Re: Fun with Thugs and Mooks
The one I've always had fun with is the random thug that makes an amazing roll, and thus pulls off something no one was expecting them to. I've often fleshed out one like this to make them an unanticipated recurring villain.
For example, about a year back in a Shadowrun campaign, one of my players got involved in a mob war (A prime example of why you never hand your GM a contact list without names and short descriptions) The first incident that involved this player in the war involved a group of Mob thugs sent to "rough him up." Now the character in question , Rocko, was a 9 foot tall 500 pound Troll street samurai that specialized in hand to hand combat. The mob thugs used a generic template straight out of the book.
So Rocko, fairly predictably, takes out about half the thugs fairly easily, but when he goes for the next thug he rolls relatively poorly. Probably wouldn't have mattered, except this thug manages to roll all successes. Next thing I know this generic mob thug throws a 500 pound Troll over his shoulder and into a parked car. Rocko still wins the fight, but he's hurt far more severely than I had planned.
I ended up using that particular mobster a couple more times, unfortunately, I never really gave him a proper name before the campaign fell apart.
