Continue reading »]]> I really should change the name of these posts but this at least keeps them all the same.  I could I guess globally swap the name out and I might at some point.

Let’s see what’s changed…

Modified the damage tracks and recovery methods to further differentiate Physical from Fatigue to Mental damage.   Physical damage, as the most common damage source has two methods of recovery, an immediate ‘interupt’ action on your part when you get hit with damage (much like Savage World’s Soak roll) and then you or someone else can (preferably someone trained in it) can work on the wounds during the downtime between fights.   There are limits, if you attempt a first aid roll and fail, the right most box on the damage track gets an X in it and it requires an extended rest (8 hours, once every 24 hours) before that box can be tried to heal again.

I think that will increase the value of First Aid such that someone in a group really should take it, preferably more than one.   And it allows for lingering damage.   Because the penalties are really kind of low from any of the damage tracks it’s not so much the penalties that get you, it’s the loss of the length of the track.

Fatigue damage occurs for a few things but typically it’s applied from the following, for every two scenes your in without a significant rest (2 hours) you incur one level of fatigue.  If you’re not actually in a scene but time is passing in game and you’re awake you incur one level of fatigue every 12 hours.  So most people can go about 48 hours before they drop down unconscious from being too tired.   In a setting that allows the Healing power, having Healing used on your incurs a level of Fatigue as Healing is simply revving your body up to regenerate in my system.  The person with the power can spend more power to offset that and block the fatigue buildup or they can elect to take the fatigue on themselves and spare the patient.   I try to have options.

There will be other sample sources for fatigue as well, bad air will incur a fatigue level every X unit of time depending on how bad it is, some poisons might cause Fatigue as well extreme labor, and it’s possible to ‘push your run’ to move faster for a turn and pick up a level of fatigue that way among others.

Fatigue is recovered one step by 2 hours of rest and doesn’t require any rolls, it’s just automatic.  So a full night’s rest will refresh and revitalize anyone.   It’s my systems answer to Healing Surges from 4th Edition, a way to regulate an adventurer’s work day.  It helps to avoid the 5 minute work day and the 5 day workday.

Mental damage, as the rarest form of damage (in most settings) is a lot like Physical damage in most respects except for the recovery time.  There is a way to mitigate mental damage as it happens and characters have mental damage resistance and mental evasion.   The biggest way they differ is that you can only recover mental damage after an extended rest, not a short one.   And if you fail the recovery then you get an X in a box that lasts for a week before it can be recovered again.

The mental damage is primarily of use for horror settings, Cthulhu, Zombie Apocalypse, adventures and settings where the characters are subjected to all kinds of mind breaking sights and encounters.

Because of the way the system works in such systems it’s quite likely that a character will go insane so it’s a lot more ‘pure mythos’ than survivable.

It’s possible to buy knacks that offset the penalties that can accrue from the damage tracks as well boost your ability to better mitigate the damage when it occurs and even extend one or more tracks with an extra buffer step.    And the inverse, to take a character flaw that makes you weaker in one area, removes a buffers step of your track, makes it harder to mitigate the damage or increases the penalties you suffer.   It’s all about being able to build a character as close to your concept as possible.

So that covers the current way to track character damage.   Each track is the same length, six boxes, well 5 since the first box is implied as it means you’re at full.  The last box means you’re incapacitation in some fashion and out of play.

I’m currently working on a sample adventure that incorporates the Extended Skill system, combat encounters with Extras alone and Extra’s + Villainous Stars.  It’s set in the 1930′s Egypt and will include horror elements to show mental damage and periods of work that will show the buildup of Fatigue.

Unfortunately due to my adventure concept I have to essentially write two adventures since it can divert pretty much right at the start into two paths but that’s okay, I like that kind of thing.

I’m toying with the idea of trying to playtest online with random folks using Maptools to do the map and some VoiP conferencing system to put everyone in voice communication.  Since I don’t see the sample adventure taking too long I think it would be possible to keep everyone entertained for the duration, and the system is hopefully fast enough that player downtime won’t be too burdensome.   Like most, I’ve found the more downtime between your turn, the much more likely you are to be disengaged.

Game systems where individual rounds take forever (relatively) find players not paying attention to what’s going on when it’s not there turn.  In great part that’s why I turned to Savage Worlds after a long 4th Edition DnD campaign in an effort to keep players engaged in what’s going on.  And disengaged players just exacerbate the problem since it takes them longer to get bakc in the game when it is their turn and that just causes more downtime for everyone so everyone disengages even more.  It’s a vicious cycle.

And in full part why I decided to write my own game system in an effort to keep that same speed of play, just with my own take on balance, options and mechanics.

Continue reading »]]> Not much to report lately but I’ll offer what I’ve got.  Work has been kicking my ass along with doing things around the house that I just haven’t had the time to do much.

But with that said, I’m going to be adding in a Dodgy Bastard Knack that can be bought by a character.   My thought is to allow them to take a hit on their next turn to increase their Evasion score this turn.  It’ll go something like this for play testing -

Dodgy Bastard – Before an attack is made against you, you may choose to dodge out of the way and gain a +2 Evasion against this one attack and are Off Balance until the start of your next turn. (Off Balance is a standard -2 Evasion penalty)

I’ve cleaned up my States section and currently employ Dazed, Off Balance, Slowed and Immobilized.  Dazed = no actions, Off Balance is the -2 Evasion penalty, Slowed reduces your speed to 2 and Immobilized means you cannot take any actions that require rolls based on Brawn or Grace.   I want to strike a balance between no states and Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition’s ginormous amount of states which while they add verisimilitude are incredibly unwieldy in game play at times.

I also really don’t want any lingering states that have to be kept track of if I can help it.  The most you can be dazed for instance is one turn and that’s if you fail your undazing check.  So fail = lose one turn, succeed = suffer a penalty on this turn, suceed well and get your full turn.   No getting stuck losing actions turn after turn because you rolled crappy and not getting to play.   It’s awesome when a party of players stun locks a boss (or is it? Really?) and they put a beat down on it and it never gets to do anything.  It’s not so awesome when it happens to a player.   And I’m going to fall down on removing not so awesome issues where I can.

The exception is Immobilized from the Crowd Control power which does linger as long as you don’t break free and the power user keeps the power going on you.

In addition to hammering that stuff out I wrote the Animate Object spell which will be used for everything from summoning skeletons to making tables walk to dancing swords.   To counter the potential power of such a thing I think I’ve got it limited in such a fashion that it’s useful but not overshadowing.  Time will tell.

And I’ve created a first draft of a character sheet, I don’t have it with me or I’d post it, it’s blah like all my character sheets are, I design for usability not graphic splendor.  I have trouble reading character sheets filled with backgrounds, stains, rips textured boxes, white text in black boxes, with tiny fonts.   Ergo I don’t do that.

Continue reading »]]> The biggest thing is possibly that I’m thinking of changing the name to Lights, Camera, Action!  - The Gaming System to stress the more ‘action movie’ feel the system is going for.   As an example I’m stressing limited use of pointless encounters.

Sure they make sense sometimes, specifically perhaps for a dungeon crawl type play session but for a more memorable session I believe that encounters should have a point.  They should provide information or a memorable boss or scenery or some item that’s relevant to the storyline.  They should rarely be ‘trash mobs’ or a grind.

It’s a personal design philosphy that really set in with the advent of Dungeons and Dragon’s 4th Edition.  Cool combat but it’s combat that by design takes a while to accomplish.  Spending that time on encounters that mean nothing quickly became a waste of limited play time.

You don’t really have a lot of pointless scenes in good movies, each scene generally has a purpose, whether it’s just action for action’s sake or to further the story or allow for character development or build or relieve tension etc.

And that’s what I’m looking for.  The highlight reel version of adventuring.  The days of running campaigns that lasted 2 years with 6-8 sessions a month that run 5 – 12 hours?  Long gone.   Life has a way of doing that to you.  The broader you live the less you get to do any given thing.

Currently I’m bouncing around as ideas hit me among the chapters of the manual or  doing the grunt work. For instance I finally chewed through the miscellaneous modifiers for attacks at range, specifically, Cover, Lighting and Obscurement and the first run on the penalties and how the mechanics works.   Lighting and Obscurement are pretty easy, if it’s dark out and there’s a blizzard you don’t hvae a chance in hell of seeing much less hitting something beyond arms length.

Cover though took a little bit of time and I’m not sure if I really like it yet but essentially there are two types of cover, Resistant and Non-Resistant.  It’s broken up into the typical 4 types, 25, 50,75, 100 percent cover with each applying an increasing penalty and with 100% cover requiring a perception roll to have any chance at all.   The attacker can at their option choose a one step better cover modifer but this grants the target additional damage resistance.  It’s my first thought on granting some bonus to both sides to simulate shooting through the cover.  The attacker can choose to shoot through the wall to get at the target rather than trying to pop off the exposed bits but if he does the wall gives a bit of boost to the target’s ability to mitigate damage.

With resistant cover the attacker doesn’t get that option unless they have a heavy rated weapon.  With a normal weapon they can only shoot the exposed bits.

Realistic?  Not terribly I suppose but I really didn’t want to get bogged down into looking up charts to see just how tough this or that material might be.   This is quick enough to me and provides an additional option for the players that it seems workable.  We’ll see once we go to playtesting.

I’m also working on Character Flaws and Traits.  Traits are very similar to the Aspect system of Spirit of the Century and Strands of Fate, they have role-playing value but no mechanical value.  When a player builds a character they have to choose two mostly good and two mostly not-good defining Traits of their character.  The player and moderator can both bring these into play with limiations on number of times and the players earn additional Plot Devices aka fate chips, bennies, luck tokens, they’ve been used under a lot of names.

Flaws on the other hand are direct mechanical penalties to a character.  I’m not putting in any Flaws (aka dis-ads, hindrances, limitations, etc) that don’t have a direct mechanic game impact.  What I’ve often seen is that players take flaws that don’t have any math and then those flaws rarely come into play, an issue with both the players and moderators for not doing it of course, it’s not one sided.  For example in some systems there are Flaws like Curious or Aggressive which have no direct impact on game play but are intended to dictate roleplaying.  And if you’re going to get something for taking a Flaw (like additional character building points which have a direct mechanical impact) then the FLaw should have the same game impact.

Right now I’m also not doing minor/serious Flaws, they’re all equally valuable or un-valuable I guess would be the better term.  Granted with many it’s hard to really know if they’re balanced since they can have limited opportunity to come up but I’ll shoot for what I think is balanced and then adjust as necessary over game play.

My current list of Flaws includes -

Gullible, Trick Knee, Bad Vision, Socket Wrench, Weak Willed, Clumsy, Weak Back, Slow Thinker, Wanted Man, Frail, Doomed To Failure, Bad Karma, Pain Sensitivity, Milquetoast, Queer Duck, Sickly, Berserker, Bloodthirsty, Slow Learner, Telegraphic, Epileptic, Obese, Hind Brain, Slow Healer, Overpowered, Vulnerable,  One Armed Man, Crippled Hand, Folds Like A Cheap Suit

It’s a work in progress though as I come up with more flaws that are unique enough to add to the others.

An iffy one is Wanted Man which I may flip over to an example Trait.  Right now it’s intended to cause a game impact at least once every session or two but again dis-ads like Hunted or Wanted tend to be pointless since the moderator seldom enforces them and if they do it has to happen within the current storyline.

Continue reading »]]> Over this last weekend we, my boys and I, played Castle Ravenloft the Boardgame.  I have one son about to be 9 and 2 sons that just turned 7.

We played the introductory mission as a group, the ‘find the stairs and escape out of the dungeons’ one.

With a Fighter, Rogue, Ranger and Cleric we beat it handily having to only spend one surge.  We were able to use the Teleport scroll to get three of us to the exit that the third son found for us saving us some escape time.  [Per Ian: Tell them that I found the stairs.]

I didn’t find any problems with playing the game with younger children.  I will be honest and say that my sons have been reading for years, they come by it honestly, I was reading chapter books by age 3 and have read tends of thousands of books in my lifetime so far.  My wife is also a strong reader and from a very early age we read to them and along with them.

I mention this because for a young player to be able to fully participate they do need to be able to read the various power, character, treasure and monster cards even if the adult handles general comprehension, encounters and the like.

From a gaming perspective, while the boys didn’t make all the very best decisions, the process of making decisions can’t help but be a good thing for them. Once three of us were stuck on a tile with a gargoyle (AOE attack that hit everyone and even on a miss did damage) that only had 1 hit point, the ranger decided to try and save his brother a tile away with a bow shot rather than use his Careful Attack which does 1 damage automatically to a monster on the same tile that would have killed the gargoyle and saved us all from certain damage.  That subjected three people to guarenteed damage on the chance that he could prevent damage to one person.   Not the wisest decision certainly in terms of efficiency but IMO you have to let them make those kinds of decisions or you might as well play by yourself.

The boys enjoyed it even when halfway through things were looking grim as hit points were being slowly but surely bled off.  A little encouragment, “Don’t worry, I got your back, I have a healing spell” kept things moving along at a good clip. I took the cleric for precisely that reason.  As a backstop and safety net.

One thing I found interesting is they were very able to divest each other’s rolling dice for their ‘own’ monsters, the ones under their control, from it actually being a direct attack on each other.  So it wasn’t “Ian why did you hit me with that?!”, it was “Oh man, that kobold got me!” even if it was Ian rolling the dice.

And the three of us slipping away from several monsters chasing us after we found the exit [Per Ian: After I found the exit.] was a high five all around.

These types of games encourage creative thinking, tactics, strategy, cause and effect, resource management, the benefits to a growing mind are pretty wide spread.

I will say that more involved scenarios might pose a greater problem when playing with younger players and I certainly wouldn’t advise you to let them play unmoderated as a general rule, there are wordings and the like that just arent’ that clear without a little more experienced intellect to go over them.

Some advice on alternative scenarios is the obvious, first one escape the dungeon but some other simple ones would be to take one of the crypt or other unique cards and using the typical randomly somewhere between 9 and 14 tiles deep placement have it spawn a a specific bad boss or maybe simply a duo or trio of monsters, a kobold and two wolf pets or three zombies or two gargoyles, you get the picture.  Or instead of an Assassinate Question, make it a Fed-Ex quest and they find an item in that tile but when they enter the tile spawn a monster on every tile with an unexplored edge and they have to get out of the dungeon alive with the item.  Ravenloft really supports a little creative thinking for dungeon crawls to keep it fresh.   And as always check various community sites, there is a ass load of extremely good (and bad) custom content for the game.

Granted you could play with even younger children but I really think the ability to work out what their cards say is a rather important factor in determining if their attention span is suited for the game.

But if your kids can read and you have Castle Ravenloft then consider letting them help you escape the dungeon every once in a while.

Continue reading »]]> Work has continued on my game math and things are still looking ‘okay’ for the most part.  I just realized on the drive to work this morning though that I don’t have any mechanism to reward good strength stats in melee.  With fixed damages for the sake of the math and balance, it’s going to be a bit tricky perhaps.

Typically games that reward strength in melee do so by granting a bonus to the damage.  Savage Worlds lets you use your str die as one half of your damage roll, Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World 4E, various D20 systems give you a flat bonus to your damage, Hero systems gives you additional dice of damage.

A problem is though that at this level of granularity flat bonuses stack up very quickly. This has the subtle effect of making your ability to hit more important than your damage output when you do hit.  As well as making any hit damaging.  It’s a lot like older editions of Dungeons and Dragons where after awhile the damage range on your weapon became less important than all the bonuses you got from magical properties, strength, feat, and assorted other bonuses.

I need to run the numbers and see just how deadly fights become with my current mechanics when adding in flat damage bonuses based on dice pools.  My thought was to add a +1 for each die of strength in the strength pool.  But that means a warrior with a 5 dice strength is going to deal on average 13 damage on a regular hit with a 2 handed weapon (2d8).  That’s going to hurt someone with each hit.  Granted that’s the worst case scenario.  I could though adjust for that by nudging protections up slightly but that will have a cross effect against ranged weapons.

But on second thought that helps to balance ranged weapons versus melee weapons as the ranged weapons have a universal DC to hit a target while the melee weapons have a variable DC based on the targets melee skill.

With game design the more features you add the more a single change can have a big waterfall effect that you’re not expecting, especially if you’re not using formulas or my favorite, simulating it with a million virtual warriors locked in eternal combat, to verify the math.    I think the lack of simulation or advanced math testing that there are powers in the 4E power collections that simply do not work based on the math.  That some powers are just such weak sauce that they’re only taken by accident or because they sound cool.  Cool goes a long way but a player shouldn’t, in my opinion, be able to gimp his character by going on cool.

But then I could be wrong.

Continue reading »]]> After a lot of consideration I picked up a Nook Color this weekend.  I had it rooted roughly 30 minutes after actually using it for the first time, and 20 of that was to check out the stock OS on the device.

A stock Nook Color is funcitonal if you want it to read books and browse the web (except for Flash).  It’s oddly disjointed in usage.  For example Pinch Zoom, the much beloved functionality doesn’t work for Books or the Browser but it does work for pictures.  WTH?  It’s like the Book, Browser, Pictures, Magazines app writers weren’t quite on board with what should be available or what the other guys were doing.   As another example, to read a book in ereader format you touch the sides of the screen to page forward and back.  With a .pdf you drag upwards and downwards.  WTH? again.

For the money a stock Nook Color is worthwhile, if you have the money without impacting important things in life.  It serves okay as a book reader (the e-ink of the Nook and Kindle are better for this in general, things like reading outside, battery life, eye strain).  The inclusion of very functional (except for Flash of course) web browsing, a magazine reader make it ‘just’ worth the price of admission.

It’s only when you Root or take control of the device and put a fully functional copy of Android on it that it really really starts to shine.

Using AutoNooter to root the device is painfully simple.  Your risk of ‘bricking’ the device is very low and you can restore it to default stock by the simple process of powering it off during the boot process 8 times in a row, this makes the nook think it’s broken and it’ll restore itself to factory fresh leaving no sign it was ever rooted.

There’s also a way to run Android Froyo off a SD memory card and thus you can go stock by simply taking the card out or go ‘pro’ by putting the card in.  This makes it almost impossible to break the Nook by rooting it.  You’d literally have to drop it on the floor and physically crack it wide open while putting in the SD card for this to go wrong.

So anyway, I got it rooted, this took roughly 60 seconds start to finish, I first tried Froyo on the SD card but it was a laggy, I was on a slow speed SD and I didn’t know about having to power of the screen after a reboot to make it not laggy.  I’ve got a quality Class 10 SD ordered and will revisit that process then.

After rooting using AutoNooter which puts on the Google apps including the oh so important Marketplace I went and installed a better browser Dolphin HD, Angry Birds (why I’m not sure myself), pdf readers, .lit readers, cbr readers, .epub readers, .rtf readers,  I have 1000′s of books in various formats and the Nook directly only reads a few of those.  Now I can read all the Walking Dead comics I have in .cbr format without having to manually convert them to pdf’s.

I added ‘cool’ launchers with themes and graphic skins, widgets to forecast the weather for me, winamp to play my music, video players, video streaming players, file server access apps, gmail, google chat, exchange mail, the list goes on.  All freely available, legally, through the Android Marketplace.

I’ve got it stuffed with game manuals and books so I can refer to them anywhere without having physical copies handy, apps and utilities to make my life easier and in general make it what I really wish my iphone was.  With a 7″ screen.  There are ‘atmospheric’ apps I could use for a little background noise or just use Winamp or Pandora or something else to have a little setting music going on.

Essentially using free, legal software I’ve turned this little e-reader into a fully functional tablet computer that makes it crazy attractive for the cost.

So I give it 5 thumbs up, assuming I had 5 arms, if you go the extra step and root it.  3 thumbs up stock standard.

Continue reading »]]> The search for a game math mechanic that I’m happier with continues.  Unfortunately the single die roll which determines attack and damage doesn’t work well for me.  The math extremes are between the top and bottom are just too extreme.  It’s a lot like the issues with the One Role Engine and it’s derivitives, there’s just too much disparity.

I’m still working on the dice pool versus the flat percentage probability of the D20 and WFRP versus the stepped dice of Savage Worlds.    The flat percentage while I think it works well for DnD leaves little area for… excitement?  You know 1 in 20 times you’re going to do maximum damage. If you’re an avenger or twin weapon ranger you know one in 10 rounds you’ll get a critical hit.  That kind of thing.  Other systems you don’t even get that, you simply hit or miss.

Granted the use of the damage dice are a secondary implement in how to determine how well you did.  But I think for most people there’s a subtle or not so subtle expectation that if you roll 12 higher than you needed to hit that you should somehow hit ‘better’ or ‘harder’ or whatever.  But if you need a 7 or better to hit (or 30% or higher) to hit then it doesn’t matter if you roll a 7 or a 19 you have the same range of results.

With the single roll out of the question I broke combat down into the ubiquitous attack and damage rolls again.  This oddly enough broadened the math between the least and maximum dice pools.

Like apparently many people I enjoy the thought that the better your attack roll the better your result should be, rather than a binary or trinary result which is pretty much all the other systems I’m familiar with.

I’ve run a few bazillion simulations and balance is getting closer and is within reasonable parameters right now.  Some of the current highlights -

A character’s ability is determined by their dice pool.  Someone untrained in a skill has a pool of 1d10 and is subject to a -5 penalty.  Someone with some training or ability gets a 1d10, a master of something gets up to 5d10 in their pool.

