[UA] New GM - help me

[Chris Cooper]

--- Jakob Pape <jakob at discord.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

Hello Jake.

My
> idea is that, instead of an instant kill, a
> hand-to-hand critical should do damage equal to the
> skill of the hitter

This is very close to how I do it. If the weapon needs
two hands to wield it (sword, axe, chainsaw) it does
Firearms Damage with the damage cap being the
wielder's Body Stat. 

Other H2H weapons do similar Body Stat-capped Firearms
damage if they roll a Crit or Match.

[snip]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. 

According to the madness gauge a character becomes
"anaethetised" to psychic trauma if he has that Rank
or higher in Hardened Notches. I character with three
hardened notches in violence isn't fazed when someone
pulls a gun on him (that is to say he doesn't
disrespect the violence, it just doesn't control him
anymore).

If the gun was used on the victim's daughter and he
has three failed notches in Helplessness, the rank
three violence works as a rank-3 Helplessness check.
The victim's player rolls a check, because Failed
notches don't anaethetise you to anything at all.

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?

No. I'd suggest you leavve the sanity gauges alone
until you hit play. Every GM has different methods of
using sanity gauges - I actually like to dish out
hardened and failed notches without rolls depending on
the character being played. 

In fact I make certain people roll before an action
and if they fail, they freeze up and cannot perform -
like shooting the villian in the head in premeditated
murder.

Use the sanity guages to guide your play. Apply two
failed gauges to each player's character and give them
three-hard in all others. Three is the most common
stress gauge rank. With the two failed ranks, certain
characters will wig-out during play, and the rest of
the team are able enough to handle the screaming
fruitloop.

A strong action piece One Shot with lots of John Woo
Woo Gun Fu won't require many checks (since every
character is three-deep in hard notches in every
gauge).

Heavy Cthulhu-esque investigators get lots of sanity
checks in all gauges.

Of course in UA/CoC games the big old guy at the end
of the summoning ritual isn't as scary to someone with
10 hard Unnatural notches: "Hey Frank, don't you think
Cthulhu has a stupid body to go with his stupid name?
...Frank?" 

Good luck.

Cheers,

Chris.

=====
The little bird that is the song in my heart
is too tired to be carried
by its battered wings.

It falls, crashes...
... and is still in its bone cage...

Dead Inside from Atomic Sock Monkey press.


                                      www.atomicsockmonkey.com

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