[UA] New GM - help me

[Saul]

As people have pointed out, HtH combat is not nearly as effective as firearms: you do far less damage on average, but also, you have to be up close and personal to do it in the first place, which means you'll take damage back, whereas with a gun you're quite free to snipe at unsuspecting passers-by from a 3rd storey window.

As for the insanity thing: giving people penalties is going to mean their character go down the drain very, very quickly. I've only played one UA session, a one-shot with quite insane amounts of stress, and everyone in the group had four or five failed notches in various things by the end of the game. If people are in severely stressful cicumstances, just have them roll more frequently, and if anything, give *bonuses* to rolls in situations of negligible stress.

Saul

"Guns don't kill people. Americans do." --Michael Moore
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jakob Pape 
  To: The Unknown Armies RPG Mailing List 
  Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 2:59 AM
  Subject: [UA] New GM - help me


  Hi - next week I'm going to start running my first game of Unknown Armies, and I was hoping the list could help me out with a couple of rules queries.

  Firstly, is there a reason why close combat is deadlier than firearms? Since a critical with a gun does maximum damage for that gun, but a close combat critical is fatal, a knife seems like a better weapon to use than a gun, especially on tough opponents (e.g. epidermomancers with 250 wound points), and particularly at low skill levels. My idea is that, instead of an instant kill, a hand-to-hand critical should do damage equal to the skill of the hitter - so for a skilled fighter that's a lot, but it's not a 1% chance of an instant kill on the Freak for example. 

  Secondly - I'm looking for help with the insanity system. Now, I know it's the best system I've ever met in an rpg, but I still feel like tinkering a bit - it doesn't seem right that a 'normal' (0 hardened notches) character has the same chance of freaking out when he's shot at, as he does if he shoots a helpless opponent in the head. It seems to me that if the violence stress is much higher than the hardened notches of the character making the check, there should be some kind of penalty; what do you think?

  Any suggestions?

  Jakob Pape

  "We only go around once,
  There's no time to be afraid."


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