SPOILERS FOR DREAM AWAY THE TIME
So, my players and I just finished up Dream Away the Time, and noticed something regarding Harm. In AW and DW, a 10+ on the Kick Some Ass equivalent results in dealing harm but not taking it. This is not true in MotW.
This makes certain characters interesting, especially those that kind of center on hand-to-hand combat. The Divine was a particular sticking point here. If a lot of what you do is get into close combat, and close combat is a generally risky maneuver at best, then there’s a bit of a tension there, especially when dealing with Redcaps that are slinging around 3 harm with a giant poleaxe.
So I’m kind of wondering what the intent is here. I can think of a few things.
1) MotW is somewhat gritty. Success is bought at a dear price. It’s heroic, not superheroic.
2) Use ranged weaponry and fictional positioning. Getting into hand-to-hand combat is typically a failure state.
3) It’s deliberate. The death spiral of lost Luck is an integral part of the game. You’re in a race against the inevitable.
4) Yeah, it doesn’t actually emulate the genre well and is pretty consistently houseruled.
5) The Redcap is really, really tough and most things aren’t nearly as big of a deal.
6) Other playbooks are better at lasting in a toe-to-toe fight (though we were dealing with the Monstrous and the Divine, which seem pretty well geared for that).
So, thoughts?
Ron Frazier Frank Falkenberg Jacob Possin Travis Keating John Jessop
I am one of the players from the game and I too am interested in this subject. When reading through the book, I found that passage a bit jarring, though after looking through advanced moves I kind fo get it. But I ma curious how it works in long term play.
The Spirit of 77 game also works similarly but they’re going off of 70’s TV and movies which typically have a lot of death.
I do note that most of the playbooks that are built for melee also have ways to get armor 2 or even better damage reduction.
In one of my games we had a Summoned dip into Hard Case and in another (different pool of players) we had a summon dip into Monstrous. Both were absolute beasts in combat.
Anybody borrowing the “Immortal” move from monstrous can conceivably reduce damage from enemies by 3 (2 armor and a further -1 from Immortal) though I’ve only seen that once. Said person was the second Summoned who suffered 5 Harm from effectively leaping into spinning helicopter blades. (Was later healed)
I think they’re trying to aim at Supernatural (which has a high death count for characters both mortal and cosmic) more than a lot of other similar shows and franchises. Dresden in particular is Urban Fantasy and has a fairly low death count amongst major characters in comparison to the Supernatural show.
Yeah, I’ve been using Supernatural as my touchstone, which has a comparatively “gritty” feel to it – fights suck for everyone involved.
The Divine and The Monstrous max out at 1 armour each (though the monstrous can also heal), without borrowing moves. Which shouldn’t be “required”.
Your one through three nail it.
Awesome, thanks!
Poor Buffy.
There are several playbooks with characters focussed on close combat (like the Divine or the Monstrous).
A character is supposed to be good at his ability focus.
A Wizard can use magic without accumulating harm or having to permanently reduce his Luck.
A Divine cannot go into close combat wielding a holy flaming sword and a divine armor, without the only choice of accumulating harm or permanently reducing Luck.
As of this stream, this is “by design”.
This is a bit unfortunate, because a player of such a close combat specialist character is basically screwed even on a 10+ result.
The move “kick some ass” actually does mean “definitely get YOUR ass kicked, and maybe kick your opponents ass a bit, too”.
If there is simply no alternative to employ close combat, the focus area of several playbook characters, without getting harm even on a 10+, then I as a player of such a character feel getting screwed by the system. It allows other characters to shine in their field of expertise, whereas my close combat expert will ALWAYS get his ass kicked, no matter what.
That makes playing such a playbook character a decidedly inferior choice, if you don’t want to burn through your Luck in no time at all and if you don’t want to get knocked out every time you try to do, what you are supposed to be good at.
