Hey guys, I recently gm’d my first round and had a blast, but I’m curious about two things. I haven’t been here in a few days, so please forgive me if these were recently covered, but I was hoping someone could add some clarity before my group’s next session.
1). When a player deals harm beyond the target’s range, do they get the benefits of a 10+ kick some ass role? Do they just deal whatever base damage plus bonuses (like sneaky) they would without the success equivalent of a high role? If they’re not rolling under pressure, how is this treated?
2). Small magic allows for creating a barrier. On a perfect cast, how long does this last? Is it a wall or bubble? What differentiates this from the spell slinger’s wall technique?
Thank you guys so much for your help and clarification. Knowing these things should improve upon our great first round with an even better second!
I’m a n00b, but here’s my $0.02:
1) Do you mean the player is outside of the range of the monster? Then there’s no rolls happening. The KSA roll is for situations where the parties can hurt each other. If the player is safely out of harm’s way, you would just “cause harm as established” and the player’s base damage would be done. No roll necessary.
2) Totally up to you and the fiction. Ask the player tons of questions. What kind of barrier is it? Where did they learn this spell? How does magic work in your particular setting? It should work no better or worse than allowed by the fiction. Don’t let the player get away with just saying “I want to ‘use magic’ to create a barrier.” force them to explain what exactly they’re doing and how. All playbooks technically have access to “use magic.” The Spell Slinger is just able to use the ‘Use Magic’ move in more situations than most and has their one signature spell.
Hey, thanks for the reply! So, the player can get bonuses in kick some ass situations that they can’t get when they take their time and are out of danger range? This seems strange to me (albeit the -1 harm choice wouldn’t apply) .
Still, I can accept that answer.
The benefit to being out of range is that they can hurt the monster reliably and at no cost. Sure with a KSA roll you might get to do that one extra harm, but you also might get the crap kicked out of you. Every roll should be dangerous. A fail should be meaningful. If I’m up against a crazy strong monster, the last thing I want to do is be close to it.
As a Keeper, if a hunter is careless enough to get within range of some storey-tall prehistoric devil creature, and they roll snake eyes, you can bet I’m going to punish them for that mistake. Hunters need to be smarter than the monsters, hardly ever stronger. How can they trap or constrain it? Or how can they hurt it from a distance? etc.
I know I default to Supernatural a lot for these, but you go with what you know.
So, if you are using magic to create a barrier to a creature, if you have ever seen Supernatural, you may have seen that Sam, Dean, Bobby, or other “normal” people will do things like drawing symbols, maybe powering the seal with blood, etc.
Also, just to show I can vary my references, in some of the Dresden books you also see Butters do this kind of thing as well, even though he’s super not competent with magic.
If you notice on the Use Magic move, it mentions that the Keeper might require you to do something to get that barrier to work, and those are the kinds of things that a “normal” person would have to do in order to create a barrier.
The Spellslinger’s Wall technique is someone like Harry Dresden or Rowena just calling up magic and pushing out the energy as a barrier; they naturally manipulate magic on a more fundamental level, especially when they have moves that call out those abilities.
If you determine that special symbols need to be drawn, but the hunters don’t have time to finish them before the threat shows up, you can definitely have them make an Act Under Pressure roll before they ever even get to seeing if they draw the symbols the right way.
As for duration: honestly, this is going to be the kind of thing that is determined by what makes sense in the story. If its a hastily drawn set of symbols, it might function for the scene, unless something else goes wrong (great time for a hard move to do something like causing the magic of the symbols to burn out).
If its something where you add in that it takes the hunters an hour to draw everything, and they have time to plan, you might say that it wards the place until daytime, when they can hustle the person the monster is after out of the house and to somewhere safe.
But in all of that, its what makes sense for the story, not a hard and fast limit. I’ll even point out that how something works in earlier seasons of a TV series might not be how it works later on, and even in the Dresden books, some of the absolute rules of magic that Harry mentions early on turn out to have some nuance to them.
As far as attacking something at range; if they worked to set up an ambush? Just deal the damage in harm, or even let them take out their prey if it makes sense. If there is an element of risk? If they can’t get harmed by trading blows, but the situation is dicey, that’s probably Acting Under Pressure; you take the shot with the hunting rifle, but maybe the shot goes through the monster and hurts an ally, or hits a gas tank. Maybe you reveal your location and the monster closes in on you after you take the shot. If you get a 6-, maybe the gun jams, and its going to have to get up close and personal, or you have to figure out how to fix that gun.
If you really want to make them roll something for an attack out of the monster’s range you could do Act Under Pressure (many GMs do this in Apocalypse World to the best of my knowledge) but there would need to be some kind of consequence for failure other than “you don’t hit.” But otherwise yeah they don’t need to roll anything, just do harm as established.
Ich Always read “as established” Like “as fits the Situation and your Partys Style.”
So if i Set a Sniper hitting Something from far away i wouldnt call for a roll but He also wouldnt do Base damage.
Depending on the Circumstances He might Just defeat His target or do max damage
Just as the fiction demands