Success at something is determined by beating a equaling or beating a 5.

Your level of success is determined by how many multiples of 5 you roll over the necessary number. This is very Savage Worlds but I found that type of mechanic workable for what I wanted and thus using it.

In combat a character has two defenses.  Their Damage Avoidance or DAv and their Damage Absorption or DAb.   DAv determines if you get hit at all.  DAb determines how badly you got hurt by the attack.  Again this is like Savage Worlds Parry and Toughness.  I’m not 100% in like with it but tracking Hit Points is slow and annoying regardless of the mechanic and I found the Wound levels of Savage Worlds another thing worth stealing from them.

A round of combat consists of a character rolling his attack dice pool and determining the highest number rolled.  This is then compared to the target’s DAv.  For each multiple of 5 that the attacker rolls over the DAv they roll their damage.  Damage is determined very simply, weapons that are wielded in one hand deal 2d6+xd6 damage and weapons that require two hands deal 2d8+xd8 damage.  The xd6 and xd8 are variable depending on how well the attacker rolls.

While it sounds odd that two attacks at 2d6 somehow equal one attack at 2d8, oddly enough that’s how the math works out with the range of damage avoidance and absorbtion numbers I’m using.  I was a little surprised myself.  But using the same damage for each major group of weapons provides for ease of play and opens up a lot of roleplay opportunities without having to worry about the nuts and bolts.  Granted for some groups that’s simply not going to work, they want the 12 pages of weapon stats, but that’s not the group I’m designing this for.

Example:  Attacker rolls his dice pool of 3d10 using a pistol, a one handed weapon.  His highest die is a 9.  This is then compared to the DAv of the target.  If this was a 5 then the attacker hit with +4 over so he deals the base 2d6 damage (one handed damage).  Let’s say he shoots another person the next round who’s DAv is 4 and gets another 9.  9-4 is 5.  This means on the second shot he does the base 2d6 but because he got 5 over the necessary value he gets to add another 1d6 for 3d6 damage.   This varies from the Savage Worlds in that it’s open ended.

Another reason I’m using Dice Pools is that I want to include a Stunting mechanism.  I’m doing this through the use of doubles.  To determine how many stunt points you have you simply add your matching dice up and take the one’s digit.  Example:  You rolled 2 6′s in your pool.  6+6 is 12 so you get 2 stunt points.  Roll 2 9′s?  18 or 8 stunt points.  Two 10′s?  20 and 0 stunt points but then rolling two 10′s is reward in and of itself.

As a character’s skill increases, their dice pool increases.  This causes a corresponding chance for doubles and thus stunt points.  Someone without any training or little training with a 1d10 pool, never gets to stunt.  With 2d10 they stunt but rarely.  With 5d10 they’ll stunt roughly 25% of the time.

Stunt points will be used add special effects to an attack.  The list is nebulous at this time but I foresee things like for X points you get to add another dice of damage, or push the target  X spaces or knock the target prone or immobilize the target by pinning it to an object or smashing a knee cap etc.

These points will allow players (and the GM) to essentially build a power on the fly as they need to and the better skill a character has the more stunts they’ll be able to pull off.

Right now I’ve got the numbers pretty balanced again, between 1H+Shield, 2H and Dual Wielding warriors.  How it’s working out is that dual wielding works better against lightly armored targets and 2 handed weapons work better against heavily armoured targets.

Dual Wielders have a bit of a penalty in that they never achieve the win percentages that the other two types of fighters do but they have an advantage that’s not apparent from the combat sim in that they get two rolls per round and thus two chances to get stunt points.   So the dual wielders will in general be the flashier fighters while the other two will be more steadfast and stable fighters.

This works out pretty well to my thinking.

Some things that came out of this is that in Savage Worlds a dual weapon fighter HAS to have ambidexterity to be as effective as the other types of warriors. As a result I’m simply not going to be sticking an off hand penalty into the system.  Anything that’s mandatory to be equitable should be a given.

Another thing that came up is that if you assume a multiple action penalty of -2 like Savage Worlds then for the math to add up you can only allow this to be reduced to -1.  If you allow something like Two Fisted to reduce that 0 then the dual weapon fighter becomes drastically better than someone who doesn’t wield two weapons.

By removing the off hand penalty completely and then limited MAP removal to -1 and subsequently offering an equivilent advantage to 2 handed fighters to gain +1 attack bonus and shield fighters to gain +1 bonus defense when using shields you continue to keep the math balanced.   If you don’t test all three types of fighters against each other then you always run the risk of breaking the math of any system.

Right now the numbers are looking good at this particular juncture, A vs B vs C are within reasonable balance and have a bit of Apples to Oranges feel with them with each type of fighter having a bit of a niche to fill.

There’s always though the ‘feel’ of the system.  I really want to replicate the ease of Savage Worlds system, just with a little different feel and the inclusion of some other mechanics and get the math more in line with what I need to be happy with it.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been noodling the math some more.  I’d come up with a scaling damage system that seems workable but I’ve hit a bit of a snag.

To sum up the system, your level of ability at something is set by a dice pool.  The more dice you have in the pool the better you are of course.  Each time you need to do something roll the appropraite number of dice and take the highest one.  The dice can ace or explode such that if you roll the highest possible value you get to keep that then roll it again.  This repeats until you don’t roll the highest value for that die.

The value you roll is compared against the defense of a target which is a flat number right now, how it’s determined is still to be determined but likely it would be a factor of skill and physical defenses.

For every X you roll over the defense of the target, currently for every 4 or 5 units is the number I’m using using d10′s for the dice pool, you inflict a damage condition.  This starts at Dazed, then 1 Wound, 2 Wounds, 3 Wounds, 4 Wounds.   Once you get to the 6th condition, 5 wounds, you’re dead.  The number of wounds you suffer inflict attack roll penalties.  Unfortuantely this is resulting in a definite death spiral that’s hard to get out of.  That’s one issue.

The other issue is more subtle.  As your dice pool for your attacking dice goes up, your average value goes up as well which also makes your average damage go up in direct correlation.

The systems I’ve got my eye on right now for inspiration I’m realizing have flat damage.  It really doesn’t matter how good you are with a sword in Savage Worlds or Dungeons and Dragons, you’re going to inflict the same base damage pool for the majority of your attacks.

It’s realistic of course that someone skilled can inflict more damage than someone unskilled, I don’t really have a problem with that.  It’s the granularity of it that’s the biggest issue.

Someone with a dice pool of 1 die has a  3% chance to defeat someone with 5 dice in their pool and this doesn’t even start to bring in the Stunting system which is currently set up with doubles rolled during your dice pool.  i.e. the more dice the higher the chance for doubles the more stunts you can pull off.  2 dice versus 5 dice is 13% chance to win, 3 dice vs 5 dice is 27% chance to win, 4 dice vs 5 dice is a 40% chance.   The percentages change too drastically for me to think this is a workable solution in its current state.

Assuming I remove the ability to increase damage with the use of stunt points this still leaves a limited level of granularity.    Now I do know that the Level +/- x range limitations exist pretty heavily in many games, it’s just a fact of life.  But I want content to be more widely useful than say Dungeons and Dragons or Gamma World or Mutants and Masterminds etc.

Perhaps I might have to go back to the drawing board and work with a system of a smaller or larger pools (hates handfuls of dice) and flat bonuses to represent skill levels.

Continue reading »]]> If you happen by here from time to time you might notice I like to run the numbers with the mechanical bits, especially when something feels off about it.   There is some iffy math in Savage Worlds for instance in that certain options are a bad idea although some become good when combined with other things.  Take the Aim maneuver, always a bad idea unless you have the ability to use it every round which requires you to take another option to allow that.  But the average player looking at that tends to go, “I’m going to aim this time for the +2″ when they’re faced with a hard to hit opponent.  When getting to roll twice is in all ways better.

I’m not picking on Savage Worlds in this regard, all game mechanics suffer from it to a greater or lesser degree.  All things considered Savage Worlds is better than most.

So now that I’ve settled on a system to focus on at least temporarily, I’m working on balancing the numbers and it’s pretty interesting stuff.  Unfortunately balance means that things can get a little… odd.  Savage Worlds for instance likes to use 2′s and 4′s for a lot of things.  +2 to this, -4 to that.  While easy to remember it doesn’t necessary make for good balance.  To get better balance you might have to go with 1′s and 3′s for some things and 2′s and 5′s for others for example.   Not the best way for ease of use but long term what’s better, a little longer ramp up time or numbers that ‘work’?

I’ve built a combat sim which makes me feel all Worlds Deadliest Warriors that allows me to nudge the numbers, basically the success and effect results in a variety of ways.  Currently I’m trying to figure out a reasonable balance between a 2 weapon build (i.e. two attacks), a 1 weapon + shield and a 2 handed weapon.

Side Note: The numbers I’m working with really drives home the point of just how powerful Ambidextrous and Two Weapon Fighting is in Savage worlds.  Take those two things and you’ll win a huge percentage of the time versus something of the otherwise same stats wielding a two handed weapon or a 1 handed weapon and shield. From a power perspective it makes Ambidextrous a must have feat since you can only take it at character creation.

As I’m being influenced by a lot of the design philosophy from the Savage Worlds system in the base mechanics I’m working with things like the Multi-Action Penalty and Off Hand Penalties.   But I’m also basing weapons on very broad categories and taking the base accuracy trait from Dungeons and Dragon’s 4th edition.   The categories I’ve devolved down into really 1 hand/2 hand and melee/ranged.  I was initially looking at adding in Light and Heavy as the Gamma World system but really by the numbers they’re either functionally the same or unbalanced.  Lighter weapons hit more often but deal less damage, heavy weapons hit less often but deal more damage.  Numerically over time all things considered for a decent game mechanic to work those should be balanced.

I may revisit that idea but right now it didn’t fit with other portions of what I’m trying to accomplish.   It works in Gamma World because your ability to hit is based on your raw stats, not a skill at fighting and I want the ability to have a fighting skill.  But I didn’t want to have a Fighting Heavy and Fighting Light skill to allow for distinctions.   It shoeboxes characters too much.

Anyway, after a few million simulations I’ve got some numbers that are probably as close to balanced as you can get without getting up to using a d100 for everything.  It’s a question of granularity, too little and it’s impossible balance, too much and it’s unwieldy.

A 1H+Shield vs 2x1H vs 2H are all at 50% plus or minus 4%.    The worst discrepancy is a 1H+Shield vs a dual wielding 1H.  The shield guy wins roughly 54% of the time.  The actual combinations and win/losses are (running  100,000 simulations each time):

1H+Shield vs 2 x 1H  = 1H/S wins 54% of the time
1H+Shield vs 2H =  Draw, it’s 50.3% in favor of the shield guy
2H vs 2 x 1H =  Draw all things considered but 2 x 1H wins 51% of the time.

To verify that the algorithms aren’t horribly broken I tested each type of fighter against itself and as expected it was within half a percent of 50%.

While these simulations are simply a starting point for a working system, it’s nice to be able to have it balanced at the gross level.   And of course, once details start going in it could end up completely unplayable/imbalanced and kick me back to the start but at least I get to create a few new neurons out of it which might help stave off Alzheimer’s for a few more years.

Continue reading »]]> As I mentioned awhile back I’ve been tossing around a dice mechanic for a game system.  There’s a rather extensive set of design goals I’ve got floating around in the back of my head.  Here’s some random thoughts on existing mechanics that keep them floating.

Disclaimer: I like my systems to be mathematically balanced.  Some people don’t, I’m not them.   I don’t like systems where combinations of race/class/powers/builds are just world crushingly more powerful.  Whether by accident or player design characters that end up with those combinations make the game less fun.  When one player constantly upstages everyone else during play, you’re going to find few enjoy playing.   So balanced math is near the top of the list for design goals.

Let’s look at an obvious mechanic in almost every game, weapon damage. Weapons have different damage… for lack of a better word let’s use range. Let’s take a familiar system to many, Dungeons and Dragons.   A longsword is a d8, a greatsword is 2d6.  One averages 4 points of damage, the other 7.  But it gets tricky, a long sword has +3 to hit while the greatsword is only a +2.  That nudges the longswords damage over time upwards because it hits more often.   A long sword also allows you to use a shield which decreases the damage you take over time because you’re harder to damage.

Are they balanced?  Unlikely.  With a limited set of ranges caused by a fixed set of dice (d4,d6,d8,d10,d12) it’s not possible to balance them.  You can get them close but there’s always going to be a particular weapon that’s simply… better to use.

Gamma World Fourth Edition bypasses this by throwing out the whole individualized weapon stats, a move I really applaud.  It’s a paradigm shift for this particular style of mechanics.    There is no one best Light 1-Handed Melee weapon in that system.   This is an awesome step forward for roleplay and characterization and a giant step backwards for mechanical diversity.   But the step forward is what I personally care about.

So one of the design goals is that weapons are Gamma World 4E in flavor.  A few broad categories or rather combinations of categories, Light/Heavy, One Handed/Two Handed, Ranged/Melee, define each weapon.  Light weapons favor faster fighters, heavy weapons favor stronger fighters etc.   Light weapons hit more often but do less damage, heavy weapons hit less often but do more damage.

But mathematically is there any real difference?  If something hits more often but less damage and less often for more damage, isn’t that simply the same thing by the numbers and all its really doing is giving the illusion of a difference?  Something to think about certainly.

The damage ranges conflict with another design goal, a better roll on your attack increases your damage output.   Dungeons and Dragons allows for this in a binary way, you hit and deal your normal random range of damage or 5% of the time, on a natural 20, you deal maximum damage.    But if you need say a 5 to hit that means that it doesn’t matter what you roll really.  You either need any one of 14 numbers, makes no difference which one or that 20.  5-19 always results in the same damage.

It works but I’m thinking, what if your damage scaled in a more granular fashion?  So that a 19 is better than a 15 is better than a 10 is better than a 8 is better than a 5?  That would be pretty cool now wouldn’t it?  Of course if we were playing with a computer we could easily do that.  Computers have no trouble computing what 57% of 1d8+4 is.   People, generally not so much, ignoring any Rainmen in the group of course.

On a side note, one of the House Rules I used for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is I averaged damage across the board.   1d8+4 meant you dealt 8 damage.  It worked really well for speeding up the game and no one found it detracted from it.  So it was a win/win in our group.   Other’s who’ve tried it report a similar overall

After running millions of simulations and computing percentages and spreads and the like my current design (after shelving several) is to use dice pools for your attempt roll.  The ‘better’ you are at something the more dice you get to rol but you still only use ONE of them.  The pool currently ranges from 1 to 5 with non-skilled getting 1 die with some penalties and legendary world shaking heroes getting 5 dice with bonuses.

To this basic premise I add the ability to fine tune percentages by adding flat bonuses, a flat bonus nudges the percentages up by (1/dice size)*100) percent.

A hero with a some training in Heavy Melee skill might have a 2d8+4 which averages out to roughly a 10, while a 5d8+4 averages 1 better with an 11.

Whaaaa? you might be saying, increasing the dice pool from 2 to 5 increases my average roll by only 1 point (technically it’s 1.4 give or take).  That’s crazy, why spend character points to get bigger pools?

Well there’s a fix I have in mind for that which is simply adding in the exploding or acing dice mechanic from Savage worlds.   Which simply means that if you roll the maximum on a dice you get to roll it again and add them together.   With explosions turned on let’s run those numbers again.    2d8+4 exploding now averages 11 per roll.  5d8+4 exploding is 13.6 so we’ve gained a 2.5 higher roll.   That’s a more reasonable gain.

Exploding dice also have a very critical (to me anyway) benefit of allowing anyone to successfully attack anyone. Granted it might be a ‘ slim chance’ but there’s none of that “Oh they’re level 2′s and I’m a level 12?  Pfffft, I just walk through them, they don’t have much chance to hit me and if they do it’ll take a week to burn through my hit points.  Meanwhile every time I swing three die.”  This is important to me because it keeps all content relevant.  There are no creatures that get ‘out leveled’.   That’s one thing I dislike about Dungeons and Dragons in all Editions but especially 4E.  Any creature four levels higher or four levels lower than the players is difficult to impossible to use.   They’re either impossible to hit or impossible to miss or vice versa depending on your viewpoint.

One of the other design goals was the use of ‘stunting’ dice mechanic that Dragon Age Origins RPG brought to the table.  With that system you roll 3d6 but one’s an off color.  That die is your stunt die and the value shown gives you that many stunt points you can use to give your attack a bit of ‘oomph’ by letting you knock someone down or daze them or move after the attack etc.  In other words you’re encouraged to do cool shit on your turn which is never a bad thing.

Now we could go with an odd color in a dice pool and that would work certainly.  But what if instead we say that if you roll doubles of a number you get that many stunt points…  That gives a player a bigger incentive to up their dice pools than purely more chances to succeed.

Your chance of getting doubles with 2d8 is only 12.5%,  with 5d8 though you’re going to end up with doubles 83% of the time.  Which kind of makes sense, a barely trained fighter is going to be lucky to hit you with a sword much less do a double flip over the bar, bounce off the mirror after cracking the bartender on the skull and then swing out to catch the chandelier to swing over to the door.  But a legendary warrior with a 83% chance of getting some stunt points should be able to do something that awesome a majority of the time.

Another design goal the use of a bell curve where extreme swings in value are infrequent is in one of those shelved systems but I had to drop it as I like the idea of dice pools.  It might be possible to ‘do the math’ and come up with a way to drag it back in but for now it’s on a back burner.

By the way, the d8 I refer to is simply a placeholder.  I’ve yet to determine which die size offers the best results for the damage design goal.

So right now my current mechanic, using a dice pool for attacks of exploding dice along with a way to allow for stunting handles several of my large view goals.

The trick is of course going through the nuts and bolts of the minutiae.   How to handle specialized training? What about weapon quality?  What are the typical min/max ranges of bonus possibilities and penalties.  What about the range of target numbers you’re trying to succeed at, whether it’s whacking someone with a sword or picking a lock or convincing a tavern wench to meet you after closing?

Let’s not forget about weapon classifications, how do we truly differentiate those?   What about damage mitigation?  How many hits, hit points, damage ratings does it take to go from healthy to dead?  How many attacks does that take on average?  Is it too slow to be fun aka the high level solo boss slog in 4E or too flast like the one hit kill possibility in Savage Worlds?

Game mechanic design isn’t something you can just jot off on a piece of paper.  You can have what appears to be an awesomely workable system but then once you start coming up with all the nuts and bolts it just falls apart.

But running through it is certainly mentally stimulating.

Continue reading »]]> I found this post on some alternate rules that you can use for Castle Ravenloft.  These are rule changes and tweaks fostered by the gaming community to help with some of the… idiosyncracies of the existing rule system and by all accounts make the game even better.

Your results may vary but I’m linking it to give you the option to look over and try them if they appeal.  Because options are good.

I’m appending the current alternate rulings here but understand they’re definitely a ‘living document’ and you should check the forums for the current version which may be different than these by the time you read this.

Unless stated otherwise follow the standard rules. If there are options, it is Hero’s choice per standard rules.

1. Player Count Scaling
……a. 4-5 players – No starting treasure and 1 Healing Surge
……b. 1-3 players – No starting treasure and 2 Healing Surges

2. Heroes explore during their Move Action instead.
……a. Exploration Phase is removed. 
……b. Once per turn, Heroes now explore in the middle of their Move Action by spending 2 movement points while adjacent to an unexplored edge.
……c. If the explored tile has a white triangle, in addition to normal Monster placement, draw 1 extra Encounter Card and resolve immediately.
……d. If the explored tile has a black triangle, in addition to normal Monster placement and Encounter card draw, place 1 extra Monster. Resolve the Encounter Card normally drawn immediately.
……e. Exploring does not end your Hero’s turn. All unspent movement points and Attack or Move actions are still available.
……f. When exploring a tile and a villain spawns on that tile, the exploring hero ends his Hero Phase immediately. (The hero was shocked to see such a villain and fear took hold of the hero for a second)

3. If Hero did not explore, spawn extra Monster(s) instead of drawing an Encounter Card in the beginning of the Villain Phase.
……a. In the beginning of the Villain Phase, place 1 monster-generator token (use HP tokens) on a tile with an unexplored edge and then place the same number of monsters on that tile as the number of monster-generator tokens there. For example, if there was already one monster-generator token on a tile and you place another monster-generator token on that tile because you didn’t explore, 2 monsters will spawn on the said tile.
………..i. Every monster card drawn this way can be discarded instead by spending 5 XP each.
………..ii. These extra monster spawns count as Encounters when Adventures has special rules regarding Encounters. For example, in Klak’s scenario, every Encounter that is canceled, that player takes 1 damage. Therefore, every monster canceled (discarded) canceled will also cause 1 damage to the active Hero canceling the monster spawn.
………..iii. When placing the monster-generator tokens (HP tokens), they must be evenly dispersed (i.e., can’t put a second on a given tile unless every other tile with unexplored edge already has one, can’t put a third unless all others have two, etc.)
………..iv. When placing the monster-generator tokens (HP tokens), they must be traceable through squares to a hero (either alive or dead/downed).
……b. Any time a tile with monster-generator tokens no longer have an unexplored edge or cannot be traced through squares to a hero (either alive or dead/downed), move all monster-generator tokens (HP tokens) from that tile so that they meet all the requirements above (i.e. evenly dispersed, traceable to a hero and on a tile with at least 1 unexplored edge.)

