Newbish n00b questions, MkII

[stubby]

Also, question: so I'm a bit confused... do you still have to pay for these off-map reinforcements as normal, or are they "bonus free units" generated by kicking ass & being patient? Or a mixture of both?

They're units you pay for at the beginning and just delay deployment. Originally I thought adding extra units on top of that for waiting would be a good idea, but now I'm thinking that adds unnecessary complication since you need to budget and build stuff mid-game. So instead, I'd go with something like giving the reserve forces an "Advantage of Surprise" benny instead for each turn the commander waits to deploy them.

[stubby]

Weapon turning speed has never really come up before, except for weapons mounted directly to vehicles without the benefit of a turret. Tbh I can't see a whole lot of gameplay benefit except in very, very specific scenarios.

[aoffan23]

I can imagine it being a story element, where minifigs are trying to evacuate a ship/building before the cannon can fire at them. While that would be a cool, tense scenario, it seems like it would just be a turn countdown type of event.

[stubby]

6: When you Sprint, do you have to use up the full Sprint roll, or can you stop yourself short? (this especially comes up when a unit crits their Sprint roll & way overshoots to the other side of the battlefield).

Only if you roll a 1 on the bonus dice.

• The Skill roll for Sprinting can benefit from Bonus Dice like any other roll (1.2: Numbers) - the extra dice keep adding more inches to the Sprint, potentially allowing truly ridiculous straight-line speed. By tradition, if a series of Critical Successes in a Sprint roll suddenly ends with a roll of one, it's a special kind of Critical Failure - the unit is unable to stop itself, and must run the full distance allowed by the extra Bonus Dice, even if he runs into a wall or off the table.

7. How are vehicular shoves handles? (We had an excavator "grab" a police van, & then the van driver "shove" to break the grab).

Vehicular shoves have been an outstanding issue for awhile. Right now there are only rules for making shoves with melee weapons (see 8.2), and Collisions if you have Momentum to spend, but a semi truck without weapons or momentum should still have a way to push through a crowd of protestors. I just haven't decided on the best way to handle it yet.

To get back to the original question, the only official way for a police van to escape an excavator grab is for somebody to disable the excavator or its arm. But piloting stunts, heroic feats, or WISG rolls can fill in if you think of something outside of the obvious.

8. How does Blessing/Curse SN over a group work? Say I've got 4 dudes in a squad (doing combined fire) who've been cursed w/ an SN d10 - do I just roll the d10 once, or 4 times (once for each of them)?

Once for each.

9. Can you Overskill w/ your "native" Skill die regardless of a curse? Say you're cursed w/ a d8 or 10, but you roll a 6 on a d6. The dd/d10 rolls a 1, so you have to take that, but do you still get the Overskill, or do you act like the rolling of the d6 never happened in the 1st place?

Nope. The curse roll replaces the native roll, including bonus and overskill dice. If you were feeling really generous you could let somebody use overskill to ignore the curse for that roll, I guess.

10? Do you have to have an action saved up to Bail? By my best interpretation of Chapter 4, it seems to be the case, but I don't know if there was an exception I missed.

Yes.

11. Can range penalties reduce the damage to negatives (i.e. trying to fire a BlastGun at long range?)

Nope:

• No matter how negative a modifier may be, the lowest possible result for any die roll is zero. A roll of 1d6-100 will almost always have a simple result of zero, for instance, unless a player's luck with Critical Rolls defies belief.

12. Do negatives in Combined Damage carry over to the other damage pooling in? Example: 3 BlastGuns combined-firing at extreme (6") range: at 1d8+1(-6)= 1d8-5, they roll a 7, 7, 2 -> effectively reduced to a 2, 2, -3. Does that negative affect the positive damage results?

Nope. Negative rolls are always treated as zeroes.

13. How does Squad size bonus on damage work for things like Arc Fire, since it's still individual squad members being hit?

Use the Sizes of the individual members. I should add a note to that effect.

14. What do we do w/ an Instant Benny earned by an end-of-turn action? Say one of my guys gets the Benny of 1st Blood... but it was the last of my guys that I can do anything w/ in my turn. Do I save the Benny as a response for the inter-turn, or does it carry over to my next turn?

There's always somebody who can use it. If nothing else, one of your guys who already moved can now get a second wind to move another 1d6 inches.

Letting people carry over Bennies if they can manipulate things to receive them at the very end of the turn leads to all kinds of weird metagamesmanship that I'd like to avoid. But I might change it from "disappears at the end of the recipient's turn" to "disappears at the beginning of the recipient's next turn" if I can figure out how to keep that from making things even more confusing.

15. Can a pilot save up Crazy Stunt inches as a response? (I recall someone mentioning a fighter pilot rolling a "parry" against a missile to do evasive maneuvers).

