This game looks extremely promising. I have some heavy RL stuff going on right now but it's at least moved up to near the top of my 'want to try out' pile.

Most of it makes pretty good sense on first reading. However, I'm confused about the 'Introducing Peons with Kick' rules.

1) Can these be brand-new peons beyond the 150 points worth at the start? Or does it just allow the Antagonists to activate extra peons of that boss' above and beyond what the player called for? (So if I held up 2 fingers, they could swat me down by paying 4 Kick for 2 extra R2s or something.)

If the latter, I guess the extras are just one-wave peons? Or one-encounter? Or what?

Also, if you boost peons, is that just for a wave or an encounter? Or what?

2) If we assume that you get Fuel and Kick 1-1 in all cases, I note the following. Fuel converts 2:1 into Fire which converts 1:1.3 into bonus points on die rolls. So each point of Fuel is +.65 to die rolls in an encounter. Introducing or upgrading peons, on the other hand, has Kick 1:1 into Peons which converts 1:2.5 into bonus points on die rolls. So each point of kick is +2.5 to die rolls.

Now, I would have thought that this kind of ratio (Kick being roughly four times more effective for points for the Antagonists than Fuel is for the Protagonists) would pretty quickly bury the Protagonist. On the other hand, the Protagonist does do permanent damage, whereas she only takes temporary damage (leading up to another Bind) in most cases. So maybe it balances out in play. I just wanted to call attention to the issue and see whether this had been noted and how it works in play.


But I'd really need some help with #1 before I could play. I don't understand where the extra peons/peon ranks are coming from or how long they last, and I'd need to know that.

Hey Sean,

1) Can these be brand-new peons beyond the 150 points worth at the start? Or does it just allow the Antagonists to activate extra peons of that boss' above and beyond what the player called for? (So if I held up 2 fingers, they could swat me down by paying 4 Kick for 2 extra R2s or something.)

2) If we assume that you get Fuel and Kick 1-1 in all cases, I note the following. Fuel converts 2:1 into Fire which converts 1:1.3 into bonus points on die rolls. So each point of Fuel is +.65 to die rolls in an encounter. Introducing or upgrading peons, on the other hand, has Kick 1:1 into Peons which converts 1:2.5 into bonus points on die rolls. So each point of kick is +2.5 to die rolls.

Now, I would have thought that this kind of ratio (Kick being roughly four times more effective for points for the Antagonists than Fuel is for the Protagonists) would pretty quickly bury the Protagonist. On the other hand, the Protagonist does do permanent damage, whereas she only takes temporary damage (leading up to another Bind) in most cases. So maybe it balances out in play. I just wanted to call attention to the issue and see whether this had been noted and how it works in play.

Hi Ben -

I'm really grooving on the idea of your game, but I'm not quite satisfied with what you say here.

OK. First of all, compare your point investement for say 'healing the boss'. That's 2 kick for 1 point of healing, as opposed to 2 fuel for 1.3 points of damage. So there the tradeoff is to the Protagonist's advantage.

Likewise, with 3 kick for increasing a boss's stat, you can figure that the increased stat is 1 point for the boss plus the point of karma - essentially 3 for 2, but this time lasting. So there you're talking .75 but the changes to the boss may last more than one encounter, so it's actually more. (Actually, given this, it hardly seems worth it to heal the boss - you can just buy him up instead.)

Anyway, my point is that the point costs for the different things you can spend points on seem really uneven to me. More on why this matters (or not) in a second.

You wrote that the introduced peons are 'like sub-bosses' and 'controlled by the antagonists', and last until they are dead. Are you serious? So I can spend 20 kick and just throw four R5 peons at the guy for every wave of every encounter from there on out? Um...

Adding to this, you wrote

"we upped the challenge, and seriously kicked the crap out of the Protagonist. We boosted her Boss to maximum traits, then brought in a Sub-Boss, and boosted his traits to maximum, then we deprived the PC of her Weapon. It was mad."

