[Basic] Skills of the week: Fire Eating and Stage Combat

[johndallman]

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?

[whswhs]

Don't you want Fight Choreography in this list?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

Or politicians.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Or politicians.

I think they only breathe hot air.
It's Baptist preachers that spew fire and brimstone.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Don't you want Fight Choreography in this list?

I looked at that, but it's one of the specialisations of Group Performance, and I plan to do them all together.

[joppeknol]

Originally Posted by johndallman

On a failure, you take 1d-3 of burning damage, minimum 1.

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.

[Flyndaran]

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.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

1d-3 means half those failures don't result in any HP damage.

Book says minimum of 1 damage.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Book says minimum of 1 damage.

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.

[Overheat]

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.