Missing moves – Mix it up
Want to see what people do when their players miss a “mix it up” move in a firefight.
A firefight is a clear invitation for the MC to make a hard move – perhaps most obviously “inflict harm” (a la dungeon world) – but the Sprawl is already a very deadly environment and I think it cheapens the scene somewhat to keep trading “hit points,” particularly if the character is a quick type who isn’t wearing armor (though I guess they’ll be dead in short order if that’s the case).
One choice is to end the firefight with a negative fictional consequence – but what if the PC(s) have gone to great lengths and cornered a mission-critical NPC? Give a PC the choice to take harm to keep the firefight going?
I almost always change the environment: Buildings collapse, security doors slam shut. AND the rolling PC takes harm. Almost all firefights in my Sprawl games are about escalating until the team is required to retreat as strategically as possible.
Do you always inflict harm on a miss?
Yeah, I think mostly I do. I do a lot of “exchange harm” just as part of the progression of a fight. Since Mix It Up doesn’t actually include dealing out harm as one of its consequences, I’m pretty flexible about throwing it around.
Are all your characters armored?
I think most of them were. They were also good at taking cover.
Does that directly influence harm taken mechanically, or is that a fictional effect?
A bit of both. I generally treat it as armour-1 for soft cover or low cover, and armour-2 for chest-high or shooting around a corner.
How much harm you inflict might change depending on how many times they need to roll mix it up in a given firefight.
I tend to resolve most fights with a single roll, so I apply harm liberally. If you resolve fights with multiple rolls, then you’ll need to be more careful.
This is great advice. One of my players is a violent infiltrator, and I’ve been pretty conflicted on how to handle the extra shooting it sometimes entails.
Obviously, “violent” doesn’t always mean that it’s to the death, but I was grappling with how to address “mix it up” when the objective is to kill.
…this is aside from the terrible fictional consequences of leaving a trail of bodies.
Junk Addy That extra shooting can snowball into extra Act Under Pressure rolls since stray bullets (or the sound of gun fire) can reek all kinds of havoc on the scene’s environment, bystanders, etc. Not to mention the longer a fight lasts the longer reinforcements have time to arrive…
Thanks Omari Brooks. This is useful reference point. That said, I probably skew away from this approach as I like to try to run my games with fewer rolls that have a more significant impact.
I’ve also found that having lots of rolls can make dice results more deterministic, since each roll has to do something narratively, and you can only meaningfully carve up the results so thinly…
For the +dangerous tag, would you apply damage from both their weapon and the enemy’s, or is it just a potential hook on which to hang self-inflicted wounds?
Junk Addy I take it as the fiction comes. Applying both would often be a very hard move, so I’d usually save that for a particularly dramatic or climatic moment (like a shootout escaping the compound with the Action Clock at 2300), if at all.
Nothing gets people back into the scenario by inflicting harm on a bystander.