My worry about the rules as written is that with the efficacy of fuel vs. kick the Antagonists can do this more or less at will after the first half-dozen or so scenes. That every time the PC builds up enough fuel to do damage the antagonists can subvert her with even better stuff from the kick. That's why I'm comparing the points so carefully.

So OK. Why is that a problem? Well, because you invest a lot of the game with this hard-core Gamist rhetoric, even though the Dilemmas and some other stuff seem to push in a Narrativist direction.

Dude, if the game is hard-core Gamist, I'm playing to win. Which means based on the numbers I just crunched I'm going to do the following: spend all kick on bonus peons and throw all of them at every other player every time. Furthermore, he can't beat me point for point with fire, so on average I'll rock his world. Why is this a bad strategy? Even if he goes to the bind and survives to up his die types, he still has this massive pile of d4's to overcome. Plus, even if he can overcome it, the game starts to become uncool, if there's just this endless slog going on.

I guess I'd like to see the kick/fuel expenditures more tightly regimented and balanced against one another. If this were a game where players were helping each other tell a revenge story, that wouldn't matter so much, but with winning and losing, it seems to matter a lot more. There can't be a 'win' strategy for the antagonists just to prevent protagonists from 'getting too cocky' in a gamist game.

This game has a ton of stuff in it that really, really kicks ass. If you want it to really be competitive between the players, though, you can't have 'instant win' strategies for either side. The Fuel/Kick resource management challenge is an absolutely awesome idea, but if Kick always dominates through the right tactical choices, then the game becomes an exercise in futility.

If it were me, and if I'm understanding you correctly, I'd remove the bit about raising Peon competence (needless complexity - they're just peons!), and make people pay kick for every encounter (or maybe even every wave, or every 5 waves to balance with some of the other kick tricks) they wanted to keep a sub-boss or peon involved. Otherwise, you just build a big floating pool of 'hose the protagonist' NPCs, and one which is more point-effective AFAICTAFG than almost any other maneuver.

Another possibility is that the Antagonists are there to help the Protagonist tell his revenge story - you talk this way sometimes in the rules-text - in which case fine-tuned kick costs are slightly less important (though I'd still like more rules to regiment use of bonus peons and sub-bosses). In this case a lot of the problem I've described above isn't as big, but that cuts against the whole winning thing. I mean, if I'm trying to help the hero be cool on his turn, I can do that, but then I'm not thinking about winning any more.

Another question, as long as we're chatting: Is it assumed that you fight the bosses in order unless you're summoned forward to fight a shared boss by the actions of another PC?

Lot's of good points. Overall, I'm with you about the balance thing. It needs to be nice and balanced to enhance the viability of all the options. To be honest, I really had no solid idea of how to approach the balance issue when I wrote up the rules, so I just designated arbitrary Kick costs to things based purely on my subjective reasoning of incentive and disincentive for use. I was hoping that play-testing would allow me to more accurately decide on the relative costs. In all my playing, and from what I've heard from other people, the Kick costs seem to be working fine, so I just thought "well, if no-one's complaining, it must be all cool". But I agree with you that it needs to be more thoroughly and mathematically balanced.

First of all, compare your point investement for say 'healing the boss'. That's 2 kick for 1 point of healing, as opposed to 2 fuel for 1.3 points of damage. So there the tradeoff is to the Protagonist's advantage.

Likewise, with 3 kick for increasing a boss's stat, you can figure that the increased stat is 1 point for the boss plus the point of karma - essentially 3 for 2, but this time lasting. So there you're talking .75 but the changes to the boss may last more than one encounter, so it's actually more. (Actually, given this, it hardly seems worth it to heal the boss - you can just buy him up instead.)

You wrote that the introduced peons are 'like sub-bosses' and 'controlled by the antagonists', and last until they are dead. Are you serious? So I can spend 20 kick and just throw four R5 peons at the guy for every wave of every encounter from there on out? Um...

If it were me, and if I'm understanding you correctly, I'd remove the bit about raising Peon competence (needless complexity - they're just peons!), and make people pay kick for every encounter (or maybe even every wave, or every 5 waves to balance with some of the other kick tricks) they wanted to keep a sub-boss or peon involved. Otherwise, you just build a big floating pool of 'hose the protagonist' NPCs, and one which is more point-effective AFAICTAFG than almost any other maneuver.

