Fight Comics #4 - pt. 3

We're back, looking at Chip Collins. Now, in my very last blog post I was crediting this story with some ingenuity; Wang (again, he's Mongolian, even though his name isn't) has hired Chip to kill his enemy, Chin Lo (also Mongolian), and is tricking Chip into thinking Chin is the bad guy. So, it makes no sense to kidnap Chin's daughter and be holding her prisoner somewhere Chip might find her. Sure, it's good to have a back-up plan to finish off your hated enemy, but you should only try one scheme at a time so they don't thwart each other! 

I almost missed this on first reading the page, but - how does Chip get the manacles off of Chin's daughter? It's not clear if he's picking the lock, if he found the key in the room, or he's forced the manacles off the walls; it seems like all he had to do is touch them and they magically fell open.

I know the aviator genre is too big a part of early comic books to ignore, and I've tried to accomodate it in Hideouts & Hoodlums as much as possible...but I feel this page best exemplifies my problem with the genre. Chip, on the ground, fighting overwhelming numbers, may seem heroic, but as soon as his air support shows up, the balance of power swings way too far in his favor. The scenario might as well be called over at that point - unless you give the enemies planes/air support too, which evens the odds again.

I did say seems heroic. Let's go over again what happens in this story: Chip is hired through trickery, doesn't figure out he was tricked but just stumbles across evidence he was, changes sides, asks the other side to help him in the shootout and putting them all at risk, and barely manages to even hold his ground until the cavalry comes to save him. But this can easily happen in H&H if you suffer enough bad dice rolls.

I have some serious problems with this page, the least of which is that Chip is served "exotic oriental food" that looks like turkey and ...pumpkins?

My second biggest problem with this page is the perceived outcome of Wang Chi's death. No taxes? Wasn't Chin Lo a rival warlord? He's going to absorb Wang's territory and make those people pay to him now. And even if not him, someone is going to step in to fill that power vaccuum. This libertarian fantasy of a suddenly tax-free zone wouldn't happen - unless what they mean is Chin Lo declared a temporary tax break to celebrate Wang Chi's death, which would actually be pretty smart to ingratiate himself in with his new subjects...

But the biggest issue is scenario-wise: If you are dropping a bomb on a hideout to eliminate the bad guy, how do you know he didn't survive? How do you know he was even home at the time? Game mechanic-wise, I am not going to award you experience points for everyone in the hideout you just killed, because your Hero was at no risk while murdering them. 

(Disguised plug!) So we're pretty far into the Minnesota Campaign Sourcebook now and the last thing we're adding are 10 short, 2-page scenarios you can run as part of a MN-based campaign. Something I've been thinking much about, then, is how to make sure the outcomes of failure scale upwards. For example, I don't want the level 1 adventure to involve saving the world because - how do you scale upwards from there? 

You can't get much more low-end on the failure scale than this - if you fail to stop the racketeers, they will go on making exactly 800 pennies off of each farmer! It's hard to imagine the FBI even getting involved in a case this small, let alone put their resident superhero on the case.

Rip Regan is based in San Francisco and we got told on the last page that he is at a farmers market. But what a weird farmers market it is...according to the background, there are buildings, an open field, a wooden dock, and some sort of body of water here. I guess this isn't downtown! 

The nickname of "Si" is the only indication this farmer is Hispanic, a very rare sighting for a 1940 story taking place in the United States. 

This is already a bad story, but this is just a particularly bad page of this story. Rip is FBI, right? You'd think better tactics would come to his mind than letting one bad guy get away and come back with reinforcements, so they can have a shoot out in a public place. Maybe Rip should have, oh I don't know, questioned the hoodlum? Or followed him back to his lair? 

The hoodlums know a bullet bounced off Rip's back. Why are they so confident he's vulnerable from the front? It's almost like they know game mechanics - Rip is buffed by Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, which still means a lucky shot will hurt him.

And look at that one hoodlum in panel 8 - reduced to a midget suddenly so his reaction is visible below the caption!

The mobsters came back with guns, the farmers are defending themselves by throwing tomatoes, and Rip thought this was going to be a fair match-up? 

Although I didn't always think this way (I have run some pretty lethal H&H scenarios in the past..), I am more with than against Rip's line of thinking now - if the players don't want to offer lethal force, then the villains can tone down their response to match the same tone of play (what I've always called campaign mood).

That said....there should also be a logical expectation of a certain level of resistance from the bad guys and choosing to go against them unarmed shouldn't necessarily keep your Heroes safe. It's a situation that requires balance.

We're going to jump right into Big Jim McLane, and I have to say I almost admire his directness. When Jim thinks these rival lumberjacks are stealing his wood, he doesn't watch them, or wait to find evidence - he walks up, basically says, "Hey, guys, come fight me!" They get goaded into attacking him, and then he can charge them all for assault. 

This reminds me of another old RPG campaign, one I was playing in, where we knew who the bad guy was and that he was up to no good, but we wasted so much time being super-cautious and hunting for evidence, forgetting the directness of these old stories.

Inverting the order of how a story normally goes, Red has already defeated the bad guys when he finds out what the stakes are and the reward. I would be tempted, if this was my scenario, to shrink the reward for two reasons: 1) the fight turned out to be really easy and the risk-reward is unbalanced in the reward's favor ($500 per bad guy?), and 2) the Hero already took care of the bad guys, so the reward isn't needed any longer as a plot hook. 

(Scans courtesy of digitalcomicmuseum.com)