NPCs for Montana

As discussed yesterday, I need to come up with a handful of NPC's for Sunday's session. Unlike previous sessions, these characters need to be combat-ready, as I intend for them to serious attempt to take the party into custody, even if I don't expect them to succeed. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot written on how to construct a reasonable combat challenge in A Time of War. Let's do a quick review of what is written.

Page 336 of A Time of War starts the section on NPCs and Random Encounters, which is as close as we're like to get to what we're trying to assess. This section contains four "templates" for NPC's: Thug, Soldier, Savant, and Boss. Each of these templates are designed to be filled as modifications of your party's capabilities. I think this is a neat way of handling A Time of War's level-less mechanics, but it puts an awful lot of work into designing a new NPC, not the least of which is compiling the average stats for the party. I'm tempting to compute NPC's as a function of the party's XP, but that seems even more work. This is a busy week for me, so let's talk shortcuts.

Fortunately, A Time of War is kind enough to provide a set of example stats for a basic combat character for each category (except Savant, which is intentionally a non-combat character.) In this circumstance, I can cheat and get away with ripping off the templates whole-sale: they're designed for starting-level characters, and although two of my characters started around 7,000 XP due to aging, two are also very much non-combat characters. Thus, I feel I can probably balance the engagement with four thugs and a soldier (the head officer charged with apprehending the party), but to reduce the risk of accidentally wiping the party before I have real run-time experience with the combat rules, I'll downgrade the engagement by one thug. That should provide a solid challenge without too much actual risk.

One worrisome thing about the combat rules is how lethal they are, and how much getting the first shot in counts. When you look at the weapons tables, anything lower than a rifle looks positively harmless, but in actuality, I'm a bit worried. Let's run through a quick example.

For the moment, I'll assume our thug-level TerraSec officers are carrying revolvers -- your basic slug-thrower, suitable for law enforcement duties. Light, concealable, portable, and low-maintenance. Its damage code is 4B/4, easy to remember. What will this gun do if we shoot, say, Clark?

Clark's BOD is 4. He wears no armor to speak of, unless he upgrades suddenly and unexpectedly in the near future. The 4B armor penetration tears through what clothes he might be wearing like tin foil. The bullet does 4 damage plus 1 point for every four points above the to-hit number the officer in question rolls (Standard Damage Table, p. 182). Let's imagine it does 1 extra point of damage (the Thug having +4 in Small Arms.) We're playing with hit locations (Page 190), so let us also presume a straight 7 gets rolled there -- the most likely result. Clark is shot in the leg. A leg hit multiplies the damage by 0.75, round up, for a base damage of 4. That applies a -2 to every check Clark makes from that moment forward, including the Knockdown check a shot in the leg triggers.

The Knockdown effect is a flat RFL Attribute check. Clark's RFL is 4, minus two for the injury, means he needs to roll a 10 or better to avoid falling down. Reasonable, I suppose -- I would likely decide falling to the ground screaming was the appropriate response to being shot in the leg as well. This is actually the kindest of the rolls Clark needs to make. Next up is the Consciousness roll (page 184.) The Consciousness roll is a flat TN of 7, but is modified by Clark's WIL linked attribute modifier, as well as his injuries, including this one. Clark's WIL linked attribute is 0, but he still take the -2 to his roll, meaning he needs to roll a 9 to retain consciousness. He likely falls down. Fortunately, the 4 damage falls just shy of forcing Clark to make a bleeding roll, which could easily kill him. (REVISION: This last sentence is in correct. See the August 1st entry for correction.)

The point here is that the first shot from these NPC's will likely take anybody not wearing armor out of the fight. To make matters work, under the hit location rules, those revolvers are potentially fatal -- rolling snake eyes on the To-Hit table would mean a head hit, 10 damage, and a dead PC. Unlikely, and as long as a point of Edge remains, avoidable, but still a disquieting probable instant-death scenario. The problem, of course, is that there are no slug-throwers of the type you'd expect a law enforcement officer to be carrying that do less damage than that -- the only 3-damage pistols are either Burst Fire (which would make them more hazardous to the party) or FedSuns affiliation -- reasonable for a PC to get with some effort, but not standard issue to Terra's Finest.

The point here is that the party is going to be in real danger tomorrow if shooting starts. Tomorrow, I'll talk a little bit about how to make sure shooting starts.