Ooh, interesting question. I'd treat it as a special kind of Vehicular Bail - the Pilot would need to use an Action, but the vehicle wouldn't be Disrupted at the end.

16. If a Component that was big enough to grant a size bonus to targeting (a 2" van windshield) gets destroyed & component overkill goes through it, how do we adjudicate what exactly it hits on the other side (such as the 1" minifig driver).

Well this is the generic answer:

• When the attacker wasn't specific about which part of a target he was aiming for, assume that the attack struck the closest, largest, and most generic part of he target - the center of a minifig's torso rather than the brainpan or groin, for example.
  
  If the attack location was too-Koincidentally chosen so that the Overkill Damage would happen to hit a target or component the attacker couldn't have known was there, that's in pretty poor taste. It's one thing to fire at a vehicle cockpit and happen to hit the pilot; it's another to fire at the one spot on a blank wall that happens to have a security guard on the other side. In cases of obvious metagame shenanigans, the defending player can declare by fiat which location on the target was struck by the attack, and then kick the attacking player in the shin.

The specific answer here is: Either you're firing at the whole 2" area of the windshield in general, in which case you get the size bonus but the defender gets to choose where on that 2" your attack hit, or you're aiming specifically at the part of the windshield that lets you hit the driver, so you don't get the size bonus, but you definitely hit the driver on component overkill. You don't get both.

17. How much of a larger unit w/ stealth needs to be covered before it becomes Hidden? Is it still 2/3, regardless of how far it scales up?

I don't have any real rules for larger creations with stealth, so it's all up to your own house rules. I think for me it'd depend on the fiction.

[bann154]

Can vehicles be in squads? Be in among a bunch of infantry or even be in a squad with other vehicles?

[bann154]

Ok so what happens when a unit with fixed armor is blessed? Say a minifig with heavy armor (6 armor) is blessed by a d10 for armor does it function like two dice? Roll the d10 and choose the highest still be that the 6 or whatever is rolled on the d10? Or does it ignore the 6 and simply roll a d10+2 for their armor? Just curious with fixed armor values.

[*CRAZYHORSE*]

Ok so what happens when a unit with fixed armor is blessed? Say a minifig with heavy armor (6 armor) is blessed by a d10 for armor does it function like two dice? Roll the d10 and choose the highest still be that the 6 or whatever is rolled on the d10? Or does it ignore the 6 and simply roll a d10+2 for their armor? Just curious with fixed armor values.

It would be an armor value of 6+1d10 and an increased structure level of 1.

[stubby]

Ok so what happens when a unit with fixed armor is blessed? Say a minifig with heavy armor (6 armor) is blessed by a d10 for armor does it function like two dice? Roll the d10 and choose the highest still be that the 6 or whatever is rolled on the d10?

Blessing is normally only used for Skill - Armor just takes the die as a straight bonus - but if for some reason you applied the blessing mechanic to armor, then yes, that's how it would work: 6 or the 1d10 roll, whichever was larger.

It would be an armor value of 6+1d10 and an increased structure level of 1.

But normally you'd just add the die straight to the armor, and this would be the result.

The only reason Skill uses blessings and curses is to make sure that skill ratings are always a single die. Other stats aren't subject to that limitation.

[bann154]

Ok thanks for clearing that up for me!

[Captain-Camper]

huh?

[Captain-Camper]

OH! thanks that makes more sense.

[Gungnir]

it's all up to your own house rules.

Isn't that basically the whole game though?

[stubby]

Basically, I want to be able to have a unit take a Field Hazard, but rather than have it be "attached" to itself, be able to "project" it at range.

Say, for example, I have a Radiation Tank - it doesn't irradiate the ground around itself, it irradiates an area over there.

The easiest way is to treat it as a variant Explosive. That'll give you a 2" radius and a hazard die of your choice (or more, depending on the size of your explosive round).

Alternatively, couldn't we make it a burning/acid/poison/etc "Field Hazard" centered on the weapon? Sure, it'd cause damage to w/e you swung it through w/o having to make a UR roll - once/turn - you wouldn't get the ability on counterattacks, b/c of Power/Size limits on Field Hazards.

Depends how picky you wanted to get. A 1 Power Field Hazard on top of a 1 Power hand weapon would use up a minifig's power limit in a single swing; anything larger would be too much, and he couldn't use a shield or second weapon.

But in the end I think it'll just be a lot easier to add a section to Chapter 8 about weapons mods, and avoid having to jump through arcane hoops to get the results we want. I'll put it in the space left over when I move field hazards over to chapter D.

[stubby]

Persistent, instantaneous, or w/ a "burn-roll"?

For a straight-up explosive, I'd make it instantaneous. For anything else, just buy it as a regular field hazard and launch/deploy/activate it by whatever means make sense to you.

[Gungnir]

Can you use SN dice to add range to melee weapons?