4. If at any time you cannot place a monster, draw an Encounter Card instead for each monster not placed.

5. Can only keep 1 monster card as an XP card per turn. (Heroes choose which monster card to keep for XP if killed more than 1 monster.)

6. In addition to standard Hero leveling rules, a Hero can spend 10 XP to level up during their Hero Phase.

7. Moving Monsters will go to the closest square to achieve its Tactics.
For example, when a monster moves adjacent to a hero to attack the hero, it’ll go to the square closest to its starting point instead of going deeper into the target Hero’s tile. This minimizes the occurrence of monster being placed in the middle of a Hero mosh pit. Another example is when a blazing skeleton moves to the next tile to get closer to Heroes (following the Otherwise tactic), the blazing skeleton will go to the closest square of the next tile. This increases the distance that the slow warrior has to close before it can attack it with his “adjacent” attacks. Overall this rule gives a feeling that the monsters are smarter by applying this one sentence rule.

8. Remove Encounter Cards from play. Remove every copy of the cards listed below. For example, Neglected Passage and Passage of Time has multiple copies.
……a. Neglected Passage (2)
……b. Overrun (2)
……c. Hands of the Dead
……d. Circle of Death
……e. Patrina Velikovna
……f. Green Slime
……g. Passage of Time (2)
……h. Gray Ooze
……i. Howling Ghost
……j. Icy Corridor
……k. Strahd’s Hunger
……l. Strahd Attacks!
……m. Choking Fog
……n. King Tomescu’s Portal
……o. Animated Armor
……p. Prowling Ghost

Continue reading »]]> What with work and a birthday party for the boys we again side tripped into another Castle Ravenloft adventure.  We only had time for one as I was busy triaging an issue in London but it was quite entertaining.

The adventure is The Howling Hag where some old lady is cooking up a nefarious ritual in the crypts beneath castle ravenloft.   Each adventurer starts separated in a corner of the possible 5×5 playing tile map.  They have to explore their way to each other and to the center of the map.  Due to the randomness of the tiles you’re never sure if you’re going to hit a dead end or a way out.   Each explored tile draws in at random 0 to 2 monsters or triggers the Hag to show up on the new tile explored.

The Hag has all kinds of gnarly teleport powers and as a result adventurer’s were popping all over the place.  Our cleric found a workable path to the center ritual room but was then teleported to another location in the crypts.

Unfortuantely that was the ONLY working path we came up with in the end.  We were poised to make a 3 hero rush on a possible path, our fourth hero was trapped in a dead end section when the Hag slowly but surely started teleporting us away.

I’d managed to use my Great Leap ability to launch myself past all the monsters and the hag to the edge of the last unexplored tile that would connect to the ritual room that we had access to and when the tile was revealed it caused a dead end.  It really did come down to not only the last tile but the direction it was revealed from.  If we of explored from the other possible avenue we’d of had a straight shot to the ritual room and a chance of defeating the hag.

With four heroes alive but all down to 1 or 2 health, and only one working path that we couldn’t get to it started to look bleak.  Then the hag started loading up the dead end passage sending the Cleric and Wizard to join the Ranger while I, the Rogue was left to try and defeat 5 monsters and survive long enough that the Hag might randomly teleport me into the working path.

Alas it was not to be, our 1 in perhaps a 1000 chance was soundly defeated as I lay dying on the floor, out of any means of rescue or healing thus sealing our fate.  The other three escaped through a side door to spread word of my demise as the Hag completed her foul ritual causing all the women in the land to grow beards.  I’m glad I didn’t survive to see that day, better to be dead.

This was a really fun adventure for us all things considered.  The exploration to get together and the having to play solo and sometimes getting no monsters and sometimes up to 2 monsters per tile made for a fairly exciting game.   As each tile as flipped there was a sense of anticipation “Would it dead end?  Would we have a path?  Would we be able to group up and grow stronger?”.

Some people might find it annoying that pure luck can cause an otherwise well played and successful session to fail in that it’s possible to not have a clear path to the ritual room where you win.   But I quite enjoyed it myself.

So far there hasn’t been a ‘bad’ adventure in the book, I think we’re up to 8 or 9 but still The Howling Hag and and the Klak – Kobold Sorcerer adventure are by far my personal favorites.

The next map is The Gauntlet where the group has to face down waves of monsters to get to some goal.  Should be interesting.   This will also be the adventure where we bring in new Hero options from the community, a Warlock, Barbarian, Druid, Assassin, Avenger will be joining the mix at the very least.  It’ll be interesting to see if the community has come up with better or worse heroes in the areas of playability, power and interesting to play.

Continue reading »]]> No they’re not anything I’ve done, that credit goes to someone on Board Game Geek but they’re pretty cool even if I didn’t have anything to do with them.  You can download the PDF’s and print them yourself or there’s a way to get real cards as well and save yourself an ass load of ink costs.   Keep reading.

Also I’d get them downloaded if you think you’ll ever have any desire to have them before someone at WOTC decides to send out C&D letters on them even if they’re original work since they mimic official material so closely in look and feel.

It’s two sets of cards that you can have professionally printed out (albeit in hong kong) for use in your Castle Ravenloft The Board Game games.   It includes monsters, encounters, magic items.

I’ve ordered one of each of the decks, once they come in, ETA is about 2 weeks, I’ll let you know about the quality but others have already ordered them and had very good things to say about them.

Link 1 – http://www.artscow.com/share/Ravenloft-CT-Design-Deck-1-51sx67j1u8uh

Link 2 – http://www.artscow.com/share/Ravenloft-CT-Design-Deck-2-37hsub6q12a3

I don’t know if the author gets anything from it or not but if you browse for coupons you can get them for about $10 each shipped, less if you catch a good coupon, some people have gotten them for under $5 shipped.   Even at $10 they seem a reasonable value to me.  YMMV as always.

Continue reading »]]> We continued our foray into Castle Ravenloft The Board Game this last weekend.  With only three people anything else was pretty much out.

We played three different scenarios, Daylight Assault, Final Transformation and Destroy the Dracolich.

Daylight assault didn’t go well for us.  The object was to collect 12 treasures and escape with them but we just couldn’t come up with the loot faster than the monsters were taking down our health.  Like Chess, sometimes you know you’re going to lose before it actually happens and this was one of those time and we didn’t have to play out the last round.   Strahd had us for breakfast, brunch and dinner.

The Final Transformation was much easier for us and we won it quite handily.  In this one you have escort a bitten young man to a specific location in the castle and cure him.   We sped through this one once we found the fountain, even with the extra monsters spawning two tiles away as we were all in the same tile and the scenario as written says that he’s curred after 5 turns with a player in the same tile.  Since that reads as any player each game turn we cured him 3 times, once per player.   As a result it was pretty easy to hold out long enough to get him all cured up.  Interesting scenario though and we though we were going to get a bit of Defend the Castle while we cured the lad but by curing him 3 times per turn and the monsters spawning 2 tiles away and most only advancing 1 tile per turn it just didn’t  work out that way.

Destroy the Dracolich, aka Gravestorm, also went pretty easy for us.  We found the undead wyrm without a lot of trouble and was only down one surge when he popped up.   The Phylactory ended up 5 tiles away but with my wizard’s ability to Fey Step I was able to jet over in two turns and destroy the thing which crushed out half the beast’s health.   We ended up down two surges on this one as Gravestorm hits pretty hard and we were still spawning monsters rather than getting Encounter cards but we did it without losing anyone which counts as a win win situation.

Some things we take away from this – The cards, much like 4th Edition when it came out have wording that is confusing and not clear.   When in doubt we went with the 4th Edition clarified rulings where appropriate or by whatever I felt was in the spirit of it rather than as it was written.

The ranger with its Careful Attack makes mincemeat out of 1HP monsters since it’s an automatic kill just by moving adjacent.  The Fighter with Cleave has a good tile clearing power since Cleave does an automatic 1 damage to a second monster after rolling a hit on a first one but so far we’ve rarely had two monsters on one tile so the power has been rather iffy.

Some of the Daily powers or all of them really rarely get used except to absorb bad things from cards like “Burn an unused daily power or take 1 damage” since they’re too good to use on minions and by the time you find something tough to use them on you’re dead.

We’ll go after the Howling Hag the next time we play and perhaps the Guantlet of Terror since that sounds like fun.

Each game lasted about 30-45 minutes.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been thinking about dice mechanics and what I like and dislike about them.  By dice mechanics I don’t mean the guys in little overalls who fix your craps dice but rather the ways various roleplaying games introduce randomness into their systems.

The number of systems that I know about and this doesn’t include all of them by any means, is pretty large and run the gamut.  You have the ORE system where one dice role (One Roll Engine) determines everything about whatever it is you just tried from success to damage to location etc.  The problem I have with the ORE system is it’s mathmatcically sketchy, the odds of success go down way fast as the number of successes go up.  But I digress.

You have a system like Warhammer FRPG where you have a flat percentage chance using percentage dice which also determines your hit location.   A system like Dungeons and Dragons where you have a flat percentage chance at a success but a myriad ways of determining the level of that success.  There are systems with bell curves like Hero Systems where you roll 3 dice and take the total.  You have exploding dice and wild dice in Savage Worlds which means a dice can roll a number bigger than it’s max value and you pick between two different rolls as to which one you want.  Systems where you have a single die type and systems where you have 6 or more die types.  Systems where you roll one die and systems where you roll double handfuls.

It’s a lot.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out what I personally prefer and if it’s feasible.  I’d like a bell curve where the average value just falls on the success side of the success/fail line and the average ‘hero”s chances for typical tasks falls in the 75% success range.  I want it possible to have really cool rolls ala Exploding or Acing die where a player might normally get a 10 as average but every once in awhile gets a 20 or 30 or 40.   And I want a system that randomly supports Cool like the Dragon Die from Dragon Age: Origins.  In case you’re not familiar with DA:O the dragon die is a different colored die in the pool that a character rolls and the result on that die grants them points they can spend to add Cool to their results like extra damage or knocking someone down or whatever.

A problem is, the more die you have in the pool, the greater the chance of exploding die that really crank up the totals.  You want explosions to not be the ‘default’ or at least I don’t, I want them to be memorable or exciting when they happen, not a disapointment when they don’t since the don’t is the expected result.

But to have something like a Dragon Die you need multiple dice, or do you?  That’s a topic for further discussion but in general since I’m looking for a bell curve system, multiple dice are available anyway.

Then there’s the level of success.  The majority systems have an inital roll that is  binary or at best trinary levels of success.  Your initial roll determines that you either succeeded or you failed.  YOu have to then make another roll to determine the level of your success.  Some extend this so that you either failed, or succeeded or succeeded really really well with no other gradations.  The old Miss, Hit, Critical Hit trinumerate with a variant that a critical hit just gives you a chance at a greater level of success.

The biggest thing holding back a real scaling die roll in terms of results is that all systems except the most simplistic ones always differentiate the range on a per character basis.  One character might have a possible range of success of 1-6 while another might be 1-12 and this can change on a per attempt basis.  That makes it impossible for practical purposes to have the initial roll determine the success level as it would involve some crazy math on each and every roll.

A CRPG though could handle this very well.  Say a roll of 10 is a minimal success and a roll of 20 is a maximum success.  The computer can very easily compute the percentages of the ranges without any problems.  But a human figuring out what 8% of 12 is on the fly is not nearly as easy.

Obviously dice mechanics are a big thing and a major way that systems differentiate themselves, well the dice mechanic and the combat engine that falls out of it as a result, and there are many many ways of doing them.

Is there a best one?  No, not in my opinion, there are some that are a best fit for the rest of the chosen mechanics but I think if there was a best one, we’d of seen it by now.  This many designers spending this many decades at it, if there was a Theory of Relativity level dice mechanic it should have popped up by now.

Or perhaps we just haven’t had our Einstein yet.

Continue reading »]]> This weekend instead of having a session of Gamma World 4E I brought out Castle Ravenloft The Board Game and we played Adventure 2 and 3, the first two multiplayer adventures.   I’d already played Adventure 1 which is a solo adventure of the “Escape the castle” kind.

Adventure 2 was a “Find the Chapel and Recover the Widget And Destroy the Monsters In It” adventure and uses what appears to be a recurring mechanic where the location tile you’re looking for is somewhere between 9 and 12 tiles deep in the stack meaning the player(s) have to last 8 tiles worth of encounters and monsters before they start having a chance to uncover the goal tile.

A few things went wrong with this adventure, we (I) forgot about handing out treasure for a bit and the way the cards are written I ended up using my surge value as my full hit points.  It’s a pretty easy mistake to make if you don’t look closely at the card, the column that displays your hitpoints just has a number in it, the one that displays your surge value has a number and a large HPS after it.   Just glance at the character card and see which one pops off the page as your hit points.

So with those two difficulty factors added in, we failed the mission.   The Rogue and Ranger were vying to see which one would use up the Healing Surge tokens first and the Cleric burned the Healing Word power and then ta-dah, when one character starts with 0 HPs at the start of their turn and there are no surges left, the group loses.   An interesting if contrived way to insure cooperative play I suppose.

We got several tiles toward the Chapel but never found it before the incapacitation of one member of the party the remaining characters decided to pack it in for the day and head back to the Barovian Arms And Grub and get some stew and stew about their failure.

At first with multiple people, after having played solo, I thought well this is going to be dull, one person just reveals a tile, takes the hit from the monster activation and then as a group they kill it and move on.  But that mechanic where if you don’t explore a tile you get an Encounter card works very well to keep that from happening.  Some of those encounter cards are just downright mean (and I’m already compiling a list of home-brew cards I’d like to put in there if they’re not already there.  Example:

Berserk Fury!
Strahd’s commanding voice echoes through the tunnels under the castle as he urges his minions to try harder or face the consequences of failure…
Effect: The active hero activates ALL monsters on his Villian phase even those that are not under his control.

Normally a player only activates the monsters they spawned in, although they also activate any other monsters of the same type on the board if they’re controlling one of that type.  So if two people both have a Wolf under their control each person activates both wolves on their turn which makes having multiples of the same creature on the board immediately tougher.  Another nice mechanic for ramping up difficulty at random.

Anyway, it’s a definite choice to make where adding another monster to the board is a viable alternative to suffering the possible effects of an Encounter card.

With the rules a little more sorted out we attempted Adventure 3.  In this one you have to explore the tunnels looking for the chaos sorcerer Klak who’s causing grief and kill him and his evil artifact.  More on the artifact in a moment.

This one went better for adventurer’s, we reached Klak intact and not having had to expend any Surge tokens. One cool thing was right as we reached him, an Encounter came up that made everyone run two tiles back toward the entrance.  And then another Encounter that shifted one of us with a monster moving that player back near Klak and plopping a monster in the middle of the others.

Klak’s rather cool ability to constantly explore unexplored edges which summons a monster and teleporting around and pushing people around was really fun to try and deal with.   He was constantly adding in new monsters and then fleeing to new tiles.

It was all for naught though and we defeated him and then destroyed the artifact.

The artifact was a bit of a pointless twist in actual gameplay.  Yes it’s a AC 15, 5HP object you have to destroy but once you take out Klak, it’s really a matter of a single turn, two if you roll below average to destroy it and without any time pressure and it not doing anything at all except sitting there I found it a bit of a ‘uh this is anticlimatic’ moment.

My first thought on making it more of a option is extend Klak’s ability to it like so. “On the Villian phase the artifact summons a new monster on one adjacent tile that does not contain a monster already.”  That would ramp up the “Damnit would someone kill that thing!” in a simple and easy manner and thematically correct.

All in all though the game went over very well and we’ll be playing it again most definitely.  It’s a good game for the GM and players to get to play together for once if they enjoy 4E mechanics, albeit very simplified, and the tactics tree on the monsters that function as the DM work fairly well although I’d like to see some with a bit of randomness to them and some that try to retreat to stay at range, but home brew or expansions could easily add that kind of thing and the game is definitely built with expansions in mind.

Continue reading »]]> Played a solo game of Castle Ravenloft yesterday, first time playing and was immediately struck by expandable by the consumer the game would be.

Sure enough a quick search this morning and there’s a bunch of new adventures, heroes, magic items and the like available.

You can get started over on this thread on Board Game Geek and start picking up all kinds of nifty things for the game.

The game is very simple to pick up, assuming you’ve played 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons or at least have some faimiliarty with it.

The solo Adventure 1 turned out to be a cake walk for me as the Dragonborne Warrior as one of the first itmes I looted was a Teleport Scroll.  I just kept exploring edges, killing monsters till Strahd woke up and came after me.  Once he entered my tile, I burned the teleport scroll and put myself on the far side of the dungeon and kept digging through the tiles while he came after me again but I found the Secret Staircase before he got anywhere near me.

Without the teleport scroll I’d of probably been dead, the Staircase tile was 4 tiles deep and I was out of Healing Surge tokens with a skeleton, a ghoul and a gargoyle and of course Strahd.  The teleport to get out of jail free card was pretty much that, an I Win button.

Short review – Good quality materials, game is reasonably fun, playable solo and provides a bit of a 4E hit when you don’t have any other options.  It’s a basic dungeon crawl, you navigate a randomly generated tile based map finding and killing monsters, collecting treasure and trying to achieve the Victory Conditions of the specific adventure you’re play.  There’s quite a bit of luck to the game, weighted to that end in fact given monsters, loot, attack rolls, tile selection are all randomly generated.  Your only real tactics are in picking and choosing when to burn one use powers and items.  But with additional characters in play this can be mediated to some extent.

If you’re a DM who wants to play 4E this is one way to do it.  If your’e a group of people and just want a beer and pretzels session of 4th Edition without having to deal with character generation and running a ‘full’ session this certainly fills that need.

Overall I’ll give it a 4 out of 5.

Continue reading »]]> Session 2 of the Gamma World 4E mini-campaign -

We pick up with our Gamma World Heroes as they wake up to the dawn of a brave new world, literally after the F3 class Flux Storm that descended on them as they defeated the huge bag lady in Novac.

After getting acquainted with the effects of the change storm and the nightly reality shifts they headed out toward the fabled ruins of Homa where they must recover suitable trophies in order to be Have’s rather than Have Not’s back in their village.

Nearing the Strod river they come across a strange trio, a pair of radmuties, glowing greenish beings along with a External Destroyer class 209.  But Ronson’s keen eyes note the huge sentry bot never aims any of the multitudes of its guns directly at the trio (Klod and Klix having been distracted by shiny objects and wandered away from the herd).  So without any obvious peril Ronson shrugs and meanders on down the road with Stinky and Petey behind him.

They cross the Strod river where the Fofo makes a bridge over it, the dull grey poisonous waters swarming with razor fish and things better left hidden by it’s murky depths.  In the distance one of the river trader’s boats pulls up at the sight of them and waits for them to pass, it’s Omega tech laden hold safely out of harm’s way while in the distance behind them the Radmuties curse as their ambush is given away.

The trio continue their march to the south west toward Homa when they hear the heavy growl of a porker’s bike coming up fast.  They duck into the ditches hidden from view and watch as a heavy porker thunder’s by on his huge hog while on a long chain behind him a flying monkey bounces and scrapes on the highway leaving bits of itself behind with each contact, the heavy chains sending showers of sparks.

As the day passes and night approaches they spot dots up in the air behind them, circling in widening patterns and at this time they remember the flying monkeys of Castle Strod, that the evil beyond imagining Count Strod sends out to garner prey for his torture games.

Discretion being a huge part of survival in the Earth That Is they pick up the pace and strike out for the great Rift, a mist and fog shrouded valley between two huge cliffs that drove upwards as the world changed in 2012.  The Fofo diving into the mists, unhurt by the upheaval.

Scurrying as fast as they can, using terrain to try and hide them from the monkey’s sight proved of no use.  They were spotted by the outrunners and a band of monkeys swarmed them.  They broke and ran, seperating trying to save themselves and the monkeys simply split up and dove after each one catching up to them easily.

With three seperate fights going on things, Petey and Ronson held their own and managed to defeat their creatures while Stinky was put down, slowly ichoring out on the ground.   But with a push the others managed to kill or drive their opponents away and made it to Stinky’s side in time to stablize her.

Carrying the unconscious body the two of them made into the safety of the mists of the Rift where they took the time to recover as the swirling blue black fog of the mist filled the air.

They moved along the Fofo through the great rift.  After a time the fogs lightened and brightened and then through a opening in the mists they spotted an inviting house sitting next to the road, lights streamed from inside and the smell of cooking filled the air.  Through the open doorway a table set for dinner could be seen.

Stinky went closer and then the smell of good food and the thought of a soft bed took over her mind and she proceeded to stumble forward oblivious to everything else.

At this point Ronson and Petey went “well hell” and started shooting the house, knocking away its inviting form to reveal a monster underneath.   Chair like creatures vomited forth through the door, symbiotic creatures that gathered up the food and brought it to the house only to be blown to splinters before they could do more than get close.

The house rose up of two legs worthy of Baba Yaga and thundered toward the group in ground eating strides as huge pseudopods extended from it to smash into the heroes.  But with Petey swarming all over the creature confusing it and Stinky’s android grip they held it down, taking a beating in the process but the whole time Ronson’s fiery flares chipped away at the house setting more and more of it on fire until it collapsed into a fiery inferno of burning critter.

They each dove after some shiny objects littering the creatures gullet, coming away from some Omega tech items of the house’s last dinners, or diners as the case may be.

