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Author Topic: Pulp Alley rules clarification - Absent Minded, Awkward , Dithering and Timid  (Read 623 times)

Offline Idle Doodler

  • Scientist
  • Posts: 369
    • Idle Doings of an Idle Doodler
So I was perusing through my Pulp Alley booklets and mentally editing characters cards for future games, and I'm particularly struck by the new Lemuria book's abilities, adding as they do a penalty for the sake of an extra bonus.

Absent Minded, Awkward, Dithering, Faint of Heart and Timid - these all give extra abilities at the expense of hampering certain skills or actions. The book states the ability cannot be combined with abilities and perks that prevent actions or reduce skill dice. This presumably primarily relates to abilities like Big and Mindless. Does this mean that they can't be combined with Sly, Brainy and Animal, which don't reduce a skill dice but remove a skill altogether? How about the Quick-Something abilities, which reduce a dice-type?

Also, with regards to Timid vs Paralyzer (sic!) - the latter triggers an opposed Might check. If the target is Timid, do they automatically lose the dice off if they don't discard a Fortune Card?

What are folks' thoughts?

Offline d phipps

  • Galactic Brain
  • Posts: 4647
  • Pulp Alley
    • Pulp Alley
This is covered at the bottom of the page in a box...

Quote
Clarification: Some of the new abilities include the phrase, “This ability is incompatible with abilities and perks that prevent actions or reduce skill dice.” This also includes all abilities and perks that lower skill dice or prevent skill dice from being rolled, such as Animal, Brainy, Harmless, Mindless, Reanimated, and so on.

No, Quick-whatever's are not part of this group so they could be stacked with those abilities.


Timid vs Paralyzer? --

Lets assume the target only has 1d in Might and they do not discard, so they won't get to roll any Might dice...

Note, the Paralyzer still must "win" the opposed roll to make it work. So in this situation they only need 1 success to paralyze the (Timid) target.

Answer: No, they are not automatically paralyzed if they don't discard. But it will certainly make it easier for the other guy.

Offline Idle Doodler

  • Scientist
  • Posts: 369
    • Idle Doings of an Idle Doodler
Dang it - I've read that box, too! Spent too much time darting around all sorts of other pages, didn't think to look down again...

Many thanks, Dave. I'd forgotten to factor in the Paralyzer's fallibility.

I do love how to every question I've seen asked of it, Pulp Alley pretty much just has to point back to the rules and get the questioner to read the same passage again - it always makes logical sense!

 

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