RE: [DL] Money: How much is too much?

["Tabb, David" <david.tabb@msfc.nasa.gov>]

>      Here's a few ideas...
>      1) Cash-poor bandits. <snip>
>      2) Low demand. <snip>
>      3) Attention. <snip>
>      4) Encumbrance rules. <snip>
> 
	Good ideas all.  Last night presented a good opportunity I'd ike to
share.

	In my little homemade adventure, the posse was guarding a suspected
hucksteress from a lynch mob led by the local priest and anti-magic fanatic.
The whole point of this adventure was to give them a problem they couldn't
just shoot their way out of.

	So, the mob is gathered outside the jail where the posse's holed up,
and the priest is whipping them up into a frenzy.  Naturally, the party
preacher goes out and tries to dissuade them.  Because of the
crowd-mentality rules I invented and bad rolls by the preacher, the crowd
kept getting more and more ready to storm the jail and take the hucksteress
by force.

	Then, the new player walks his just-outta-the-box character out into
the street carrying two lit sticks of dynamite.  He asked for 30-second
fuses, but they were cut about 10 seconds short.  Not that he knew that.  So
the fanatic priest miracles Enigma on him, causing him to stand there in the
middle of a Colorado street, dynamite in hand, pondering where his soul
would go after he dies, oblivious to the fact that he was about to find out.
The crowd flees.

	The other posse members know enough about the Enigma miracle to know
how to snap him out of it.  I made them draw cards to see if they were able
to do it in time.  At the start of the round, there were about 2 seconds
left before the dynamite went off.  If I got past Jacks before he got rid of
it, bye-bye new guy.

	So, they manage to rouse him on Queen by shooting him in the legs
twice, and he tried to fling the two sticks 40 yards away outside the city
limits, his maximum range.  Because of the range increment, he missed.  The
deviation would have dropped them 20 yards to 4 o'clock of the target.
Unfortunately, there was a large hotel along that line.  I judged that he
threw the dynamite into an upstairs window, blew off the entire corner off
the hotel, and set it on fire.

	Long story short (too late), he destroyed the entire top floor of
the hotel, killed 6 innocent people, and wounded a dozen more.  He and two
other posse members were caught in the blast and took damage, which led to
the new guy discovering he was Forsaken.  All the windows within 60 feet
were shattered.  Fire and debris rained down on the still-fleeing crowd,
causing more injuries and winning no friends.

	I should have arrested him, thrown him jail, and hanged him.  But he
was a brand new character, and they argued successfully that the sheriff had
watched him go out there with the dynamite and didn't say anything about it
at the time, so he was partly at fault.  To save his own neck, and because
it was technically an accident, the sheriff decided to let the new guy off
with paying restitution for all the damage he'd done, pay off the families
of the deceased, et cetera.

	He has to pay off his debt before he leaves town, which will be more
than the entire posse is carrying, or a warrant will be issued for his
arrest, Dead or Alive, and distributed throughout the Disputed Lands.
They'll have to borrow from their boss, Wells Fargo, just to pay it off.  I
figure they should be in debt for a while now, giving them plenty of reason
to risk their necks fightin' evil for cash.

	Meanwhile, as a side note, the same character slapped the
hucksteress who was using Texas Twister to confound pursuit.  Unfortunately
for him, he admitted to being a hexslinger, and she's actually an undercover
Texas Ranger on the lookout for guys like him.  So he'll be getting a visit
from a shoot or recruit team any time now.

	David
	(I love it when they make it easy.)