Recovering they moved on, a bit more surefooted as surely the house would have driven out any competition.  And as it turns out they traveled unmolested.  As they drew near the exit of the rift the ground started to shake and vibrate and then ahead of them a huge machine plunged upwards out of it.   A earth borer of some time.  A strange creature emerged as they stood in stunned astonishment and it introduced itself as Bartholamole.   A explorer/inventor of the mole tribes.   His steam powered digger though was out of coal and he’d been forced to surface, just short of the source of coal his sensors ahd picked up.

A bit of bargaining and the group agreed to retrieve his coal after Bartholamole gave them a Incredible Amazing Expanding Wagon that turned from toy size to a full sized wagon to retrieve the coal in.

Pocketing the wagon they moved south and ran into Peddler Jack, a traveling peddler of a siesmic/giant origin and looking tough as a mounting they talked awhile and continued onwards, passing the sight of of a destroyed toll booth that Jack had told them about.

A little further they found the Blue Belles, a porker gang that had set up a tavern and a bit of a shanty camp.  Inside they went into the Wallow, the local bar and one of the two buildings.  Outside they’d seen a locomotive that burned coal to drive a turbine to generate electricity along with a coal tender car filled with coal.

After talking with Rusty behind the bar, Ronson went upstairs to talk to the Boss of the hogs [Yeah I went there].   The boss turned down his request for any coal and while talking another porker burst into the tavern and rushed upstairs where Ronson overheard him tell a story about Strod attacking one of their porker camps up the road.   Wasting no time Boss rallied the troops leaving but Rusty and a few bruisers behind as they roared off on their hogs to their buddies.

Ronson, Stinky and Petey, seeing but the three porkers in the bar along with a few fellow travelers opened up the whupass in an effort to get their coal.  Ronson going after Rusty while the others took out the bruisers.  During the fight as things were looking bleak and the heroes were bleeding all over the place, Ronson managed to convince one of the travelers hiding under the porkers were killing visitors and eating them or something to that effect and one of the traveler’s joined in on the fight helping to distract Rusty and giving the group a chance to kill them.  The traveler dying int he process.

As the porkers from the outside watch towers made it into the bar Ronson managed to convince the first one in that the traveler had started the trouble, killed Rusty and the other two and they’d just been helping out.  That porker spouted it as gospel to the other three that entered a few seconds later.

While the porkers were trying to make sense of it, the group headed outside to collect the coal they’d bought from Boss Hog, at least that was their story.

As one of of the porker’s rushed away on his hog to tell the others, the group hurridly and with much nervous glancing about filled the Amazing Astounding Expanding wagon with coal and then started pushing it down the Fofo.  Each taking a 5 minute breather in turn to recover.

They made it back to Bartholamole without any signs of porker pursuit and then convinced the mole man to use his strange earth digging craft to carry them to the outskirts of Homa under the saftey of the earth.  Gifts were exchanged during a tea ceremony and Ronson got an amulet that would let the moleman know if he wanted to visit again.

The group watched the moleman’s craft vanish back under the ground of the small dead end canyon they’d been depositied in.   As the stars came out overhead the distant green-yellow glow of the Homa ruins could be seen lighting up the night skies.

Continue reading »]]> After some casual thought I believe it would be possible to Savage (the general term in use to denote converting some system to Savage Worlds) Gamma World 4E.   I was able to convert several sample origins and origin powers without significant roadblocks.

The purpose of this thought exercise is that after using Savage Worlds, a combat ‘light’ game, the combats in Gamma World 4E seemed slower than they used to (and they seemed reasonably slow before) and more drawn out.  Granted the tactical options are vastly superior in 4E than Savage Worlds but with greater options comes greater down time as the players figure out what they’re going to do.   So I wondered if a bastard child of the two would be workable; a way to combine the faster simpler combat of Savage Worlds with the wacky random chaos of Gamma World 4E.

My thoughts on a way to impliment the 4E weapon and armour generalization (which I really approve of) that 4E brings to the table would be to base Light weapons on Smarts/Agility as the ‘skill’ to use for them and Strength/Vigor for the Heavy weapons.

So light melee would use the higher of the creature’s Smarts or Agility roll as their attack die, rather than Fighting skill and the damage would be xd6+Smarts or Agility with of course the limitation the xd6 could not be higher than the attribute.

Ranged weapons may be an issue unless we just generic them make the damage the same system unlike the standard SW’s where ranged weapons have a fixed damage die, no bonuses really.  But to keep the ‘feel’ of Gamma World 4E where the stat adds damage it might be necessary.

To make Guns still desirable, they would keep the same Ammo (either none or a lot) system but with a gun you can Double Tap, Auto Fire etc and we could leave those with a fixed damage appropriate for their catagory (1H/2H/Light/Heavy).

All the various conditions that 4E is famous for would in general become Shaken status as mostly appropriate.

All the 4E skills would simply become Knowledge Skills where necessary under Savage Worlds or use the equivalent SW skill.

Stats would be determined as such.  The character gains a d10 in the stat of it’s primary origin and a d8 in the stat of it’s secondary origin.   The rest would be determined at random by dealing the character 3 cards from the deck.  Joker would be a d12, Aces be a d10, face cards a d8, 5-10 would be a d6, 2-4 would be a d4.   Or that’s my first rough pass on the idea there.

Skills: You start with the normal d4 in all skills.  Your origin powers grant you a ‘die up’ for their appropriate powers and then you roll 3 skills at random and they go up a die size.

As an example here’s the Android origin Savaged -

Sample Mutations -

Continue reading »]]> Found these and thought they were worth noting…

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/26225249/Alternate_Powers_for_Origins_without_At-Wills

EMPATH

Toy with Their Emotions                    Empath Novice

With a simple tug of the heartstrings, you throw your enemy’s emotions out of balance.
At-Will * Psi
Minor Action                                         Close Burst 5
Target: One creature in burst
Attack: Charisma + your level vs. Will
Hit: The target grants combat advantage until the end of your next turn.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Vitality Transfer as your novice Empath power.

GIANT

Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum                                        Giant Novice

You can easily reach over adjacent allies or foes to strike your target.
At-Will * Bio, Physical, Weapon
Standard Action                          Melee 2
Requirement: You must be wielding a two-handed melee weapon.
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength + your level + weapon accuracy vs. AC
Hit: 1[W] + Strength modifier + twice your level physical damage.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Brickbat as your novice Giant power.

HAWKOID

Airstrike                                                             Hawkoid Novice
From way up here, it’s easy to look down on your foes.
At-Will *   Bio, Physical, Weapon
Standard Action                                Ranged weapon
Requirement: You must be wielding a ranged weapon.
Target: One creature
Effect: You fly your speed and at any time during your movement you can make the following attack.
Attack: Wisdom + your level + weapon accuracy vs. AC. You do not receive the normal -2 penalty to attack rolls for attacking while flying if you attack when directly over your target.
Hit: 1[W] + Wisdom modifier + your level physical damage.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Terrifying Shriek as your novice Hawkoid power.

HYPERCOGNITIVE

Defensive Feint                                                       Hypercognitive Novice
You make a quick, calculated strike and then prepare yourself for your foe’s counterattack.
At-Will   * Psi, Physical, Weapon
Standard Action                                          Melee or Ranged weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: 1[W] + Wisdom modifier + weapon accuracy vs. Reflex
Hit: 1[W] + your level physical damage, and you gain a +2 bonus to all defenses until the start of your next turn.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Uncanny Strike as your novice Hypercognitive power.

PLANT

Another Vine Mess                                              Plant Novice
Your vines writhe around the battlefield and drag your foe along with them.
At-Will   * Bio, Physical
Standard Action                                       Melee 2
Target: One creature
Attack: Constitution + your level vs. Fortitude
Hit: 1d6 + Constitution modifier + your level physical damage, and you slide the target one square.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Lashing Creepers as your novice Plant power.

RAT SWARM

Spread Out!                                                                  Rat Swarm Novice
You spread out in a wide swarm, biting and nibbling at your foes, then pull yourself back together in a new location.
At-Will * Bio, Physical
Standard Action                                    Close burst 1
Target: Each enemy in burst
Attack: Dexterity + your level vs. AC
Hit: Dexterity modifier + your level physical damage, and you shift one square.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Swarm! as your novice Rat Swarm power.

SPEEDSTER

Whirlwind Spin                                  Speedster Novice
You spin in a tight circle, weapon in your hand, as you slice your slower foes to ribbons.
At-Will   * Psi, Physical, Weapon
Standard Action                                      Melee weapon
Target: Each enemy in burst
Attack: Dexterity + your level + weapon accuracy vs. AC
Hit: 1[W] + your level physical damage.
Special: You can choose this power instead of Quick Attack as your novice Speedster power.

YETI

Bigger Claws                                                   Yeti Novice
You score a hit and lash out savagely with your sharp claws.
At-Will   * Bio, Physical
Free Action                                           Melee 1
Trigger: You make a successful unarmed attack.
Target: One adjacent creature
Hit: 1d10 + your level physical damage.
Special: You can choose this power instead of  Big Claws as your novice Yeti power.

Continue reading »]]> I ran a Gamma World 4E adventure this last weekend.  It was using a custom campaign with a couple of minor tweaks to the system, the players started with two Bennies and could earn an extra one if they opted in and took a Bad Mutation when they suffered their morning alpha flux.  A Benny can be used like an Action Point in 4E or can be used to re-roll any d20 roll or adjust reality in minor ways.

We started off with rolling up the characters, Gamma World 4E is pretty random.  In total, complete with leafing through everything it took about an hour to generate 5 characters with no one really knowing anything about the system but with everyone having some experience with 4E and gaming in general and get them ready to start adventuring.

Character wise we ended up with a Empathic Swarm of Parakeets by the name of Petey, an Android Cockroach who goes by Stinky, a Pyrokinetic Engineered Human named Ronson, a Mind Coercing Hawkoid called Klix and a Seismic Mind Breaker by the name of Klod.

After character generation where everyone rolled up their origins and stats and determined what their weapons were which ranged from acid filled spitballs for Stinky as her ranged attack to hundreds of plastic cocktail swords for Petey’s melee attack.   Each player was allowed to choose their armour, a melee weapon, a ranged weapon and they could take one of the few precious guns the village had.   I believe everyone used up their ammo pretty quickly.

Our five, rather strange group of adventurer’s are 16 years of age and about to make their try to be a Have.  Their village has two classes, the Haves and the Have Nots.  The Haves live large, the Have Nots toil.  But being a Have can be dangerous, being a Have Not not as much.

But our five care not for danger so they’ve elected to undergo the Have quest which is to make the trek to the ancient city of Homa and recover prizes for the sacred Happy Meals for their ceremonies and for next batch of Have wannabes.

They leave the crater that has been their home till now, sure the PITAS, a large gang of porkers and badders take their excess food, the tentacle creatures in the green glowing lake in the middle of the crater make going for a swim an adventure but overall it’s not been a bad life.  And they have the gleaming golden arches that they worship to give them hope for a better tomorrow.

Meeting with Meesa at the base of the arches he prays over them, wishing them safety from high trans fats and to go with Ronald on their trip to the dangerous lands to the south.  Each recieves a happy meal with a prize, a small pouch of Kings (the young sleek one, not the old fat one) they can use if they come across any place to sell them.

They journey through the tunnel that takes them out into the lands where the world is not the lush green (albeit glowing with radiation) of their home village.  Instead it’s a wasteland of dust, rock, stunted vegetation and creatures who really wish them ill.

Before they get very far from their mountain home they’re set upon by Podogs, giant beasts the size of Shetland pony’s and Zards, carrion birds who’s motto is, why wait for it to die?

They defeat the creatures without too much trouble, but the small simple battle was perhaps just a pre-cursor to what lays before them.

On their trip down the magical Fofo, a roadway that’s survived from the time of the Earth That Was by some quirk of fate or hand of Ronald, Ronson is narrowly missed by a poisoned crossbow quarrel from a sniper nest off the side of the road.  They drop and then scurry, in the case of Stinky, literally, into cover and then advance on the sniper nest.  They narrowly avoid a springload spear trap in the sand, Stinky recovering it for later use perhaps.  In the sniper’s nest they find no sniper, just a booby-trapped teddybear among other bits of someone or soemthing’s household goods.  Stinky is able to successfully disarm the trap and takes the grenade for good luck.

The next day they run into Steve Mountain Hair and his wife Lola.   Lola is very close to Steve, actually she’s a second head on his shoulders and communicates telepathically since she doesn’t have a mouth.  Steve Mountain Hair is a traveling gypsy trader, going across the wastes trading goods, news and the like.  He has all kinds of things for sell, including surprise boxes containing Omega Tech which can be had for 40 Kings.

[GM's Note: Meesa arranged this meeting for the characters including the chance to get Omega Tech so relatively cheaply.   From a mechanical view, I wanted to give the players a chance to get some Omega Tech and see how it worked before their next hostile encounter.]

Ronson and Petey pooled their resources and purchased a box which they played Rock Paper Scissors Tentacles to see who go it.  Petey lucked out and earned the Force Lance, if you know what I mean.  Ronson also loaned Stinky some Kings and she picked up something [Which I can't remember] and Klix used his Mind Coercer powers on Klod to get some Kings from him and bought one.  They played Mental Tug of War and Klix walked away with an Eternal Light.

Steve told them of a safe place to hole up for the night called Novac down the road, warned them of Podog packs roaming the area and then said get along there to his Brutorz, giant intelligent speaking horse like creatures that were pulling his wagon and headed on.

WIth a flux storm building behind them from the north they hurried on a little quicker and reached Novac, once a strip mall kind of place but now in ruins.  The dangling sign, somehow still vaguely lit on one large build giving the city it’s name  No  Vac…

The Jifbe building they were told about looked like a good place to get shelter but as they drew nearer, Podog’s slunk from around several corners, a pack of of them including a alpha male and female.

They fought the pack off, Stinky’s Bad Mutation power was of impressive use in this fight.  She’d woken that morning with an intense malfunction in her android parts that sent out a bolt of electricity to a random target within 10 squares.  And although somehow through most of the fight there were group members in range, her discharges always seemed to hit a hostile target.

As they were clearing up the Podogs a giant woman, obese and nekkid emerged from the Jifbe building screaming about man things taking her preciouseseseses.  She had huge cast iron irons on her mitts and a bad of lead filled doll heads in a bag at her belt, the only clothing she was wearing.

The remaining podogs ran for the hills as Orgrosh the Bag Lady stepped into view.

This fight proved much tougher and the group was forced to expend second winds, their one healing ability that Klix has woken up that morning knowing how to use and still Ronson was put down hard, and others were bloodied.

[Note: The fight probably wouldn't have been as harsh but we'd not seen the add in your relevant trait ability on  basic attack damage so their damage output with basic attacks was low. But on the plus side, Stinky's Bad Mutation was chewing Ogorsh up, she kept rolling the bag lady at random each turn even though there was usually 3 or 4 of her allies in range too.]

With Ronson down after trying to flee and hide in the Jifbe, the bag lady charged after Klix and Klod but she was herself mortally wounded at this point and just coasting on hate for males and was put down within a few more rounds.   Meanwhile Ronson is slowly bleeding to death inside the Jifbe next to the oil changing station.  Luckily his firey aura had gone out with his unconciousness.

The flux storm comes crashing down and they slid into the Jifbe, setting up Permastone Cubby in the center of building as they were taught, keeping the head shaking side to side, not up and down as the world outside was altered in minor ways by the F3 change storm, a by product of the Evil Hadron’s influence on the world.

Recap:

We leveled them up at this point, they each got to draw an Omega Tech from the bag lady’s giant shopping cart made of shopping carts and they each took Bad Mutations.  This time several people got some seriously bad mutations which might make them more reluctant to take them next time.  But those Benny’s, they’re pretty valuable…

There were several really good mutations handed out as well as they woke up the next morning.

All in all I think it was a pretty good time.   Petey really shined in character description/immersion department and will earn an extra Benny but in general I think everyone had a good time.

After playing Savage Worlds the combat definitely shows it’s speed or lack there-of.  Mechanically it just takes longer to keep track of characters in 4E and their multiple options during a fight causes them to take longer to choose their actions, which power, tech item, basic attack, etc are they going to use.

4E also has considerable more GM time involved in coming up with monsters, creatures, interesting encounter areas/terrain etc.

But hands down combat in 4E is significantly more involved, tactical and complex than combat in Savage Worlds.

That’s not always a good thing though, the time between each player’s turn is a definite issue.

But it would be near impossible to convert Gamma World 4e to Savage Worlds mechanically with the random mutations and the like each morning, the omega tech and all that.  Savage Worlds just doesn’t have the mechanics to do it very easily.   I suppose you could use Necessary Evil power system and capture some of the flavor perhaps but I’m not sure it would feel like the same game at all.

Continue reading »]]> Yesterday I heard two very interesting comments made in podcasts.

One of them is from the the Necessary Evil podcast from the Wharton Hall Gamers.  FYI the Wharton Hall Gamers are very difficult to find if you’re searching for them specifically.  Google is coming up with almost nothing on them.   If you have iTunes then you can find their podcasts that way which is the only way I could come up with to find them specifically.  Just search for Wharton Hall.

You can hit RGPMP3.com and their podcasts are listed there, just not by the group’s name so if you don’t know they’re the ones who did Necessary Evil,  Savaged Delta Green or Sundered Skies casts then you won’t know it till you download and listen.

The other comment was from one of the players at Flagons and Dragons who don’t typically record actual play apparently but they did record about an hour of the opening Gamma World 4E game play using the adventure from the book.

Anyway, back to the first comment, one of the Wharton Hall Gamers said something like, “Savage Worlds is really just a string of encounters isn’t it then?” With the implication that with other systems that wasn’t the case.

Where’as I’ve found it quite the opposite and have even tried to dissect why that might be.  With Savage Worlds the combats while serviceable aren’t of a high complexity or option level.  They provide the necessary physical risk for a storyline but aren’t necessarily the main course.  I still believe that light systems help promote roleplaying rather than ‘a string of encounters’.

Gamma World 4E while its a light version of Dungeons and Dragons 4E is not what one would consider a light system in terms of combat.  Each character has different options they can do a list of powers, pushes, stuns, dazes, slides, buffs, etc.

And yet the Flagons and Dragons player while playing Gamma World said something like, “This is nice, we’ve been playing for like 40 minutes and not rolled a single dice.  Just like the old days.”  The old days I’m taking to mean back with Dungeons and Dragons 1st and 2nd editions, or possible Traveler or even Gamma World 1.

What does any of this mean you ask?  I don’t know, you tell me.  I just find it interesting that one group using the same system, Savage Worlds, I’ve used gets a “series of encounters” where I had an entire session that didn’t have a single combat encounter.   And another using essentially the same system, Wizard’s 4E system, that I’ve used is pleasently surprised that there are actual non-combat encounters when I’ve had several sessions with an hour or two blocks of roleplaying interspersed with combat encounters.

So while I’ll stand by my stance that the game system helps promote one way or the other it does fall to the players and the GM, especially the GM as always, to help facilitate the swings one way or the other.

In a complete side note, if someone from the Wharton Hall Gamers happens to read this far down, here’s a tip, have the GM go through and skim the rules right before the session.  I keep finding myself going “But that’s not rig…” as you have the same discussions each session on shaken, raises, recovery etc.  But at least it’s entertaining yeah?  Seriously it is entertaining.  And informational, I need to find me some Big Turk…

Continue reading »]]> I wanted to make a comparison about MMOG’s and Pen and Paper gaming and the conclusions that I draw from that.

Back in the day, I played Ultima Online.  If you’re not familiar with it, it was one of the first MMOG’s in the U.S. and is still around today.  UO was very much a sandbox, there were no classes, no levels, no game directed direction to your play.  And in the first year or two of the game there wasn’t a whole lot of content.  Back then content was pretty easy to categorize.  It was random spawn that you go and kill.  No quests, no story lines, no ‘phat lewt’.   But back then programmers and servers alike weren’t all that good and the amount of spawn that was available was way under what was needed to keep players entertained because the apps and hardware couldn’t support it.   We even coined a phrase “Connecticut Online” because the countryside was completely empty of things that might prove dangerous to you.

The combats were pretty simple too, you either hit something with a hard object, shot something with a ranged weapon or hit them with the same spell over and over again *Corp por corp por corp por*.

As a result of being a combat light game, light in that there weren’t a lot of options to choose from and pretty static and infrequent things to use those few options on, players become role players.  Sitting around taverns and talking, hanging out in their crafting shops selling things to their customers, and having pretend wars with groups of ‘orcs’ or ‘elves’ and generally playing a persona rather than playing the game.

Then came EQ which had levels and lots of things to kill.  And introduced to the masses the concepts of tanking, crowd control, healing, buffers and debuffers, getting behind someone for the back stab.  Combat went from going into combat mode and trying to stay next to your target so you could ‘swing’ the sword when your timer ran out in UO to having a toolbar filled with icons of various things you could do and combinations and interactions with other players in EQ.

And roleplaying disappeared completely.  Combat was interesting and going after that next carrot on the treadmill became the most important thing.   Killing 10 of this for a NPC who had one line when you clicked it “Bring me 10 of this” was the extent of game play.  And it was good, or at least enough for 99% of the gamers.

