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Skill: You Can't Hit Me

Started by tadeusz · March 4, 2010

3 surviving posts. Original order and wording are retained; deleted and spam-marked entries are excluded.

This Psi skill is an intimidation variant suitable for defending against ranged attacks from one foe you are facing. Batman, WAW Tadeusz, and The Prodigal (from my movie review soon to be posted) would have it.

The hero faces the villain, and the villain is so terrified that he has a hard time getting an accurate shot off. I'd say something like a Relative Success roll for intimidation gets turned into a Negative Sit-mod for the villain's ranged attack roll.

Example:
The Bat stepped out of the shadow behind the roof access, his boots crunching on the gravel impregnated tarvey roof of the Morgan Hotel. A frightened criminal looking over the night city below spun to face him.
"G-get a-way from me, Bat." He cried, waving his .43 wildly.
"Come with me, Murphy O'Connor." A cold voice replied.
"No, they'll kill me."
"And I won't?" Asked the Bat as he closed the distance at an easy stroll, every line of his body radiating confident menace.
Murphy shot, and shot again, and went to fire again, and the Bat's hand closed on his wrist and Murphy fainted.
Two bullets had been fired at a man-size target at eight and five feet respectively, but the worse damage the Bat had was a hole in his cape.

It sounds to me like a P8@0 Posturing variant, viz.,:

There are many variations of this skill, but at its essence it is the ability to carry or hold one’s self so as to impress or intimidate others. In some cultures, it is a form of combat. It is not uncommon for warriors trained in these techniques to gain both sit-mods and die mods in such combat. Combat maneuvers designed to impress or intimidate might be included here. There may be similar skills which have other effects using related body language techniques.
I would treat it the way I treat evasive tumbling: RS=SM against the attacker, that is, whatever the successful roll is on the posturing skill becomes a situation modifier against the attacker's chance of success. I've seen this in action with evasive tumbling, and it's not uncommon for the sit-mod to consume the entire chance of success if the user is highly skilled and the attacker a lowly amateur; but it's got a risk to it, of course, because it can be "successful" with as little as a 1% reduction in the chance to hit, and as with all "immunity" skills it can fail completely.

There are a lot of other ways to make a character "unhittable", but this one best fits the description you give.

Are you aware that The Bat is a pre-Batman hero who is the original for the tropes of both Batman and Daredevil? He was a district attorney blinded at some point in his life who used his heightened senses and a collection of gadgetry to hunt criminals, always thought by the police to be one of the villains himself.  He was featured in one of the C. J. Henderson books I reviewed a while back, In re: To Battle Beyond, along with several other pulp era characters Henderson revived for the story.

Getting back to the skill, it would work better in a high-bias world with a character with a high psi bias himself, but given sufficient skill it would work in a flatlined world fairly impressively. If you figure that a character of this sort already has at least a 2@1 to maybe 2@8 psi BRA (intuition maybe, or will power, or persuasion--all are going to be extraordinarily high in such a character) and that he's going to practice this until he's got at least a 2@1 professional level of ability before he relies on it, that gives him something between 42 and 49% chance of getting a penalty against his opponent at least that high; and if we assume he reaches 3@1 expert level with it and has that 2@8 BRA, the chance of success (in a flatlined world) is 59%, and if he rolls 59, he's going to knock 59 percentage points off the chance his opponent has to hit him--already probably low for the target value (the intuition is going to kick up the target value, and this guy will also undoubtedly have a high agility, and a 2@ in either strength or stamina (or both) will kick up his density a notch (or two)). The two-bitters out there probably can't hit him much of the time, and even when they can they can't do much damage. It's only the serious guns that matter.

Sort of creates its own mooks.

Also, from your description, I'm reminded of the ending of that Clint Eastwood film for which he won best director, Forgiven I think it was called. In the impressive denoument, he is walking out of town and the dead sheriff's deputies are afraid to take shots at him from their hiding places in the alleys, because he might see them and shoot back. That's a slightly different application, though--the intimidation that requires the attacker make a will power check (probably RS=S/D/N, but it would require a high bias world to create the situation in which the N, that is, no check possible, would occur) to dare take the shot.

--M. J. Young

Oh--and there is no reason why the character couldn't have both skills and use both at once; success at either would probably protect him.

--M. J. Young