I am currently trying to have one of my groups play BitD. But I know them, and they would be more interested in a Cyberpunk setting. So I am currently trying to hack the game.
So far, so good. The transition is almost seamless. The Actions are staying the same, except for the Book, which became the Screen, with Datasearch, Hack, Supply, and Rig as Actions.
The Special Abilities need more work, but I am quite confident that using augments and specialisations will do the trick.
But I know at least one of the player is fan of Shadowrun. How would you handle inserting magic into the system alongside technology while preserving the balance between actions ?
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this sort of hack. Here are some of my thoughts so far.
You could leave Attune for magic and expand Cipher to include hacking (since most ciphering these days equates to good computer skills). You can leave it called broadly Cipher or specify it more as Hack/Code. Perhaps players have to specify whether their Attuning is magical, spiritual, or ki. You might also have Shamans use some of the Mask actions as their interactions with spirits.
For various types of magic, re-flavoring Whisper abilities should do the trick as models. Maybe use different names but the same mechanical effects with relevant trappings.
Mages Channel, Compel, and Summon via ley lines and elementals
Shamans Channel, Compel, and Summon via various animal spirits and associated totems or fetish foci
Adepts Channel, Compel?, and Summon via Ki and body/discipline/emotion?
Heck even a decker could Channel, Compel, and “summon” via electronics/decks/Matrix jack-points or wifi and Matrix programs/avatars, and a Rigger can do so with mechanical devices, vehicles, and drones.
Thinking of Essence, I have been envisioning a cybernetics list (or maybe body slots with blanks to fill in) like the BitD gear list, except ticks are surgically permanent and “encumbrance” represents Essence loss and thus disconnection from magic. 0 = Pure, 1-3 = Minor Essence disconnect, 4-5 = Great Essence disconnect, 6 = Total Essence disconnect. You could mechanically treat these levels as if they are scale levels, or just leave it as narrative justification. Or perhaps, each level of Essence disconnection could mean -1d on Attune actions and/or each use of Channel, Compel, Summon etc costs additional stress: 1-3 = +1stress, 4-5 = +2stress, 6 = +4stress (or those abilities are unusable?)
To make the metahuman heritages count a bit more, I also was considering offering 1-3 special abilities available to members of each heritage. Players could take them instead whenever they could gain a playbook ability.
What do you mean by augments and specializations?
simplest way to let magic in is to use the existing ability of the whisper. it using stress as a resource is also thematically in keeping with shadowrun’s drain.
You know there’s a cyberpunk skin incl. in the kickstarter, right?
I expect he does, but it’s not available yet.
Marshall Brengle I do know about it, but I am not just patient enough to wait for November.
Adam Minnie I meant cybernetics and genetical spicing. For instance, Battleborn becomes Dermal Plating
What I have come up with concerning Heritage and Background
Heritage : Asian, European, Arabic, Android, North America, South America.
Background : Corporation, Military, Criminals, Security Companies, Politics, Science
My problem is, I am already using the Whisper as base for the Gearhead (Hacker)…
Maybe hacker doesn’t need to be a class, if they want to be a hacker, they can play any class and take ranks in the hacking skill.
I think I agree with Chris Boyd about class. You could hack like a Lurk, like a Slide, like a Cutter, even like a Whisper. The playbooks to me seem less about what you do and more about how you do it.
However, you can also just duplicate the Whisper class, and slightly modify/re-flavor it for Mage and Shaman.
What are you thinking of doing with metatypes?
My goal is not really to make a Shadowrun hack. Just a vanilla Cyberpunk one, with a little magic in it if I can figure out how.
Ah whoops. I somehow thought you were going for full Shadowrun, sorry. 🙂
Adam Minnie No problem. My aim is actually to lure some friends into trying BitD. Magic would make it even more alluring to them, but I am sure Cyberpunk will do it 🙂
In that case, I would keep Attune for magic, and expand Cipher to Hack. Then for abilities/contacts/etc, I would duplicate the Whisper sheet and tailor one for Hacker and one for Mage, but the same functional abilities.
