Editing The Tale of Reginald "Ragin' Reggie" Dempsey (section)

=== The Interim ===

Following the attack on Manilow, the ZM realized things needed to change if we were going to keep playing. If our game of AFMBE were a movie or a videogame or a comic or a book, the raid on Manilow's stronghold could've been the last act of the story. I truncated the events pretty heavily, but the time from when we met Manilow to the moment he died lasted about six sessions, or a little over a month of real world time. It was a huge undertaking for an AFMBE campaign and simply FELT like an ending to a story: the heroes face off against the villain, get their vengeance, and walk off into the sunset and an unknown future.

We were just having way too goddamned much fun. The four of us wanted to keep playing, and our ZM wanted to keep running it, so the problem arose of how to keep things fresh and exciting.

The second problem was Reggie. Just, Reggie. See, Mike, Jim, and Luke's characters were well-rounded, generalist characters. Sure, Mike was the brains and rogue-type, Jim was the sniper, and Luke was our traps and explosives guy, but the three of them had spread out their points to be competent at taking on different challenges in different ways. Reggie just punched stuff.

The thing is, I hadn't tried to min-max him at creation. Reggie started with a background and I just built this big and dumb but caring and honorable boxer around him.

It's just that in the process of making the crunch fit the fluff I'd created a guy who could solve almost any problem the setting could throw at him in one punch. We all knew Reggie was a problem character, but again we all liked him too much. I offered to rebuild him and tone down his strengths a bit, but even the ZM said that was a shit idea because it'd remove what made Reggie Reggie.

As best as I can recreate him from memory, after killing Manilow Reggie looked like this:

Reginald "Ragin' Reggie" Dempsey<br/>
Age - 32<br/>
Height - 6'1<br/>
Weight - 235 lbs.<br/>

Attributes<br/>
Strength - 7 Dexterity - 5 Constitution - 5 Intelligence - 1 Perception - 3 Willpower - 6<br/>
Life Points - 73 Endurance Points - 59 Speed - 20mph/10yps Essence - 27<br/>

Qualities and Drawbacks<br/>
Hard to Kill (5), Nerves of Steel (3), Fast Reaction Time (2), Charisma (5) Addiction(Alcohol) (-4), Honorable (-3), Attractiveness (-1), Reckless (-2)

Skills<br/>
Brawling - 8 Dodge - 8 Intimidation - 7 Martial Arts - 6 Running(Dash) - 5

Equipment - Leather Jacket (had to find a new one, ZM ruled the old one was destroyed), axe-fist (made my left hand count as a Slashing weapon, but could only be used once a round because it was so heavy)

Here's a general run down of what Reggie did with average rolls.

A punch from Reggie's right hand would do 37 damage.<br/>
A kick would do 45 damage.<br/>
A punch from Reggie's axe-fist would do 74 damage.<br/>

Please keep in mind those are AVERAGE rolls (Reggie's maximum feasible damage from an axe-fist punch was 98 damage against an unarmored target). An average zombie would die from 15 damage to its weak point, or 40 damage done anywhere. An average human would be knocked down/out at 26 damage, and die at 36. Reggie never missed, and was almost guarenteed to kill anything or anyone in one hit. Reggie could blast through regular and reinforced doors with one punch, punch through wooden walls over a foot thick, kick down brick walls half a foot thick, and with two punches or kicks could knock a yard-wide hole in an inch-thick solid concrete wall. And because his Dexterity, Martial Arts, and Dodge were so high, he could Parry anyone several times a round and dodge hails of gunfire with mediocre rolls.

Not only that, but Reggie was fast as a bat out of hell. His base run was faster than the brutes, who were the FASTEST ZOMBIES possible to make in the core book. When Dashing, on an average roll Reggie could move at 12 yards per second, running a 100-yard dash in 8.33 seconds. For reference, the current real-world record is about 9 seconds. So even against people with guns, Reggie could dart around from cover-to-cover so fast they could only get off a few shots before he was amongst them wrecking shit.

Reggie's Willpower and Nerves of Steel meant nothing phased him, and his Intimidation reduced any man who heard his booming voice to pants-shitting terror. There was nothing in the apocalypse that could make him take a Fear test. Zombies devouring babies' eyeballs just made him angry. He'd charge into a hail of gunfire without a moment's hesitation, and even if he got hit A LOT he'd still be good to go. The only times Reggie came close to death from gunfire was from Manilow's rifle fire and once when he took an astonishingly lucky max-damage hit of buckshot at point-blank range.

He still had 17 life points left.

Reggie was a man and a half.

So at the beginning of our first session after the death of Manilow, our ZM sat us down and basically said, "Look, guys, I'm worried this shit's gonna get old fast. Is it alright if I add and change a few things with the setting to spice it up a bit?"

We all said, "Sure."

A few things changed fast. Most obvious was increased groups of hostile Survivor-level NPCs. I used Fist of the North Star and God Hand in my original image for a reason; we were basically going up against muscle-bound hulks all day erry day from here on out. These guys were tough enough that Reggie could only have a guarenteed insta-kill against one per turn (since I was able to wreck five zombies a turn at this point, that seemed incredibly tough), and they could actually land hits on Reggie with some regularity. This might not seem like much, but it changed the dynamic enough that now Reggie needed help from the rest of the party if he wanted to survive. I couldn't just wade him into a line of goons and be guaranteed to win anymore.

This was a change we could all enjoy. It gave the other guys the opportunity to help out and snipe and it made Reggie a better fighter after he got bashed up a few times.

The second major change was heavier enforcement on Drawbacks, and was pretty much the ZM's "hose Reggie" initiative. I was the only one who had maxed out my Drawbacks, and while I'd really done of good job of playing up Reckless and Honorable the ZM declared that he'd be observing the effects of my Alcoholism much more carefully. If I didn't get a daily drink, I was at a -4 to all Intelligence, Perception, and Willpower related tests, and a -1 to all Strength, Endurance, and Agility related tests.

A quick explanation. The Alcoholism Drawback could not be "bought off" with experience like every other Drawback. To beat it, Reggie would have to make a series of once-a-day difficult Willpower tests (which were at a -4, remember) until he accrued 10 consecutive successes. This would drop his level of Alcoholism by one.

Of course, that was if there was even a need to do so. Alcohol was still surprisingly easy to find in the city, and after beating Manilow we returned South of the river and started working our way around the slums again so there were plenty of liquor stores for us to loot.

Thirdly, our ZM statted up a few new zombie types.