I know there was a recent thread on Lock, but this is a slightly different question. So I thought I’d start a new thread.
Here’s the question. Lock, if successful, reduces stats. If I’m wrestling my human friend and I lock him, I reduce his stats such that I might actually knock him unconscious. That makes sense. I’ve seen it happen on many movies. And it’s probably happened in real MMA fights, too.
My GM wonders about this, though: what if someone is wrestling a dragon or some other creature with Grey or White shade stats? Sure, it’d probably be harder to lock such baddies, but assume for the moment that the person executing the lock was actually successful. Would lock work the same way? It doesn’t seem like it should, given that grey and white shaded stats are so much more powerful than black shaded stats, but we don’t see anything in the rules to suggest it doesn’t. So we thought we’d ask.
It works the same way. It’s much harder to achieve, but it works in the same way.
For example, in Burning THAC0, our Dwarf Locked a Dragon with the help of Artha, Greed, Aid, and Help. Once we incapacitated it, the rest of us had to scramble in order to find a way to actually kill the damn thing!
Bobby the Mundane, with B4 Brawling, is trying to Lock Heracles the Oily, who has G5 Speed and Power.
If Heracles has scripted Avoid, then it’s Bobby’s B4 Brawling versus Heracles’ G5 Speed. If Bobby (somehow) beats Heracles by 2 successes, he gets him in a 2D lock.
If Heracles instead scripted Strike, then the tests are independent. Bobby targets half Heracles’ Power, which is…
a) Ob 3 (as per BWG p. 440), +2 Ob for black targeting Gray (as per BWG p. 545), for a total of Ob 5. (Woah.)
b) The Lock vs. Strike is Ob 3 - p. 545 doesn’t apply, since it’s only half the obstacle, not ‘the obstacle’. Gray has no effect here.
c) Factor in the Gray +2 Ob before halving, so it’s Ob 4 (5+2, halved, rounded up as per p. 440).
My favourite is c) - it seems fair, it gives gray and white the boost they deserve, but without making it weirdly impossible to lock a hero on independent tests.