[TSoY] Secret of Mighty Blow

[Frank T]

Rules question. I have a Vigor pool of 5+ and the Secret of Mighty Blow. The first time I hit, in a fight, ends the fight, because I can spend as many points as needed to get the opponent to broken. Correct?

[Eero Tuovinen]

The fight ends only when you get a result past broken, or 7+. Being broken only means that you have to spend extra pool to roll dice, and you get one penalty die for it. The rules would probably be more clear if we had a "Devastated" result in the damage track beyond Broken; now the only place where you actually find the rule about being forced to concede the BDTP is one sentence in the rules, and people seem to miss it a lot.

You can also force somebody to concede by filling the upper echelons of the damage track: for example, if you made two 6-point blows in succession, the first would break your opponent, while the second would force him to concede, because the harm always goes up when it's proper slot in the track is already filled.

Of course, remember that forced conceding is something of an extreme case; usually your opponent should concede willingly after being taken to Broken while you're still unharmed, as he's now fighting against a considerable disadvantage, and will likely just harm himself further by continuing.

But other than those points, Secret of Mightly Blow indeed allows you to end the fight with one blow.

[oliof]

Yeah, that mighty blow came as a surprise to us yesterday. The Vigor-7 goblin going on a rampage was quite ... effective. Although he would have needed to spend one more point of Vigor.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Also, remember - you can't ever get a result over 6 without a skill of 4 and +3 on the dice.

So, yes, you can break someone with one blow, which makes the secret extremely powerful, although there's lots of ways to prevent it. But you can't end the battle with one blow, and you can't use it that often, because of the pool cost.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ah, that's an interesting point. My reading of the secret was that it doesn't increase the actual result of your roll, only the degree of the resulting harm, and thus wouldn't be limited by the skill rank system. That's certainly reasonable, though. I guess I'll have to write our first errata for the Finnish edition to make this point clear...

[oliof]

Also, remember - you can't ever get a result over 6 without a skill of 4 and +3 on the dice.

I really don't remember reading this explicitly in the rules, although I can infer this from the transcendence rules in hindsight now.

So, yes, you can break someone with one blow, which makes the secret extremely powerful, although there's lots of ways to prevent it.

Care to share an example or two about this?