Re: Chapter 20: Not in Kansas Anymore
In reply to Thomas Pearce (msg # 312):
In the span of a dozen seconds after Beaucheveux had alerted the hilltop campers to his approach, under the light of a gibbous moon, the heroes had dispatched with three of the four campers. The investigator had dropped the watchman with a single shot; the rifleman and the investigator had shaken the man with the pistol and the hombre with with the scattergun, respectively. Those two campers had no chance to react, because the barber had rushed in and thrown knives at each of them, and the mechanic had fired one barrel from his shotgun -- taking down each of the men in succession.
Earnest witnesses all of this, without having made any attacks as he approached the hillock. However, he notices a figure running from the hilltop to the south, now some 20 or more yards away and quite likely to get away in the dark of night. The fourth camper, to be sure, the one who had slipped into the shadows when the fighting began -- and apparently a feller with enough horse sense to run away from a group of men who had just proved themselves as deadly as they come.
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OOC: Tommy's roll is definitely a hit and raise. The Shooting roll was fine; there was a -2 for darkness, which the Judges is applying to all PC rolls after viewing the dice roller results. Sometimes the Judge will alert the players ahead of time about an obvious modifier that affects most or all of the combatants (as done in this play-test, the Judge has noted multiple times that there is a darkness penalty, and if you include that modifier within your roll and your roll notes you will be saving the Judge time and effort, which is always good for the players.
(Btw, the Judge notes that both of the new PCs got some serious Aces on their recent rolls -- it's a good mental note that at any time an action can become extreme in this game, from extremely bad on a snake eyes to extremely good when your Ace Aces, and then your Acing Ace Aces, etc.)
Tommy's damage roll has some issues, but that's why we're doing this play-test. Stand by for more OOC notes in this forum about the combat -- and the Judge will reach out to Tommy in PM as well.
Regardless, the results of all the rolls this turn enable the Judge to summarize the end of the round and to continue this play-test narrative, as above, and with aftermath expected, during which the Judge sees other testing to be done. In short, Tracy and Jake had achieved Shaken results on each of their targets. A second shaken result was all that was needed to inflict a wound on each of them. The Judge could have spent NPC bennies to try to soak the wounds, but there isn't much value in that for now, so even if we re-rolled Tommy's damage roll, the odds are quite high that he would get at least a Shaken result -- and Rof's damage was enough to seriously Wound even experienced Wild Cards all by itself. So, for the play-test, we will just there are three men down and the fourth camper escaped. We could perhaps test a Chase, which is what would occur here if we were playing in the regular game thread, but the current circumstances aren't advantageous for such a test, so we will do a few "combat aftermath" things here and then wrap this particular play-test. We can do another one as needed / desired.
Go ahead and react / act with free posting as to what each PC does next (anything you want to do, other than chase the fleeing camper). There are still potential rolls to be made here, and still a resolution to such an encounter that is worth finishing even though it's a play-test.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:57, Thu 27 Feb 2020.