| From: | shadowrn@*********.com (Ice Heart) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | NPC fatalities (was others, latest: Weird SR Weapons) |
| Date: | Wed Feb 6 09:40:01 2002 |
>As an aside, I tend to find that NPC professional ratings (or other
>indicators of NPC willingness to stay in a fight or flee/surrender) are
>rather useless in SR. With a character or two who typically roll ~30 for
>Initiative in my games, and who have weapon skills of ~8, even if bad guys
>survive the first shot, they don't get a second action until they've been
>shot 4 more times... Makes running away or surrendering a little difficult
>when you're dead. Very often I wonder if my NPCs are ever going to get the
>chance to get an action to flee or give up. The poor things just keep
>getting blasted, and then they're all dead. The only ones who tend to
>survive tend to also be the ones who will not give up, so from a player's
>perspective, it appears that all NPCs literally fight to the death :-).
"Aargh!!!! Those cold-hearted bastards shot Joe Corpguard! He was just
doing his job. Damn them all! The man's pension can't even keep a roof
over the heads of Mrs. Corpguard and the kids. Sniff. Sob."
*display huge grin here* Okay, perhaps I am too sympathetic over the
plight of my NPCs. Seriously though, the corp actually does not expect
their low end guards to stand up in a fight with a 400K sammie. They have
heavy hitters for that. They expect the average guard to duck, hide, and
hit the PanicButton.
I came up with an alternate use for professional/threat rating, with regards
to morale in combat. The number range of the prof/threat rating is the
number of phys/stun boxes the NPC will take before losing all interst in
fighting. I call the self-preservation instinct. Even a really tough goon
(threat rating 8), will start thinking about brave brave Sir Robin if his
condition moniter is dripping with red ink. A street tough with a threat of
2 is going to be backing down/retreating/etc. after a couple of light
wounds. I take into account the NPC's profession when I do this. A ganger
defending home turf doubles the number of boxes before losing interest in
combat. Said ganger would hang in there until he had 4 boxes of damage
before playing dead and hoping he gets overlooked in the aftermath. Greatly
superior numbers also modify the survival instinct of NPCs. I subtract the
threat rating from 10. The resulting number is the ratio ( x to 1) that the
NPC needs to double their wound tolerance. The same ganger would hang in
for 8 boxes of damage if he was on home turf AND the odds were 8 to 1 in the
gang's favor. A corp goon (threat 8) would fight to the death if defending
corp property or if his team outnumbered the runners 2 to 1. In the
exceedingly rare cases that I use a threat rating over 10, the runners are
not going to accept surrender, or fail to put bullets in anyone "playing
possum". I reserve double digit threat for campaign stoppers, called
"bosses" in console gaming. :P
The final villain and her two trusted advisors might have double digit
threat. The PCs are not going to be fooled if one of them falls down and
keeps his eyes closed after an "S" wound anyway. :)
One other thing: insane NPCs don't worry about combat morale, nor do
cyberzombies. It is highly likely their instincts for self preservation is
skewed/broken anyway.
Since implementing this rule, I have had over half of my NPCs live to fight
another day. The wired/jazzed/ripped PCs don't look twice at an opponent
who drops like a rag doll after a 3-round burst from an AR. And capping a
guy who seems to be unconscious and bleeding, but alive tends to bug at
least one of the runners in big ways. The psychotic merc nearly died from a
tranq overdose after he did it once. It seems the team medic did not
appreciate the act. In one fight, the runners squared off against a cult
who believed their vampire mage leader was a benevolent god. The runners
were hired to kill the vamp, and had no problems with doing so. (The medic
PC's exact quote: "Hell, the slot's dead anyhow. It's not like he has
AIDS, or some other cureable disease. We're doing him a favor." Hmmm...)
The cultists threw themselves at the PCs to defend their beloved leader, and
went down surprisingly easy. Reason: the pacifistic, grade 4 initiate
vampire was actually pretty benevolent. He turned on his anchored Super
Improved Invis spell, handy for god-like appearance/disappearance acts, and
stood in the middle of the fight. Whenever a cultist got hit at all, the
vamp dropped a doozy of a sleep spell, stacked with a trid spectacle. The
runners saw the cultist take gruesom wounds and drop. The vamp picked one
of the unlucky victims of a head wound and phys masked the body to look like
the vampire was supposed to. The runners waded through 40 apparently wimpy
cultists, actually killing only 5. They dragged off a dead body, got paid,
and went home to argue the ethics of what they had done. The cult
relocated, and the Johnson came after the PCs for selling him a bogus
corpse. (He represented an unsrupulous purchasing department for some
doctors researching a cure for HMHVV. A little toooooo ironic...) My
players hate me. ;)
Look at it this way:
Cherish your NPCs, for they are precious. And, in any Shadowrun game, there
are only about 6 billion. When they are all gone, the game's over. :P
Kori
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