The team have made it to Reading, the town where we live that we destroyed on the first night and they have settled in. They made a few contacts and traded some bags of high quality grain for high tech paramilitary body armour (SDI 4) and some cool weapons. Each character has their signature weapon and I wanted them to have a particular weapon that makes them special in a certain way, this is how that panned out.
Aggro (not his real name, I'm not even sure he has one) - sniper. I gave him an obscene automatic Plasma Sniper Rifle with SDI of 5. It charges off a hefty power supply and has limited ammo before it runs out.
Byrn (sounds like his real name but isn't) - Likes swords. I gave him chainswords, SDI 3 (like normal swords) but with +2 attack dice.
Rob (the other one) - shotgun. Gave him an automatic shotgun, SDI 4 (same as before) and +2 attack dice.
Fish (that's just what we call him) - Crossbow, SDI 4 with +2 attack dice.
Sian - Machete (how cool is that?) - SDI 3 with +2 attack dice.
The reason I pumped them up was that I wanted to throw something nasty at them. They took a mission that sent them out into the wastes, where they were met by...
The Tank
Last night, I threw a big reanimate at them. I modeled him on a Tank from Left 4 Dead: SDI 4, Necro factor (hits): 25. His drawbacks were poor hearing, sight and hands too big to use weapons outside of improvised ones.
The tank fight worked brilliantly. A mixture of sneaky sneaky (Fish and Byrn), snipey (Aggro) and downright cavalier disregard for one's personal safety (Rob). The tank was shot at and rammed with a combine harvester that Rob miraculously got started.
We knew beforehand that bumping up a weapon's SDI made it more powerful so it needed a balance. When shooting at the Tank, Aggro was rolling clutchfulls of D4s and just about managed to have enough ammo (thanks to the scarcity dice).
Scarcity dice work brilliantly. With the tank defeated, he used the plasma rifle to blow the back door off the farmhouse he was sniping from. He rolled a D6 for scarcity (only a single shot but he had had his trigger finger pulled back most of the way) and hit 6, running out of ammo. Poetic statistics.
Byrn demonstrated that having 2 more D6s to roll doesn't mean you automatically do it 2 more damage. I've never seen such unfortunate dice! It is quite nice fishing out 8D6 to have a go at the bad guy, though.
The locals
With all the noise, they attracted a bunch of locals, who turned up to take their stuff. A fight ensued. The drop in SDI compared to the tank was welcome by all and as a first proper Human vs Human fight, I think it went well. The PCs armour made it difficult for me to do damage (although I got a point or two through). The PCs won, having taken more damage.
The locals had between 6 and 9 Animus (hits) and a SDI of 2. They were firing normal rifles but without burst and had ranged at 3. This was not an even match but then I had just thrown the Tank at the player group!
Fish was using burst with his assault rifle to hit more than one target, which worked well. The damage he rolled was applied to all the bad guys, which feels overpowered but isn't in practise.
Things we learnt
Having a high animus (and thus hit points) does make you rather hard to kill. Byrn faced off a shotgun for a number of rounds of me rolling 7,8 on D8s. Animus is one of Byrn's character's strength. He was reduced to a crawl.
I could not remember how to use Deadening in the thick of it and my cheat sheet didn't have much on it. We used it as giving extra attack die per deadening, which is not in the rules (Strength and Quick). It worked OK but was a bit harsh: Byrn took himself down to 1 Deadening during the Tank fight so when the locals turned up, he was too tired for anything fancy and, exhausted, walked into the fight with the shotgun. Cinematic and ruletastic.
Burst is rightly powerful and gave the team much more damage capability. Perhaps there should be something similar for close combat people? Byrn was burning Deadening 1-for-1 die, which was quite harsh in retrospect! Perhaps Deadening can be used to give 2 dice in close combat? Sort of fits - if you really throw yourself physically into the fight then you get to do more damage.
Combat is slick.
Next...
No game next week because of the Queen's Jubilee celebrations (wooo! free holiday). There is one area of the rules I really want to test next but I'm not going to give it away, although I probably just have.