Basically replacing ghosts with AIs/avatars, electroplasm with networks, and demons with elementals/astral beings.
I’d be very, very careful about turning playbooks into classes. They look like classes, but they aren’t classes. Everyone can do almost everything, and everyone can be good at anything. Classes are about how you do it and what you focus on, but not what you can do. (The one exception is Channel, and I actually really dislike it for that reason. It’s the one case where there’s a special ability that really does grant you an entirely new ability.)
Without magic, I’d keep Cipher as the data/research/software skill and change Attune into Hack, for actually doing (Hollywood-style) computer break-ins, manipulation, data steals and such. If you’re not going to have big gangs and do want drones I’d roll Command into Sway and use the extra Blades spot for Rig, although I agree Tinker’s also a fair spot for it if you want less gadgetry. Oh, and I think Rig also needs to be good for operating vehicles in person, not just remotely. Someone has to be the wheelman.
I also think going for cyberpunk means you’re going lighter on the division between quiet killing and loud brawling. I think it’s fair to have one skill for fighting and killing if it’s fair, and Prowl or even Stalk for killing someone who isn’t aware that there’s killing happening. That means Murder can be Fighting, and then Mayhem can be reworked to be about breaking stuff, not people. Mayhem’s for busting out of the zip-ties, smashing the lab equipment, or setting the charges and blowing the whole facility sky-high. And I’d call it Wrecking or even Demolition.
I’m not even sure you’d need playbooks. Make people choose gear from a list, then stick with their stuff—or even make it something picked for the crew and shared by everyone. Let anyone choose special abilities. Better hacking with better shooting’s fine; someone else will take being tough as steel and also an ace behind the wheel.
Magic’s tough, and I think it really deserves to be a full additional system. Channeling alone is a simple solution, but probably too simple. What you probably need is another axis, one that’s like a gear list but has other stuff on it. Maybe add a “Wiz” category with four Actions under it. Cast, Unravel, Conjure, Boost for a Shadowrun-like sorcery, dispel/shield/overwatch, spirits/elementals, and adepts. Everyone can take them as desired.
Okay, but what can you summon and what can you cast? I’d suggest making magic lists, like gear, but fixed at selection and requiring advancement to expand. What spells are available is a big deal, too. Don’t go the Shadowrun/D&D route of making a spell for every problem, or the guy who’s good at Prowl will feel shown up by invisibility, the shooter’s going to be annoyed by fireballs, and the medic will feel slighted by magical healing outdoing his stitching. Good spell selection makes or breaks balance.
You also need to decide whether there’s a cost to spells. Again, Channel’s one option, but I don’t like it for hearty magic. Maybe no direct cos; you can make being drained a danger on the roll. It’s even easy: you suffer general debilitation for a while. Maybe the loss of the ability to use magic for a short time. Maybe both, if it’s bad enough! (Don’t make the mage unable to mage, though. That’s no fun.) Clocks are great for this: you’re Drained, -1d to stuff, or take stress.
You could also have a magic clock/track. Maybe four segments. You can use magic four times for free, or fewer if some are big deal spells that take more than one segment. After that every use of magic’s dangerous and you roll Effect to resist that drain—and that’s in addition to any danger from the action.
Just some thoughts thrown out there. Hope they help!
Oh, and you’d want some augmentation too. Once again, the simplest solution is adaptation. Make special abilities into cyberware. It’s a simple reskin.
For a little more detail, make it like gear, but locked in at selection. Maybe you only have a few “boxes” total you can take, and Wired Reflexes are 3 boxes while night-vision cyber-eyes are only 1 box. Pick your loadout and you’re cyborged up. Some, like a datajack or gill implants or a built-in radio, might just be purely fictional and open up things you can do by existing. Some might be fine equipment for some purposes (say, a smartlink for shooting people, or tricked-out leg prosthetics for running and jumping). Some might be both (fine hand razors are not only a fine thing in a fight, they also let you cut the ropes tying up your friends even when you’re locked naked in a storage shed).
