I’m having trouble understanding how the playbook Rat-Pack handles damage when fighting as a gang. Hopefully someone can help?
Let’s say you are fighting as a gang (2 elder, 5 middluns and 2 pups) against a gunlugger (effectively small gang vs. small gang). The gunlugger inflicts 4 harm to your gang. How is that applied?
Looking at the gang countdown clock, this would normally incur widespread serious injuries and many fatalities to a gang. However, the Rat-Pack playbook states that kids only die when you would normally take a debility. Are a couple middluns and an elder injured per the gang countdown clock’s indication of widespread serious injuries? (It doesn’t seem you can say a pup is (really) injured, because 1 harm kills a pup.)
Is the Rat-Pack now at 10 o’clock and 2 harm away from having the first kid die? If the fight breaks off at this point, does it then become individual damage to be kept track of on each individual kid’s harm wheel? Who decides how the 4 harm is allocated?
It would be great if someone could detail what happens if a full Rat-Pack gang takes 4 harm twice, both in the combat and then what that looks like to the Rat-Pack after the combat is over, in terms of how injuries are applied.
Thanks!
Normally, for a gang, you start taking fatalities at 6 o’clock. So, it seems that part of taking harm as a gang is ignored. If harm taken would put you at 12 o’clock, one of the kids in the Rat-Pack dies rather than taking a debility (and stats are adjusted). I think you can still stop the clock at 9’oclock like a debility?
Let’s say the fight ends and the Rat-Pack is at 11 o’clock. Since it takes 5 harm to reach 11, should 5 harm be spread among the remaining members or is it more fluid with the MC determining who is hurt and how badly in a narrative manner?
Okay, I had to pull out the Rat-Pack playbook. Yeah, I suppose they did a bad job of accounting for huge gang death because it definitely implies that you could lose gang members from taking harm but it explicitly states the debility loses a gang member, so… I’d say both. As an MC I would likely rule that none of the Rat-Pack are dead, per se, at 6 or even 9 o’clock but at 11 o’clock there will definitely be many fatalities unless the player elects to lose only 1. It’s interesting that there’s no space for debilities and depending on which member of the gang you lose it could be worse than a regular debility, but one.advantage of this is that you could theoretically take more than 4 debilities if you gang survives long enough to grow bigger.
Thanks for the input, Patrick. I’m enjoying the playbook quite a bit, but the gang/harm stuff for them is confusing.