Jet pack bowling

[headsetguy]

So, I had a small issue come up in my campaign last night that I thought I would throw out here and see if anyone had any opinions about how it was resolved… Or not resolved. With three adversaries lined up in a row on a boarding ramp leading up to a ship that they were trying to take, one of the party members, a Bounty Hunter, decided that he wanted to use his jet pack to fly up the ramp successively crashing into or bulldozing the three adversaries as he flew up the ramp. My decision was that this can all be done in one round but that it would constitute three different attacks with the skill and question being Jetpack operation. This would also mean that he would have a -2D penalty due to MAP. He thought that he should be able to make the first attack at full dice value and then suffer a minus 1D penalty for the second any minus to the penalties and third as it would be increasingly more difficult although not as difficult on the first adversary. I was trying to keep it more in line with the general rules of taking multiple actions in a round, and rationalize that even though the three people were in a relative straight line on the ramp, he is still ultimately steering towards the third person in line and has to keep that ultimate objective in mind as he does this, ergo, each of the three is equally difficult as far as MAP is concerned. Given where his skill currently is, he frustratedly opted not to do this. I realized later that I probably should have suggested he spend a force point on this as it certainly was at a dramatically opportune moment. Any thoughts as to how this was going to be resolved?

[shootingwomprats]

That is very interesting. This is certainly an example of making it up on the fly. Congratulations, I think you did very well. If I may, here are two additional ways you may have handled it.

Since this is a special situation and his intention is to try and hit several targets, set the difficulty number normally for the first adversary then allow him to include the next target if her rolls +5 and the third if he rolls +10.

Another option would be to allow an additional target for each difficulty level above the Target he rolls (moderate difficulty, he rolls a 23, that is two levels higher, he hits all three).

Finally I would suggest using the cover rules (REUP p.93-94). Give the second adversary +2D cover (1/2) and the third +4D (3/4). This makes it very easy to see who and how many are hit and makes sense.

Example: The first adversary not expecting this type of attack does not dodge and the GM accesses a Difficult (18+) Jetpack Ops roll. He rolls the cover modifiers for the second adversary (7) and the third adversary (13). So it would now look like: 1-17 miss, 18-24 hits first adversary, 25-30 hits first and second adversary, 31+ hits all adversaries.

He could use up to two Character Points to augment his roll. As you pointed out, depending on the scene it may have been a heroically appropriate time to spend a Force Point.
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Don Diestler
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[Whill]

[Pel]

I understand your MAPs ruling, but would have penalized the invaders' dodge/reaction rolls due to the unpredictable nature of the attack and the fact that it's just dramatically cool. In fairness I also would have assessed a penalty for the bounty hunter to stop at the end of the ramp.

Sounds like you've got some innovative gameplay going on there. Keep it up!
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Aha!

[ZzaphodD]

[garhkal]

[Naaman]

It seems like the purpose of the jet pack charge was to get the enemies off the ramp. In which case, I would yave required one roll from the player and imposed a penalty on the bad guys to dodge or "brawling parry" the "attack" without falling off the ramp. That is, it may be easy enough to get out of the way, but they certainly will get hit if the don't dive off the ramp. Of course now the single player character has three bad guys to deal with outside the ship.

He'll need to maneuver back onto the ship (probably as it takes off, ala Qui Gon Jinn) which ccould make for another cinematic scene.

[tetsuoh]

I would have used ramming rules basically - since it required a jet pack operation roll to begin with.

This would make the difficulty +10 to hit them (making him hit each once as a seperate attack would still be up to you as the gm - would have had it be an over-run attack meaning its designed to get past them not really harm them and would be only one attack at -3D to any dmg and hit anything in the path that fail to dodge.)

They could try to dodge: either to cover (inside the ship) or a simple dodge (off the ramp) If they don't get good enough he still catches them.

As the difficulty is plus +10 this means they would probably dodge but he would make it on the ship. I would have suggested spending the FP as well.

If he would fail by less than 10 he succeeded in the manuever but crashed into the ship's interior himself. (full damage of ram)

Then roll scatter for anyone he hits - a 6 means they ended up inside the ship.

Note - If he surprised them with this (they have a chance to hear that jet wind up more than likely) then they cannot dodge.

[cheshire]

Given that you were trying to come up with a simple mechanic to do this on the fly (no pun intended), I think you did pretty well. Personally, even if I had doubts that my character would succeed, I would have given it a shot just because of how great the scene could have been. You can spend up to 2 CPs on an offensive roll, and though that might mean burning 6 CPs for the scene, it would probably have been worth it in exchange for the memory. Even burning a FP might have been worth it.

There is sometimes a "coulda-woulda-shoulda" in retrospect when we run our games. But all in all, we've got a fair few people giving mechanics on how it could have been done, but I'm glad that you were open to it being done, and trying to work with it on the fly.

I know that isn't what you were looking for in the thread, but still kudos to you nonetheless.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Whill]

[headsetguy]