffy to me. The Incidental and Concentrated fire keywords suggest that a battle is a fight where everyone is already shooting at everyone else. In this case, I found that using help another to change the battlefield was far more appropriate (especially considering the fact that neither of the other two were actually trying to hurt anyone in the goon's gang, and they kept the violence down with their rolls rather then heightening it.)

COMBAT SUMMATION
setup: act under threat of detection, help another (under threat of detection), read a stich
followup: seize by force, help another (seize by force), manipulate
last to leave: eye on the door
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Harm

I skipped out on tracking the harm in this example. It comes down to the fact that the small-gang would've had something like one real exchange of harm, which would've happened during the seize by force roll. He'd had suffered 2-harm +1 from the gang's size -1 from some armor (the gang-size in dealing harm right there I might've dropped seeing how most of them weren't around to shoot at him or be shot by him) and then made his harm roll. Gruff would've dealt 2-harm to them himself, but the gang didn't have armor. So -1 harm to the small gang's total. I'd make it sound more serious for the few standing in the street because he's fighting so few of them right now–so some of them might be dead or dying, but I'd not remove the size buffer on the total gang's harm clock because the other two groups of the gang's splintered selves could've still been regrouped and involved if shit went sideways.

The only other moment where I'd have dropped any harm here might've been during Gruff's escape., since a few uncornered stranglers might've been shooting in his direction... But with his armor and battlefield grace triggering there and with nearly all the gang in the distance, traumatized, pinned down, or distracted over yonder, it wouldn't be any more then 1-harm. In that case he'd make his harm roll at -1 to see if any of those random shots got lucky.
« Last Edit: March 10, 2014, 02:33:11 AM by Ebok »

Re: How to run a good fire-fight
« Reply #13 on: March 21, 2014, 03:14:31 PM »
This has been just a fantastic thread ... We ended our last game on a cliffhanger that has every possibility of turning into a bloodbath.

In my mind, initially, the first floor of the hospital where the players are was just featureless. Because I was thinking like a tactician instead of a storyteller. "Of course the gang's torn down everything they could hide behind, they're not amateurs!" Reading Antisinecurist, Munin, and Ebok made me realize how much I needed to switch focus.

So in comes the map. Yeah, there's still an atrium covered with boards and fabric, but on the first floor you've got the huge fucking built-in reception desk that the gang would need jackhammers to take out. They've jammed the elevator doors open but the shafts are still there. There's three bathrooms - doors jimmied again, but out of the line of fire from the atrium, and with a line of sight on the busted escalator the gang would have to come down. And underneath the atrium there's what used to be the cafe, the gift shop, and the pharmacy, again with lines of sight toward the gang's egress.

I'm excited to see what that sparks in them when I lay it down.