This is the way this combat scene ends, not with a boom but with a click. Also, with a boom.
On this page…
New combat round, everybody gets a new card.
To shake the Shaken condition you must make a Spirit check, or just use a Benny. Raffaela didn’t make her Spirit check, and she has no Bennies left. Being Shaken only prevents you from taking actions – you can still move and do some simple things – but Nadav rules that getting herself unstuck from this roof will require an action on Raf’s part.
Muna goes all “teamwork” and tries to Shaken the beast with a Test of Wills, since it’ll allow Mac to move away from the beast and shoot at the pillars without any interference.
Test of Wills is either Intimidate vs Spirit, or Taunt vs Smarts; since Muna doesn’t have any of those skills, she’ll be rolling d4-2 in either case, so the main question is: What’s the beast’s lowest Attribute? She guesses it’s Smarts, since it seems both this beast and the previous one retain almost no human intelligence.
Rotem knows her own playstyle well – she tends to try skills that Muna doesn’t have – which is why she chose the Elan Edge (p. 35), to help her when she inevitably uses Bennies to succeed in untrained skill checks.
Her d4 Taunt roll explodes, which is great, since it was made vs an equal d4 (she was right, the beast’s Smarts is rubbish), both with Wild Dice since both combatants are Wild Cards. A regular success would be enough to give her +2 on her next action against the beast – in order to Shaken it, she needs to get a raise. Thankfully, she got a raise.
Moving on to Mac (who, thankfully, acts before the beast; if the beast had had its turn first, it would have gotten a chance to shake the Shaken condition). Guy, who always wants to make effective actions, asks his GM for clarification about his current condition, since it was a bit muddy – the description (and the drawings!) in the past few pages seemed to indicate the two are grappling. Guy rolls to recover from Shaken, -2 because the damn wound penalties apply to everything (he actually also has +1 from Muna’s 2nd Edge, Command (p. 37) but neither of them remember that).
Mac’s action is to shoot the pillars – we don’t see it, but Nadav actually asks him to roll Shooting with +2, just for the chance he gets a failure anyway (and has to spend his last Benny) to make the moment more intense.
Related RPG article: Improvising Interpersonal Interactions
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