[tbone]

Thanks, all, for the thoughts. In short, it sounds easy enough to get more explodey fun: just make the little demonkids automatically blow up at -HP, or even HP 0. (Or for even more kaboom, let a major wound – or any wound – do the job.) Yeah, that weakens them quite a lot as individual monsters – but any GM knows the remedy for that. ("Moar doomchildren!")

But let me play demon's advocate for a second, and consider leaving these monsters as they are. Okay, as written, the little murder brats don't die all that easily, but that gives them more time to swarm the PCs, which itself will be amusing.

And if their explosions are too weak to reliably cause chain reactions, well, maybe that's OK. Maybe the intent of the design is simply that the explosions are a bonus surprise, not the key feature of the monster; that bizarrely powerful knife attack (Striking ST +10!!) is what these little Chuckys are meant to be all about. (It's not like the explosions will even matter than much in terms of actual PC damage; at DFRPG power levels, 1d cutting, and some distance-dependent fraction of 3d crushing, won't get past the DR of many PCs.)

I'll note too that a chain reaction of a half-dozen exploding kiddie demons sounds fun on paper - but for the GM, that's a half-dozen incidents of distance-dependent explosion damage, plus a half-dozen fragmentation damage rolls, each originating in a different hex and thus affecting different targets. . . . Sounds like a hassle to work out without some fudging.

So perhaps I'll just first play the demons as written, and see how it goes.


Even doing that, a few ideas come to mind as things that would be fun:

1) Smart PC tactics: Even if untouched doomchildren don't die (or chain-react) all that easily, wounded ones will. Smart PCs might want to focus on one 'child at a time, instead of beating on separate targets in the horde, to avoid creating lots of wounded demons that could explode and chain-react easily. Or maybe they would want to wound lots of 'children, in the hopes of taking out many with a chain reaction, if their DR can handle the booms. Either way, tactics could get interesting.

2) Smart demon tactics: Grapple! Grab a PC with one hand and stab with the other, or dogpile a PC into immobility and let another 'child do the knife work. The point: Grappling means "same hex", and even DFRPG heroes can't necessarily shrug off a full 3d explosion. Grappled PCs may have to stow their weapons and desperately work to pry the things off.

3) "Get it off me, it's gonna blow!": Unless I'm missing something, doomchildren can go unconscious like most any other being. That means a lot of 'children in a battle may end up KOed instead of blowing up. And that just doesn't feel right to me.

So here's an idea: How about death or KO causes a doomchild to blow up? That means 0 HP becomes the kaboom point; it just may take a second or few from there, until the hellbaby fails its HT roll. Imagine that at HP 0 or less, the 'child starts vibrating and smoking, letting PCs know that they have only a second or few to get away. . . .

4) "No, don't use fire!": To bring in more tactical play, it may be fun to specify some attack that readily causes explosions (fire? lightning?), and some attack that will let the PCs kill the demons with just a puff of smoke and no explosion (brain hit? silver? Deathtouch?). The PCs will probably need Hidden Lore, or hard-won experience, to learn these tactical tricks, though.

All right. These mürderkinder are starting to sound fun!