If I’ve made a mob that is huge, and has taken over a library or stadium or something, with a factor of five or ten, and my players move in sneaky like, and take out just two out three guards on the perimeter of that mob, can they choose “Reduce the Size of the Mob by 1?” How many are reduced, then? Is it equal to their Factor or just the two they positioned to take out? Do they have to, like, sneak attack 8 more before they can choose that option with the move?
Basically, what do I do if the players fictionally position themselves to be up against less than the Mob’s Factor, and want to reduce the Mob with Take Down?
I only let them reduce the size of the mob if they’re facing the mob entire. It wouldn’t make sense to take out 1 dude and it reduce the size of the mob by 10 dudes – at least in my mind. When players do a Take Down move to reduce the mob by a lot of dudes I always expect that to line up with the fiction, too – I’m expecting them to give me a narrative where they can go to town telling me how they’re jumping around and smashing people together and doing stuff en-masse. When this kind of thing does come up, I treat those guys as their own thing, and my players have never tried to reduce the size of a mob by attacking just one or two guards – probably because I didn’t present them as part of a mob at the time?
Now, if you set up the situation and have more of a fixed number in you head, and these two guys reduce that number, then I think I’d just run the whole thing as a not-mob (in terms of mob size) but just give them really low Condition Thesholds between 1~3 to get a similar badass feeling from taking mooks out.
So it’s only a Mob if they can face it en masse. If it’s a single group spread out over a facility they are all individual Low Threshold threats. Sound right?
Yep, that’s how I’d do it =)
To be fair they could describe a sneaky Arkham style approach of steal thing through an area and quietly taking guards out as they notice them. But that would involve a combat round representing 5 to 10 minutes rather than 2 to 3 seconds.
Which would be my table and I saying “we’ve done three or four of these already, rather than bog the game down with thirty to fifty more stealth kills let’s montage the whole event into a couple of rolls.”
Yeah, I’d be cool with that too. Like, if there was a mob in one place and they used Take Down to reduce the size of the mob, but did it by narrating taking out the appropriate number in a stealthy way over an extended period of time. Then if they botched the roll or something went down they’d be alerted and the mobs would rush in a la Arkham, like you say, Luke Green