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4E One-off ft. TPK

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« on: <08-27-17/1803:59> »
"It doesn't matter what the run was, it has failed, there is no salvaging it, just get out.
You are on the fifth floor of a highrise and an Ares Firewatch team has just breached the front entrance.
A helicopter will be on the roof in 90 seconds to evac you, 30 seconds later it will be gone.
Roll initiative."


This was the opening spiel to my recent one-off, edited slightly to take into account the fact that one player didn't have time to create a character and another player suggested he just go for a total amnesiac.

The character I thus created for him was designed to appear as a traditional hacker but under the surface he was a chaos mage who had let his magic slip as he focused more on technology, much to the chargrin of his mentor spirit the Wise Warrior who I added to help him get to grips with the character given the extremely limited timeframe of the run.

The other three characters were;
  • A human street sam, featuring some standard cyber and multiple weapons (including a Euro Wars burst-fire grenade launcher),
  • A troll adept, focus was on strength with unarmed combat and archery,
  • A bear shaman adept with four initiative passes and heavy mil-spec armour (you can tell this player knows the system, I let him go with it because it was a one-off and what other chance would you get to have a character like that?)

The four PCs were built with the standard 400BPs, the six members of the Firewatch team each had 600 (they're meant to be the best of the best after all).
The highrise was 20 stories and at a run they could climb a single flight of stairs a turn.

The players started on level five in a security office, the hacker having just been ejected from the matrix and lost his memories and upon leaving and making their way toward one of the two stairwells they were set upon by three cybered-up guard dogs, which the two adepts took apart null sheen.
As they started climbing the stairs, the bear used to SMG to spray-n-pray the Firewatch team below them, in response I set off a blizzard spell (my main aim was to slow them down with some icy stairs but the hacker/mage suffered quite a lot of damage from this. He wondered whether he had any healing magic and tried his best to rectify the situation, the subsequent illusion certainly made him look better but he didn't feel any warmer.

The street sam then decided to look for the origin of the blizzard, for whatever reason looking up the stairwell twice, on the second occasion he took an APDS round to the back of the skull and that was him out of the game (as it turned out that nobody had any first aid, the troll took to carrying him for a while but he never regained consciousness).

The rest of the party then figured that it might be better to head through the building to the other stairwell but this was sufficient for Firewatch to catch up with them (three were following on the first stairwell [soldier and two mages], two were ascending the second [rigger and melee adept] and there was a lone sniper with a laser weapon on a nearby rooftop incase the party tried to ascend the building externally [they didn't]).

The troll, with unconscious sam on his shoulder, takes on the Firewatch adept in a one-on-one brawl. The Firewatch adept managed a decent blow with his combat knife before the troll pushed him down the stairs. Now with a clear target, the rigger opened up with a narrow, full auto long burst using APDS rounds from his Ares Alpha and the Troll ceased to be.

As this was happening, the Bear was fighting off a Beast spirit in the shape of a Boa constrictor and the hacker/mage had plugged himself into a control panel and was summoning a lift. Having already forced open the lift doors, upon hearing that the lift was inbound the bear threw off the spirit and "stepped backwards into the lift" which wasn't there yet. He of course tanked the fall and decided that he would pull the hacker/mage up onto the top of the lift with him as it rose up past the opening (at this point I think they were on level 7, having only managed to ascent two floors). In order to throw off the pursuers, th hacker/mage asked the Wise Warrior what to do and she suggested that he think of the scariest thing he could imagine and project it (phantasm, incidentally the same spell he used to appear healed earlier). Having no idea how powerful he was, he decided to cast it at force 7. Being Magic 4, this caused him to suffer the final box on his physical damage track and the bear ended up pulling an unconscious runner into the lift shaft. The lift reached level 7 and stopped, with the two runners standing on top of it.

The bear (with the hacker/mage over his shoulder), preceded to climb the lift shaft to level 8 then return to the stairwell. Pursued by the Firewatch rigger he made it as far as an electrified gate, the electricity did some soon-to-be-regenerated stun damage but also knocked him prone for a round. Having caught the bear, the rigger then got his leg carved up by a vibro sword and the bear continued on his merry way. He made it as far as a heavy security door before deciding to return to the lift shaft and climb that to the top floor. Here he came face to face with a heavy combat drone with a minigun which caused sufficient damage for him to decide to run away. He got as far as the stairwell, only to find three Ares Firewatch, the first one was sufficient to take him down and we called it there.

In conclusion; 2 dead, two dying, always have an escape route, know when to fight and when to flee.

Glyph

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« Reply #1 on: <09-10-17/1705:04> »
But it sounds like they did have an escape route and were trying to flee.  I don't think they made any glaring errors, they were just outnumbered and outgunned.