Actual Play: The Spin System

[Brian Leybourne]

But first, a bit more hammering out of mooks: Should I use the Feng Shui system, where mooks are either hit-or-miss targets? In other words, an attack either puts them out of the fight, or does nothing. Maybe a mook is out of the fight when you score two more Successes than them? Or just one more?

Additionally, when you say that all mooks have the exact same stats, do you mean that they share Spin Pools, or is each mook's spin tracked seperately?

Their stats are the same, i.e. all 4 "Taco Bandits" have "Shootin'" at 4, "Tough as Nails" at 3 and "Body odor so bad it makes you gag" at 6, but they share a common spin pool. Lets say they initially provide 3 each (I just pulled that number out of the air but it's probably reasonable). So their combined spin pool is 9. At each action, whoever is having a go can spend down that pool, but they also earn it back up with successes/zeroes. This way you're only tracking one pool instead of 4 and you only need to remember one set of stats. Once a Taco Bandit takes 5 hits, he's out of the fight.

Pretty simple. You can even do just one initiative roll for the four of them and they all act together, or if you want you can give them individual initiatives but it's a bit more work.

Brian.

[Jeph]

Ah. A communal spin pool. I like it! So if you had 5 mooks each with a spin pool of 4, they'd have a communal pool of 20 that they could all draw on, right? Eliminates the hassle of having to keep track of all those fluctuating numbers. I'd proably give them the same initiative rating during a round-using combat, again just to keep it simple.

[Jeph]

Last thing before I go to bed: Would your players mind if you released their names, to be put in the playtesting credits?

[Brian Leybourne]

I seriously doubt they would mind.

Glenn Beaumont
Tony Hardie
Kurt Scholz
and of course me... :-)

And yeah, that was the point with the combined pool. Keeps things nice and simple. Of course, important NPC's should still be statted up normally and have their own pools.

Looking forward to V2.1

Brian.

[Jeph]

Okay. The Spin System Version 2.1 text has finally arrived (sorry I took so long). You can view it here.