I am currently reading Spirit of ’77, a game where very hard to kill heroes go against all sorts of outrageous opponents, kicking more than just “some” ass. It has basically the same damage system: If you try to be cool and show how competent your close combat specialist is, you will get your ass handed to you. Always.
Somehow this approach to dealing out full harm as established every time even on a 10+ seems to me flawed. It produces a result that I do not expect considering the genre and setting expectations either MotW or So77 do awake.
Poor Buffy. And poor Shaft.
Perhaps it would have been advantageous to more clearly state, that MotW is not about kicking the monster of the week’s ass (Buffy style), but about something more grim and gritty. Now I know and now I know to avoid the close combat playbooks if I like to play a character over a few sessions and still have some Luck points left. My expectations were certainly more in the direction of Buffy or Angel, kicking some monster’s ass, not kicking my own character’s ass all the time I try to fight evil monsters. It is a sobering experience.
And yet, I found that players still yearn for a good old-fashioned mano-a-mano melee with the monsters every now and then – even though they remember the hurt from last time. Hah.
I think also if you can maneuver so that you can melee the creature without it getting a chance to fight back….for example the chain from Beowulf to wrap the monster up and render it a sitting duck for a while.
range is not the only way of denying the monster an ability to exchange damage.
If you have maneuvered a creature, so that it could be harmed without any danger to yourself, you are not fighting a monster, you are murdering a helpless victim. – That might be OK, if monsters are assumed to be vastly powerful, so that you really cannot even think about going into a swordfight with such a creature. Then you would use every advantage, as unheroic and murderous as it might be.
Is the recommended strategy for MotW physical conflicts to murder helpless opponents?
The description of especially the close combat experts in the playbooks do look a bit different from the restrain-it-until-you-can-safely-murder-it approach.
I can see that the rules system does steer the PCs in this direction. But MotW does nourish quite different expectations the rules are not intended to support.
Houseruling is always an option. Or avoiding close combat and the kick some ass move altogether. The latter seems to be the route most agree upon. So this is as intended. That helps avoiding the clash of expecting one thing and the rules delivering another thing.
This stream was very helpful clearing this up.
I feel Kick Some Ass should never (from the Hunters’ perspective) be a part of the strategy. They might have to do it, so it’s good if somebody has the skills for it. But the plan should not be based on “and then we all stand in front of it and stab its face.”
Think of Supernatural: The boys do everything they can to gain the upper hand before a confrontation. That’s why lore (and Read a Bad Sitch and Investigate a Mystery) are so important. When it’s a proper brawl, people die.
Supernatural is far from the only inspiration for MotW, though, and the fact that the Slayer – ahem, “Chosen” – is not supposed to bring her game with that neat ancestral weapon without expecting to bleed a lot is not readily apparent.
I can see what it was going for, but I think I´ll be houseruling it to allow you to take less Harm on 10+.
it’s not murder until causing death is the intent rather than the consequence of protecting self or others.
consenting to give an opponent the chance to fight back when you know that a consequence of your defeat is the deaths of many other people is not honor and valor, it’s pride and arrogance.
Besides that, such a maneuver could be as simple as taking the chance to dart out of the way into the enemy’s blindside where you have perhaps 1 or 2 seconds of opportunity to stab at them before they can respond.
basically, my thought is that even in melee and active battle, your first action should be to distract or avoid the huge monster and force a safe opening to take advantage of rather than to trade blows.
Trading blows is counter to basic tactics for any school of practical combat. While it is accepted as rather inevitable to occur eventually, the main difficulty in battle isn’t killing, it’s staying alive. Killing is mechanically easy. Some schools encourage killing before the opponent has time to strike, others playing defensively until given an opening. But getting the maximum effect for the minimal risk is key to all.
If you look at a lot of fight scenes, the majority of them display an extended sequence of stalemate with victory coming once some character gets an opportunity to attack without provoking counterattack.
Since PbtA moves represent the results of an extended exchange rather than one attack, it seems to make sense to me that “kick ass” is to be used when you can’t afford to play it safe and have already lost the swift kill option. Otherwise, what I’d do is play the environment and avoiding damage until I could maneuver myself that opening of 1 to 2 seconds.