If you want Shadowrun-type balance, you can make each point of augmentation selected cost the loss of a point of spells, spirits, ki powers, or whatever. But that’s arguably a game balance artifact; it’s certainly not fictionally necessary. You could maybe give only a small number of points to distribute to chrome and magic initially but allow advancement to buy more points in lieu of special abilities, and those could be either one. Eventually you could have a souped-up spell-slinging cyborg… and maybe that’s awesome. You can decide, but make sure it’s a group decision, not just something you stumble into because of Shadowrun inertia.
In general this is looking to me like it’s somewhat downplaying gear loadouts in favor of more fixed inherent benefits. I’m fine with it and think it’s fairly fitting with the genre, but consider it. I also think there’s a lot of room for acquiring assets. Maybe you can’t have an amazing sniper rifle or that deadly monowire or the unstoppable drone all the time. Decide which temporary gear you’ll hit your fixer up for, but remember it’s a rental.
Cool thoughts Daniel Helman. “Class” vs “playbook” is a key semantic distinction.
For Shadowrunning, I like your Wiz action set idea so everyone can mix and match as they like.
Likewise, I had envisioned cybernetics as permanent gear lists, but summons and spells too is a nice touch if it doesn’t get out of hand with too many choices or the need to make each mechanically unique. Even if they are all kept narrative rather than mechanical, making some cost 2 or more slots (like wrecker tools), as well as some being treated as “fine” gives some great opportunities for manageable customization.
Heck now I’m thinking of spec-ing vehicles or drones with upgrade/component tickbox lists like that for things like “fine optics array” fine gyroscopically balanced handling “big guns” “NOS injection tank” etc.
You could get rid of the extra “Wiz” category and just keep all spells as fictional add-ons and gear equivalents. An invisibility spell is fine gear for sneaking. A fireball spell is fine gear for blowing people or stuff up. A mind-reading spell is great for Discern. None of them are things you roll; they’re not actions. But you can say, “I’ll cast my invisibility spell and walk straight into the front gate, taking care not to bump the guards,” and that’s Prowl with +1d.
Then you just decide based on weight. Sneaking’s a pretty big deal, so maybe invisibility is a 2 box spell. But maybe not if radar detectors are everywhere. A spell that lets you fly is impressive, but a little less so if everyone has a flying motorcycle, much less so if jetpacks are a standard criminal armament, and maybe it’s not even worth a box if whisper-quiet vectored-thrust packs are the way everyone commutes in the future.
If not playing by the separation of magic and tech rules you can get some really crazy stuff. Spell detectors right past every metal detector. Spirit-enhanced circuitry. Electroplasmic ammunition supplanted by guns that fire nanite pellets designed for spirit interdiction? Magic that’s only possible with special cerebral implants?
Thanks Daniel Helman and Adam Minnie for such comprehensive replies.
I do agree that making special abilities into cyberware is the way to go. Also, I was going for Tinker to be both Rig and Tinker, but I do worry about balance here.
I am not sure I understand why the distinction between Murder and Mayhem should be lighter in a Cyberpunk setting. To my mind, this distinction is still (even more) crucial in such a setting. Also, Daniel, I think you are right about Magic: it would need to come up with a fifth action type. I am not sure I want to do it with so little experience playing BitD. I think I will eliminate magic from the equation entirely…
No, I think you could go with my second suggestion: magic isn’t something you ever roll, just something that gives you more fictional arsenal to either get to do stuff, get to roll Actions, or give +1d to actions. No specific magical actions required. It seems much more parsimonious and I like that it also doesn’t pigeonhole someone into being “the magic guy” to the exclusion of other stuff. Everyone can be “the magic guy” with different kinds of magic. It’s just another kind of gear, basically, one that doesn’t take up physical space but has to be limited by something else, like “you can only have four spells, +1 per crew tier” or whatever makes sense.
I have a few reasons to want to do something different with Murder/Mayhem.
1. I think cyberpunk embraces the big explosion. Adding demolition to Mayhem is, I think, a pretty significant fictional space, and it needs to lose something in exchange.
