I had only two players this session, so i whittled the final encounter in Red Chrome Cargo down to a nub. That nub was a rifle turret, another enemy with a rifle, and a single booster I swapped for a hardened statline to maintain challenge. The party managed it, and there were some interesting choices from turn to turn, like a good minis skirmish game
The real Asuka; the only Asuka
- she/her
she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real
Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)
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Though the hardened booster might have been overtuned. She absolutely shredded through the melee nomad. It was impressive they managed that, and a cyberpsycho who was eying the train they stopped (though that was more of a puzzle and social standoff).
The trick is setting limits on your enemies and sticking to them. There’s a line in the Hardened Mooks DLC that roughly paraphases to “make the PCs remember the people they’re killing see human, even if they deserve it.” In this case, the second the hardened booster went down, the rifleman freaked and begged for a ceasefire so he can patch her up. The party didn’t give him time for that, just enough for him to flee with his mainline. Instead she failed her death save and perished in his arms.
I think that’ll leave a mark, and that sounds almost tragic, but this was a Red Chrome Legion fascist whose face is in a permanent Icebreaker scowl. The PCs were genuinely debating whether they’d even bother and I gave them the choice between continuing the encounter or performing a facedown to end it (the shooter’s valkyria profile poser was hammered on black lace and wanted him to avenge her in her last moments instead, so his mind wasn’t perfectly made up). They went for the facedown, with the solo’s reputation against the Piranhas party gang coming in clutch, and it felt like both the right thing to do and an ideological wound.
Campaign spoilers past this point:
And I don’t have a polemic takeaway for that. The players are simply going to have to sit in that ambivalence. Of course in the abstract, the PCs stopped a fascist militia from getting their hands on chemical weapons they were planning to use on the unhoused by the behest of one of the campaign’s many Real Estate Bastards. Also, this is not a mercy the Legion would have spared to the PCs. If it was the nomad and not the hardened booster, the hardened booster would have started carving the nomad up with her wolvers to worsen the nomad’s death save.
If there is a takeaway from this encounter, it’s kind of a scary one. With RED I keep circling around this one thought: The shittiest people have interiority, can create affecting bonds, and are human; they are still no less shitty as people.
Somewhere in there I was trying to say “Here’s how you effectively pace a combat encounter,” and I deliberately lost the thread. When I see a RED encounter done poorly, the gm treats their npcs like they’re a beehive telepathically relaying orders to each other, and that’s boring from a narrative perspective as well as a slog from a mechanical one, so it’s hard to fixate on that for too long
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