Another question, as long as we're chatting: Is it assumed that you fight the bosses in order unless you're summoned forward to fight a shared boss by the actions of another PC?

Hi Ben!

I'm flattered that you'd ask. Let me see what kind of help I can give.

Basically, you get exactly as much Kick as Fuel, right? So the way I see the game working is something like this: Protagonist takes damage to build up Fuel, triggering Bind which raises stats. Meanwhile, Kick builds up at same time, allowing complications to ensue at Antagonists' option, and making potential encounters harder.

So you can control how fast the game moves forward by controlling the effectiveness of Fuel and Kick relative to one another. There are some 'forward moving things' for the protagonist: bosses and peons killed are killed permanently, whereas the protagonist almost always comes back sooner or later. OTOH if Kick is TOO effective then it will start to be a slog. On the other hand if Fuel is too effective then almost everyone will move through their challenges at the same rate, making the competition closer (perhaps) but also more arbitrary (less satisfying IMO).

The only way to know what the really best ratio is through play, but it doesn't hurt to start with mathematical balance and work out from there, I don't think, in a resource management game. That is, you may discover that some 'unbalanced' things work better, but it seems worthwhile to come up with a mathematically sound currency first and work out from there.

-------------

So here's what I think. I start with the observation that 2 Fuel = 1 Fire and 1 Fire = either a new d4 (+2.5 average roll) or a bump of a die to the next die up (+1 average roll). So Fire's average effectiveness is +6.5/5 = +1.3 on a roll. So 1 Fuel for the protagonist is worth .65 points on conflict resolution dice on average.

Fire lasts for 1 encounter, right? So then when you balance things, if you want Kick to be about equal to Fuel in terms of in-game effect, you want to shoot for about the same value.

So for example: if you introduce peons, they get you about 2.5 points per point of peon (because 1 peon rank = 1d4). So if these 'bonus peons' last for an encounter, you figure about 4 points per rank would be balancing. On the other hand, if they just last for a wave - so that it goes like this, the protagonist holds up 3 fingers, and you say, ha ha! you're fighting 5, buddy - then maybe the costs you have are right on the money, 1/1.

If you heal the boss, then actually 2/1 like you had it seems about right for balance. This values the kick at .5. The healing is 'permanent' so that makes it seem more, but on the other hand damage is permanent too, and damage is the result of higher dice.

The other ones are harder to weigh. But basically what I'm doing is looking at what Fuel gets you in terms of points in conflict resolution: it gets you an average of .65 added to all your die rolls for an encounter. So if you want Kick to be about equal you should balance costs accordingly: if it lasts an encounter (or five waves, like some of yours) then it should average in the .5-.75 range too, if it lasts longer probably it should average less, if it lasts for just a wave it can be cheaper. That's how I calculate this stuff, by turning points of resource into points on dice and then seeing what's worth what.

So there's a start. What else do you want calculated? Is the general method there helpful or were there particular questions you had? I'd keep some things general based on rough averages, like the sub-bosses - this would probably mean that sub-bosses would be cost-ineffective early when the PCs were weak and cost-effective later when they were strong. But that seems fine, and you don't want to overcomplicate things.

Edit: Tell you what, I just re-read your post. When I get some time I'll go through your list and try to weight the costs according to what seems to make sense to me, keeping in mind I haven't tried to play yet and that I may be missing some stuff that's obvious to you. Then I'll post what seem like reasonable costs to me and clarifications of what the kick does in terms of temporal duration. Then hopefully that will be useful to you and you can adjust according to your much greater experience!

OK. I looked at this a little more. I think in order to evaluate costs I need to know exactly how the Kick works, when it's spent and how long it lasts, which wasn't clear to me from the game-text. The biggest problem is that I don't know what it means to 'introduce' peons or a sub-boss when the Protagonist calls for foes! I'll deal with things point by point below.

