06-12-2015, 05:42 PM | #1 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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[Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
Fire Eating is the DX/A skill of putting out fires with your mouth without hurting yourself. On a failure, you take 1d-3 of burning damage, minimum 1. You can also do fire breathing, blowing a stream of fuel from your mouth and igniting it with a flame source. If the GM agrees, you can use this as a attack, doing 1d-3. The skill has no default, and is normally only used for entertainment, but cinematic circus performers are an RPG tradition of sorts, and I can't help wondering it's a social skill amongst dragons.
Stage Combat is the DX/A skill of appearing to fight as a spectacle. Like Fire Eating, it is about producing the illusion of danger for an audience. It defaults to Combat Art or Sport -2, an actual combat skill at -3, or Performance-3. The only listed modifier is -4 for an unfamiliar weapon. Critical failure is an injury to someone, 1d-2 to a random hit location. Group Performance (Fight Choreography) defaults to Stage Combat-2. These skills appear on a few templates for entertainers, performance-orientated martial artists (and fakes). Power-Ups 3 and 7 have examples that include them. Social Engineering has uses for Stage Combat in complex persuasion schemes, and Supers covers its use in choreographed super-battles. Chinese Elemental Powers has an example that boosts Fire Eating, and Thaumatology: Magical Styles makes it a possible part of a style. I'd be surprised if these skills had seen significant use in many games ... but life round here is often surprising. Have you set an audience on fire? |
06-12-2015, 05:58 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
Don't you want Fight Choreography in this list?
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06-12-2015, 05:59 PM | #3 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
Quote:
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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06-12-2015, 07:33 PM | #4 |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
I think they only breathe hot air.
It's Baptist preachers that spew fire and brimstone.
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06-13-2015, 12:47 AM | #5 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
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06-13-2015, 01:10 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Dec 2009
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
So the average entertainer, having skill 12 and eating 3 fires a day, has a chance of 1-(0.7^3) =65% chance a day of burning himself?
There was another thread where it was stated that the dice should only be rolled when it mattered. Still I would either apply a skill bonus during a performance or rule that only a critical failure would cause burning. |
06-13-2015, 01:24 AM | #7 |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
Fire eaters do get minor burns regularly. It isn't a safe hobby at all.
1d-3 means half those failures don't result in any HP damage.
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Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. |
06-13-2015, 01:40 AM | #8 |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
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06-13-2015, 03:17 AM | #9 |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
Which isn't a big deal if you rule that the need for one hour of Physician nursing in cases of burn damage does not apply to non-Major wounds. Particularly once you add a +4 TDM for non-adventuring use, and probably make rolls no more often than once per day even if multiple fires are eaten.
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06-13-2015, 05:37 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Nov 2014
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Re: [Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat
Only tangentially related, but I had a session of Pathfinder that was focused around the PCs facing training stage combatants in front of an audience.
Hopefully at some point I can do a GURPS version. Since it is staged, you can go all out against the PCs without worrying about them dying, just "losing", even in a gritty campaign. They will be at -3 on all their attacks vs a group trained in stage combat, so it would be an interesting challenge. |
Tags |
basic, fanny reply 6apr2018, fire eating, skill of the week, stage combat |
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