The supporter's tactics have said this since it was written: "It is a
flyer, and a flyer with a hole in a wing is a quadruped: disable either
wing and it is on the ground for the rest of the scene, which is the
fight the agents can actually win."
Playing a full combat against it showed the sentence was decoration.
`flightLost` was computed, printed on the NPC sheet as GROUNDED, and
read by nothing. Both wings disabled cost 20% off PHYSICAL rolls, and
Brawl is a MELEE category, so woundPenaltyFrom returned 0 and a grounded
supporter attacked at exactly the 75% and exactly the 1d6+1+2d6 it had
in the air. In the played fight it was grounded from round five and went
on to kill one agent, knock out a second and leave a third dying.
Losing a wing now changes the animal. A plan declares what it becomes —
winged says `grounded: "quadruped"` — and hitLocationRoll drops the
creature onto that plan the moment a wing is disabled or destroyed. The
wings leave its hit chart and the six ranged faces they covered go back
to the body: vital hits rise from 3 faces in 20 to 5. Every other wound
moves across on the R-94 remap with its severity intact.
The wing's own damage is deliberately dropped rather than carried, and
cleared in its own update so the remap never sees it. A ruined wing must
not arrive as a ruined foreleg — the creature is not lamed, it is
earthbound, and the injury has already been paid out as the change of
shape.
check-anatomy gains a fifth property: a declared landing must exist,
must have no wings of its own, must not itself be a flyer, must have
room for every wound the flyer was carrying without two collapsing onto
one location, and must not heal a disabled location on the way down.
Three induced failures confirm it fires; the third — landing somewhere
with too few locations — passed at first because I had not stated the
capacity property, and the guard was sharpened until it caught it.
Measured, and reported honestly: this does NOT deliver the fight the
tactics text promises. Over 4,000 simulated fights the win rate moves
12.7% -> 12.1% on borough ground and 85.8% -> 86.3% off it, because
grounding only happens in 9% of fights there and arrives late. What
actually decides this encounter is ARGENT AND GULES: 11.4% win on
borough ground against 85.4% off it. The wing rule is now real and
mechanical, but the creature's advice still points the GM at the wrong
lever.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