Which brings me to an observation and the basis for this post.  Many people decry 4th Edition as the death of roleplaying because the books don’t have any rules for it, that the books are all about combat.  And in that I think they’re right but for the wrong reasons that they claim and not that it kills roleplaying but that it impacts it.  In an aside, “Seriously people?  You need rules to roleplay?”

I believe a direct correlation can be made, at least by me, as to why this might indeed be the case taking the MMOG’s impact on gaming and applying it to our tables.

It’s because combat in 4th Edition or Hero Systems or Mutants & Masterminds  is interesting, much like combat in EQ was.  It’s entertaining and really isn’t that why we’re playing these games?  To be entertained?

In these types of systems players have a huge ‘toolbar’ filled with various things they can try during combat, powers that let them buff and de-buff, crowd control, heal and hurt, single target and masses of targets.    The sheer number of cool things that a character can do is enough to make one giddy.  The GM has way cool monsters and bad guys to run and pit against the players.   Very little is cookie cutter which his bad guys, he has access to sugar cookies, oreos, gingersnaps, all kinds of tasty variety for the players to consume and enjoy.

Then there are systems like Savage Worlds or Fudge or Spirit of the Century or to kick it old school Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  These are combat mechanic light much like UO was.  Your toolbar of tricks is very limited, you either turn on auto combat and try and stay near your target so you can ‘swing’ your sword at them when the timer (your turn) goes off or you shoot them with your ranged weapon or you cast the same basic spell over and over again to kill the target.   The GM has the same issue, all his bad guys do tend to be cookie cutter with minor mechanical differences, all sugar cookies but some with white sprinkles instead of blue ones instead of powdered sugar.

As a result the amount of roleplay in my experience both online in a MMOG or offline at the table with your friends can be affected in direct inverse ratio to how interesting and involved the combat system is with the added bonus/penalty of how many new toys (carrots) you gain along the way.   Players act differently when there is a new toy to pick up, a new power to be gained, all just dangling out of their reach waiting for the next block of experience than there is when the prize is simply the doing.   Some game systems promote the journey’s end, while others promote the journey itself.

And I’m not saying you can’t roleplay with any system or that you can’t have fun and entertaining combats in any system.  Obviously you can.  We’ve had periods where roleplaying that lasted for a couple of hours straight without any combat in 4th Edition and had vastly entertaining fights in Savage Worlds.

What I am trying to say is that the system you choose to play can have a direct impact on the results at your table and these impacts can be obvious and sometimes subtle.

So what’s the end game of all this?  Not much to be honest other than perhaps if you want a game that’s heavier in roleplay then perhaps choosing a lighter system might promote that while a group that might be more interested in combat might choose a heavier system.

Continue reading »]]> In running Savage Worlds which is a very stats light game in comparison to GMing 4th Edition Dungeons or Dragons (or worse 3rd Edition DnD or Hero System/Champions) it’s become interesting to see the differences as they play out.

Savage Worlds lets you as the GM come up with on the fly encounters that are as interesting as any pre-planned encounter simply because it is so stats light.   This isn’t necessarily a rousing endorsement as the variety of attacks, barring magic, psi or super powered settings is pretty limited.  With the ability to shoot, hit or throw something at someone it’s not hard to make a creature on the fly.   This is definitely a pro and a con both.  It’s a pro because it makes it extremely easy for a DM to sandbox a session and to accommodate the players when they bypass his carefully crafted plotlines.   It’s a con in that the bad guys can tend to blur together mechanically.  This puts more creative pressure on the GM to make the bad guys distinct based on something other than their game mechanics.  Which is a pro and con both depending on your players needs and your own creative abilities.

With systems like 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons or Hero Systems, on the fly encounters requires more pre-prepping, you have to have already created some generic stand-ins to haul out when the players go off the track as in both cases making reasonable balanced creatures on the fly is a hit or miss procedure and requires a fairly deep familiarity with the systems.

In Savage Worlds even after only a couple of sessions it’s pretty easy to just go with ad hoc encounters.

Another thing I’m finding is that much like the original Dungeons and Dragons maps aren’t necessary for a lot of encounters and when they are, they’re much alike, simple line drawings on an erasable map that take seconds to knock out.  4th Edition battles, because of the strength of impact of movement powers/effects and the like really need ‘good’ maps to take full advantage of the system.   Places of difficult terrain, obstacles, pits, shadows, braziers full of flaming oil, patches of ice etc. that the players and NPC’s can use to make use of their abilities.   I have a huge roll of maps that I pre-drew out every Saturday morning for the upcoming battles during my 4th Edition campaign.   Which typically meant the players would encounter those battles and led to a more focused non-sandbox campaign.

Encounters being necessary to play out is another factor.  With 4th Edition the system by RAW requires a lot of battles that are really pretty pointless because they’re designed as resource drains.  To burn off the player’s daily allotment of resources.  It’s a practical guarantee that the players are going to win and the chances of someone dying in the first few battles is pretty nil given a typical setup.   I deviated from this with mine in that I just didn’t have the pointless battles, each battle was typically rated as Hard and required the players to burn a lot of resources to win it.   And then there would typically be enough downtime to recover.  Occasionally I would have the chained battle sequence where the intent was to wear them down but for the most part it was boss battles.

With Savage Worlds when you though add in the wild card factor of any attack by any creature has the chance to kill any other creature with one attack it means that every creature is a force that can’t be ignored and even what would be a pointless battle in 4th Edition becomes something that could have major impact.

As an example in our last Zombie Run session, three of the party escorted a engineer into a nuclear reactor so he could fix a problem.  They ran in to four undead.  In 4th Edition this would be a hand wave at best, there’s just no way 4 minions could possibly cause a problem for even a single dnd character assuming the minions were of appropriate level.   To make the disparity worse in this instance in the first round three of the undead were killed leaving a single undead for the three of them to fight.   And yet this single undead almost killed one of the players and perhaps has due to possible infection.

In our last session which lasted our typical 5 hours roughly, the group had an encounter with Zombear (boss battle), a band of raiders (boss plus horde), an ambush by snipers, another band of raiders (horde) and a group of undead that were played out tactically.  That’s 5 tactical encounters in 5 hours something we never managed with 4th edition and the actual tactical dice rolling portions of the session took perhaps 2 hours of the session total.

In many systems like 4th Edition or Champions or whatever, such encounters would have been unnecessary to tactically play out simply because they wouldn’t, couldn’t  have any impact barring astronomically screwed die rolling.  The player characters would simply have been in no danger from any of it and personally I’d of hand waved it with dialogue, “About 10 minutes outside the base you take fire from ambush positions on the road and…” made up something about what might have happened.  Rather than playing it out as we did.

There’s also a subtle issue with 4th Edition in that since the participants in combat are so diverse that combat becomes a joy in and of itself and with the players and GM’s knowing or unknown influence the combat can overshadow the story simply because there are so many cool things everyone can do in combat.

With Champions, like many of universal systems (GURPs, Mutants and Masterminds) the games can end up where building unique and cool characters and then having them fight other unique and cool characters can end up being the primary source of entertainment simply because it is fun and entertaining to take a pile of build points and see what you can come up, taking a character concept, “I ran over Death in my truck and now I have to take his place.” and then building powers around that.  In our heyday we played a lot of champions and a lot of it was character building and set piece fighting with just enough storyline to let us make more cool characters to use.   This isn’t a bad thing, just another area where the game mechanics influence the game play in a significant fashion.

Anyway as I continue to bounce between the game systems it’s interesting to see the effects the mechanics has on the game play.   If you could somehow manage it, it would be extremely intriguing to me to see how the same group would play through the same storyline but with different systems. But that would require me to break out my time machine and after the last time I’m not doing that again barring dire emergency.

Continue reading »]]> As I listen to more and more podcasts I find myself taking mental notes of things that slow down a game in terms of dealing with mechanics.

And as you may know in my old age I’ve become a bit aggressive toward speeding mechanics up where possible as slow mechanics just aren’t fun to me.

One of the most common and most easily fixed issues that’s not really applicable to the game mechanics is that  I hear from practically everyone I listen to podcast-wise, regardless of the game system is the GM/DM going “Does that hit you?”, followed by a pause as the player checks their data and then responds “Yay or nay” as appropriate.  With perhaps a 1 in 4 chance of a clever quip or false answer followed by a correction.   Going back decades (literally), I’ve always had a piece of paper with the player’s AC’s or PD/ED or [fill in the protection of the system here] in front of me.   This seems like such a an obvious thing that perhaps it’s easily overlooked.  GM’s deal with monster data and PC’s deal with PC data mind set perhaps?

4th Edition DnD adds a very obvious slowness hook to any game session in that rather than the old school, “I roll a d20 to see if I hit.  I hit?  Okay I roll this d8 and add +X to see if I do damage.” way of combat, a player even at first level has typically 5 or more powers and on top of that various other things that they have to choose from each round and each power has different damage output, different bonuses to hit, different side effects and for any given situation there may be 2 or more powers that are very applicable and a couple of others that are applicable making a decision a time intensive affair. “Do we need to slow this guy down?  Should I unleash my Daily power to try and take it out?  Is someone else having a hard time hitting and I should use this one that grants Combat Advantage or grants that guy a bonus?”

If you follow the site, you’ll know I’m currently trying Savage Worlds.  It’s catchphrase is Fast Furious Fun.  The Fast portion of that really stood out and made it worthy of notice.   It’s an odd little system, unique as far as I know in its use of dice and its dice mechanics.   But I’m finding those mechanics to be very slow to put into practice all things relative. The dice mechanic defies their Fast Furious Fun slogan.  So much so that I expanded my die rolling application for a friend with vision trouble to handle the Savage World mechanics to speed things up by rolling and figuring out the base roll + the wild die + exploding dice with one press of a key.

As a for instance in Savage Worlds, say a PC want’s to Shoot someone.  He rolls two dice, a d6 and a dx where X is his Shooting skill die.  Now if one of those dice roll a max value (i.e. a 6 on a d6 or a 4 on a d4) then you roll it again and add the next roll to the first.  Now we’re up to 3 individual dice to see if we hit.  And if two of those dice roll max we’re up to 4 dice, each separate rolls.  So let’s say we did manage to shoot our target, now we roll more dice, typically 2dx.  And yes if one of those dice roll max value we pick it up and roll it again and add the new roll to the old one.    With 2d6, one in three rolls is going to require us to pick up one of those dice and roll it again.

As you might imagine this is a slower mechanic than some, perhaps most.  Sure something like Exalted where you roll a double handful of dice is going to be slower.  Heck super heroic level in Heroes is slow simply because of the sheer number of dice you have to roll every attack and then count up both the body and the stun values.  Slow kills game play IMO.

Now overall, combat in Savage Worlds is fast but a lot of that is really due to the fact that on both sides, any character has a chance to kill any other character with a single die roll.  Granted it might require two series of really good rolls (to hit and to damage) but the chance is there.   Add in the fact that roughly 90% of the NPC’s can take one hit and down they go.  And the fact that 99% of the creatures, PC/NPC can only take 4 hits and down they go and you have a fairly short life span for any given creature.  Unlike say 4th Edition where a low level solo might have 200 hit points and take roughly 20 hits to go down.

But the actual combat speed is slow and all this boils down to is in virtually every system  for combat a character rolls two sets of dice, one set to see if they hit and then another set to see how much damage they produce.   This has been the basis of combat systems in most RPG’s since we’ve had RPG’s really. And each roll typically has math involved.   “I rolled this, I add this, I have this temporary bonus or minus.  I hit or miss.  Now I roll this, I add this and I have this temporary bonus or minus.”

It seems to me that a unified dice roll should be possible to come up with where the degree of success of your roll to hit determines damage, rather than the vast majority of the binary systems.  Well I guess some where there is a critical hit mechanic could be trinary.  By binary/trinary I mean you either missed, you hit, or you hit as well as you could.  Damage is a completely separate roll and you might do a lot of damage or a tiny bit of damage (or no damage in many systems) and has little to no bearing on how ‘well’ you hit the target with the exception of those systems with a critical hit mechanic which is usually a pretty low percentage chance.

In an aside, there’s ORE or One Role Engine of course  but that system has so many issues with it in terms of math in terms of degrees of viable usable difficulty settings that it’s hopeless, again my opinion, yours can differ.  But I ran a lot of ‘Monte Carlo’ simulations of percentages with this system and the problems surfaced pretty quickly.

I’ll be honest and say my issue with combat slowness has really peaked with Savage Worlds with its exploding dice system piled on top of the creatures having defenses against both getting hit (Parry/Fixed 4) and taking Damage (Toughness value).   To put it in other systems terms everyone has damage resistance, or a minimum value that any damage roll has to equal to have any chance of hurting the target.  Just so you don’t think I’m singling out Savage Worlds, Hero System has the same system with it’s ED/PD (and Resistant ED/PD) but at least in Hero System die rolls don’t ‘explode’ which adds to the time it takes to roll dice.

But is it really possible to have a unified system?  Sure, you can do like we did with 4th Edition and just apply average damage on a regular hit and max damage on a critical hit.  In the long run the values work out exactly the same (within very minor deviations due to rounding issues).   But systems with damage thresholds like Savage Worlds, Hero Systems, Gurps(?) this doesn’t work as well or at all.  And toss in the exploding dice mechanic and it really breaks.  ANd of course this is still a binary system.  Either you hit or you missed there’s no variation where a really good to hit roll hits harder.

To explain the issue in more detail (goodness I’m getting long winded tonight) with these types of systems, in Savage Worlds it’s completely possible that a character could roll some extremely high number, something along the lines of 1% chance of ever rolling something that high and then completely fail to do any damage to it’s target because they rolled low on damage and didn’t break the damage threshold i.e. Toughness value of the target. FWIW this  really steals the thunder of rolling so well on the to-hit, to for instance roll three 6′s in a roll and end up with a 22 to hit and then roll a damage total of 6 against a creature with a Toughness of 7 and I’m tryng to come up with something to make the ‘game feel’ of this system feel better to me.  Right now I’m leaning toward any critical hit (both sides BTW, NPC and PC alike) will always result in a Shaken status regardless of damage.  It might make it a little gritty though and more deadly definitely.

This brings up another issue.  Randomness favors the NPC’s in any System.  The more random the results the more the PC’s get screwed by things.  Why?  Because the NPC’s typically are only subject to a very few rolls.  They just don’t live long enough to be affected by random chance.  PC’s on the other hand live a very long time, barring killer GM’s, and are as a result subjected to LOTS of random rolls.

Okay I’m diverging all over the board now so I guess I should wrap this up.  The sole point for you take away from this I suppose is Speed Kills.  Or rather the lack of Speed in a mechanic.  It kills player attention spans, game flow, energy and overall entertainment.  So anything you can do to get rid of the slowness helps.  And given the most used mechanic of ANY RPG is combat rolls, speeding those up is going to have the greatest effect of anything you can do.

Or such is my thought.  Your thoughts will probably vary greatly.

Continue reading »]]> This is our Finale session for the summer, during the hiatus we’ll be delving into the Savage Worlds system.

Everyone is present and accounted for in this session, Biminey, Stak, T’Balktu, Torel, Visra.  Our heroes have reached level 10 in the quest to end the dangers to their little corner of the world.

We join them in Aricee’s lair where the dragon, shifted into human female form, instructs them in their tasks, how they must defeat the Guardian of the Lance of Unmaking, recover the Lance and then go to Darkmith to destroy the Chaosborn.

T’Balktu and Aricee spend a few hours alone while the rest work on their gear and Biminey crafts magical items.  Aricee gifts T’Balktu for his performance with a matching set of axes, the greataxe known as Ghost Slayer and the throwing axe known as Splintertree.  He is pleased as was she.  And it’s not everyone who gets to lay with a dragon.  Which I’m sure will have no dire consequences…

They proceed toward the Guardian’s lair after Aricee assures them that she will help them return after they find out it’s a chute down into a room.  Biminey uses his Ladder ritual to make it easy to descend into the depths.

There they find a floorless room with flipping platforms on gears and pistons to stand on.  As the fourth one comes down the platform flips and almost tosses Biminey [I think] into the bottomless darkness but a quick grab by one of the other’s saves him from certain death. [Yes this was a return to the Save or Die of the old days but it is the season finale and the dangers are ramped up accordingly.]

They spread out and defeat the constructs that are attacking them for serious damage, inadvertently spreading out and reducing the risk of any particular platform flipping over. [A platform flipped on a roll of 15 or high, +2 for each person on the platform over 1.  By splitting up they made it a lot less likely that a platform would flip.  Purely unintentional on their part.]

They moved around the room, jumping from platform to platform with Biminey working his way closer to the central brain to shut it down but the amount of damage the party can pump out swiftly overwhelmed the mobile portions of the construct.  There was another bit of a hair raiser as T’Balktu jumped on the platform that Biminey was on and caused it to flip over sending T’Balktu plunging to his death only to be snagged at the last second by Bimney’s Acrobatics roll (which he has no skill in) saving T’Balktu’s player from having two deaths in the campaign.

Under the platforms they uncovered the Lance and retrieved with T’Balktu nimbly climbing the pistols and gears to get to it.  There was no sign of Aricee so they left the room of the guardian by T’Balktu using the lance to open a passage through the shielding magic.

Aricee was waiting at the top and she had a bit of an interlude with T’Balktu in a frozen moment of time where she gave him her True Name so he could destroy the crystal binding her to her service as the tunnel’s guardian.   When he destroyed the crystal embedded into her chest a two headed dragon shadow was cast from the explosion of light.  T’Balktu kept this bit of information to himself.

They talked with Aricee about what they were supposed to do, “Kill the chaosborn” and she was going to get them to their destination and bring their airship to them and support them in their battle.

[In an aside, with herself free from her captivity she didn't give a rat's ass about the chaosborn, a minor annoyance only to her and simply wanted the party out of her hair figuratively speaking.  When she didn't show up to help, when they had to walk back because there was no airship, and later on as Biminey figures out the whole 'explode the airship' was bullshit the light began to dawn on the group.  "Never trust a dragon." isn't a phrase that came about by whim and whimsy.]

The group found themselves in Darkmith where a war was going on.  They spotted the central power area and headed that way, failing their attempts to sneak through town and were surrounded by undead, summoned by Phy’el Fleshwalker for the battle.  They defeated a huge swarm of undead only to seem hundreds more running after them.  When the undead all stopped and Phy’el himself appeared.  “If you win, remember I did you no harm when I could have.” he says and all the undead drop motionless to the ground as the cut the strings binding them to him.  Phy’el has long held a grudge against Liloth and her King and like all good evil people is more than happy to screw them over for slights they have done him.  And he’s also hedging his bets, he senses the magic artifact the group possesses, trying to curry a little future favor perhaps.

They push on and reach the ziggurat of power where the Chaosborn is being reborn.  Liloth his lover is climbing the tower toward him.

T’Balktu kicks on his Ghost Slayer ability and charges the Creature, slaying it, at least it’s human form, releasing the chaosbeast within.  He continues to use the Lance of Unmaking against the creature, finally destroying it and the group turns its attention to Liloth who’s a little upset at the events.  But the group has grown too strong for this little regional hazard and mops up the floor with Liloth and the pet shadows.

They recover a Shadowblade, a dreadful greatsword from the shadowfey that was the Chaosborn’s weapon and very gingerly maneuver it into a bag of holding without touching it.

They help mop up the city, joining in with the hobgoblin tribes battling the minor darkness’s still released in the city alongside the strange eyeless, mouthless priests of the white king.

Leaving the city, on foot, they trudge through the swamps surrounding the city and stop off to spend a couple of days with the Soul Eaters in their home range, the tattoo’s on their arms are extended by the tattoo artists of the tribe, depicting their battles against the darkness in stylized abstracts.

They continue back to Larkson where they find Teagon working a power play to take over the city and remove the Council.  He’s hired more mercenaries from Anvil and after all the fighting his forces outnumber the Watch.    With the group informing him that the deed is done and the city is safe he bargains with them to join in.

The group does and become partners with Teagon.  They arrange for Garon and the just appointed Merchant faction Councilor Neev to be moved out of power gently as possible.  They work a deal to keep the Watch alive and in their control and direct all martial activities in the city, although everyone understands that with Teagon holding the purse strings that feeds the mercenairies that that control could be tenuous.  But Teagon is smart and wise and understands the power that the group presents so the deal is made and at this time both sides appear to be genuinely interested in keeping it.  The group will receive a 1000 golds a month each for their portion of the bargain, a fortune really for this town although Biminey is going to donate his income to the Watch to help train, equip and restore them.  The Watch lost most of their men, dead or injured beyond fighting ability, and what’s left are the lucky, green and inept without only a small cadre of veterans.

They bring the airship into town and then fly out to the slaver stronghold searching for the two ships full of the town’s women and children, finding only a work crew lead by a slaver working on rebuilding the islands buildings.  They capture them all, interrogate them and then destroy the newly constructed works and building materials and fly back to their city.

Sushanna tells Biminey that one of the until now dead lights on the ship’s consoles lit green for a few hours one day while they were gone (during their walk back to Larkson).

When they get back to the city, there is talk of a flying creature spotted in the skies out to sea, seen more by it’s blocking out the stars than any direct visual.  It was assumed to be the group’s airship but when word got around that it wasn’t then other people stepped forth saying it was a vast flying creature, a dragon certainly.

