Clocks for difficult opponents
Hey folks. Does anyone care to describe how they use clocks in combat for more difficult opponents? I’m thinking of linked clocks. Thoughts?
Clocks for difficult opponents
Clocks for difficult opponents
6 thoughts on “Clocks for difficult opponents”
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I personally like short combat, so I’m way more likely to give a tough opponent a clock of 4 or 6 segments, then say “Every round you engage but do not finish out the clock, you take a level 2 harm. The engagement is desperate. Complications will involve you losing the ability to continue the fight until you clear the complication and re-engage.”
If they engage as a group, have someone knocked swooning or off the edge of the cliff or into the nearby fisherman’s netting or whatever with each complication.
They can’t finish it off in one, so there’s some hurt to spread around. Offer Devil’s Bargains to give the fighter further advantages. Rearrange the mechanical pieces to reflect new fictional circumstances.
And if they kick his ass in 2 rounds, well, let them.
I don’t use clocks for enemies, unless they’re specifically trying to do something. The way I see it, an injury is an injury, just with a tough enemy it’s harder to give them one in the first place. So, strong enemies just make the starting position and effect worse, making players have to bargain and spend stress to get on the enemy’s level.
What I do use clocks for, however, is when someone’s poisoned, or bleeding out, something that gets worse over time.
I think, “by the book,” you can either give them larger clocks or reflect how strong they are when considering effect/position. A bruiser of a gang boss is more difficult to take down by skirmishing than by being hunted from a distance. A master assassin is probably easier to skirmish with than they are to prowl up on and surprise, because they know that song and dance.
Andrew’s suggestion sounds really interesting though. If you go that route, please let me know how well it plays out.
Also to Blaze Azelski’s point, I wouldn’t mechanize the situation until the players selected a course of action. “I rush out of hiding and jam a stiletto in his heart” is mechanized differently from a gang surrounding the proud warrior, who sneers at them, then they pounce with intent to tear him down.
Consider the Raiders of the Lost Ark example, where the GM is all enthusiastic about a sword fighter who outmatches our hero, who pulls a gun.
Sure, the GM could force the situation to make Indy fill up that clock, giving the dervish wuxia powers to dodge bullets and making a crowd scene battle. OR, the GM could acknowledge the fictional situation has shifted, and let Indy shoot the dervish with a single die roll (that rolls a 6, no complications.) That’s my jam, as there’s plenty of time to dangle Indy off the grill of a racing truck later.
The other thing I bear in mind but neglected to mention is the matter of scale, quality, and potence; at least nod to that. If there are 4 characters and 1 opponent, you can tell them “Your scale counters his potence as a fighter, but if so much of one of you gets knocked down, he gets that advantage back.” =)
The unspoken clock of most opponents is the two-segment. That is: took them out (2 effect), and almost took them out (1 effect). Taking them out isn’t so much killing them (which I’d rate closer to 4 effect) as running them off, convincing them to retreat, etc.
So I only tend to bother putting a clock in front of a higher tier opponent. When I do, it is because of a special skill or power that resists effect (their effective tier, on other words), and their advantage there is gone once the clock is filled. For a difference of two tiers, I might use two layers of clocks each one lowering effective tier by 1. This offers some strategic decisions during the encounter.
I’ll add one of two things for the stronger enemies in a faction. A 4 clock for armor is a pretty standard clock for me to add for commanders of mooks, or I’ll give them an action they do which must be resisted before the PCs can act. An added 8 clock or more is rare and reserved for the big bads, or I’ll give them two actions which must be resisted before acting.
I tend to break out the clocks when the crew is fighting an opponent that would take several successes to finish off, so say another crew of similar tier or higher or an expert like a skilled fighter from a higher tier crew or a demon who can fight as a tier III crew. They’re almost always 8-part clocks, I have found that tends to create the right amount of tension.
This happened recently actually. My crew of Shadows got themselves into the HQ of the Sacred Flame, deceiving one of their leaders into thinking they had come to parley. They knew through gather information rolls that there was a demon inside, but it wasn’t until they tried to poison everyone and take out the members of the Sacred Flame that the demon showed itself as one of the Sacred Flame leaders.
Whenever anyone confronted the demon I did the standard “resist with resolve else you run screaming or stand and drool”. Once they resisted that, if they tried to engage with the demon, they first had to break through the illusory, reality-bending magic that it exuded, so I created 2 clocks: “The Demon’s Defenses” an 8-part clock that represented it’s magical aura that confused the players and turned the Sacred Flame’s hq into a weird maze full of manic revelers. The 2nd clock was “The Demon”, another 8-part clock that could only be effected when the players nullified the demon’s magical defenses.
It was actually a pretty great moment when they realized how powerful the demon was, and the slowly dawning realization that maybe they weren’t going to pull off this score.