2. Quiet murder versus noisy killing is an archetypal rogues-with-knives thing. In cyberpunk, a little less so. There are assassins, but it’s not so core to the genre. I think that type of action is less prominent and doesn’t need to be broken out as a separate thing, just as the base game doesn’t separate research and codes (they’re both Cipher) but a game about Cold War spies might well decide those are two major and distinct actions that will come up all the time.
The more you see wetwork and offing people in their sleep as central to your cyberpunk game, the more you want to keep Murder in. I’ve played a lot of Shadowrun and it’s happened, but it’s not a daily type of thing.
3. I think the case for Murder/Mayhem is relatively weak to begin with. Wrecking stuff is Mayhem; that’s solid. Killing without evidence is Murder; that’s fine. But then fighting someone’s a messy in-between case based on whether it’s one-on-one, whether you intend to kill or just batter into submission, whether it’s loud or sneaky… I don’t know, I’m just not sold. I think a lot of the “quick, quiet, clean efficient,” part of Murder really belongs in Prowl, which is all about going undetected.
My test case is adopted from Burning Wheel: a man is asleep in his bed. His door is unlocked. The intent: kill him. The task: sneak in and slit his throat. The task determines the roll, and if it’s successful the intent comes true. Which fits better, Knives or Stealthy? I’d say Stealthy; you don’t have to be great with a knife, just good at getting right up to the guy.
Switch to BitD. You want to sneak up. Okay, that’s Prowl, and the danger is he wakes up and screams.. Phew, made it. Now you’re over his bed, knife drawn. You slide it across his throat. Roll Murder. The danger is… the same? That’s lame. Okay, so it isn’t. The danger’s actually getting blood-spattered so anyone who sees you knows you’re a murderer? That’s in the spirit of messing up a clean kill all right, but it’s not an immediate danger. I just don’t think Murder adds all that much.
Where it does matter is when you scale the wall, pick the lock, sneak past the guards, and open the door to the study. Your target looks at you and freezes, and you want to kill him. Mayhem might get him dead, but Murder gets him dead quietly, without screams and alarms. I can see how that fits, but again, I think in this case it’s better to roll that all into Fighting/Killing to leave room for making a mess of physical stuff elsewhere—and I think this kind of confrontation is more important in a quiet assassins game and less important in a lot of cyberpunk games, which have so many other things going on. Hacking, exploding, extorting, messy hits, bodyguarding, planting evidence and stealing evidence… it’s okay to let this case get subsumed into something else.
But it’s a personal, subjective design preference. Of course you can disagree.
Hmmm… Actually I don’t think Mayhem can be reduced to just killing people. It is how you do it. If it involved only killing, then Murder would be far more useful than Mayhem, since most of the time, when a PC want to kill someone, it is in his best interest to do it quietly.
To use your example, if a player says he wants to sneak in to the bed to kill the sleeper, that’s Murder. If he wants to brutally kill him, with gore, to send a message for instance, that’s Mayhem.
To my mind, Mayhem entails creating mayhem in all its dimension : making a noisy diversion, blowing stuff, intimidating someone…
Daniel Helman While I don’t want to threadjack from Antoine Pempie, I’m intrigued. Are you saying you advocate removing Murder as an action type since it doesn’t often add something that other actions don’t already account for (ie Prowl, Mayhem, etc)?
Antoine Pempie I wouldn’t reduce Mayhem to just killing people. What I’m actually suggesting is broadening Murder to be fighting/killing people and making Mayhem all about smashing and blowing up things but not people. And intimidation is already under Command, actually. I’d say “sending a message” could be Murder or Mayhem. Killing someone and splattering their entrails all over the place is still murder if you get in, do it as intended, and leave. Jack the Ripper was a Murderer, not a Mayhemmer. In fact, I think it’s critical to make it so you can’t sneak into someone’s room and off them gruesomely with Mayhem. Because it’s not Mayhem, it’s a murder. Cold and pre-calculated killing, no matter how messy it gets, is Murder. Seeing red and ripping someone to pieces in the moment, that’s Mayhem.
