Question about Minions and Harm
All humans have 7 harm capacity, right? Let’s say the Wronged is searching an abandoned house, and a cultist attacks him with a sword, close quarters. I imagine he’s already read a bad situation, and now the cultist got to him.
So the Wronged fires his shotgun (3-harm close messy) at the cultist, while maybe getting cut with the sword (2-harm hand messy). With a hit, the cultist takes 3 harm. The Wronged takes 1-2 harm, depending on armor.
I’m ok with the harm on the PC in this case. The player can choose to suffer little harm on a 10+, which together with armor reduces harm taken to 0. But what about the cultist? Clearly he’s not close to dying, unless the player chose to inflict terrible harm, in which case the cultist is unstable and will die without help.
Or should I just roll with it, and say the cultist is out, unconscious, dying, or dead? In any case he’s taken a shotgun blast at point blank, so should not be a problem any more.
You should determine the harm capacity of the cultist before the game starts, while preparing the mystery, or on the fly, during the game. By the way, you cannot say the cultist is dead unless he is full of harm. Remember you still have to use the harm moves both on the PC and on the cultist. So, maybe the cultist is not dead but he’s passed out.
Follow the fiction. If a normal human being takes a shotgun blast to the chest point blank and you feel they wouldn’t survive it, then they don’t. The harm track is there to help inform the fiction, but the fiction should still take priority. For me, it wouldn’t really matter how big a harm track a normal human has; if someone puts a gun against their temple and pulls the trigger, they’re gonna be dead.
I would direct you to page 137. Remember that wounds have consequences and the consequences are more important to the story than the number.
By this I mean that the straitjacketed cultist attacks the wronged with an overhead swordstrike. The wronged grimly ignores the attack and pumps a shot into the minions stomach at point blank (inflict terrible harm +1) while the swords momentum slices the brim of his hat and carves a furrow into his shoulder (2 harm). The minion dies with a pitiful moan as he drops the sword.
Alternately the wronged ducks out of the way his shot catching the minion in his thigh. The cultists sword skitters across the wronged’s heavy boot for 2 harm as the cultist falls over. He’s down but can still raise an unholy racket and slice at anyone who comes into range.
If instead, the wronged had come up behind the same minion with a knife and announced he was slitting their throat it would be just as deadly as the shotgun to the gut. For minions narrative wins over numbers but numbers will usually guide narrative.
I can definitely work with the narrative first, numbers second approach. But I was asking because the harm rules for NPCs seem more explicit in AW than in MotW, and was wondering if I’ve missed something.
I mean in AW, the PC would ‘Seize by Force’ and the player could state seizing the cultist’s life was the objective. Then one of the move’s choices on a hit is ‘take a definite hold’, which can mean that the cultist is out, however much harm he took. And also in AW, 2 harm is typically enough to put any NPC out of the fight, possibly killing him or her. PCs have more harm capacity than NPCs.
So if I want to play more by numbers and less by the narrative, I could adjust NPCs harm capacity slightly down. Has anyone done this? And now I realize that the fight and harm rules are more geared towards fighting the monsters, while NPCs and minions might legit get different treatment (more narrative oriented).
All the advice here is good.
Another thing I would add is to remember that most people and many monsters will not fight to the death. Maybe your cultist decides to stay down rather than take more harm.
Antti Piipponen, just remember that about Apocalypse World Vincent said on Barf Forth Apocalyptica that the seize by force options cannot overcome the need to do harm to kill an NPC (in other words: you can never ignore or bypass the harm rules).
That’s where I came from, when I said: “you cannot say the cultist is dead unless he is full of harm”. In my opinion, you should use all the elements both the rules and the fiction are giving you: maybe the cultist just took a 4-harm shot in his stomach and therefore, even if he’s not dead yet, he’s crawling on the floor in his own blood.
Oh, I had understood that in AW seize by force could override any harm, but of course to do that you’d still have to do that. That’s probably another discussion and in any case, it won’t matter much here.
What I like with AW’s harm countdown is the descriptors. For example, an NPC taking 2 harm means “wounds, unconsciousness, bad pain, broken bones, shock. Likely fatal, occasionally immediately fatal”. The NPC’s harm capacity isn’t explicitly set, except that at 5 harm they’re done.
So if I wanted to, I could also use the same harm descriptors as in AW. Or possibly up the thresholds by 1 step for tough human minions.