Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 066: Hey Dupinski!.

OK, so where did we leave off?

Right. You take your flour, and you add a little bit of cumin, paprika, and a little garlic. And then you want to take your chicken and roll it around in that mix… make sure the whole thing gets coated, okay?

I’m sorry, what?

Oh. Wrong blog. RIIIIIGHT… the talking rat, weird robot thing. Keep rolling… we’ll go again and fix it in post.

So, we’re back from vacation at Roll For Combat after a couple weeks of rest and relaxation over the holidays. Obviously, I didn’t get a chance to do any writing, for which I mostly blame Gamestop’s 2-for-1 used game sale. (And, to be sincere for a second, the fact that my daughter caught a last-minute flight home for the holiday break.) So… I rested. I relaxed.

Returning to where we were in the game, we beat our way past the 40-foot-tall guard dog, and now we have to attack the house itself. At first, I figured the occupant(s) have to know we’re coming, don’t they? But then again, if there’s no atmosphere, there’s no sound, so if they didn’t look out a window… maybe we still have some element of surprise.

On the other hand, we can’t use the door because Butchie The Wonder-Mutt flopped its dead carcass right down in front of the door.

Which leads to our second problem. When Steve first described this structure, I have to admit I (and the rest of the guys) thought he was describing a glorified tent. When I hear “skin stretched over bone”, that sounds flimsy. I figured we could cut a hole into the “fabric” and let ourselves in fairly easily. And the artwork on the map didn’t particularly discourage that; it looked like a big circus tent. Albeit one with rather macabre aesthetics.

But if you think about it, “skin stretched over bone” equally applies to something dense like the structure of a ribcage, and – at the risk of turning this a little ghoulish and serial killer-y – you can’t just cut your way through that with a pocket knife. What you CAN apparently do is cut just enough of a hole for the people inside to start shooting at you. Which they do.

So now we have a choice between Stubborn and Go With The Flow. I get that using our best grenades (and a fairly expensive resource to boot) for wall demolition isn’t exactly ideal, but neither is 20 rounds of hacking away at a wall under constant fire, hoping the other guys miss a lot or run out of ammo. The Flow is saying “blow up the damn wall and get in there”.

(Note that “The Flow” sometimes gets a little close to metagaming, which one likes to avoid. The Flow is that voice in your ear whispering “that’s why the previous enemy dropped grenades in the first place”. It can be a tough needle to thread, separating the path that’s easiest to take from the path the person who wrote the adventure “wants” you to take. Then again, they probably wanted us to kill the Big Boi a little further away from the door. “Just Sayin’” as the Young People say.

We do have the rare good idea of being sneaky and blowing the wall on the other side from where we were originally hacking, to try and restore a little surprise. Actually, it seems to have been cut, but we briefly discussed trying to coordinate explosions on both sides simultaneously, but I believe we decided we wanted to make sure we poked one hole large enough to get us in rather than waste our grenades on two smaller blasts that might still require further effort to clear.

So we’re in the room, and this is one of those fights where I was quite content to hang back… even more so than usual. The big problem was the amount of damage CHDRR had taken in the previous fight – I did heal him some, but he was still probably about 1/3rd health where one or two solid shots (or a crit) could’ve taken him out. As I’ve said before, noble sacrifice at just the right moment is baked into drone rules; getting killed stupidly is not. This isn’t as dire as Castrovel because we’re still near a population center – we could theoretically return to Trux’s office and lay low for a day while I fix him, but no need to be dumb about it. So CHRR and I sit back and take our shots from a distance.

Standing in front of Bob, of course. I seem to have a knack for moving right into other people’s shooting lines.

I have to admit I thought this fight would be tougher. The marrowblight just looks tough – lots of pointy bits – and the flow of the adventure felt like it was driving toward this as the big bad. But I don’t know if Mo’s armor is just that good, or Steve was rolling poorly, but I never felt like we were in all that much danger. Does that mean we still have another fight yet to come? Or is it just a “those are the breaks” fight where it went a little better than expected? Or maybe even large pointy humanoids are a cakewalk after fighting giant alien livestock.

The last thing I wanted to touch on is Steve’s discussion about the Rule of Cool. Overall, I’m a fan. I think we get so enamored of the system that we sometimes forget that this is a framework for storytelling as well, and the best stories don’t always fit the system. It’s kind of an interpretation of the improv “Yes, and…” mindset.

However, I do have a few cautionary points.

The first is that I think the players should be the ones INITIATING the “off-roading” from a rules perspective. If the GM decides to do it, it runs the risk of rendering the entire rule framework arbitrary; if the players choose to instigate it, it becomes more of a collaborative thing. I think the GM then decides the success or failure conditions, but let the players come up with the idea. “I am asking you to let me do this weird thing; what odds can you give me?”.

The other caveat is that it’s vulnerable to exploitation by a me-first showboat player. In the wrong hands, the Rule of Cool is an invitation for one player to dominate the game. Some of it is the personalities of the players; some of it is the match between the skills of the characters and the situations they find themselves in. In a melee-focused game, Tuttle doesn’t have the same options in combat that Mo or Hirogi does. If it’s heavy on social encounters, Rusty might be the only one who can really take advantage. I think if the GM is going to allow Rule of Cool gaming, he or she needs to make sure everyone gets an opportunity to be… well… cool, or push back a little if one person is hogging the spotlight.

But with those cautions in mind, indulge! Do fun things! Otherwise, you’re missing the point of roleplaying games, and Yahtzee has much simpler rules.

Well, that’s about all I have for this week. Next week, with combat in the rear-view mirror, hopefully, we can get back to unraveling mysteries and figuring out where the Corpse Fleet (and the cultists) have disappeared to. We’ll see you then – in the meantime, feel free to drop by Discord and join in the reindeer games.

By which I do not mean a Starfinder game with a crew of sentient reindeer-people. Though, that might be cool, depending on whether antlers could be used to equip extra items. Hmmm… let me see if I can get a Rule of Cool ruling on that…