Adam Minnie No, I’m not saying Murder shouldn’t exist. I’m saying it’s not something that obviously must exist. The skills that are or are not present do a huge amount to define the game. For example, Bullies in the Schoolyard would have Mayhem but wouldn’t have Murder; Murder isn’t part of the game, just roughing up the other kids. (And one of my favorite examples, the game Free Market, has only one combat-like skill, Wetwork, and the minimum success is death. It says a lot about a game if you make all fights lethal, although it’s also a setting where death is mostly an inconvenience.)
Prowl covers being sneaky. Mayhem covers killing people. Between the two you could say Murder is covered: Prowl for stealthy kills and Mayhem for obvious ones. The fact that Murder exists says something about what matters. BitD is a game that expects murders and makes a distinction between killing generally and murder specifically. Murder not only can but should come up as a distinct thing, a viable but not necessary approach. Not all games really have a lot of murder expectations; thus, not all games should have Murder. While cyberpunk certainly CAN have murder in it, I don’t think that kind of killing is really a prominent feature. Demolition, on the other hand, does seem like a prominent and important and distinct task. Thus, I’d pull killing out of Mayhem and put all of it in a different skill so that both of them serve full and distinct purposes in the genre.
Cipher for a lot of games would be fine, but for a hard spy-thriller game I think it’d also be wrong because it’s too much. Research, Forgery, and Codes might all deserve to be different actions not because such actions must be broken apart like that per se but because doing so reinforces the conventions of the spy genre. A game of goofy spying or of suave James Bond agent/assassin/action hero spying also wouldn’t separate those all out, because that level of granularity in the stuff combined as the Cipher action doesn’t benefit goofy antics or action-spying.
With a limited skill palette the choices of which things go together and which don’t is very important. I expect to see a lot of interesting decisions in all the hacks. Womb of Night, Scum and Villainy, and Throne of the Void are all hacks set in space, but I expect them to have different lists of actions because they aren’t creating the same genre in space. And that’s a good thing.
So, after spewing all these words, to bring it back to cyberpunk:
Consider a game that splits, say, Drive from Rig vs. one that has “DRIVE when you operate a vehicle or drone, either at the controls or remotely” and you have similar but different games. One’s putting drones in a special position. You have to focus on using them, and it’s separate from vehicles. You’re giving drones more prominence, but also requiring more character investment to use them. You could have a single “Hack” action. Or you could have a game in which Tinker includes programming and overclocking, Secure includes setting up ICE and making/using ICE-breakers, Cipher includes encrypting and breaking encryption, and so on. The former game puts the online world in a small box: it’s a distinct part of the game, and one that not everyone will participate in, probably, but one that definitely matters. The latter makes hacking potentially a huge part of the game, so big that it can take up an entire session or campaign, and no one character is going to cover all of it. The former gives you the decker, who does his decking as part of a larger mission. The latter gives you Automatic Jack and Bobby Quine and a whole team around them, each a specialist in part of virtual intrusion, and that virtual work could be the entire game.
Both are entirely reasonable approaches that lead to different places, so which one you pick gives you different games. You can’t have both at once, so pick the one that works best for what you want out of your cyberpunk. Shadowrun isn’t Gibson, but I also wouldn’t run Burning Chrome and Neuromancer with the exact same rules.
I’ll say it: I too have been struggling with the Murder vs actual skill used in Murder issue (for WiaT). I don’t feel there is really a clear case for it.
WiaT?
Sorry: Wizards in a Tower, a hack mentioned in another thread. I think murder is an intent, which can be achieved so many ways. Having now played Dishonoured, one of the game touchstones, I think that perhaps Murder could represent specialist assassination skills like drop-assassination, and rooftop crossbow kills, but it seems like is speaks to a profession rather than a skill.
We have been thinking about similar issues to what has been brought up in this thread with regards to the way a more expansive conception of magic fits with the BitD rules, so I have been following the comments here with interest.