What it was, what the green light means, where the slavers took the slaves, where did Phy’el wander off to, where the slavers main bases are and what they’re doing, the rebuilding of the city of Larkson and the outcome of the battle of Darkmith, these questions and more will have to wait till we pick up this campaign and enter the Tier of the Paragon’s…

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Continue reading »]]> We start our little soiree with everyone present, Biminey, Stak, T’balktu and Visra.  The group meets with the Council and founds out all the bad news, the town was attacked shortly after the group left by portals pouring through undead inside as funnel clouds descended and ripped up the protective stonework even as an army of undead swarmed over the outside walls.

The priests of the temple of Eris were able to eventually sever the controlling strings of the undead and they all dropped to the ground motionless and the citizen rose up in arms to destroy those wandering the city streets.

As the group arrived back they found Captain Werrick missing one of his legs from the knee down and discovered that he led a force against three figures that seemed to be commanding the forces as well as breaching the walls, a female in white, a mostly nude man who’s flesh morphed and wavered and a dark shadow figure.

They also learned that ‘merchant ships from the south’ had arrived and were taking on women and children to sail them to safety.  Two of the three ships had already left filled to the brim with children and women and the third was still loading.

The group jumped to the conclusion that the ships were slavers picking up an easy profit and headed to the harbor.

They ran into a group of sailors and approached them.  A noble looking individual confirmed that what the group suspected and delivered an ultimatum, the group delivers the airship to the island and they give the women and children back.  If they don’t deliver the airship then they’re going to infect all the captives with the parasites and give them back.

The discussion rapidly went downhill.  The noble turned out to be a fake, while the real noble, a fire mage of some power was dressed as a sailor.  The sailors were quickly put down leaving the fire mage and the slaver lashmaster.  As things took a turn for the worse for the slavers the firemage made his escape using a contingency teleport ring to teleport back to the ship leaving the lashmaster who surrendered to the group.  As he made his getaway he told the group that they’d just doomed one ship full of children and if they wanted the others returned then bring the airship to him.

The gruop took a few minutes to recover, loot and discuss the thing and smoke started rising from the harbor.  They rushed to the harbor and found several of the small fishing ships on fire as well as the docks and warehouse. People  rushed in to quench the flames.  Once it was clear the flames were under control  the group got out their longboat and sailed out to the airship and set off after the fleeing slaver ship.

after an attempt to set the ship’s sails on fire failed, the firemage simply doused the flames, Stak shot a note down to the ship demanding the slavers debark in the ships boats and leave the captives onboard.   The slavers failed to listen so the group started riddleing it with ballista bolts.  The slavers quickly retaliated by lashing their captives to the sides of the ship.  This failed to deter the group and they continued to try and sink the ship.  And yes their ballista bolts hit more than one captive.

On board the ship the firemage weighed his options and found them wanting and performed a ritual that exploded the entire ship, killing everyone on board rather than see group rescue a single one.

The group turned the air ship around and headed back to its usual place with a rather somber atmosphere.   They re-entered the city.  Torel’s new found ability to see the lines of power protecting the city while holding the battle standard lead them to an old reading room now in use by the high priest as a bedroom as he didn’t feel comfortable taking the last high priest’s bedroom.

They found a mosaic in the floor and using the key they’ve been carrying for so long they triggered a lift, the entire floor of the room that dropped them down deep into the earth into a chamber.

There they were accosted by constructs demanding a pass phrase, when it wasn’t forthcoming they fought the constructs.  Torel in his infinite avenger wisdom opened a door and added in another set of constructs.   But with clever use of the Deamon Heart amulet and a failed reaction roll the new buzz saw construct fought with one of the other’s and the two ended up dealing something like 150+ points of damage to each other which was probably one of the few things that could have saved the group.   In total the encounter ended up a level 15 against a level 9 party which would typically result in someone or all someone’s dying.  But by setting two of them on each other they removed roughly 300 damage the group would have had to absorb and added 300 damage to the group’s output.   Call it luck if you will but it saved them.

Inside the second chamber they found the Book of All Things and Biminey was able to recover an ass load of residium from the cylidners powering the protections on the room as well as enough parts to make a new construct, a mobile buzzsaw that he can deploy in combat.

As they left the temple they were met by Aricee, a strange being in the form of a plain looking woman but with the eyes of a dragon.  She opened a portal leading them into her lair where they waded through piles of gold and jewels to a side chamber where they were fed a great meal.

Aricee told them that their best chance in the upcoming battle was to recover the Lance of Unmaking which is located deep in her lair guarded by a creature.  She tells them she guards the lair, the guardian guards the lance and she has a device embedded in her chest that protects the lance from her.

The group is located in an instant between the past and future and will have several days grace before the time in the world ticks over and the chaosborn is freed.   This gives them time to prepare, recover the lance and save the world.

She also tells them that the lance and the banner may not be enough and that it is possible to destroy the airship in a single cataclysmic event that will unmake everything in the blast radius.

We leave our group there as they prepare to descend into the tunnels after the Lance of Unmaking for their final climatic battle against the chaosborn and go down in a ball of flame or emerge victorious.

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Continue reading »]]> Even the burning rains couldn’t conceal the odor of death as Stak moved up the last rise before reaching the cleared ground around the city.  If anything the rains added another layer of stench, one of sulfur and brimstone.  As he crested the hillock the scene he pulled up, momentarily shocked at the grisly scene stretching out before him.

Bodies, hundreds of them, most long dead it looked like from their appearance lay scattered, ripped and torn on grounds around the city walls. The walls of the city beyond were breached in several places but the holes were filled and blocked with everything handy from what he could see.  Wagons, push carts, crates, timbers and the rubble of the walls themselves were piled high in the breaches.   The main gates lay twisted and shattered but what looked like ship timbers filled the opening.  There was a sudden pop of light and sigils flared along the walls, twisting red arcane symbols floating above the walls that reminded him of the barrier wardings that Utha had cast in her lair.

The others joined him atop the hill each pausing to stare at the battlefield in silence for several moments.  The bodies lay sprawled, filled with arrows, blasted and burnt by fire or other forces.  They covered a wide spectrum, what were obviously farmers and peasants mixed with hobgoblins and goblins and even larger creatures as here and there a hill giant formed a large mound of dead flesh. 

Most appeared to have been dead for days even weeks, at odds with the time of length the group had been out of the city, obviously foul magics were at work here and the undead army they’d feared for such a long time had materialized, only in their absence.

“What do you make of those?” Torel asked Biminey as the strange symbols flickered into visibility atop the walls of the city. 

The artificer narrowed his senses, reaching out toward the city with that inner force that gave his creations life. His voice was uncertain when he finally spoke, “They’re wardings and artificer origin but they’re… odd.  I get a sense of great age about them but they’re weak, weakening even, running down.”

Stak spoke up, “Those figures on the walls, they’re townies.  I can see the Watch and the Anvil mercs up there along with normal folk.  They’re armed but just barely, a lot of fishing spears and table legs by the look of it.”

Everyone glanced at Stak and then at the minuscule forms, little more than dots in the distance. Visra said, a little incredulously, “You can tell that?”

In answer Stak held up his left hand, the stylized eagle beak running up his forearm from the swirled red patterns across his hand.

T’Balktu grunted, “So we won.”

The avenger shrugged, “Looks like.  Let’s get down there and find out what’s going on.”

The group picked their way through the corpses, the stench even worse close up and it was obvious that all the combatants had already been dead by the time they dropped on this battlefield at least.  The wounds were mostly dry or oozed a black ichor rather than the vats of blood that should have been covering the ground.

A crowd gathered on the walls as they approached and Torel made sure the city standard was unfurled and visible.  A small cheer went up from inside as they made their way closer.

The Captain, his left arm held in a sling next to his body along with Sargent Driskul met them atop the barricade filling the gap where the main gates had been. 

Stak nodded at the upraised eyebrow of the grizzled warrior, holding up his left hand, displaying the red tattoo of the Soul Eaters.  The Sergeant blinked then slowly nodded back.

“Hope we get a better reception than these got, Captain.” Biminey joked as they stopped at the base of the rubble.

“Depends on what news you have to give me.  Come on, Council wants you.  Sergent!”

Driskul glanced behind, “Pyotr and Jenna, get that ladder up here and over the side.  The rest of you lot, get back to your gods damned posts.  Move it or you’ll be defending this wall from outside!”

A long wood ladder came clattering down and quickly the group went up it and over the barricade.  The scene inside was grim, the citizens mixing with Watch and Anvil mercenaries alike atop the wall.   The large courtyard inside, that typically held all manner of carts and vendors was torn up, the cobblestones ripped and torn in a huge circle that encompassed easily a 30 yards across.  Biminey and Visra both flinched at the magic residue lingering over the circle, magic twisted and broken in feeling.

“What happened?” Visra asked holding out a hand, feeling the energies that lay in fragments over the courtyard.

The Captain shot her a look, “Funnel cloud sprung up, ripped up the cobblestones in that circle.  Priests say that let them use it as a summoning circle and creatures poured into the city.  We beat’em but it cost us.  It costs us a lot.  Bodies are piling up in a couple of warehouses on the docks waiting burial.  Same thing happened in four different spots around the city at roughly the same time, same day you left.  That night, an army of undead showed up.  We almost went under but then those showed up” he said jerking a thumb at the flickering wardings, “and the bodies all dropped like someone had cut their strings.”

“Where’d the wardings come from?” Biminey asked.

Captain shrugged, “Not sure on that one, Eris folk weren’t too clear, all I got out of it was they disrupt whatever powers the enemy is using to power the undead.  Surprised you made it through, every time I sent a squad out to try to destroy the bodies they roused long enough to drag them down or force them to retreat.”

Torel glanced up at the standard he held in his left hand and pursed his lips in contemplation.

“We’ll go over everything at the Temple, the Eris priests say we shouldn’t talk in the open, the rain can act as an extension of the enemy they say.  Temple’s supposed to be shielded from it.”

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Continue reading »]]> Due to scheduling difficulties and my desire to do what we can to make sure that everyone is available for the next two sessions the CATS campaign will pick up again on May 15th and 22nd.  These next two will be the last two of this season and will end I hope on an appropriate high note (assuming they survive) as well as a bit of a cliff hanger.

The campaign is/was designed to end at level 10 as our doughty heroes enter the Paragon tier of play after having faced the regional Big Bad.  I have some thoughts on season two that should be entertaining for the players and take the play in a new direction.

In the interim I’m going to be taking a look at Savage Worlds with a, as usual, home brew setting.  It’ll be a horror campaign with crazed asylum escapees, dark deeds and strange symbols inscribed on the victims although with the usual goat skin leggings crew making an appearance.

Savage Worlds is a ‘light’ game system with a decided different take on things.  The fans (dare I say fanbois?) are pretty rabid about the system but then so are [insert game system here] fans typically.  Myself I like to think I look at the good points of a system and modify the points I don’t like to something I do.  Rarely do I just hate on a system, if you’re having fun with it, then it’s a good system, it just might not be good for me.  Also rarely do I take any game system as written as a System From On High and the rules are sacrosanct and never to be trifled with.  Any reasonably complex system can always (with)stand change.

Anyway, one thing I’m not thrilled with in Savage Worlds is the mandatory need for multiple dice.  With a blind player, dice can be an issue.  Right now since we only use a d20 I wrote a audible dice roller for the player such that he just presses a button and rolls a dice and the results are spoken out loud.  But with Savage Worlds, we’re looking at sequences like “Okay to shoot him, roll a d8 and a d6.  Okay the d8 got an 8 so roll it again.  Okay you ended up with 13 total.  That’s a hit plus a raise so your pistol is going to do 2d6-1 damage and an extra 1d6 for the raise.  One of the dice got a 6, roll it again and add the total.”

That kind of sequence is far from unusual with this system.  It’s only when you can’t see the dice that it becomes a significant issue. Not a game breaker but significant.

Another thing with Savage worlds is it falls back to the “My turn?  I hit him with my bat / shoot him with my pistol.” as the basic go-to option for combat.  Not good or bad in and of itself but it will be interesting in seeing how things go after having a laundry list of things you can do combat with 4th Edition.  Yes I know there are “Trick Maneuvers” you can do in Savage Worlds but those really only add one option, “Opposed check to get a +2 to hit” basically.

On the plus side you have a natural combat speed up since the possible options are a…bit… less to choose from mechanically.

One thing that sticks out to me at first glance as I go over character creation  about Savage Worlds RAW is that Agility is King with a huge effing  K.   Agility influences the most skills, determines your skill at hitting with every possible attack as well as determines how hard you are to hit.  Strength’s only function is to add damage to melee hits and let you carry more.  There’s but a single skill associated with it, Agility has something like 10 skills and Smarts 9′ish.* (see below)  which makes the ‘dex monkey’ or ‘wizard’ cock of the walk in combat by far.

Vigor, the semi equivalent of constitution has no skills.  With this system the strong hero pretty much sucks as a character concept.  He either has to spend double the points to keep his Agility high compared to the Agile or Smart character or he has a huge skill cost penalty, has trouble hitting things and is easily hit.  Strength doesn’t even let him absorb damage better, that’s the demesne of Vigor.  So a melee fighter has to raise three skills, Agility, Vigor, and Strength, where as a ranged fighter only needs Agility and Vigor and a caster typically only Smarts and Vigor or Spirit and Vigor.  All three of them can be equally tough but to be equally effective the melee fighter has to spend 33% more resources than the others.

The biggest source of the problem is that perhaps too much is tied in with Agility.   It heavily influences a characters ability to hit with Melee, Ranged and Thrown weapons by making those with low agility have to spend more points in those skills (double the cost) as well as making them take more damage.

In 4th Edition they avoid the problem by strictly tying Strength to Melee and Agility(Dexterity) to Ranged attacks.  Perhaps it might sense to try it here as well by simply moving Fighting over under Strength?   But then we screw with the swashbuckler character concept.  4th Edition avoids that issue by simply using Str or Dex as attack modifiers by class power, only the basic attacks are strictly Str and Dex based per Melee and Ranged.   A rogue could be using Dex to stab you with a knife.

Ahh tis a conundrum.

* – House Rule Changes (so far) –

• Combined Swimming, Climbing into Athletics under Strength
• Combined Survival and Tracking into Nature
• Changed Notice to Perception
• Changed Persuasion to Diplomacy
• Changed Lockpicking into Thievery and move Pickpockets from Stealth into it.
• Added Insight Skill

Continue reading »]]> With everyone present and accounted for we zoom into the world finding Biminey, Stak, T’Balktu, Torel and Visra sitting around the fires of He Who Walks The Night.  They talk of the foes they face and one of the shaman on watch in the world of spirits is possessed by the Strongest Foe.  He mocks the group and then notices Biminey.  Nightwalker lops off the head of the shaman before the Strongest Foe can determine more of the oddities about the artificer.

With the blood of one of his shaman’s staining his rugs, Nightwalker bids the group good night and they sleep in one of the hobgoblin tents.  Rousing in the morning they set off on a hunting / bait trip taking a small hunting party of hobgoblins with them.

A herd of Dark Horns or One Horns attacks them, 5 of the beasts sweeping over a rise and charging into the middle of them.  The creatures focus on the hobgoblins during the initial wave but swiftly engage the players as it’s painfully obvious that they, the dark horns, are suddenly vulnerable to the blade and edge of their foes unlike the past.

The hobgoblins are killed but the party emerges victorious.  With incredible skills at combat they manage to prevent not one but two of the dark horns from fleeing the combat at the last possible second with an amazing throw of a tanglefoot bag by T’Balktu and a foot race performed by Visra and Biminey after the last one.  [Actions points for the win here, without them at least one if not both of the one horns would have escaped and then been in the battle with the Hunter]

The group cuts the three foot dark horns from the creature’s and stows them away as proof of the encounter and collects the personal effects of the hobgoblins that fell in battle and then burn the corpses.

Stak goes ahead to determine the tracks and see where they lead.  He overhears two voices, hard to pinpoint speaking the toungue of the dragons.  The voices refer to each other as sister and from the snippet of conversation Stak comes away with the thought that they do not like the Spirithunter, referring to him as a trespasser on their domain.  They also reference the group, “they bear that which can give us the true death sister.” before he catches a glimpse of a shrouded shape, seen more by displaced air than sight.  A dragon like shape although with two heads.

They do not travel far before they find themselves in a clearing, dimly lit, dimmer than the day’s light would make it seem.

[Although no one remarked on the coincidence of without searching they ran into the Hunter, it was because he was twisting reality to bring the two of them together.]

Diplomatic talks fail rather quickly and the battle is joined.  The hunter unleashes his deadly bow shots on the party, never missing while his flayed bulls and a single dark horn engage them in melee.  The bulls although formidable proved to be a mere roadblock in the group’s path as they engage the hunter.

The hunter, although he could have fled the battle, elected to stay.  His chaotic nature or a lust for vengeance against the group that has killed his ‘children’ or a sense of invincibility may have driven him to his death.  Or perhaps something else entirely.

The group recovers the Hunter’s bow, Fatebringer.  A gleaming black greatbow with strange properties.  As well as the hunter’s cloak which blends one in with the surroundings as well as for a momentary time can render one invisible completely.

[This encounter could have actually ended without a fight if the party had taken the right tack with the hunter and they could have steered to other pastures.  But "Enough talk!" and the fight was on.]

They head back with their trophies to the Soul Eater tribe and there was much rejoicing, well as much as a on the brink of starving group can rejoice.  NIghtwalker brings them into his sacred tent and totems are set up around the edges.  He tells the group that for their deeds they are being made honorary members of the tribe and can elect to take a totem creature.   Each member does and as they touch one of the totems the red dye on the wood smoothly curls up and out over their left hands and halfway up their forearm, then recedes leaving behind a abstract tattoo that twines about their skin.    The tattoos lend a minor touch of the creatures power to the members of the group.  T’balktu gains the strength of the ox which lets him ignore the hindering weight of his armour, Stak gains the vision of the eagle allowing him to see that which might be missed, Visra gains the silent stealth of the hunting owl that glides on soundless wings before grabbnig its prey, Torel gains the wolves ability to recover from damage that would kill most creatures and Biminey gains the slyness of the fox that lets it slip through a pack of dogs without getting bitten.

[The players did not know the effects of the tattoo's before making their choices.  Mechanically they gained the following - T'balktu isn't subject to armour penalties to skill checks or movement, Stak makes two perception rolls and keeps the highest any time he needs to make one, Visra can make two stealth checks and keep the highest, Torel recovers +2 hit points when he spends a surge and Biminey can dodge one opportunity attack that he might incur during his movement.   These were intended as cool features for the players as well as make them stand out a little more.]

After the ceremony they talk with Nightwalker about their next steps and the Soul Eaters are going to send out messengers to cease hostilities against the town and outlying settlements while the group seeks the missing knowledge that holds the ka or soul of the Strongest Foe.  Biminey translates that as a Book that holds Hash’Kar’s true name.  He mistakenly assumes it’s the amulet he’s been holding onto these long months and hauls it out of its warded and protecting spot in his heavy flail.  Nightwalker looks puzzled, “Why would you give me this?” and then all the shamans keeping watch in the spiritworld start having siezers, muttering or crying out that “He’s coming!”

Three of the spiritwatchers manage to rally but one of them is possessed and Nightwalker is forced to kill him before the Strongest Foe can take over and manifest. But not before the Strongest Foe, King Hash’Kar, chaosborn again, knows what it is that Biminey was hiding, knows that the group has the key that could unlock his doom.

[It was missed during this session by everyone but the Hobgoblins kind of ate the group's horses after they left on the hunting trip.  I completely forgot to mention it an no one else made any note of the fact that they were missing.]

They pack up and rapid travel back to the city of Larkson.  Nightwalker doesn’t seem to happy with them, he’s lost two of his shaman brothers because of the party although he does realize that he’d of likely lost them all if the party hadn’t of shown up and killed the hunter. [Or did they?] After two days travel they run into Liloth in her travel form who unleashes a prince of the abyss on them, a minor one admittedly but still.  The beast almost destroys T’Balktu several times but the persevering healing of Biminey keeps the goliath alive and they destroy the deamon prince’s corporeal form sending its essence back to the abyss there to spend 66 years pulling its tattered form back together.

[This was a triggered encounter that's been pending for a long time awaiting the bad guys finding out the group has the amulet.  mechanically it's leveled up with the party as it waits its turn in the limelight]

The group arrives back at Larkson to find it has been under attack, the walls have been breached in several places as well as the main gates.  Bodies of animated corpses litter the grounds in front of the walls but the city still holds.   The gaps have been blocked with makeshift barricades and strange wardings flicker along the walls.

The group makes it way down through the grisly battlefield, the stench of long dead flesh strong and harsh, something finally able to overthrow the smell of fish that lay about the town.

As they clamber over the rubble and littler that block the main gate we leave our heroes to find out exactly what happened in future sessions.

[Overall this was a little collapses as I want to get to the season ender in the next two sessions as Torel is going to be unavailable for awhile after that so I'm going to compress my kind of planned out 3 or 4 sessions worth of gaming into the next two but I think it'll still be coherent and logical progression.

For the curious Fatebringer has the following stats:  Greatbow - Properties: On critical hit the target is restrained.  Critical damage: 3d8.  On a miss the wielder gains +1 to hit to a maximum of +4.  The bonus goes away once the wielder hits the target or switches to a new target.

