Ok, I need help with this. Hunter in my table with Deadly and Prepared for anything moves can do, with a custom weapon (on a 10+) up to 7 HARM!!
Here is the math: Shotgun 2-harm, Big add-on (+1 harm), High-powered add-on (+1 harm). Extra add-on from Prepared for anything: silvered (+silver).
Now I’m gonna pause here to elaborate, in the intro questions you ask the hunter “what’s your main prey?” (vampire he says), and “what are their strengths, weaknesses?” (silver he says), so +1 harm from silver to vampires. That means the aforementioned shotgun does 4-harm to anyone and 5-harm to vampires. +1 harm from Deadly move, +Terrible harm from a 10+ on the dice. That’s 6 damage vs anyone, and 7-harm vs vampires!!! Isn’t that a little OP??
Eh. Be a fan of the characters. This is the player signalling you that the character is really good at this one thing, and wnats to do it. So throw monsters by the dozen, and watch the player smile as they go splat.
I mean, sure, go nuts I say. However, what do the police have to say about it when they’re carrying that kind of weaponry around?
I understand all that, but I feel like this is out of proportions, with the fiction I mean. 7-harm vs a 4-harm granade. What about a rocket launcher, how much damage will that be, 5-harm? What about the other players feeling things are unbalanced (I saw their faces at the table).
Yeah, this character is really good at murderizing any vampire that walks into their crosshairs. Cool! So I bet the vampires in the city talk about them in hushed tones, like they’re some kind of Anton Chigurh. Roll with it.
But also, sometimes complicate things:
So, what if they end up needing help from a vampire? Is that vampire gonna be willing to talk, or will it go to ground and hide like a boss as soon as word gets out that this hunter is looking for it?
What if an up-and-coming vampire frames his rival, the vampire prince of the city, for the kidnapping of this hunter’s loved ones, and then uses a steady drip of clues to manipulate the hunter into killing his political enemies for him?
What if a ghost is the problem, and just laughs in the face of a shotgun blast?
And so on.
What the fiction means to me, btw, is mostly: they know how to use a shotgun real well, and make every shot count. It’s the old “being killed with a knife is just as deadly as being killed by a bomb” thing.
That gun has pretty much no nuance – it’s practically a one shot kill. This is great! It’s just begging you to ask the player, over and over, “So, would you like to kill now?” and rain the horrible aftermath all over them.
Also, use the weapon when the roll 6-. Like, “Ok, you fire! The vampire goes down – and the slug passes through her into the mayor’s daughter. She collapses and is bleeding out. The other vampires are in a frenzy from the smell of fresh blood. What do you do?”
So much good stuff in this thread. Remember that the players are supposed to be awesome, and let them be awesome.
And then hit them where they aren’t awesome. Like figuring out who their real enemies are. Or trying to solve a mystery when none of the vampires will talk to them. Or getting in tight with the vampires they need to stop a demon from wreaking all kinds of damage on the world.
Think about Blade. His sword does like a million harm. But that’s just the start of his problems…
One GM have has said “The more powerful the characters, the more cool stuff I can throw at them.”
Yeah, I was just thinking about Blade when Mark Diaz Truman mentioned him. Blade would be doing an equivalent amount of damage to vamps, but yet he still needed friends and allies and there were lots of stuff that he couldn’t do, which forced him to often select kill-all-the-vamps as his only realistic option when other paths would have been preferable.
Or, an alternative: Buffy is really good at killing vamps, right? She can one shot kill vamps, especially later on.
Demons, though? Werewolves? Or, perhaps worse, the emotional fallout human beings have to face when a loved one is eaten by a vampire?
Or — and be careful with this — the body. How does the Hunter who does infinite damage to vampires deal with it when encountering the body of a loved one?
I am fairly certain that if I picked up a rocket launcher or a grenade that I would be more likely blow myself up than be able to use it as well as the revolver I own, which I’m guessing if I had to use it I’m capable of inflicting 7-harm with it. It doesn’t sound overpowered, it sound like that character has a favorite weapon – which can also run out of ammo, get knocked out of his hand, or kill an innocent bystander easily enough.
It’d be really, really easy to frame SuperSlayer for killing a Vampire. So his ubershotgun is red meat from a plot perspective.
Yeah. Sources of great power are GM toys