Hi Guys, I’ve got some combat related questions that I’m hoping some of you can help me out on.
Hi Guys, I’ve got some combat related questions that I’m hoping some of you can help me out on.
Ran my fifth session of The Sprawl last night and I came away from it feeling that the Action phase was a bit of a mess when it turned into combat.
For some context, the mission was basically a kidnapping/extraction job and the team had decided on a time and relative location on where they’d attempt to grab the target. As you might have expected, things didn’t go exactly according to plan. To make a long story short, the ensuing fight involved two cops, six gang bangers (several of which were heavily cybered), and a teenage target attempting to flee the scene. Once the target was apprehended, the team threw him in this repurposed military vehicle they ride around in, and a chase ensued with three motorcycles.
Dealing with that many combatants against a three person team felt a little overwhelming to me as far as keeping things cinematic and interesting, and a result of that was several of the combatants didn’t get very involved with the PCs until others had been dealt with.
So, do you guys have any tips for pitting your PCs against a larger group of enemies? I’m reluctant to condense it all into a small scene as I want to give the combat oriented characters a chance to shine and to drive home the danger of combat. I was also afraid about shortening things up into a quick narration would result in a short session. I kept things moving within the fiction and didn’t get too hung up on harm clocks for the enemies or the specifics of their weapons, but I just feel it wasn’t a terribly interesting combat situation. Are there any tips out there for prepping a combat situation without really knowing when/where/how the characters will engage in this fashion?
Once the fight became vehicular, I also realized that I had no idea how to handle car combat. The team had a Driver, and he was plugged in via Second Skin, so with that in mind, should the damage taken to the car be reflected on his Harm Clock? The gangers on bikes were armed and taking shots at the vehicle, blowing a tire out at one point, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with it mechanically. Sorry if this is covered in the book, but I wasn’t able to locate it.
Last thing I was wondering about was whether or not you guys had any tips on how to keep your Hacker engaged during a combat situation. After receiving advice from you guys here in another thread, I had talked with my group and concluded that hacking enemy cyberware was not worth the headache, so aside from hacking the police vehicle’s communication system so he could shut a call for backup down, and failing on a spoofed request to get the cops to respond to another call, he wasn’t sure what to do. In hind sight, I probably should’ve encouraged him to hack the motorcycles during that phase of combat, but hadn’t thought about it at the time. If you guys have some general suggestions for things a hacker can do during combat I’d love to hear it.
Sorry about the long post. Any advice on this stuff would be hugely appreciated.