Saturday, September 19, 2015

Detective Comics #12

Speed Saunders is in a cross-genre tale here in the Mythic West. But aside from the pretty scenery and racism, the real lesson here is how long a fight can last in a comic book story -- 60 one-minute combat turns.

I thought Hideouts & Hoodlums needed fatigue rules for realism, and to keep combats from going on too long, but I didn't want to overdue it so there's only some minor penalties after too many consecutive turns. Past that, I did nothing with exhaustion, or setting a maximum number of turns you can fight. It looks like I made a good call.



Larry Steele finds out the danger of hanging out with people who have 100' deep pits ending in pools of lime behind their closet doors.  It's the fall that kills, doing 10d6 damage. Lime is dangerous, but not that dangerous; immersion would do maybe 1 point of damage per hour. The lime is clearly there just to remove evidence.



Here, Larry loses control of his car and crashes. Though Book III: Underworld & Metropolis Adventures has some guidelines for vehicular combat, I never wrote anything for car chases, or a mechanic for losing control of a car. My article on plane mishaps (The Trophy Case no. 8) comes closest and some of it might be applicable here, with some creative fudging.



The Slam Bradley story has an interesting twist -- there's a waterfall and no one falls down it!  The trope, of course, is that waterfalls never hurt anyone in stories, but it should.  There's also an interesting chase scene, with running across floating logs. I should think that's a lot tougher to do than it looks in the scene, maybe requiring a save vs. science at a -2 penalty?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)

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