Being on fire

I came up with a front that involves a lot of people with a bad case of pyro-fetishism, and I wanted to flesh out the rules. I did some poking around (I found that searching the forums for "molotov" got the most results I wanted and the least I didn't, compared to "fire", "on fire," "burning,' etc.), so plenty of this is stolen.

Feedback welcome! Goals are:

The rules should be simple and fit in with the rest of AW.
Setting someone on fire should not be better than shooting them (it’s for crazies, tactics, or terror).

Catching fire:
 
When you catch on fire, if its just a little bit of fire, maybe just your arm or just your torso or maybe just your head a little, take 1-harm. If you are like seriously fucking on fire, like most of your body, it's 2-harm. The same applies if you go into a place that's on fire a little or a lot.

If you stay on fire or stay in a place that is on fire for some reason (I don't know, I don't tell you what to do) then the harm becomes AP.

Doing stuff when you are on fire, including becoming less on fire, is, of course, acting under fire.

If you don't stay on fire, being on fire isn't that scary. Good things to do as a result of not-strong-hits on acting under fire: harm (including s-harm, for smoke inhalation, etc.), their armor slagging, their ammo cooking off, them setting other things on fire, panicked unhelpful NPC action or inaction.
 

New weapon tags:
 
+Incendiary: the weapon sets fire to things. Maybe it will only set fire to things that are already flammable, or maybe it’s a nasty thing that spits out something that is flammable and then sets that on fire.

I thought about making two tags to distinguish between "hot" and "covers in burning chemicals," but nah.

New gear:

molotov cocktail (1-harm incendiary messy)
firebomb (2-harm incendiary area messy)
flamethrower (2-harm incendiary messy)
dragon’s breath rounds (+incendiary to a shotgun)

Molotov cocktails are breakable containers full of flammable chemicals with a wick, mostly good for setting stuff rather than people on fire. Firebombs are anything from crude explosives to WP grenades. Flamethrowers are man-portable (I thought about "autofire," maybe?), and clearly the tank should explode at some point. Dragons breath rounds are real goofy, but too cool not to include: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_breath

I'd make cocktails practically free, firebombs as as rare as grenades, flamethrowers as rare as assault rifles, dragon's breath rounds as rare as ap ammo.

Nice!

Don't forget to make them make the harm move. If there's any kind of harm that the harm move should be made for, it's being on fire.

When I played Blind Blue & Hatchet City, Ambergrease doused my skinner with gasoline and lit her on fire. She lived.

Nice!

Glad you like it! It wasn't in my forebrain or anything, but I recently found and listened to your interview with The Walking Eye where were very grumpy about Ars Magica 2nd Ed. having seperate rule systems for, i.e, drowning and falling, so I'm glad I avoided the same mistakes. :P

Don't forget to make them make the harm move. If there's any kind of harm that the harm move should be made for, it's being on fire.

Oh yeah! If I made a final draft I'd put that next to the advice about consequences for Acting Under Fire. As an aside, I might also add the custom move "When you are using a flamethrower, 'your flamethrower's tank explodes like a firebomb' to the 10+ harm list," because of course it should.

What do people think about flamethrowers and autofire? Maybe I'd make crude low-capacity flamethrowers as written and as common as other common weapons, and ones with big fuck-off tanks rarer and with +autofire or +area (+area is mechanically worse and therefore maybe better).

(Minor typos I noticed: cocktails and firebombs should be +reload like all grenades, dragonsbreath should be -1 harm as well as +incendiary).

When I played Blind Blue & Hatchet City, Ambergrease doused my skinner with gasoline and lit her on fire. She lived.

That sounds like a pretty rough snowball. Debility or no debility?

I've always wanted to play a Gunlugger with a flame fetish. I always figured if it came up I'd reskin the grenade launcher or machine gun (area, messy) as his beloved flamethrower. Then take AP ammo for his shotgun and call that dragon's breath ammo. I dig this incendiary tag though. It's nice and tightly defined and gives a lot of good hooks for fiction.