So... innocent bystanders... I came up with a quick way of handling them in play for last night's Aeon Mall game. I take a handful of dice representing Bad Things Happening to Good People (or whatever... it can represent all kinds of things, but really easily maps to innocent bystanders).

Unlike Menaces (which are also just a pile of dice) the sets rolled on a Bystanders pool don't hurt the PC's... instead, they represent the number and severity of the casualties (and the aggressiveness of the resulting lawsuits, legal charges, emotional fallout, etc).

How is this pool determined? How'd you come up with 8 dice? And that's awfully high for a hazard, innit? Also, tell me more about this Menace thing -- is it kind of like the Perils! dice pools from MotC, or like the environmental hazard from WTEE?

At the moment, I just make up a number I think will be interesting, depending on the number of players, the number of foes, and how much crap I want happening simultaneously.

I like complicated action scenes, where there's more than one thing happening, and I like there to be some way to mechanically track this stiff. This is what I was working to with the Peril rules introduced in Candlewick (and further refined in Bigger Bads).

With more than one PC, 8 dice isn't all that trying really.

You could do really complicated scenes using this stuff...

Say you're fighting the Monkey Kahn in the Ancestor Jungle.

(SAY IT!)

The Monkey Kahn is a powerful stated out WT character.

His Red Monkey Guard are a dangerous mob of mooks - 8 dice, and they inflict S/K damage, and have 3LAR. They're going to try and gnaw the soft tissue off the PC's faces.

There are also dozens of kidnapped humans locked in bamboo cages, dangling from the Monkey Kahn's tree-top palace, waiting to drop into the depths below. Sadistic monkey guards will start gnawing at the vines holding them up when the PC's attack. This is a 6 dice threat to the innocent, and represents a dire threat to life and limb.

But perhaps even more worrying, the Kahn's Monkey Concubines have the Chosen One- still a baby- and are alternately cooing over him and tossing him about like a football. This is a 6d threat to the innocent, and un-countered sets are threats to the baby's life and karma.

Now, what if the Monkey Kahn, fearing for his life, wants to further distract the heroes by aggravating one of the threats?

He takes an action to do so, and then throws the Width of his action into the threat pool as bonus dice for the following round (this is the basic 'assist' rule applied to a threat or menace.

He leaps into the branches, and swings his death-monkey sword at the vines holding the prisoners up, getting a 4x8 success. Next round, that threat is 4 dice worse.