1. Introducing Peons. Lets say you introduce or boost peons for 1 wave only. This fits with the protagonist player holding up say 2 fingers and getting smacked with 4 peons in return. Then I think your cost (1 kick for 1 peon rank) is exactly right as is. If they last longer it's too low, but I don't understand what 'last longer' would mean exactly. I mean, the Protagonist keeps calling for foes, right? So what does it mean if there are these extra peons lurking in the background somewhere? I'd encourage to just do this by single wave and keep the costs you have. If you wanted, you could even require that bonus peons be that boss' pre-existing peons, so the game didn't drag out and you didn't have 'loose NPCs'. I kind of like that, actually.

2. Heal Boss. I think 2/1, like you have it, is just right.

3. Increase Boss' Traits. If this lasts for only one encounter, it's essentially like 'improved fire' for the boss: it gets the boss better dice and more karma. If you evaluate 4 points for the +2 Karma and 1.3 for the improved die type, 5/1 seems about right for this. IF it just lasts for the one encounter that the boss is in. Permanently jacking a boss seems wrong to me somehow, but if you wanted these changes to be permanent, I guess 10/1 might be good.

4. Deprive Trait: Assuming that 5 waves is roughly equal to 1 encounter (it's a kind of, 'can you survive five waves and then escape in this encounter' type challenge), and assuming that an 'average' trait is 3, then this deprivation is worth 4.5 points. That's about the same yield (4.55) as 7 points of Fuel, so charge 7 Kick for this one.

5. Can't run, can't hide seems good at 10, presumably with the idea that you've got some more kick to really throw the works at the PC during those five waves. I'd need to play to judge this better. I'm not sure what purpose the 'fail roll' and 'kill PC' expenditures serve, but I guess the costs seem OK assuming you want that to be part of the game.

6. Sub-bosses. When the heck do these guys come in? Do you hold up 3 fingers and then a sub-boss comes out with the peons? Or does he come out by himself? Or what? I don't understand how these guys get into the narrative.

Assuming that's settled, I'd note the following. A sub-boss has 5 stats. If you assume an average of 3, and that 4 of these will be going at a time in any given combat, that's 4d8 or 18 points. So if you introduce a sub-boss for a whole encounter, I might charge 30 kick for that. But if they only came in for a wave (like General what's his name in Kill Bill) it might be a lot less - maybe 8 points.

Still, you want sub-bosses to be lasting characters. I can see a PC calling for a scene where they're trying to outwit a sub-boss, say, in a Style + Luck stealth contest or something like that. Or they might just want to kill him. So I suppose sub-bosses should be noted on the PC's sheet for whom the sub-boss is introduced. Then that same sub-boss can be re-called for when antagonists want to spend the kick, or the PC can put the sub-boss in a scene themselves, in which case it costs no kick at all.

Attaching a sub-boss to a particular boss, so that the sub-boss has to be killed before you kill the boss, creates a permanent obstacle in the PCs path. That should therefore cost extra points, maybe +10. If you don't pay this then the guy's just sort of a floating nemesis, someone who shows up at uncomfortable moments, whenever antagonists feel like paying the kick.

Anyway, I think when it's totally clear how sub-bosses work in the narrative, when they come in and out and who has rights to bring them in and out, the kick cost should become pretty clear too.

--------

I'd like to see one of your first three examples be an example of combat. Maybe a couple. You have an example of getting out of a bind, a race, and stat improvement. Then, much much later, Jodi gets four dice for combat. Why just four? Which four? It would help to have some clear examples of all this. I understand that you want situational interpretation of stat applicability, and I'm totally down with that - I think it's good. But some sample situations are really, really helpful for dealing with this IMO.

Keep up the good work!

Sean

My calculation on #3 is wrong, but the answer is right. That is, if you assume 2 Karma = 2 Points = 3 fuel (1.95) and +1 on a die = 1 point = 2 fuel (1.3) then you get 5 fuel for the same benefit on the player side. So 5 kick seems right for boosting a boss stat for 1 encounter.

(added post because I exceeded my hour to edit...)

Hey Sean,

Thanks heaps for your input, very much appreciated, and you've given me some valuable things to think about. I'll try to address all your points.

