I don’t have any Sunday games for at least the next two weeks, so now I’m just going to bloviate about random Action Movie World stuff. I had a conversation with my Pugilist player the week after our Razorfist AD 1995 game, wherein his supporting Pugilist wiped the floor with any and all adversaries. It occurred to me that the Pugilist + the Fighting Tournament playbook can create something of a no-lose scenario with experienced characters. And a no-lose scenario is not necessarily bad, but it is potentially a bit dull.
To run some numbers:
Say you pick the Pugilist playbook. You give him an ability set that grants him Agility +2, and take the “Sting Like a Bee” move, which lets you roll +Agility instead of +Muscles in melee. You also take “Go for the Gut,” adding an extra +1 to Agility. If the Pugilist then takes the "Hands of Stone" move from the Fighting Tournament movie script, that’s an additional +1 to close combat and stunt rolls, making for a total of +5 to melee and close combat rolls. If they add a "Training Montage" move beforehand, the total goes even higher.
The upshot of this: the Pugilist, under these circumstances, will never fail, and only succeed with a cost if he rolls a 2, 3 or 4 on 2d12. His average roll will be more like a 12.
How big a problem is that? It depends. Having a Lead who always mows down the bad guys without breaking a sweat is perfectly within genre, if a little Steven Seagal-ish in dimension. But it does tend to flatten the action a bit. Since the Director never rolls the dice in Action Movie World, the only chance to execute a Director move is when a hero either fails or succeeds with a cost. If that failure state never occurs for a character, then the chances anything interesting will happen to that character drop dramatically. The “sweet spot” for Action Movie World lies in that 7-9 roll where you get the push-and-pull of success and failure together.
To be fair to my player, it’s not like he set out to break the game. He’s just a natural and highly skilled min-maxer. (You should see his Shadowrun characters -- better than the entire rest of the party combined.) He likes to succeed at everything, and taking joy in failure does not generally come naturally to him. So if he sees a chance for a bonus that helps him succeed, he’ll take it. But unfortunately, succeeding all the time in AMW is even more boring than it is in other games. If you never roll below a 9, the bad guys literally can’t touch you -- unless someone else makes a move that says you get hurt.
So What’s the Solution?
To be honest, I’m not sure this represents a serious problem. In our session, the Pugilist was just one of a whole troupe of characters, and there was plenty of interesting, juicy failure to go around. Also, the supreme bonus-stacking only applies to combat rolls -- which, while likely to be copious in any AMW game, are hardly the only roll in the game. Such a focused Pugilist isn’t going to be very good at one-liners, drama, or anything except killing and beating people. A whole squad of min-maxing Pugilists could present a problem, in that all your combats would be extremely boring because the PCs would ace every single roll and never take a hit. They’d be like late-career Bruce Willis: their contract says they can no longer take a savage beating, and they might become a bit of a snore to watch.
The Pugilist player is talking about retiring this particular actor, as it looks like he’s painted himself into a corner game-wise. Even if he doesn’t, having that one guy who shows up to effortlessly beat the living daylights out of everyone isn’t a bad thing. My only real gripe as a Director is that this allows the character to rack up massive Star Power without providing a lot of nail-biting excitement at the table. But with movies changing Leads every game, that only amounts to a bonus XP.
So again, not a huge problem, but it does present an interesting dilemma in the long term: the more capable the characters become in AMW, the less exciting the action might become. The real juice lies in their failure.
