Recalled to Action - Pyrrhic Weaselry and Lord Zondark!
This is part of the Recalled to Action challenge, started by Sahh inspired on something I was rambling about while rereading Berserk on Discord. She explains what the challenge is here so I'll just focus on the actual fight here and use the Pyrrhic Weaselry system made by the excellent Ms. Screwhead from Was it Likely.1
As I usually play Duets, I'm envisioning this as one, and therefore our PC - Mr. John Gutsberserk - is assumed to have above-human capabilities. He's from the Path of the Warrior, his training is that of Mercenary, and his Motif until now is the Dragonslayer Sword. We've elected to leave the rest of the Motifs to be decided during the game.2
Content warning for mutilations and strong violence; Berserk is a very gory comic.
Our starting situation is this: our PC, Guts, arrived into town looking for the Evil Bishop. He's found him and decided to (very smartly) provoke the guy by throwing the head of a recently executed woman at his face.
Not one to take this shit lying down, the Evil Bishop sent his Gaggle of Goons after our boy, and he promptly chops a bunch of them down 3.
Some crossbowmen show up in the balcony to shoot at him, but Guts remembers that he helped save the life of the little fairy Puck a while back, so Puck is back and saves his ass... but Guts promptly saves him back.
No rolls are needed until now. There are men-at-arms following Guts, Guts knows his sword can mow them down until tuesday, the challenge here is that there's too many of these guys and they're encroaching him; this is essentially me ruling "fray dice" on Pyrrhic Weaselry by just declaring that yeah Guts can just slice normal men in half, and his sword is magical so their armour don't account for much.
Now we get to the juicy part.
Noticing the prologue has been going easy on Guts and wanting to spice things up, I add a lieutenant to the mix - Lord Zondark, captain of the Evil Bishop's guard and someone I expect to be a minor scoundrel to defeat. Following Medieval art symbolic rules, he's both physically huge and has a Big Ass Weapon, but he's clearly overconfident.
Lord Zondark is taunting Guts and wants to put him to test with his pickaxe shaped war hammer. The guy raises it to hit the sword; he doesn't know the Dragonslayer is unbreakable, so Guts isn't particularly worried. Still, he can't think of a compromise and doesn't think the hit will be particularly bad, so he just rolls up his (very high) motif and gets a pass, describing how he easily parries the blow and backsteps away from it.
As I describe the ground beneath his feet crumble with the power of Lord Zondark, I ask the player if he'd like to do something and fight back. However, he knows Lord Zondark's armour is probably a bit much for now4, he doesn't have room to maneuver.
John Gutsberk decides he'd like to lure the captain to a more advantageous position. Since he's encircled by guys, we decide this "more advantageous position" is probably close to the wall.5
Lord Zondark doesn't have any means of rolling to avoid this lure, he's too much of a hothead, so he takes the compromise of himself mowing a path through his own guys but at the cost of him getting Guts in a bit of a compromising posture to follow up with a better attack.
He raises his big ass war hammer and brings it down on Guts. The fictional positioning would allow for guts to take a glancing blow or something to that effect, but he's a gutsy bastard and decides he'll roll for it again - and he manages it.
I start to describe how the war hammer falls, but we have a little miscommunication. The player, assuming the action has already been taken, just says he'll go for the attack this time, armour be damned. I misunderstand him and say "Wait, you're attacking the war hammer?"
We both have a moment of "wait, actually that's cool" and he says that he will, in fact, attack the war hammer and try to homerun it with his sword into the head of the guy; surely this is enough to kill him!
I rule that yes, it is, BUT Zondark gets to compromise here, so instead of just killing him I rule that this will just explode his helm and give way for a followup attack.
My player thinks this isn't a full compromise and might be a little bit unfair.
Thinking a bit and looking at the Pyrrhic Weaselry guidelines, I end up agreeing with him; the compromise was from a killing blow, so it should also hurt him, not merely give Guts a breach, especially considering Zondark would have the upper hand now.
However, I don't want this to be without compromise, so I tell my player that this will probably enrage the guys around him. This is a minor compromise for his own compromise6 and I think it's fair.
He agrees but (compromise!) says he kicks Zondark in the face to add insult to injury. I think that's nice and end the compromise exchange here, with him surrounded.
I could go on with a long fight of Guts mowing down even more guys, but I think the message has been passed that there's too many of them, and besides I wanna introduce the next plot point because it's just a couple of minutes to the end of the session, so I just say a mysterious stranger beckons him from a safe place and Guts goes with it.
we finish the session and start making out, it's super hot, shame you weren't invited though
Which I have been playing on sundays with DireGrizzlyBear, who's also made a cool post about a fight in that system that, unlike this one, isn't fanciful or invention.↩
We would eventually notice that the whole plot from before the game started sounded really cool and decided to do a flashback, but we got so enthused about it that it ran on for a couple of sessions, and by the time the flashback ended we weren't as much on the grimdark edgy 80's action movie vibe that we started the campaign with. Little inside joke from me to you about Berserk.↩
We later thought this could be a retroactive Technique he learned in the Hundred-Men Slayer chapter during the aforementioned flashback. It would be a Finisher, but we couldn't think of enough conditions beyond "when he has the Dragonslayer" and "when he's surrounded by guys". We decide against it and just say this is a case of different scales - John Gutsberk is an 80's action hero, he simply can take on a bunch of goons without issue, but we're inconsistent as fuck with this, so every so often we forget about it.↩
Why is Zondark's armour better than his goons'? Well, I flubbed it in the middle of the session, the Dragonslayer shouldn't really be able to mow that many armoured guys down so easily, but I thought it looked cool. Alternatively, I think Guts was just going for the joint of the armour between the cuirass and the leg plates, but Zondark is much too girthy to be chopped so easily.↩
In hindsight, I think it's cooler if Lord Zondark has 2 attacks, as Sahh did, but I didn't think of that during the session.↩
Notice how Pyrrhic Weaselry is just giving us the vocabulary and framework of "compromises" to just talk and make shit up, occasionally rolling as needed.↩