1. Introducing Peons. Lets say you introduce or boost peons for 1 wave only. This fits with the protagonist player holding up say 2 fingers and getting smacked with 4 peons in return. Then I think your cost (1 kick for 1 peon rank) is exactly right as is. If they last longer it's too low, but I don't understand what 'last longer' would mean exactly. I mean, the Protagonist keeps calling for foes, right? So what does it mean if there are these extra peons lurking in the background somewhere? I'd encourage to just do this by single wave and keep the costs you have. If you wanted, you could even require that bonus peons be that boss' pre-existing peons, so the game didn't drag out and you didn't have 'loose NPCs'. I kind of like that, actually.

2. Heal Boss. I think 2/1, like you have it, is just right.

3. Increase Boss' Traits. If this lasts for only one encounter, it's essentially like 'improved fire' for the boss: it gets the boss better dice and more karma. If you evaluate 4 points for the +2 Karma and 1.3 for the improved die type, 5/1 seems about right for this. IF it just lasts for the one encounter that the boss is in. Permanently jacking a boss seems wrong to me somehow, but if you wanted these changes to be permanent, I guess 10/1 might be good.

4. Deprive Trait: Assuming that 5 waves is roughly equal to 1 encounter (it's a kind of, 'can you survive five waves and then escape in this encounter' type challenge), and assuming that an 'average' trait is 3, then this deprivation is worth 4.5 points. That's about the same yield (4.55) as 7 points of Fuel, so charge 7 Kick for this one.

5. Can't run, can't hide seems good at 10, presumably with the idea that you've got some more kick to really throw the works at the PC during those five waves. I'd need to play to judge this better. I'm not sure what purpose the 'fail roll' and 'kill PC' expenditures serve, but I guess the costs seem OK assuming you want that to be part of the game.

6. Sub-bosses. When the heck do these guys come in? Do you hold up 3 fingers and then a sub-boss comes out with the peons? Or does he come out by himself? Or what? I don't understand how these guys get into the narrative.

Assuming that's settled, I'd note the following. A sub-boss has 5 stats. If you assume an average of 3, and that 4 of these will be going at a time in any given combat, that's 4d8 or 18 points. So if you introduce a sub-boss for a whole encounter, I might charge 30 kick for that. But if they only came in for a wave (like General what's his name in Kill Bill) it might be a lot less - maybe 8 points.

Still, you want sub-bosses to be lasting characters. I can see a PC calling for a scene where they're trying to outwit a sub-boss, say, in a Style + Luck stealth contest or something like that. Or they might just want to kill him. So I suppose sub-bosses should be noted on the PC's sheet for whom the sub-boss is introduced. Then that same sub-boss can be re-called for when antagonists want to spend the kick, or the PC can put the sub-boss in a scene themselves, in which case it costs no kick at all.

Attaching a sub-boss to a particular boss, so that the sub-boss has to be killed before you kill the boss, creates a permanent obstacle in the PCs path. That should therefore cost extra points, maybe +10. If you don't pay this then the guy's just sort of a floating nemesis, someone who shows up at uncomfortable moments, whenever antagonists feel like paying the kick.

I'd like to see one of your first three examples be an example of combat. Maybe a couple. You have an example of getting out of a bind, a race, and stat improvement. Then, much much later, Jodi gets four dice for combat. Why just four? Which four? It would help to have some clear examples of all this. I understand that you want situational interpretation of stat applicability, and I'm totally down with that - I think it's good. But some sample situations are really, really helpful for dealing with this IMO.

Woof. This is a great discussion. I'll try to come back to some of your individual points later.

As far as the math goes: my reasoning is just that what happens in Scarlet Wake is relatively free-form narration by the player who's turn it is, punctuated by contests which that player calls for.

Contests are determined simply by 'high roll', so a point's a point on either side. But then there are these metagame resources, Fuel and Kick, which match each other 1:1 in terms of accumulation rate.