My assumption would be that blows are being traded continually even while I’m not using the attack move, but neither of us are allowing an opening to occur so no damage is exchanged. Finally, a feint, some tossed dust, a burst of UV light, a dart out of the way as the demon is tricked into charging onto holy ground….something, and the fight ends with an attack that cannot be returned.
also, I was aware that Supernatural wasn’t the only inspiration, but I think it was the inspiration for the grim and gritty feel of the game. Haven’t watched much Buffy, but Supernatural is very much a lot of Harm going on.
Honestly, even the name of the Move (I mean, “Kick some ass”!) seems counterintuitive in this interpretion. Seems like “engage in desperate melee” or whatever would be a better fit.
So77 has the main melee play books gain an advantage when they are hurt. I can’t remember if that is true in MotW. If so, then it balances out taking damage from a 10+.
The advanced Kick Some Ass move allows “suffer no harm at all” on a roll of 12+, which is easier to get by that time.
Plus, I’m fairly certain, the intention is not to have harm carry over from one session to the next since mostly you’re supposed to finish one mission in one session.
Like I said, before trying to deal damage, I’d like to try to knock them on their feat, maneuver behind them or something else in the manner of “Acting Under Pressure” to create a chance to deal damage without suffering a counter attack, try the death of a thousand cuts.
IMO the other thing that stands out is that like all the PBtA games, the game itself is fiction drivien. Meaning i dont necesarily want it to come down to ” I roll kick some ass”.
I just ran 2 con games, and every player there loved that there was a consequence to going toe to toe with a Monster.
Well that’s a big part of expectations, right? Like, my expectations going into MotW were heavily based on Supernatural, and so the rule didn’t really cause me much of a hiccup. If Sam or Dean is going hand-to-hand with a badnasty, you expect them to come out with a few ouchies.
If your touchstone is Buffy (as it was for several of my players), your expectation is probably that they go and do Kick Some Ass and not automatically get beat up for it. I can certainly understand the mismatched expectations – and mismatched expectations are probably the #1 cause of serious issues in gaming.
It’s certainly good for us to get on the same page and know that the expectation is that you seek advantage, and not just go into slugging it out with dice. Certainly more setup moves could be useful, which is good to understand since we’re coming from Fate so Create Advantage equivalents should be fairly easy to integrate.
Robert Hanz My go to for that is to either not roll if it doesn’t look like there’s a chance for danger or failure or, in the presence of danger, “Act Under Pressure” where the success is you do what you want to do…which in this case could be “force an opening”
Yeah, I know how it works mechanically. My point wasn’t “how do the rules work” it was “now our expectations re: doing this should be set more in line with the system.”
ah aha, I see
Yeah if you go in thinking Buffy you’re not likely to gel with the heavy amounts of injury inflicted by the “kick some ass” move.
Another tactic which hasn’t been mentioned is to have someone cover the person kicking ass. The other hunter can roll protect someone, which offers a bit more harm mitigation.
That is a good point!
That makes team up tactics interesting. Hmm. Someone needs a Big Whammy equivalent to allow rolling Protect Other with Weird.
Speaking from experience running MOTW, it’s also significantly less of an issue against lesser monsters/minions that deal 1-2 harm.
Remember that for most playbooks, a “big fricking knife” deals in the range of 1-2 harm meaning that for me as the Keeper if I’m designing a bunch of not completely turned vamp spawn or a few ghouls or even an evil sorcerer’s black dog familiar I’m forced to ask myself “What is this roughly as dangerous as?”
If the answer is “a big fricking knife” then that’s 1-2 Harm. And most times, when you’re dealing with creatures with normal-sized natural weapons, that’s the case. Monstrous and Divine characters can take that all day every day, especially with things like the Monstrous Moves to regenerate and use Weird to Kick Ass.
Yup, hence my point #5.