The post proposing the hack is here, if you are interested: https://plus.google.com/106989539226430288394/posts/ak4TsqQpLSg
Talking about it here has helped crystallize it for me. My conception may not match Mr. Harper’s. In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, but since his version is a couple of sentences and I find it problematic, I’m going to go ahead with my own for now.
By making Murder a skill Blades makes a statement: you can’t kill someone in cold blood just by being sneaky, by being strong and good with weapons, or by any other methods. There’s even an argument to be made that you can’t poison someone without turning to Murder. Blades says that the killing is special, and that it takes a special something to do it.
Maybe the murderer is sneaky, slips in unseen, and kills the mark in his sleep. Maybe the murderer busts down the door, slaughters the guards, and stares down the hapless, quavering target before ending him. Maybe the murderer bribes the guards, sweet-talks the maids into ushering him into the right room, and slits a throat or even poisons the wine with a smile. The point is that it takes Murder to do it. You have to invest specifically in that kind of killing to make a character who does it well; on a meta-game level, it means that murdering is something difficult and special. Any Cutter knows how to bash heads and shed some blood in a scrap, but he can’t look someone in the eye, draw steel, and just end him. That’s where Murder comes in. And that’s actually a big thematic difference between Cutter and Hound. The Cutter fights; the Hound kills.
The problem, of course, is the little snippet on page 30: “Murder… engage in skillful combat.” I think that’s a mistake. Combat belongs under Mayhem. Skillful is a question of fiction and Effect; a Cutter with panache and Finesse might be skillful duelist while another with brute force and Power might be a hulking beast, but that’s Mayhem. I think a duel should almost always be Mayhem. The one exception is when you hunt someone down with murder in your heart and the target grabs a weapon to defend himself. Maybe also if the guards are the ones who take up arms instead. If the intent is the death of one particular person it’s murder and you roll Murder. If the deaths are incidental, accidental, or ancillary it’s Mayhem.
Yes, it does weird things to characters because they can be implacable death-dealers against one man and wimpy and ineffectual against another based entirely on why the fight’s happening, but I think that’s an acceptable cost to the value of distinguishing the warrior from the assassin.
Keep in mind that the player gets to determine what skill they are rolling for any given action; the earlier example of using prowl to murder by stealth and surprise is completely on-point in this case. By design, you declare the skill that you choose to fit the fiction. The title Murder, in this case, may in fact be a red herring when your intent is to Murder people.
No, and this is a critical piece of Blades. Page 17. The player doesn’t determine what she’s rolling. The player decides what the character does, and THAT decides what gets rolled. The player can retract an action and try again for a roll she’d prefer, but she can’t just say, “I’m going to use X.”
I was working it out as I wrote, and while killing someone with Prowl would be a fine design decision, it’s not the one that was made in Blades, at least in the base rules. You can’t do it. Why? Because what you’re doing is murder. There is another action for it—Murder’s literally the name! If there were no Murder action then Prowl might be fair game, but the specific action takes precedence.
For the same reason you can’t distract someone and Slip a blade between his ribs. That’s not Slip, that’s still Murder. You can’t Sway someone with a show of bravado into thinking you’ve got the Bluecoats at your beck and call because that specifically is intimidation, which falls under Command; you could sway him into thinking you’re someone important so he’d want to curry your favor. You can’t Prowl behind someone to find out where home is because although, as sneaky as it seems, that’s what Stalk is for, not Prowl.
Can you Slip lethal poison into someone’s cup? I’d say yes. I think it’s different enough from the idea of murder with one’s own hands that it works; you could also kill someone by Tinkering up a lethal trap and Securing it somewhere.
I hope there’s more guidance on this in the final product. I’m still just going by gut and play and cobbled-together RPG experience, but it feels right to me.
I pretty much agree with what Daniel is saying, especially how you choose what you roll by choosing what your character does.
But I don’t think you have to be quite as much of a hardass about what each action covers. There’s definitely some overlap, by design. You can kill someone in a fight with Mayhem. You can duel someone with Murder. The actions aren’t hugely broad things, but they’re not laser-focused single moves, either.
