Saturday, January 30, 2016

New Adventure Comics #31 - part 1

Barry O'Neill takes it slow while moving through hideouts. He tests the walls, pulls on anything suspicious, like rings set in walls -- and finds secret doors that way!

In the first room behind the secret door, Barry finds two cobras. Luckily, even though Barry came disguised, he still has a concealed flashlight and weapon.

In the room is a note for Barry from his nemesis, Fang Gow. An Editor can always do this too, retroactively placing notes wherever the Heroes are, as if the nemesis anticipated them. Just be careful not to go too far with this, if the Heroes went somewhere really unexpected.

The tunnel after the cobra room is trapped -- it swiftly fills with water. I assume the secret door Barry used to get in can't be opened from this side. I'll have to wait until next month to find out how he gets out!

Tom Brent, in his adventure, is captured, but his captors forget to search him and leave a weapon on him. This same situation happened in one of my Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns; in that case, the player asked for a chance of having a weapon left unfound on his person, so I gave him a save vs. plot to make that happen.

Tom makes the smart move of capturing the leader and making all his henchmen stand down, rather than fight his way through everyone. It's the safer move, anyway. I'm not sure I'd allow full experience awards for the henchmen for it, even though he's technically defeated them this way.

Players often want to get to where they need to go as early as possible. Tell them that they have a midnight rendezvous and they'll show up at 6 pm and start staking out the place. The same holds true for Steve Carson of Federal Men, who thinks the 4-hour car ride from Washington, D.C. to New York City is too long and flies there instead.  Knowing this, the Editor can plan more scenarios that require a time crunch.

On the other hand, if the scenario has high stakes, like a kidnapped child who will be killed if the Heroes do not find him in time, it's best to keep from setting a definite deadline, so the Heroes can always show up at the last minute and save him.

In Dale Daring, the Heroes shockingly take a moment to check their guns to see if they still have any ammo left. One is empty, but the other is okay.

I have suggested several "fixes" over the years for good ways to more easily keep track of remaining ammo during combat. One of them was to roll randomly, 1d6, to see how many turns you can shoot before running out of bullets. That seems to be what happened here, in Dale Daring, given the disparity between their ammo situations.

In Cal n' Alec, Cal wants Alec to go ahead because Cal thinks he sees quicksand and Alec doesn't. Sounds like spotting dangerous terrain needs to be a random chance, just like finding secret doors.

Cal n' Alec is a gag strip, so I don't know how seriously to take this, but it takes Cal five hours to dig a 25' deep pit.

As Captain Desmo's India adventure continues, a bounty is set for him at 20 gold pieces. Which is odd because, by 1938, India already was using the silver Rupee as its unit of currency.

Desmo wins two battles against the thieves by failed morale saves -- once after mowing down enough of them with a machine gun, and then later by mowing down their leader with a machine gun.

(This issue can be read at Comic Book Archives)


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