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 #3 - pt. 2

We're going to skip the introduction and jump right into this issue's Kinks Mason story. These mermen are too strange to stat as ordinary mermen. They are called nothing but amphibians all through the story, so I'll keep that name. They don't seem all that tough; I wouldn't give them more than 1+1 Hit Dice (Kinks kicks their butts bare-handed), plus a -1 to hit because of their monocular vision. As true amphibians, they suffer no penalties for fighting out of water. Maybe they get a +1 to grappling rolls too, since it seems to be the only thing they're good at? It looks like they can be encountered in groups up to 8.

I don't have much to say here, but I like the layout of this factory. There's enough detail that one could start to fashion a map based on it.

"Huge fish?" Is Kinks not aware that looks like a dolphin or porpoise?

Kinks is immune to the bends, or just making all of his saving throws?

It's unclear if Kinks has more than one crew member on his boat. It doesn't seem to be that big, so it's possible there is just this one guy.

Wait, didn't they want to test that ray on Kinks first? I guess Plan B was to invade the surface world without running any tests on the ray yet.

Kinks' strategy might work over time in a chase scene; if not everyone makes their skill checks to increase speed, then some pilots will fall behind and create these gaps between ships.

This is also an interesting example of rayguns having limited charges. 

Spoiler - Kinks wins. So let's jump ahead to Fletcher Hawks' favorite lumberjack, Big Red McLane. We've talked before about pacing golden age scenarios and sometimes they can require a lot of patience (this is baked into Hideouts & Hoodlums in various ways, from the low chance of wandering encounters to the slow rate of healing from hit point loss). Here, we see that Big Red has to wait out in the woods for two whole days before this encounter finally happens.

The six bad guy lumberjacks -- what do I stat them as? Brigands, maybe? -- they don't fare well against Big Red despite two of them having weapons vs an unarmed attacker, and using the tactic of surrounding him to make sure at least some of them are getting an attack-from-behind bonus to hit.

This is an unusual reward for a scenario, both the flapjacks and the percentage stake in the company rescued. The latter is actually a great idea, giving the Hero(es) incentive to keep protecting the company against future threats.

The lumberjacks were careful to use facing to their advantage in the above encounter, so I share this page of Oran of the Jungle to show how Oran deliberately tosses away any benefit he would have from it by jumping down into the middle of the group of natives. It seems like the smart thing to do would have been to jump down before they reached him, so he can block them from getting to the village, or jumping down after them, so he can attack them from behind. The only benefit I can see here is if he is expecting to get the "combat machine" advantage of fighters and multiple attacks against low Hit Die mobsters, so he places himself within reach of the maximum number of opponents.

Oran tracks them all night. Just think about how dark that second panel would really be, then, compared to how clearly we see the tracks in the dirt, and try to imagine what kind of penalty you would assign to Oran's tracking skill check. Then he successfully tracks them for hours. How many skill checks should that be? I would count this time in exploration turns, which means he has to succeed at six skill checks per hour. That is a lot of lucky rolls!

Oran is overwhelmed because the natives use "heavy weapons." H&H doesn't distinguish between normal weapons and heavy weapons. I would take this simply to mean that the weapons feel heavy as they are bludgeoning him for so many points of damage.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Fight Comics #2 - pt. 3

If you've been worried about poor Kinks Mason and how he's going to get out of this pickle since my last post, you can see that he still has his hands full. The seaweed men turn out to be quite the challenge, with fist attacks seemingly having little effect on them. Now, it's also possible that Kink's punch just "missed" and did no damage, but to make the seaweed men more challenging, I'd like to make blunt attacks do half-damage to them.

The Navy would be shocked to learn that submarines can be run with one-man crews. Who knew? Now, I'm not sure what the minimum number of crew members required to pilot a submarine actually is, but I'm pretty sure it's higher. High enough that even an expert skill check shouldn't make this possible...

Also, we see Kinks loading a vacuum cleaner into a firing tube. Oops -- I guess that's actually supposed to be a torpedo?

Only here at the very end do we get the cool name of binding weed for this environmental threat.

Chlorophyll is super-effective on binding weed and seaweed men; more of it makes the former grow super-fast and lack of it kills the latter almost instantly.

This is Fletcher Hanks' Big Red McLane, King of the Northwoods. I include it because fighting fires sometimes comes up in scenarios and it's good to know how wide you need to dig your trenches to keep a forest fire from spreading.

Red is quite the high-kicker! I'm not sure, though, if using his feet should really give him any advantage at disarming opponents.

Heavyweights might qualify for a mobster entry, but I already have one for boxers in the Mobster Manual (it's coming -- someday!). Perhaps a note about heavyweights in their entry would suffice, rather than their own entry. Heavyweights might have +1 hit point and do +1 damage punching.

The term "palooka" predates the character Joe Palooka by at least a decade.