Hunter's Cloak - Property: +3 to Stealth skill.  Power - Daily - Minor action: Gain invisibility until the end of your next turn.  The invisibility is lost if you attack or are hit by an attack. ]

Continue reading »]]> As my 4th edition DnD campaign is drawing to a season finale for the summer I’ve been looking around at other systems.  One that I’ve had a vague interest in trying is Savage Worlds.  This system, if by some odd chance you’re not familiar with it,  is a sandbox system, much like Champions/Hero System, GURPS and Mutants and Masterminds (to some extent) to name a few.

These systems are set up to handle a lot of genre although superheroes is the prevalent one along with most eras with various degrees of success and typically include an assload of additional settings books that add specifics that are related to an genre/era to round them out that in general cover a pretty wide gamut.  Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Wild West, Swashbucklers and Post Apocalyptic etc. are typically published over the years after the initial release of the base system.

One thing and off topic, after dealing with the simplicity that is DnD 4th Edition from a Player and GM point of view (especially since the only dice we use is a d20), other systems feel anitquated. I forsee new gaming systems taking some of the 4th features and expanding them into other genres including a sandbox mode.

Anyway, so I’ve been looking at Savage Worlds, it’s one of the few I’ve not looked at very heavily or used which has a draw in and of itself for that reason.  It’s not as complicated as the other sandboxes, at first glance, which is a plus as I’m too old for complicated for the sake of being simulationist.  As part of my ‘looking’ I looked around for gameplay podcasts using Savage Worlds and found one over at rpgmp3.com on their rss feed called Savage Worlds – Rippers.  The Rippers part references the setting the group is using which is Victorian England from the sound of it circa late 1800′s with a bit of supernatural and of course featuring the most infamous Jack.  Other than Burton of course.

As they’re going through their character design (see I do get to the point eventually) it strikes me how much a sandbox system can force players to make characters where-as a class based system allows players to make characters.  And by make a character I mean give it a personality rather than a list of powers and numbers.

So I toss my mind back over the decades of GM’ing I’ve done and it’s easy to see this repeated.  Game systems that hand a player a character ‘off the shelf’ as in “here, you’re a fighter, you get to do this” make it…. easy(?) for the player to simply accept that and for the… lazy? detached? gamist? player, that’s enough.   Off the shelf characters focus on the What, and the Who is at the players discretion without any natural pressure to define that. And in may cases the What is all that’s of any concern.

Let me interject here that I’m not saying one or the other is bad or better or right or wrong, I’m merely pointing out observed human behavior and some thoughts on underlying causality.

Game systems where the player has to literally build their character from a essentially unlimited collection of parts seems to force them to have a character rather than a collection of numbers.   The Who is forced to be considered even as the What is created.  “Well Miss Angela is a doctor so she should have this medicine knowledge thing and be smart.  And she studied fencing in college so I guess she should have some skill in fighting.”

As opposed to, “I guess I’ll play the cleric.”

To make a construction analogy, when someone builds a house, they’re involved with it from the ground up, they make changes to the floorplan, add arches and decorative bits to the strcuture, put in that big bay window where they can sit and read while enjoying the sun and the view.

When they buy a house, they may put on a new coat of paint or they may not.

Both people could and in many cases eventually do end up with the same ‘house’.  But it’s more likely that the person who bought the house is going to settle for things the way they are when they bought it.

To bring this analogy back to the ‘real world’, as a GM you can help with their paint choices.  There are “10 minute questionnaires” out there that you can pass on to your players, regardless of game system with questions like “How has your character earned a living up to this point?”  “Are there any people, groups or societies that the character is a part of or involved with now or in the past?”  “Where did you grow up?”.   These kinds of things can help the player get a handle on the character before they get to the numbers whether their choice is as simple as which class to play or as diverse as does their weapon have the armour piercing advantage and deal extra knockback…

So as you bring out your class based games and get your players going with new alternate lives, remember to encourage them with word, question and setting to make those characters theirs and not fighter_0001 or blaster_003.  Your game play will be the better for it.

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Continue reading »]]> I thought some people might find this interesting.  To me what makes a good session great or a bad session better is the amount of time the DM puts into thinking about what’s come before and what comes afterward.  It’s only with thought that things tie together.  You might get a happy synchronicity on occasion but these, at least for me tend to be accidents and can’t be relied upon.

So with that said, the party was  going to need to seek out the hobgoblins in the region last week, who have banded together.  On the way there I’d come up with a minor POI or Point of Interest that could be engaged or bypassed as the party wished.  These always start out as ‘filler’ material to lend verisimilitude to the world that things happen in spite of the players, not because of them.

There have been several such incidents during this campaign.  What might appear to be a minor encounter just for an encounter’s sake branches the world as the player’s react to it.  The rescue of the people kidnapped when the airship touched down in Darkmith, the rescue of the slaves from hobgoblins, the encounter with the Hill Giant (Rest in peace big fella you had so much ahead of you), the bandit encounter, the woman and child who entered the town bleeding to name a few off the top of my head.  These were all Important Moments In Time and helped determine future events.

This most recent PoI was of a similar nature.  This little encounter started out in my planning as a small little tactical combat opportunity as they searched around the countryside looking for a tribe of hobs to parlay with.  Nothing special, the kind of thing that every DM pencils into his flow chart to make sure he has enough ‘stuff’ on hand to fill the session.

But over the course of the week this little minor side point grew and evolved and here is how it happened.

As the week went by the generic “Necromonger” as it was, your basic necromancer encounter, a creature shunned from town for his stereotypical fetish for the dead.  My initial envisioning was of a necromancer taking advantage of the bodies of a hobogoblin intra warfare site.   The initial single encounter broadened into two encounters and the scenery was filled in.   The generic aka without much interest antagonist turned into the Steppes Hag as I found time to consider the upcoming weeks events.   I envisioned this creature as a minor legend in the area, one that fed on the dead and made them serve her and the encounter grew into three ‘minicounters’.  A kind of minor delve.

Then as I was working on my Rogue’s Gallery of villains on the opposing forces a little note I’d penciled many weeks ago about one of the creatures working for the BBEG back in the day, Utha Plaguebringer now escaped from her prison like so many others of the dark days, caught my eye and the Steppes Hag became Utha and a new plot branching was brought into being.

I’d already set the stage for Utha to make an appearance, her pet, a kind of liche like dragon creature had already been spotted searching the countryside (looking for bodies for his mistress truth be known now after the fact as a kind of foreshadowing but it also had the side benefit of increasing the paranoia of the players).

As I dressed up the encounter a bit more I realized that Utha wasn’t doing her job very well.  So the encounter grew more legs and stretched out.  Instead of just sending out Bonegnasher to spot battle sites, she set up a ritual, a powerful summoning magic that subtly leads people toward her lair and drives them to their natural tendencies to fight.  It was aimed primarily at hobgoblins who enjoy fighting other tribes.  This way she doesn’t have to go looking for bodies, they come to her.  Naturally though as the players traversed the countryside they would be caught in this ritual.  Although they discovered it before walking into the trap as heroes tend to do.  But what makes a hero is what he does with such knowledge.

In addition she’s still bitter about her sister, Liloth gaining the favor of the Dark One and is always scheming ways to curry favor and throw down her bitch of a sister as she sees her.  So she’s concocted a plan to infect the corpses with plague and give them back the semblance of healthy flesh.  These hobgoblins she’ll send back into the tribes where they’ll pass on the infections.

The underlying reason for her actions are many as I inked her into being.  She along with all the others of the Darkmith bunch hate the hobgoblins as they were part of the forces that locked them away and to date still guard against any creature that escapes the wardings of the ancient prisons.  By decimating the tribes she hopes to win the ‘love’ of the Dark One.  In addition committing genocide by disease is just a joy of hers anyway.  She’s not a very nice creature.

In the end the encounter grew from a simple time filler into what I think was a fairly interesting encounter (even if there was no loot ) and the players’ actions or inactions yet again have a direct and major impact on the world.  If they’d not followed up on the encounter, if they’d of not killed her or if they’d of taken too long to kill her she would have escaped and continued on with her plans and the players would have had to deal with the consequences of the hobgoblin tribes, a major if unknown factor in the fight against Darkmith sickening and dying.

As it was they performed a service for all hobgoblin kind, the same hobgoblins by the way who have ransacked and destroyed several farming villages of Larkson and taken the people they didn’t kill into slavery.  Just because hobgoblins have a common enemy with the group, doesn’t make them nice people either.  Not everything is black and white, in fact few things are.

So there you have it, the evolution of an encounter from a generic combat fight into something with interest and ties to the world and the story line and it was simply by spending a little time each day thinking about the planned encounters and past encounters and the forces at work in the world.

Hopefully this will inspire you to turn that next random wandering encounter into something with deeper roots than as a portable bag of experience and gold for your players.

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Continue reading »]]> We start the day with a full house, Biminey, Stak, T’Balktu, Torel and Visra are all present and accounted for.

As the group prepares to depart the city looking for the Soul Eater tribe they’re stopped at the gate by a messenger who delivers a note from Councilor Teagon along with a small pouch.  The note is innocuous enough, wishes them well on their journey and mentions he’d like to discuss the town’s leadership with them when they get back.

The pouch contains a months supply of elvish trail mix and delicacies for 5 people.  It’s a minor bag of holding with a 8 cubic feet of storage space and roughly a 50lb limit on goods.

The group heads south in search of the soul eaters.  On their second day Stak notices a pack of wolves lead by a huge wolf with bony spikes and vertically slit yellow eyes pacing them.  The alpha wolf goes out of it’s way to let Stak see it and appears to be mocking them.   After a couple of hours of this the wolves disappear to not be seen again.

Toward the end of day 2 they realize that they’ve been pulled off their course by a very subtle magic, one that’s pulled them eastward and they arrive at the site of a battle.  Hobgoblins a few mostly whole, others torn to bits litter a large swatch of dry riverbed.  A large tunnel leads into the opposite cliff side.  As they look the area over, two large hobgoblins, bearing the full length tattoos of hands of bane plod out of the cave entrance and each grabs the ankle of a hobgoblin body and drags it back into the cave.

Torel’s avenger senses kick off and he realizes that the two have no aura of life about them.

They devise a plan to ambush the hobgoblins and barely get into position when the two re-emerge and move out gather more bodies.  They’re swiftly and quietly downed by the group.

Stak sneaks into the cave and spots a larger chamber littered with hobgoblin bodies of multiple tribes.  At the far end a female figure is crooning and cackling over the body of a hobgoblin, magical energies flowing from strange crystals in the cave walls through her and into the body and the body is slowly repaired of all damage.

She’s muttering to herself, about how her little pretties will go forth and spread disease and sickness among the guardians and how her beloved will throw down his current favorite and take her up instead.

Stak retreats and informs the others and they move into the caves.  The creature, Utha Plaguebringer, senses their life force and flees, triggering the bodies to rise up as well as locking the chamber behind wardings preventing exit and bringing into life blaster sigil’s that fire flaming rays of energy at the party.

They cut a swath through the zombies, none of which are very strong and Biminey disables the sigils that are flash frying the goliath barbarian.

Together they work on dropping the wardings after dealing with all the hostile threats in the room.   As they destroy the warding there’s a rumble from deeper within the earth and the cavern shakes and dirt and rocks fall free of the ceilings.  There’s also a piercing cry of pain and surprise from where Utha fled.

They proceed deeper and find Utha clawing her way out of rocks near where a large dragon like creature lays buried under new rubble.  The same creature they spotted flying in a search pattern on their way back from the hobgoblin raid.

Utha screams and locks burst from cages holding the last two of her plaguedogs which leap out after the party.

They work well to contain the threat, Stak pouring massive damage into Utha while the rest manuever around the room tying up the others.

Bonegnasher, Utha’s pet flying creature emerges from the rubble only moments before his mistress dies.  Although as usual T’balktu takes the brunt of the damage the fight is of no match for the strength of the party and they down all four of the creatures.

[Note: This battle had four level 7-10 elites.   Bonegnasher's main attack was an 'overkill' which did the trope'ic claw claw bite attack old school style which T'balktu felt the brunt of more than once.  This is another example of where player actions impact the world.  The group could have ignored or retreated from this battle at any time. In that event Utha's plan would have continued on and the party would have run into plagues sweeping through the hobgoblin tribes later on which would have created another situational branching of world events.]

They clean up after the fight, disposing of the bodies with fire and light, dragging them outside.  T’balktu laments the last of his smoking jacket and tosses it on the pyre.

Finding a place to hole up they rest the remainder of the night.  On Visra’s watch she comes awake as temperatures plummet and spots a pair of yellow glowing eyes with vertical slits in the face of a human male staring at her.  As she screams the eyes blink and deep laughter fades away into the distance.

They move on the next day crossing the trail of hobgoblin war party heading in the direction they’d come from after moving west to get back on their original trail.  They elect to not pursue.

They run into two skinless bears, huge dire creatures that rip T’Balktu and Stak into catfood before they’re put down hard.  The city banner reacts to these creatures and Torel, the apparently holder of the banner plants it and feels the flare of powers interacting between the banner and the creatures.  Biminey and Visra vivisect the creatures and uncover powerful components for the making of unique magic items.

That night Torel is surprised by a band of what turn out to be Soul Eaters who enter the camp and give them guest rights for two days and invite them to come talk to the elder of the tribe. The band seems very nervous and twitchy and constantly stare out into the darkness.   The leader of the band Seoul tells the group of the Hunter that is plaguing them and his foul Furies, hairless beasts that are killing them.

The group follows the band to the Soul Eaters camp, a fortified encampment.  There they meet with He Who Walks The Night, an ancient hobgoblin shaman with tattoos down to at least his waist.

They palaver and Nightwalker tells the group of the black Hunter who kills them during the day with arrows that strike and kill them without any sign of the attacker and his creatures which hunt them at night.  How their blades and magic do nothing against the creatures and how they’re dying slowing in small numbers trying to stay alive.

Biminey recalls some lore on this creature, that it was a force of Chaos, called to the chaos that the creatures of Darkmith created, that fed off the energies and occasionally did tasks for the Darkmith king, mostly as the tasks would generate more chaos.

The group and Nightwalker speak long into the day, sharing tales of their exploits, explaining the trophies they bear.  They learn that the hobgoblin tribes were set to guard against creatures escaping Darkmith but over the decades the tribes ‘lost their way’.  Much like the Keepers of Secrets apparently have as he refers to the city of Larkson.  That the Keepers have lost the knowledge that was their sacred trust and Nightwalker now fears that the Darkmith King will find his way to freedom without the means to put him back down again.

The group hears the tales and decide they’re going to help the Soul Eaters with their issue and they share the goodies that Tegaon gave them with the tribe, all of which are starting to show signs of lack of food and the next day they’re going to head out and see if they can get the Hunter to come after them.  They believe that the banner that the priests of Eris made for them will let their own weapons work against the Hunter, a creature of chaos that is allied with the powers of Darkmith.

[DM's Note: The banner does work this way actually.  Merely having it out allows the players to deal normal damage against the Darkmithian's. Planting it and setting up the draining zone actually allows the players to truly kill one of the Darkmith's.   They're a tough breed and hard to give a true death to...

The magic items they’ll get out the Furies are as follows for the curious, they’re not intended to be perfectly balanced for 4th edition but are balanced for my campaign and the finances of the party –

• 3,400 residium – Bear Skull Helm – Property: Critical attacks deal 1d12 additional damage. Daily Power – Demoralizing Roar Blast 3; Wis vs Will; target takes 1d8+4 psychic damage and is weakened and slowed until the end of its next turn.
  “A transparent roaring bears head appears over your head and blasts out a crushing roar at nearby opponents daring them to attack you.”
• 4,000 residium – Bears Heart Amulet – Property: +2 on saving throws versus Fear or Psychic.  Daily Power – Bear’s Fury – Immediate Reaction when first bloodied – Make a melee basic attack, Str vs AC; 1d8+4 damage close burst 1; target’s enemies only.
  “The ghostly image of a bear appears overlaid upon you and spins, clawing everything within range.”
• 5,000 residium – Bear Claw Amulet – Property:    Daily Power – Spend a healing surge and deal 4 damage to any enemy creature that successfully attacks you with a melee attack until the end of the encounter.
  “Ghostly images of bear paws lash out at anyone foolish enough to attack you.”

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Continue reading »]]> I’ve posted on the masterplan facebook about a rather painful bug with Masterplan and custom monsters and it’s important enough that I thought it should get as wide a notice as possible.

Defenses on custom monsters are invariably screwed up.  Typically if you have NO modified defenses on a creature that you import from the MB then you’ll get the right AC.  FRW though will typically be broken and broken on the high side like +3 to +6.  If you’ve modified defenses down very far then you’ll see a corresponding increase on the + side of FRW.  So if you have for example FRW lowered by 5 in the Monster Builder you’ll find F up by 5 and RW +11 in Masterplan.

You can fix this in MP by going in and modifying your monsters manually until there author gets a fix out.

My apologies to my players for not noticing this earlier.  Luckily for them I’ve only run two sessions using MP at this time and it really only drastically impacted two encounters.

D

Continue reading »]]> The session includes Biminey, Stak (played by Ryan my 8 year old), T’Balktu, Torel and Visra.

We join our group in the aftermath of the hobgoblin raid.  For the curious the hobgoblins in my world are a cross between feudal japan and American Indian.  Highly martial ideology but formed into large tribes that stake out territories and have a lot of intra-tribal warfare as well as fighting anything that invades their territories.

The group has just wiped out a force of the Throatcutter’s tribe.  A sizable force of their better warriors according to Sgt. Driskull afterward as the Throatcutters sent a lot of more well trained than normal fighters on this raid.  For someone familiar with the hobgoblin ways it’s easy to tell a warriors relative skill by the tattoos they bear.  They did lose over half their forces in mercenaries and city watch in the doing though as a result.  A good thing the city sent a well trained force instead of mixing in neophytes and raw recruits.

[DM's Note: The relative 'worth' of a hobgoblin warrior can be judged by the tattoos they wear.  It starts with a tribal identifying tattoo in the palm of their main hand.  As they rise in skill and respect the tattos grow up their arm across their shoulders and down the other arm.  A warrior who has 'gone the distance' becomes a Hand of Bane in the tribes, one of the most feared and respected warrior the hobgoblins have.   Shaman's, warcasters, fleshcarvers, spiritspeakers, etc. have tattoo's that grow out from the top of their heads.  A Speaker Of the Dead, the shamanistic equivalent of a Hand of Bane tattoos will have covered their entire head down to the base of their neck.]

They rescue 31 captives, farmers and crafters that were taken by the hobgoblins out of about 60 and get them bundled up to head back.  The trip back is slower, taking 12 hours rather than 8 due to the infirm from the fighting or the general condition of the farmers.

While hiding in a dense copse of trees lookouts spot a bat winged dragon like creature flying high overhead in figure eights, obviously a search pattern but they go undetected or at least unmolested by the creature who’s search pattern takes it out of sight to the south east.

They’re welcomed back in town as heroes and as it’s well past evening they head off to the Temple of Eris to take a break while Driskull and his aid Baen head off to report and others see to the welfare of the farmers and the wounded.

At the council meeting the next day, which includes the entire group, Captain Werrick, Sgt Driskull, Councilors Teagon, Lerik and Garon and their aids.  Lerik has a new aid, a non-descript human who’s gaze rarely leaves that of the group and who says nothing or even moves much during the meeting.

While the group is reporting Lerik makes outbursts, primarily to himself it seems that they’ve doomed them all, the whole town will now suffer the wrath of the tribes and be destroyed.

Finally Garon has enough of his comments, rants and snide remarks and dismisses him, requesting Driskull to escort the man out of the building.   As Lerik passes the group they recoil a bit at the rank body odor of the man, although appearing up kept and clean he reeks of old sweat.   Lerik’s aide follows his boss out staring at the group the entire while.

Garon presents the group with an award, Dragonshard Daggers, obtained for them by Teagon from a crafter back in the Feywild.  Each dagger gleams of highest quality craftsmanship, the pommels set with a strange quartz like crystal that has a sheen like an opal.  Teagon tells them they are a gift from him and he relieves them of the eladrin custom of a return gift.   *hint hint*

The daggers have the ability that if they are infused with life force (healing surge) they can be used to communicate with a holder of the other daggers.  In addition they have the ability to allow two wielders who are adjacent to the same target to get combat advantage once per encounter as the wielders will be able to time their strikes just so to open a target up for attack.

Biminey wonders out loud where Lerik’s house might be after his rant against them and Garon is a little suspicious of his reasons.  Teagon though gives them a bit of a high sign and a shake of the head and Biminey drops it.

Later that day a commoner arrives at the temple with a note that has directions to a house on it but without any identifying marks.

Torel goes and talks to Captain Werrick and Driskull about their next steps and learns that Driskull wanted to leave to seek out a tribe of hobgoblins that the other hobgoblin tribes hold in high respect.  They are known as the Easters of Souls and their tats are in red rather than black like the other tribes.  Their home ground is far south near Darkmith although with the recent upheavals in the tribes wanderings they may no longer be there.

Meanwhile Biminey and T’balktu follow the directions and reach Lerik’s house.  There Biminey detects strong arcanic energies around the place.   He sends for the others of the group who eventually arrive and he also detains a 2 man patrol of the Watch.

A strong smell of incense hangs over the area near the house.

He tries to open the door, it’s a good lock though and T’Balktu in his barbarian impatience simply scales the wall to see if he can figure out what the problem is.  He notes that the inner vegetation is all dead of the courtyard gardens.   Inside he undoes a couple of bolts and lifts a heavy bar away from the door.

