Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[chillburn]

So real quick, if you haven't seen the movie Pandorum and plan to, (it's a fun, violent SciFi movie, you should go watch it some time) then turn away now.

Spoiler Space (only one for thread)
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Okay, so I'm starting up a SciFi game based on the movie Pandorum. It'll be set after the end of the movie and the characters will wake-up as their cryo-pods are ejected from the crashed space ship and they swim to the beach.

My first question is how to handle stating the Hunters/Eaters aboard the Elysium? These guys are VERY tough (it takes the three main characters working together to kill ONE, and they spend a lot of the movie running/hiding from them, which I want to emulate). High stats/toughness is easy, but given the kind of damage they take in the movies (one gets chopped in the head, the blade remaining embedded, and keeps fighting) I was thinking of making each a Wild Card. But that could easily be overkill and make things complicated if the group ever has to face a couple. So what about making them "Wild Extras" that have wounds like Wild Cards, but don't get their own bennies or a wild die? Thoughts?

[Drue]

Wounds, beni use, and the wild die give you a lot of flexibility for your extras. Don't limit your choices to full wild cards or stock extras.

Some examples (not everyone uses the same labels)
Mooks are incapacitated on any damaging attack that would cause a shaken result; may still be shaken by non-damaging effects, e.g. tricks

Hardy Extras: per standard rules; second shaken does not cause a wound, may only be incapacitated on a wound result

Tough Extras: four wounds to incapacitate, no wild die

Skilled Extras: one wound to incapacitate, uses wild die

Lucky Extras: one wound, no wild die, has a single beni

For wild cards, it's not so much a mechanical choice, but a question of story impact. How meaningful is the character to the progression of the story?

A few games back, my players had an equal number of skilled extras allies (one each) and faced down a horde of sixty zombie mooks closing in on a town the party was defending. I was more than a little concerned since almost the whole session was a combat encounter, but there were big grins all around when the last one dropped. If the zombies had been regular extras, the horde would only have been a bunch making for a pretty standard combat encounter.

[Zadmar]

[chillburn]

Now I'm thinking of just giving them Hardy. That way they are can still be shaken (giving the group a chance to recover, regroup while fighting one), and I don't have to track wounds on individuals.

Thanks for the input guys.

More thoughts to come (specifically converting Sanity rules into rules for Pandorum).