Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[SeventhZombie]

So tonight I was running my group through the 3rd Episode of the NE Plot Point. The group had a fairly good plan for getting the first family out but with limited knowledge on how many enemies lay waiting within the barrack things got a little hairy.

The PC who plugged all his power points into Invent decided to use his nanobots (which is the trapping for his power) to pump up his piloting and computer skills so that he could grab the Manta parked by the barracks and use it's weapons to destroy the M'buna and keep the Fins, Drones and V'sori from escaping with the first family.

A few rounds later he has managed to get the Manta hovering over the barracks and decides to fire a fusion missile at the M'buna while being inside the blast radius. This is after his Manta has taken one well placed grenade blast and had a fusion grenade stuck to the outside hull waiting to go off (my fusion grenades are always magnet). Needless to say the barracks, M'buna and the Manta took massive amounts of damage.

The Inventor sat unconscious in the burning wreckage of the Manta for quite awhile before they pulled him out.

This is where I'm not sure I wasn't too harsh. Technically from all the explosions, crashing ships and what not the PC should have been dead. But I gave the player two options, he had spent all 20 of his points in Invent, so I ruled that his nanobots in a ditch effort to save him used material from the wreckage and saved his life. BUT he would have to "lose" 4 points of Invent because to save him the bots had to rebuild him into a cyborg. So the 4 pts would represent the Construct power (which he would get at a one point discount to keep his point total even) leaving him with 16 pts still in Invent. The second option was to have his current character be dead when they pulled him from the wreckage and to make a new character. He choose the latter.

Was I too harsh in my options? He looked a bit disappointed.

[Peanuts]

Wow, he chose to make a new character? I think what you did is pretty awesome. One of my characters had a similar sort of comeback, though I did get to tweak him and his powers somewhat when I did. Really though I would have been happy to become a cyborg, I don't think you were too harsh. Characters are meant to be difficult to kill in Necessary Evil, but it sounds like that one was self inflicted, and would count as a heroic sacrifice to me (assuming the others and the first family survived anyway).

[geijhan]

Given that "You don't die unless specifically ruled so" is a (heavily paraphrased) setting rule for NE, yes, you might have been a bit harsh.

Reconstructing him with parts of the wreckage is a cool idea, though. If you have to hand him a disadvantage because of his near-death, you might just give him distinctive appearance and/or -2 charisma. (It's hard to hide who you are when the warning light of the Manta dashboard got embedded in your cheek and intermittently lights up or some such).

Ideally, I'd have the player describe what he looks like after the reconstruction.

And in the end, even "I was in 3 successive explosions and a spacecraft crash but I got better." is within genre.

Good luck finding a middle ground with your player! (the preceding sentence does not contain an ounce of sarcasm.)

[SeventhZombie]

[Timon]

I don't think you were too harsh, what you proposed sounds like a neat solution.... but it is your solution.

You might have got more acceptance if you had said "fortunately your brilliant nanobots patch you up with the materials at hand after you are blown up, crushed, shredded and incinerated, what effect do you think that has?" but you were probably blind-sided by his negative reaction. I would also not have offered the new character option as NE indeed has 4-colour "recurring roles" (p20).

What is also going on here is that the player was going to blast the baddies with a cool spaceship and look totally rad and ended up on his ass with his eyebrows on fire: that is quite a let-down, so he probably was not very receptive.

I am currently running NE for a group and your use of the V'Sori forces seems a lot more effective than mine - my guys go through the Drones and K'tharen like a fig cocktail though a short nun.

Sticky fusion grenades are a very good idea....hmmmm
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The Doctor's Wife

[SeventhZombie]

My group is not the most combat heavy group. And I've been rolling really well against them in combat. I've also found that making at least one of the K'tharens a wild card helps the combat be more interesting. Though I think they are starting to learn if I get too descriptive with the K'tharen then they should watch out for him in particular

The PCs are as follows:

-Bruno the Werespider (Thief and webslinger)
-Gnarl Von Tangleroot (vicious tree man/ecoterrorist)
-El Presidente (Minion heavy warlord from Nicaragua)
-Captain Nicaragua (Radiation based Captain America-Esque)
-The Great Milenko (Illusionist)
-Impulse (Kinetic Energy manipulation, absorption and reflection)
-Adam Selene (Nanobot possessed Inventor) *Dead*

[Clint]

[SeventhZombie]

I've learned with this particular batch of players that death has to be a real possibility no matter the setting. If not the normal planning and strategizing turns into...well for lack of a better phrase, "Get'er!"

I believe I even started this campaign by saying, "These V'sori are they same beings that kicked the crap out of the guys that were normally kicking the crap out of you before the invasion."

[Clint]

[ogbendog]

I liike the idea of using the incient to give the Character the optoin of changing his concept a bit. But not requiring it.

You could say that he was rebuit with metal that doesn't work quite right, and it take d6 days for those temporary patches to be cleaned up. And they are gone, unless he chooses to do it with New Power Points

[SlasherEpoch]

[SeventhZombie]

I've definitely made it known that death is a possibility.

In fact the now dead Inventor was all too familiar with PC death since he executed a teammate that had been captured by the Fins. He felt it was too high of a risk to save his downed, nullified teammate so he went invisible and "put one in the back of his head".

[Evilgaz]

The most important thing is communication as the Clintinator mentioned above. You need to have an informal chat with your player about.

In the given situation I'd have said in advance "yeah, you can do that, but if you mess it up you're going to die, no holds barred, let the dice fall where they may" or something along those lines. Maybe dressed it up a bit better.

If your player knows there are going to be consequences to their actions, they'll handle it a lot better. You could even open it up to the player to suggest something and see if that fits with your ideas. e.g. "I lose an arm in the crash, but my nanobots go about creating me an Adamantium one!" and then get him to spend his next advance on bionic arm or whatever.

But yeah, chat to your players, make sure they know what the potential outcome is for a certain course of action - heck, this is where a good deal of tension can come from. They know they might die in a blaze of glory, but do it anyway!
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