So. It makes sense to me that the resources match each other. Since Fuel is crystal-clear in definition I start with that and then consider different applications of Kick to match. (Using Kick is the major game decision the antagonists make AFAICT, the only way they can effect tactics, outcomes, etc. The only other thing I see offhand is the ability to narrate binds. Essentially, the model is that the player tells their own story with the other players' help, but in order to tell their story the player has to accumulate fuel and raise stats through binds, which in turn give the player's antagonists the ability to interfere in their story in ways which make it harder. Is that right?).

'Smart play' would then consist in tempting your foes to burn Kick early, on binds and battles with peons - "we can put her down for a Bind if we just call in a couple extra peons here, dude!" - so that you have more fuel than the other guys have Kick by the time you take on your Boss. Repeat process to victory!

Just a couple of other comments:

1) I too had the thought of dropping "Can't run, can't hide" to 5. After all, the Protagonist can fight back by holding up 1 finger at a time for 5 straight waves. So you're going to need to dump a lot more kick after that first five into extra peons and sub-bosses to really hose the PC on this one.

2) "Sub-bosses come in whenever the antagonists want them to." I still think this needs clarification. You seem to be saying that you pay kick for the sub-boss and then have him 'in hand' to just dump on the PC during any wave that suits. I'd say that's really unbalanced. I think you should have to pay the kick to bring them in whenever you bring them in. You can make the sub-boss a recurring character anyway, or have more than one, whatever. But in terms of game mechanics, they're essentially free dice equal to the character's. So if those dice jump into a wave I guess it should be paid for every time.

3) Let's say you pay the kick to introduce extra peons for a whole encounter (or the whole rest of it), ditto with sub-bosses. So in that case Kick works just like Fire here except that maybe you can bring it in in the middle (not just before the first wave).

In that case, yeah, 4 points per Peon Rank is right by my calculations, because you're getting an average return of 2.5 per peon rank vs. .65 per Fuel. So 4 Kick = 2.6 and that's about right.

For sub-bosses you can consider it to be an extra 5d8 = 22.5 points. Whoa! That's about 35 Kick for a fair exchange on a sub-boss.

You could lower this a little if the idea was that the sub-boss came in INSTEAD of the peons. So the guy holds up 3 fingers and instead of say 9 dice worth of peons you send in a sub-boss instead. But actually 9d4=5d8 in terms of averages, so there the sub-boss would be free. (This threatens to get complicated if you open it up too much. You want a rule of thumb here. I'm already assuming R3's.)

4. I like the idea of reducing kick to hose yourself. Maybe either side can substitute sub-bosses for peons at appropriate cost; the player has to declare it early (by giving, I don't know, an OK sign along with the number of fingers, or something), but the antagonists can bring it in with kick. Again, though, this is kind of complex/optional rule kind of stuff.

5. The fight with the crazy 88 - this is one of the greatest film fights ever. Note, though, that it breaks down into a lot of waves, and though some of those waves involve a dozen peons at once, others just involve 1 or 2. Even though the room's full of people - Sim begone! The Bride can hold the other 8 at bay with her steely glance while she fights two or three - that's just a free product of narration, so your system's hot for that. But note that when General what's his name comes in everyone else fades out - the sub-boss at work and the peons fade out for some crazy stuff.

But why wouldn't you consider the Crazy 88 O-Ren's normal crew? I mean, they could be bonus peons, but they wouldn't have to be.

What I had in mind is that when you brought extra peons in for an encounter it would just be invoking the boss' pre-existing peons. But that's not what you have in mind.

In this case, it needs to be clear whether the bonus peons last beyond the dimensions of that encounter. I think now that you think they do, but if so, they need to cost more points, and again it has to be distinguished whether they are free-floating peons (like the free-floating sub-boss) or whether they are tied down to the boss they're invoked under.

OK, no more time for this today. Good luck with it! I hope I'm making sense here.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

Have you played Great Ork Gods? I'd really recommend you give it a shot. The metagame currency of Goblins and Spite is structurally similar in some respects to what I think you're doing with Fuel and Kick, though the implementation, color, how you get them, etc. is very different. But GOG is tight as hell and uses a metagame resource allocation mechanic with some similarity to Scarlet Wake's so it might be worthwhile for you to play it as a point of comparison, if you haven't already.

