i’m trying to pull together a final encounter for my players’ current arc, which is at a Black Hand facility. i was thinking of throwing a fire team of hollowmen at them. there are no stats that i know of, so i tried to pull some together some stats and abilities from other adversaries and wanted to get some feedback to see if they seem calibrated against the fluff and 3 PCs decently kitted out. for a little more context, i’m thinking of pitting them against five brains, with ten or fifteen bodies, using the quantronic jump to recycle the hollowmen as the PCs shoot through them (and to generally keep up pressure while they try to complete their objectives. would love to hear what you all think. thanks.
thanks. out of curiosity, have you had a fireteam of elites produce a tpk? would love to read how it went first hand.
i have a feeling it won’t be too punishing on my PCs. they are pretty well kitted out–each has powered combat armor and st george’s blades, so i’m thinking between the heat free kinematika reaction and grievous attack, i feel like they’re reasonably prepared for the fight. i also have to conserve heat a little to use the quantronic jump, so i can blow it all on reloads.
welp, 'bout to do this to my PCs in a week. a fireteam of five hollowmen locked and loaded to bear. unless anyone has any last minute suggestions, i’ll report back on whether i score a tpk.
Maybe you use the term “fireteam” differently, but in rules terms a Fireteam consists of up to five Troopers only. You might make a squad out of a single Elite as a Leader and fill it up with additional Troopers.
A Fireteam acts as a single character in combat rounds. That gives relatively weak Troopers a better chance to hit and cause damage, but for the price of the number of actions and the inability to perform Reactions. A Fireteam cannot react, so it will take damage on any hit by a PC. And any excess damage on killing one Trooper propagates to the next Trooper in the Fireteam.
Elites are considered acting independently. They are allowed Reactions, too. So they keep around a bit longer than Troopers.
So I wouldn’t think a Fireteam of Hollow Men to be that much more dangerous than any other Fireteam made up of Troopers.
A handful of independently acting Hollow Men Elites is a very different thing. 5 Troopers in a Fireteam have only one action, 5 Elites have five independent actions and are allowe Reactions.
thanks for the feedback. i am using the fire team consistent with the rules in the core rulebook with the exception that they are made up purely of elites instead of troopers. this is the “boss” level fight at the climax of the squad’s mission, so i wanted to put them in a little more peril than regular fire teams.
in terms of effect, the only real impact of a fire team composed entirely of elites versus troopers or troopers + elite is that the fire team itself is harder to dismantle as it requires two harms to eliminate a member, though the 5 armor soak contributes to that too. the best tool in PC’s kit to counter this resilience is the st. george’s blade, as the grievous quality allows them to one hit fire team members. otherwise, though rolling 9d20 on a spitfire as an opening salvo after seizing momentum was scary, they’ve been able to handle the Hollow Men without too much fuss. only one net wound inflicted so far on the PCs and (ironically) it was inflicted by a lone Hollow Man who had respawned after they killed a fire team member. with 3 to 5 armor soak on either side, it’s made the fight longer than intended, though i also jammed my players up with a plot twist after five rounds.
we ended up having to split the fight over two sessions, with round 2 slated for next week. though the fire team and the Hollow Men in general seemed to have upped the ante significantly, i probably could have wreaked more havoc with the elites acting separately and put the players in more tactically challenging situations that way. but ti would have been harder to manage from the start, so i did enjoy the efficiency of having one beast with ten wounds instead of five with two right from the jump. knowing what i know now, however, fifteen “shells” in waves capped at five is a bit too much of a slog. but not really a threat of a tpk in a HI v. HI fight without too many special weapons to speak of.
