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)

Fight Comics #4 - pt. 2

We return to Kinks Mason to find he's...well, improvising a club to bet a pirate captain with, I have no problem with that, but using a cape, underwater, to distract swordfish like a bullfighter...that seems problematic to me...

...especially since Kinks does it to pull off this trick, which I find flat-out impossible. I know, as a good Editor, I should be encouraging my players to come up with clever solutions and give them a chance to work, but sometimes you need to consider the mood, or tone, you want for your campign and if the idea is compatible. 

We're jumping ahead now into the futuristic adventures of Saber. How can you tell it's the future? Well...there's that weird machine next to his desk, and that weird machine hanging from the ceiling. And no clutter!

Saber unlikely has active powers buffing him in panel 3. The spies failed to gain surprise, which allowed Saber to "size up the situation." Saber appears to be using Leap I, but the distance crossed is no different than what he could have reached running, so the leap is flavor text.

Saber is rolling great for damge to knock out one person per punch, but it is possible without buffing. It is also possible he is buffed with the Get Tough power. 

Saber fails his saving throw vs paralysis.  

It's nice that, in the future, spies will all wear uniforms so you can tell they are spies.

It's unclear if Saber is saying he "must get out of here" from within his jail cell because he is frustrated with the speed of the judicial system or because his cell is somehow Saber-proofed. He doesn't look like he's trying very hard to escape, but maybe we missed all his wrecking things checks.

It's also unclear why that exchange with the guard had to happen through telepathy; I would be comfortable with handwaving that as flavor text, since it doesn't really impact the story whether they spoke out loud or not.

An electo-mort seems to be short for electric mortar, though I can think of several better names for the weapon than that, like an electro-mortar, e-mortar, or - heck - why not just call it a raygun?

500-foot leaps are covered by the Leap I power...but the rules as written are intentionally vague as to what the lifting capacity is while leaping. If my explanation for the leap power is my super-strong leg muscles, then maybe I should be able to carry more than someone who can leap because their magic belt lets them float. The important thing is to reach a decision between player and Editor and remain consistent.

"That just about finishes everyone in this stronghold! Oh, that's the wrong building? I just murdered dozens of sunbathers? Oops!" It never ceases to amaze me when I find someone arguing that heroes didn't kill in the golden age, because people like Saber had absolutely no compunctions stopping them from casual slaughter. There is absolutely zero consideration of bringing these traitors in for trial going on here; it's more like -- ooo, this is easy!

It's very gracious of Saber to give credit to Lt. Chandler, but I think we can trace a lot of his success to the absurdly deadly weapons Saber keeps finding, and that the spies have nothing compatible. The spies/sunbathers on the rooftop apparently had no weapons to fire back. While Saber is zipping around with an atomic disintegrator, the enemy ships are just trying to ram his - the equivalent of letting your 1940-era Heroes arm themselves with sub-machine guns, while the mobsters are armed with sticks and broken bottles. 

This is the second half of a two-page strip called Slug-Nutty Sam. The end gag isn't particularly good, but neither would the fall be lethal in Hideouts & Hoodlums; falling damage always leads to unconsciousness, except for falls resulting from deathtraps. And that is assuming an average or higher damage roll for the fall; a three-story fall could still be as little as 3 points of damage if the rolls are lucky enough.

Wang Chi and Chin Lo are surprisingly realistic Chinese names...so it's all the more disappointing that this story takes place in Mongolia. Although most Westerners, even at the time, thought of Mongolia as a province of China, Mongolia was more closely aligned with the Soviet Union than to China at this time.

The twist plot - that the Heroes are recruited by the bad guy under false pretenses - is worth pointing out, and an exciting scenario alternative when used sparingly.

Shanghai is probably a thousand miles from where "Wang Chi" lives; that's a long distance to travel to recruit the Americans. Geopolitically, the story makes little sense; Wang would be better off and have a shorter route to go heading north/northwest to recruit some Soviet pilots. 

Again, when you ignore these particulars, the plot itself is clever, using your own gunmen to convince Chip an innocent man is the enemy.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)