Best,

Sean

Hey Sean,

Sorry about the delay, I've actually tried to reply twice now, and both times my computer crashed right before I finished. My resulting annoyance detered me from trying again immediately.

Re: GOG, I haven't played it, but I've read up on it alot and have a copy of the play-test rules. I'd like to play it (and a swag of other games), but my gaming group is fairly small, and have been involved in a long-running D&D 3e campaign for years now, which isn't showing any signs of ending soon (I dropped out after a few sessions when I realised that my action choices had no impact on what happened, and taking the higher ground to fire my 4(!) magic missiles at the enemy was akin to standing next to them and spitting on them, for all the advantage it gave me... anyway, I digress). So I content myself with reading about systems and their rules and imagining how they work.

'Smart play' would then consist in tempting your foes to burn Kick early, on binds and battles with peons - "we can put her down for a Bind if we just call in a couple extra peons here, dude!" - so that you have more fuel than the other guys have Kick by the time you take on your Boss. Repeat process to victory!

1) I too had the thought of dropping "Can't run, can't hide" to 5. After all, the Protagonist can fight back by holding up 1 finger at a time for 5 straight waves. So you're going to need to dump a lot more kick after that first five into extra peons and sub-bosses to really hose the PC on this one.

2) "Sub-bosses come in whenever the antagonists want them to." I still think this needs clarification. You seem to be saying that you pay kick for the sub-boss and then have him 'in hand' to just dump on the PC during any wave that suits. I'd say that's really unbalanced. I think you should have to pay the kick to bring them in whenever you bring them in. You can make the sub-boss a recurring character anyway, or have more than one, whatever. But in terms of game mechanics, they're essentially free dice equal to the character's. So if those dice jump into a wave I guess it should be paid for every time.

3) Let's say you pay the kick to introduce extra peons for a whole encounter (or the whole rest of it), ditto with sub-bosses. So in that case Kick works just like Fire here except that maybe you can bring it in in the middle (not just before the first wave).

In that case, yeah, 4 points per Peon Rank is right by my calculations, because you're getting an average return of 2.5 per peon rank vs. .65 per Fuel. So 4 Kick = 2.6 and that's about right.

For sub-bosses you can consider it to be an extra 5d8 = 22.5 points. Whoa! That's about 35 Kick for a fair exchange on a sub-boss.

You could lower this a little if the idea was that the sub-boss came in INSTEAD of the peons. So the guy holds up 3 fingers and instead of say 9 dice worth of peons you send in a sub-boss instead. But actually 9d4=5d8 in terms of averages, so there the sub-boss would be free. (This threatens to get complicated if you open it up too much. You want a rule of thumb here. I'm already assuming R3's.)

4. I like the idea of reducing kick to hose yourself. Maybe either side can substitute sub-bosses for peons at appropriate cost; the player has to declare it early (by giving, I don't know, an OK sign along with the number of fingers, or something), but the antagonists can bring it in with kick. Again, though, this is kind of complex/optional rule kind of stuff.

5. The fight with the crazy 88 - this is one of the greatest film fights ever. Note, though, that it breaks down into a lot of waves, and though some of those waves involve a dozen peons at once, others just involve 1 or 2. Even though the room's full of people - Sim begone! The Bride can hold the other 8 at bay with her steely glance while she fights two or three - that's just a free product of narration, so your system's hot for that. But note that when General what's his name comes in everyone else fades out - the sub-boss at work and the peons fade out for some crazy stuff.

But why wouldn't you consider the Crazy 88 O-Ren's normal crew? I mean, they could be bonus peons, but they wouldn't have to be.

What I had in mind is that when you brought extra peons in for an encounter it would just be invoking the boss' pre-existing peons. But that's not what you have in mind.

In this case, it needs to be clear whether the bonus peons last beyond the dimensions of that encounter. I think now that you think they do, but if so, they need to cost more points, and again it has to be distinguished whether they are free-floating peons (like the free-floating sub-boss) or whether they are tied down to the boss they're invoked under.