This is Oran of the Jungle. Oran is still a bizarre character, combining the urban prize fighter with the jungle hero. What concerns me here is whether Oran should be able to drag two people at once. I've previously talked about how a drag attack would work, mechanically, like a push attack, but in reverse. It's also in the rules that, if your opponents are also unarmed, you can make two unarmed attacks per turn. So yes, it is feasible to drag two opponents at once...

However, given the distance involved here, and that Oran needs to drag them over obstacles (the ropes), I might rule that Oran has to also succeed at grappling checks first, to make sure he can hold them long enough to drag them that far.

This is Terry O'Brien, Gang Smasher, though you wouldn't know he was a gang smasher since he seems to be a fairly ordinary boxer here.

There's something interesting in here, about how the Killer gains the upper hand by "craftily clinching" with Terry. For the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules to reflect this, there would need to be a space rule, where weapons need a minimum amount of space to be effective, allowing opponents to close into that space. It does require more preciseness to combat than H&H normally requires (even facing is rarely considered, except for back attacks). If you close so tight that your opponent can't get in a cross, can you only jab (a punch with a shorter space, but does lower damage?).

If we did institute this rule, we'd have to consider how to counter it. Does your opponent have to use the rest of his turn taking a 5' step back? 

This is "Strut" Warren of the U.S. Marines. Klaus Nordling is the artist and I enjoy his cartoony style here.

Here he battles a sumo wrestler, who I may need to stat as a mobster type. It hurts to punch a sumo wrestler (1 point of damage to self?), but other forms of unarmed combat, like kicking, work fine. In fact, sumos might be extra vulnerable to kicking (+1 damage?).

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fight Comics #1 - pt. 3

I somehow skipped this page of Kayo Kirby last time, even though there's something rather interesting here. In the consummables subsection of the trophy section, there should be an entry for adrenalin, with the benefit being that it gives you 1-6 bonus hit points temporarily.

This is the unfortunately named Kinks Mason. Kinks is a test diver, wearing a new kind of diving helmet, when he gets caught in an apparently supernatural undertow that pulls him deep underwater (supernatural because, just panels earlier, he announced he was only two fathoms, or 12', deep).

Here we find it's pulled him into a lost world setting that's a bit unusual, being in an enormous air-filled grotto deep underwater. The barrier of sunken ships blocking the entrance serve as a nice transition between worlds.

A carnivoplant looks a lot like the creeper vines I introduced in first edition.  This is a large, maybe even a huge creeper vine and with 5 vines I would give it 1-3 attacks per turn.

The phosphomites are tougher to stat. They look like giant sea urchins, so they probably do sea urchin-y type stuff in battle. They appear to be helping Kinks, but maybe they are just a wandering encounter that turned up in the middle of combat and attacked a random party.

The goor are definitely non-humans, though I don't see any particular way to stat them except maybe as orc substitutes. It's interesting that the first of the Gor novels, Tarnsman of Gor, is 26 years away at this point.

By virtue of having rescued a princess (I guess) of the Procono people, Kinks is suddenly an admiral leading their navy. The navy rid on the back of giant "tauserus", which look vaguely like large Plesiosaurs, and are big enough to have tank turret-like structures mounted on their backs (though it's not clear how they keep from falling off...unless the tanks are somehow grafted to their skin...?). Anyway, that's a pretty powerful navy for a 1st-level fighter to be leading!

Note the map showing, roughly, the layout of this hidden realm.

Granted, Kinks did put himself at considerable risk in that scenario, so giving him the chance to leave with all the gold he can carry may seem like an okay reward. Gold was worth $34 per ounce in 1940, so if he left with 50 lbs, that would be over $27,000 -- way more than he needs to level up. So, it's really up to the Editor if he wants Kinks' player to have that much this soon...

This is Big Red McLane, and I love how all he has to do to get a job in 1940 is to put up his dukes. I think that's how we know Mr. Farlow is a plot hook character instead of a random character who would have rolled on the encounter reaction chart for this job interview. "Oh, no experience? (*rolls*) Don't call us, Mr. McLane, we'll call you."

Here I'm stuck wondering a couple of things. Is cutting down a tree so that it falls on someone an attack, or a trap? Does the lumberjack roll to hit (attack), or does Big Red roll a saving throw (trap)? And either way, how much damage should a tree falling on you do? If falling does 1-6 damage per 10', is it safe to assume that a 60' tall tree should do 6-36 points of damage?

Big Red is certainly a capable fighter. He appears to be making two attacks simultaneously each time, which is odd. In the first battle, when everyone is fighting unarmed, then Big Red is entitled to two attacks, but I don't think my rules let him split them between targets like that. And in the second battle, when people are using improvised weapons, that should slow the combat down to 1 attack per turn (oh...unless improvised weapons should not count against that -- I like this idea, because it allows barroom brawls with the occasional chairs and bottles to proceed at the same pace).

Note that Big Red can hit hard enough to knock his opponents prone. The punching rules don't account for that yet (unless these gangsters just happened to have 3 hit points or less), and it's something I'll have to work on (maybe for a future supplement, unless I accumulate enough material to need an Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Editor's Guide someday).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)