[Diaspora] Assassination in Diaspora

[Brad Murray]

Chatting with a fan today, I was advised that there is a flaw in the
personal combat system: there is no way to totally get the drop on
someone with, say, a sniper rifle, and assassinate them. I thought
about that for a while and considered a reflexive defense: sure you
can, with maneuvers and so on, but the more I thought about that the
more I thought it was a boring way to do it and more likely to fail
for boring reasons. Then I realised, assassination is actually social
combat.

A successful assassination means getting the Means into place at an
Opportune time while maintaining Secrecy. The actual violence is the
tiniest fraction of the endeavour. And so I propose social combat on a
bulls-eye map (for visual analogy as well as simplicity of the map).
The center is labeled KILL and the outside labeled FOILED. Three pawns
are on the map: Secrecy, Means, and Opportunity. Two actors are on the
map: the assassin and the target, with their own skills and aspects
and so on. A timeout is established (one turn per zone is good, so
with a bullseye of FOILED-*-*-*-KILL that's five turns). The
operational rules are:

Get two pawns and your opponent into your target zone (KILL for
assassin, FOILED for target) and your opponent is Taken Out (if you're
getting close, maybe a concession is in order). If no one succeeds
before the timeout, no one is taken out -- the assassination is a
failure or never comes off at all, but the assassin has escaped.
Narrate these results based on pawn positions -- if Secrecy is in the
FOILED zone, obviously the target has been alerted and raised the
alarm. The assassin may even be a wanted man now. If Means is in the
FOILED zone, maybe the target has managed to get the materiel
confiscated or even changed border management laws so it was
impossible to get it in! If Opportunity is in the FOILED zone, the
assassin was never able to match up with the target's deliberately
obfuscated movements.

No matter which way the map state changes and no matter how it ends,
there is a whole diverse story of several scenes all related to the
whole process of political assassination. Now the actual trigger pull
is so boring and obvious that we don't roll for it at all -- a really
good assassin never fails when all the pieces are carefully in place.

And isn't that really what you want an assassin character to be good
at? The hard part?

-- 
Brad Murray (halfjack)
VSCA Publishing