Then I’m left worrying about Murder. What does it do that others skill don’t do? For everything else I can come up with clear cases where to make a fictional thing happen you really have to use that action. Where’s Murder’s niche?
It’s useful for murder… as you said. You can’t murder someone with Prowl (“I hide so well, he dies.” “Uh.”). Murder has some overlap with Mayhem (a serious brawl can be deadly, after all), but is otherwise the niche for murdering someone.
Some overlap means some overlap. There’s a middle ground between “super narrow use” and “anything goes” right?
Think of it this way.
“I kill him.”
“Um, okay. How do you do that?”
“I channel a million volts of electroplasm through his skull.”
“Whoa. Okay. Attune then, eh:?”
“I kill him.”
“Okay. What do you do?”
“I smash him over the head with a chair and shove him out the window. I’m rolling Mayhem.”
“I kill him.”
“Okay, how?”
“I step in close and put my blade through his throat. I Murder him.”
Murder is murder. It’s definitely the action you want if you want to kill someone smoothly and quickly, leaving a minimum of evidence and suspicion. But you can kill someone in a variety of ways, using various actions, depending on the situation.
John Harper I think you should reconsider the Prowl example. Rolling to kill a sleeping person when you have already snuck in masterfully seems dumb. Maybe prowling is not directly rolled in the case of sneaking in, but this is just a matter of table-negotiation:
“So, it is the middle of the night and you are outside Griff’s house; everyone seems to have been asleep for hours. What do you do?”
“I sneak in through that window we made sure was unlocked when we visited earlier.”
“Okay, roll Prowl; it is an old house, with creaky floors, so it is risky. Obvious danger is that he will be awake when you get to his room.”
[Rolls a 6]
“Okay, you make it to his room. He’s totally asleep. How are you killing him?”
“I cut his throat.”
“Okay, he is dead. There’s blood all over the bed and your hands. What do you do next?”
Yeah, Sean, that’s exactly how you do it. There’s no obstacle or danger when the throat-slitting occurs, so there’s no roll. You never roll when there’s no obstacle or danger. This isn’t a special case.
Did I suggest doing it otherwise? I don’t see how.
I also have problems with this:
“I kill him.”
“Okay. What do you do?”
“I smash him over the head with a chair and shove him out the window. I’m rolling X.”
“I kill him.”
“Okay. What do you do?”
“I smash him over the head with a chair and leave him. I’m rolling X.”
“I kill him.”
“Okay. What do you do?”
“I smash him over the head with a claymore and leave him. I’m rolling X.”
“I kill him.”
“Okay. What do you do?”
“I cut his throat and throw him out the window. I’m rolling X.”
“I kill him.”
“Okay. What do you do?”
“I sneak up behind him and smash him over the head with a chair. I’m rolling X.”
There are some blurry lines, which is okay, but they’re blurry enough that I can see someone legitimately using “murder” as a dump stat and turning all the killings into something else, which I like a lot less.
John, I thought that was the implication of your statement: “You can’t murder someone with Prowl (‘I hide so well, he dies.’ ‘Uh.’).” which seemed dismissive of the idea that stealth was a legitimate way to murder someone.
Sean Winslow What I meant was, the Prowl action doesn’t murder the guy. Of course you can prowl and then be in a position to kill someone (without a roll, even). But the action of prowling doesn’t kill them. This is why they’re called “actions” and not skills or whatever.
You don’t “use Prowl” to kill the target. First you prowl to avoid detection. Then you do something else to kill them.
Daniel Helman There’s some overlap between Mayhem and Murder when it comes to killing. In a similar way, there’s overlap between Command and Sway to get someone to do something. Some overlap doesn’t make one a “dump stat” IME. When the differences matter, they really matter. When they don’t, they don’t.
This seems like an armchair problem, not an issue from actual play.
Having said that, if you want to play with a more strict read of Murder as the only killing action, that’s totally fine. There’s no ultimate single right way to judge the actions. If it’s fun, go for it.
I’m stating my opinion here, not stating a rule.