10 thoughts on “In combat, how do I handle henchmen or other faceless goons who attack in groups?”

  2. If you want goons who almost have faces, it mentions that you can also treat a gang as a single villain. You can do this when you want the group to actually pose a threat. The scenes in Daredevil where he destroys a dozen mobsters, and gets the hell beaten out of himself in the process, are examples of a group that is a threat and a single enemy

  4. That also probably depends upon the playbook! If you’ve got a Bull against a bunch of security guards, that’s totally no big deal, the narrative states they can beat that group without any problem.

    On the other hand, if there’s a Beacon who isn’t very combatty and they’re not feeling very superheroic right now? Maybe this is a great time to allow them to roll to see if they can be as Dangerous as they need to be.

  6. Also bear in mind that just because the enemy doesn’t pose a direct, physical threat to the heroes, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still an actual threat that has to be taken seriously.

    If you have a bunch of bystanders who are being put in danger, those ‘lesser’ enemies can deal a powerful blow to a hero by harming the bystanders. (You’re probably going to be angry/insecure/etc. if a bystander gets maimed or killed because you didn’t manage to stop it.)

    But, yes, treat a group of significant nooks like a single villain, possibly with only 1 or 2 conditions at most.

  7. I would probably create strong EDIT fictionaly important henchmen (not mooks) at one condition. Mooks they get tossed, they are the criminal equivalent of the civilian. I would also used them as foils to push emotional buttons of the characters.

  8. Henchmen are my favourite. I like them more than actual individual villains, and very rarely let a villain leave home without some. They’re not there to hurt the heroes, they’re there to create lots of little threats spread out over an area and offer both you and the players a ton of different ways to make moves and look awesome.

    – Whether it’s 4 guys or 40, definitely treat them as a single villain for mechanics. It’s about fictional power: more conditions, more screen time to resolve. Fighting 40 guys who had a condition each would be your entire campaign.

    – 1-3 conditions is usually sufficient. If the mooks are purely background colour you can choose not to give them any and just let your heroes walk through them, but if they’re meant to have any real impact on the scene at all, give ’em at least one.

    – More than 3 conditions and you’re into the kinda power range used for grouping up villains that would be a threat by themselves (hot tip: do that — Magneto is a villain himself, make the Brotherhood rolling up behind him a many-condition group).

    – If they’re human(ish), give ’em Insecure. The GM condition moves list for Insecure is solid gold for wavering morale, which is often what actually defeats a group of people. If they’re robots or demons or something, maybe not so much.

    – Use the geography to determine groups, sometimes. If you’re doing a heist, the henchmen throughout the entire building might be one big group, or you could have several 1-condition groups like “east wing goons”, “upper floor goons” to be dealt with separately.

    – As with all villains, remember that henchmen can give up or run away before they’re utterly defeated. Don’t be afraid to have them bail out entirely when your Transformed picks “impress, surprise or frighten” from the directly engage list, regardless of their remaining conditions — your goons are here to make the players feel like crime-fighting badasses, so revel in it.

  9. I’ve also sometimes had mooks act as extensions of a villain, especially when they had some deep connection to the villain rather than being hired mooks. So a mad scientist and the deathbots he manufactured were treated as one entity, for example.

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