They knock on the house door, taking one of the guards with them, leaving the other outside.  This door yields to Biminey’s artificisistic touch and swings open. Billows of incense waft out, a chaotic melange of all possible flavors.

Inside they find the house empty and Biminey follows the arcane energies to the back of the large residence and into a bedroom, obviously a master bedroom.  A quick search uncovers a trapdoor cleverly hidden under a rug so that it can be opened and closed again from underneath leaving the rug over it.

Stak hears voices from below, a raspy voice demanding Lerik move faster at getting ‘them’ out of the city or he’ll find another tool and Lerik whining that he’s working as fast as he can.

T’balktu tries to head down the shaft but one of the ladder rungs is trapped to slide easily under any weight and he ends up as a noisy thud at the bottom of the shaft.

Down a corridor he spots Lerik talking with a large winged humanoid that appears leprous in Lerik’s hidden church of Bane a very human-o-centric god.  A fight ensues and undead, Lerik’s servants appear and join the fray.  The party is unfortunately tied up in a narrow hallway without much room to maneuver but they eventually get the battle opened up a bit and take out the winged creature which cuts the power ties with the undead.   Lerik is killed during the fight, electrocuted by Lightning Sphere from Biminey which dropped him into a dying state.   Then Visra finishes him off with an AOE invoker power that catches him in it.

[DM's Note: I completely fubarred this encounter in terms of mechanics.  For those not familiar with my house rules I remove the +1/2 level on tohit bonuses and defenses.  This makes it a wash in terms of accuracy but opens the playability range of creatures tremendously.  But this fails if you include the wrong version of the monsters you've made, ones without the -1/2 level modification.  So the players were trying to hit things with essentially a +5 to all defenses for the entire fight.  This resulted in their hit ratio shifting from around 70-75% where I like them to be to roughly 45% or less than half the time.  On top of that they're level 8's fighting level 10 standard soldiers and a level 10 elite controller, typically this is a non-issue with my HR but that shifts the chance to hit down another 10-15% or so and now they're hitting on about 1 in three attacks.  This was my first fight involving creatures this high and I was thinking I was going to have re-visit my numbers.  I didn't want to change the defenses midstride so I put an exit plan in that if the boss was killed the undead would drop as well.  Unfortunately the players didn't kill the boss all that fast.  As a result the fight dragged on.  At the time I was worried I'd hit this whole 'grindfest' that some people complain about but as it turns out it was just a dumbass mistake on my part.

In regards to Lerik, a major NPC dying, I let the chips fall where they would.  I had two possible endings, he dies, he doesn't die.  This way the party got the satisfaction of killing someone they really didn't like.  And that's the sign of a good NPC.]

The watch shows up, brought in by the guard the party sent for reinforcements.  The guard they’d kept specifically to watch what they did ends up being a good witness in on their behalf and by the time the events are reported on, believes he saw everything the party did first hand and he keeps their name clear.  Torel has a nudging suspicion in the back of his mind about the winged figure and it suddenly dawns on him that the facial features look like Lerik’s new aide.  The others don’t see it but are willing to give the avenger the benefit of the doubt.

They head back to their bed and breakfast after reporting on the events.

Reporting to the council after they’re cleaned up they find Garon more than suspicious as to their motives for happening to be there but secretly Garon is also more than relieved to be free of Lerik and his poisonous impact on the town from his position of power as a non-human hater.

Teagon encourages Garon to give them Lerik’s house, a fine residence as befits the leader of the merchants guilds of the town under the ‘rationale’ that they would be best suited to ensure that no further evil influences come through the place.

[DM's Note:  Teagon knows that the party 'suspects' he had something to do with the missing gold shipments.  Much like the bandit leader Warrick, it wasn't anything personal, just business.  Eladrin's in my world are businessmen first and foremost in their cultural outlook.  But he also knows that other races can take things personally so he's making obvious gestures to balance things out as he sees it.]

The party splits up briefly with some visiting the airship and others hanging out in their new house.  T’Balktu arranges for a clean up crew for the blood and gore of the church below.   His leisure time with bottle and a pipe is broken up by screams from the underground area and still in Lerik’s smoking jacket he rushes in to find the commoners fleeing one of their own, the man in a fit of all consuming rage.  T’Balktu drops him with one punch and questions the others.  The one guy was trying to clean the arcane sigil in one corner of the room and went berserk and tried to kill the others.

T’Balktu gets a new cleaning crew and has them move an easy chair down into the underground chamber and continues his enjoyment of Lerik’s goods as he keeps an eye on the new group.

Biminey and Torel wander back and Biminey tries to destroy the sigil.  He’s not paying attention as he counts the empty wine bottles around T’Balktu’s comfy chair and seriously flubs up the disruption.

He spins on the others and attacks.   Torel and T’Balktu eventually get him down and dying.  Only to have him flare up again after they stuff a healing potion down his throat.  T’Balktu proceeds to sit on the lanky artificer while Torel invokes the power of Kord to break the evil force possessing Biminey.

Then they proceed a little more carefully and a lot more cautiously to dismantle the arcanic devices in the underground chamber.

They get the place clean and arrange for Spar to move into their new abode to repeat a warding ritual on the place in their abscence with the hope of making it permanent.  It only takes a year.

[DM's Note: I like such optimism.  That they're going to keep the house, that it's going to be around in a year and that they'll be alive to enjoy it.]

Torel tries to get Captain Warrick to let them take Driskull with them on a hunt for the Souleater tribe but he refuses.  He’s lost too many of his better warriors and Driskull is his best.  He’s not going to risk him on an endeavor that he’s not sure will have any impact on the outcome of the future of the town.  He will give them whatever help he can though as long as it doesn’t weaken the city.  At least without a good chance of results.

[DM's Note: This is both a realistic reason, the city is weakened and Werrick is as I've pictured him a pretty conservative leader.  Giving up what is literally the best fighter the city has right now or his protege in Corporal Baen doesn't sit well with him.  He was willing to send the bulk of his well trained forces on a lightning raid as the reward/risk ratio was good. The fact that they lost over half the force if anything has now made him ultra conservative.    But this isn't as clear cut to him.  There's also a pure game play mechanic reason.  I don't really use DMNPC's unless I have to, they detract from the 'heroes' of the stories and they can end up being sacrificed by players.  Doubt if it would be an issue with this group, they sacrificed one of their own in their quest to help Torn.]

The party gathers supplies for their trip and we’ll embark on it at the next session.

We will not be having a session this upcoming week, we try to do a 3 on, 1 off schedule so that everyone has an off Saturday night they spend without missing a session.

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Continue reading »]]> Lucky session 13…

In attendance for this session are Biminey, Stak, Torel, Visra with T’Balktu being played by Visra as well.

Sushanna is brought out to the airship and started down the path of the Artificer by Biminey.  This after a couple of days and Biminey attuning the master control to her and giving her a artificer familiar grants her rudimentary control of the airship.  In that she can take it down to the ocean’s surface or up above the clouds.

While the rest of them are in town Biminey has crafted a mount for one of the ballistae that was purchased giving it the ability to aim downwards at a 45 degree angle from the bow of the ship.  He also devised mounts for the longboat attaching it to the stern of the ship.

In town Torel and Stak meet with Garon, Werrick the Watch Captain and a new face to them that of Sargent Driskull, a fighter of middle aged years which tells them a lot about his skill levels.

Captain Werrick and Garon have obviously reached something of agreement as to how they should proceed and the group talks with Driskull primarily.  It’s his firm belief and he’s convinced the others that the city needs a show of force or they risk the hobgoblins thinking they’re weak and that would result in the tribes swarming over the city, an attack they cannot hope to repulse.   It’s his plan to strike at one of the villages and wipe out one of the tribes, allowing a few to spread the word.  If they don’t succeed he believes the town is doomed to fall to the hobs.

This makes sense to Torel and Stak and they defer to the old warrior, expert killer that he is, and agree.  The city is going to send 50 men on the mission, 6 heavy squads of 8 men along with Sargent Driskul and a corporal Bael.   They make arrangements to get the mission underway and start picking the men and getting them equipped and arranged and agree to meet back 2 or 3 days for a review to acquaint the troops with the party.

They head back to the ship and pick up Biminey who’s now got Sushanna trained enough to raise and lower the boat.   The group united once again head back to town and head to the Temple of Eris to gather their goods and such and are going to send them to the boat.  Biminey also brought one of his new hirelings, Visra’s old retinue and is having her shop around for a suitable home for them all assuming that real estate given the future of the city and the exodus that is going on will find them a suitable place cheap.

At the temple Biminey finds a beggar child waiting for them with a tale woe.  A man, an elf in his words wants to meet with the group to talk and the man has taken his sisters and threatens them with harm if the group doesn’t show up.  Biminey rallies the troops and they head to a tavern in the dock district.

There they meet with Warrick the leader of the bandits that were raiding gold shipments, that captured them and tried to sell them to slavers and fought with them in the warehouse during a meeting with slavers and Meri, one of Shuk’s seconds, in an upstairs room.  Warrick tosses Torel a scalplock and tells him it will grant them passage to a hobgoblin tribe that he’d dealt with and that he was doing this as a final job for his employer.  He offers them the same general information that Driskull gave them. That hobgoblins respect martial ability.   He tells them how to reach the tribe the trophy will grant them access to, the Jagged Maw tribe.  He doesn’t know why he was tasked with meeting with the party but the money was good.   He comes off to the group while cold blooded, he’s willing to have children killed if the party causes any trouble at this meeting but honorable in his own way, in that he’ll fulfill his side of a bargain.   Meri’s presence is a bit of a puzzle and she’s not forthcoming with much information.

The group backs out of the room and leaves the tavern to be attacked by hobgoblin assassin’s, three of them in the street outside.  The hob’s paralyze the party with poisoned bolts from crossbows and then attack them with garrotes in the street.  The fight carries on for a bit and with two of the hobgoblins down, the third tries to flee.  Biminey knocks him through a tavern window with his thundering armour power and Stak is waiting at the tavern door with his deadly accurate bow as the assassin tries to flee through the tavern.

They recover a pair of gloves that can be form and color shifted at will and that produce small bladed weapons at the wearer’s need.  In addition they recover coup sticks from each of the assassins, one bearing 68 notches, the other two 18 and 19 notches.  Obviously a master and his apprentices.  They strip the bodies claiming valuables and wait for the watch to show up.  They send for Driskull who wonders what the party has done that hobs would send assassin’s after them but the group isn’t very forthcoming with the information.

On one of the bodies they find a note from Warrick wishing them the best if they managed to defeat the assassins and admitting that he’d set them up for the attack after he had his meeting with them. He also pointed suspcion at Teagon one of the three councilors of the city, the one in charge of shipping goods inland by river and wagon.  Mostly river.

They head back to the Temple and find Lerik waiting for them.  Lerik has dug up some ancient law on the books granting the city the ability to tax adventurer’s 10% of their goods although in times of extreme duress the city can raise the cost up to 50%.   Lerik’s aide lets slip the information that the group would have 24 hours to arrange for their goods to be appraised.  Lerik has also hired two body guards that the group reads as being highly skilled, easily their own abilities and probably higher.  On top of that he’s arranged for the Sargent Major of the watch along with Torn and several watchmen to be present as the party is served their notice.

As the group threatens to leave the city they’re given advice to talk to the other councilors and see what can be done about the laws.

They talk to Garon and reiterate their threats to simply leave the city to their fate and Garon swears to deal with the issue, passing along the information that Lerik is just not acting rationally these days and that he seems to have a very personal hatred of the group.

They pass the rest of the day in preparing for their trek in the morning to meet with the soldiers that are going on the hobgoblin raid.  Biminey retrieves the high priests crystal and hides it in the heavy flail he carries for his Dancing Weapon power.

They meet with the soldiers and get introduced all around.  Most of the troops are middle tier, in fact they’re probably stripping the watch and mercenaries of the bulk of their middle experience troops leaving only the young and the old so to speak left in the city.

Lerik finds them later that day, he’s furious and almost insane with rage that they’ve bypassed his attempts to get their goods or them to leave whichever he was going for.  Visra, an impartial observer believes it’s not so much rage as fear is the primary emotion driving Lerik.

Early in the week hours the next morning they head south toward a farming commune on the coastline.  They’re able to stealth their way through the countryside and reach a vantage point.  Stak and a couple of scouts from the Watch kill an observer and they’re able to view the commune.  They make plans, the bulk of the force will attack the commune and wipe out the rank and file of the hobs and rescue the visible captives kept in corrals.   The party will go after the command structure that is set up in tents outside the commune.

A fight ensues and goes well, the group defeating mixed forces of hobgoblin warriors, casters, summoned undead, hill giant mercenaries and a Hand of Bane.  The fight went well for the group, they’re able to take down the hobgoblin forces although one of the hill giant flees toward the end of the battle as it goes badly for them and the warcaster surrenders assuming he’ll be dealt with as other hobgoblins do.  The group turns him over to Driskull to be tortured for information and makes sure he dies.   A few of the grunts are set free to spread word of the deed in typical hobgoblin fashion and the group takes trophies included the Hand of Bane’s flail and the battle standard of the tribe which were known as the Throatcutters.

As the survivors of the battle are patched up and seen to and the captives counted and gathered we bring this session to a close as the group starts packing up the leader’s tent and stuffing it into their bag of holding along with assorted weapons and the like that will come in handy for a town under siege.

[Notes: This was a long session with a lot of non-combat interaction and we got a bit of a late start as the application I wrote for Temple (Biminey) didn't want to work right for me.  Basically it's a dot net app that lets Temple press a mouse button to roll a d20 which is then announced audibly.   But in the end we got going.

I was also using MasterPlan 'for real' for this session.  It has a lot of good features but there are things I would have done differently to speed up usage of the app but overall I was happy with it.  There are some basics that need to be addressed, the ability to add effects that boost defenses for a turn or two, attack boosters and that kind of thing.  But its a very much supported and constantly updated application so there's a pretty good chance it'll continue to be developed.]

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Tweaking my death/dying house rule. Pretty simple and it came to me this morning in the wee hours. If you make your death save you get a minor action. This doesn’t seem like much but as long as you have a potion of healing on your person and the surge to use it, this gives you ‘self res’ ability.  Since the group only has one leader and that leader is an artificer this gives them very limited healing.  For groups that have clerics or multiple leaders this is way overkill, if someone dies in such a group then they’re either going up against things they shouldn’t be, the dice REALLY hate them or they’re not playing well.  And those situations don’t need a full blown rule, just DM mediation from time to time.

You can still die, for the average person in multiple ways. You don’t have a healing potion. You’re out of surges. You fail your death save three times before you make two successes. [Going to disallow Quickdraw for this particular effect. It's hard to be quick and dying at the same time.]

Because it’s not a standard action you can’t Second Wind. Unless you’re a dwarf of course so this boosts the dwarf’s ability to Second Wind as a minor action. But then the only dwarf in the party is my wife and not killing one’s wife’s character off is probably a good idea if it can be helped. Although I’ve done it in the past.

If you have some other way to heal yourself with a minor action you’re also good.  So leaders or anyone multi-classing into a leader or hybridizing into a leader will be set up fairly well. The rest of them will need to keep a potion and a surge handy.

It makes use of a saving throw that’s already being made so there’s no extra rolls. It simulates a recovery into semi-consciousness. On the downside, any character that is feebly fumbling a potion out of their belt will be subject to discretionary attack by any adjacent hostile although ranged attackers unless they’re sentient and particularly vicious will probably ignore or not notice a prone dying opponent’s movements.

Anyway, thought I’d share.

Dying Condition-

Make a saving throw when you are dying.  If you fail you take one death strike.  Fail three times and you are dead.  If you succeed you can make a minor action.   If an desired result requires two minor actions then they must be made in succession typically.  Example:  Retrieving a potion and drinking it requires two minor actions typically.  If the character makes their save they retrieve the potion.  If they fail the subsequent save then they’re assumed to have dropped the potion and must now spend another minor action to retrieve it from the ground where it may have rolled.

Continue reading »]]> We join our heroes in mid conversation at the Temple of Eris, it’s the same day they were dropped off in from the airship and left to hike into town, the crew not wishing the airship to be known yet.  Biminey, Dash and assorted persons, primarily Visra’s old retinue, now Biminey’s crew are sailing above the clouds eating dates and figs and the like.

Elisssa has decided to retire for awhile from the adventuring life [Laura wanted to try something else]. The reason that I made up for this was a fairly obvious one, the group (characters) keeps getting on Elisssa’s case about killing the hill giant, not being able to pitch a tent or sail a boat.  For a dragonborn such insults and snide comments are hard to take.  Them not letting her kill the captured slavers was the final straw and furious with the group she stalks off to see her friends and family as soon as they enter Larkson.  She takes with her a couple thousand in gold and Krag’s Axe and Bracers and some assorted trinkets and souvenirs.

Later discourse over the course of the session might reveal that Elisssa may come back as the floating crew of available NPC’s for use by players (Torn, Dash, Sushanna, Kane)

The action starts immediately with the first of three encounters for the night.  Screams are heard echoing through the temple and grabbing their arms the group rushes to see what’s going on.  T’Balktu, Torel, Visra and Stak are joined along the way by a visiting Cleric of Kord from Anvil here to do research at the temple by the name of Spar.  [Played by Biminey's owner Temple]

THe five of them find the room that contains the temple’s main ritual circle filled with a vortex of energies.  People located in the room are being sucked into the vortex and being… reformed as something else.  As the energies die away the group catches a glimpse of Liloth and Phy’el Fleshwalker through a rent in space causing the effects.

An abomination of flesh, humanoid, composed of merged persons in the room roars out a challenge.  It’s back bursts and hunks of flesh drop free to create little humanoid creatures dripping flaming slime. The monkeys immediately start flinging their slime around the room and where the gobs hit, invisible before now runes flare and burn out, a few seconds later the bricks blow outwards in blasts of energies and shrapnel.

The group attacks of course, taking down the big creature and then mopping up the smaller ones but not before they cut a wide swatch through the walls, floor and celing of the room destroying  large sections of the bricks and subsequently the wardings inlaid upon them.

As they stop and catch their breath they hear more screams, deducing (correctly) that this was a diversion while another attack was going on.  They rush through the temple to find the forbidden archives under attack by rats.  A section of the floor has fallen away down into the sewers that run under the town and rats are streaming in, each grabbing a scroll or parchement or tome to flee down the hole with it.

They follow, smashing rats as they go.  In the dank large sewers they run into Krag’s animus which has formed a temporary body out of rats along with other rat swarms.  Due to their positioning Krag has to reveal early on that he can absorb the rat swarms to recover his mass (i.e. recover health) and the group destroys the swarms before working on Krag.  (this made the encounter easier on the group by a considerable amount thanks to their smart thinking).

As the mass of rats that is Krag collapses to stream away a red mist shoots off down the sewers. (Krag’s animus).

They follow the animus (and trail of parchment fragments) to Krag’s lair where he’s been feeding the blood of those he’s slain through one of Liloth’s warps.  A large chamber has been damned up at the doorway forming a pool of blood like liquid several inches deep.   The room is filled with rats each holding a parchment.  Right now the rats are being lifted through the portal bearing the parchments. They turn on the group as Torel and Spar both try to bless the portal to destroy it.  (A whole hella lot of very low rolls).

Eventually the group gets the warp closed and triggers a trap laid into the room turning the blood into a blood elemental.  It’s not designed to be able to stand up against a full group but is aimed to destroy single intruders and the group makes short work of it.

Spar had the idea during the fight to break the dam holding in the blood and if they’d of done that before the fight they could have destroyed the warp and prevented the elemental from spawning but hind sight and all that.

They recovered a bracer and axe that Krag’s been slowly enchanting to replace his lost axe and bracer.  He’s a very good enchanter, at odds with his brutal nature but has a knack for things that deal with blood.  It’s just hard to enchant things when you’re a ghost.   The bracers are similar to Iron Armbands of Power but require a healing surge to activate, after activated they boost edged weapons damage by 2 for the rest of the encounter.   The axe gives its wielder a Immediate Reaction ability that grants them a basic melee attack with the axe when an adjacent target is bloodied for the first time and it deals an extra +2 damage when the wielder is bloodied.

The group retreats from the chamber and heads back to the temple.  They rest and recover and then work on plans.  They talk to the captain of the watch and Garon of the council.  Garon is floundering.  He’s out of his league with the things that are going on and doesn’t know which way to stumble much less lead.  People have been leaving the city out of fear, this is obviously a bad thing for the city’s protection and the party points it out and want him to lock the city down.  He’s reluctant to do that, he doesn’t want to be the ‘bad guy’ or institute the martial law that this requires.  Larkson has always been a free city and preventing the poeple from leaving strikes him too much like slavery, an act that really runs against his core values especially after having lost his children to slavers.  He’s also loath to go against the agreement with the Watch in terms of disbursement of the mercenaries.

He asks Torel and Stak to hire on advisors, a task they reluctantly agree to consider.   The group considers their actions and decide to send a fetch out to Biminey asking him to meet them early.

They purchase a longboat and row out to sea, successfully navigating to their general meeting area.  They discuss things with Biminey and the others.

Biminey asks them to ask Sushanna to come visit him for multiple reasons, the primary one he wants to teach her the ways of the artificer so that she can at times take control of the airship allowing him freedom to leave the ship.

After discussion they’re going to try and lead a band of mercenaries out of the town to gather information on the hobgoblins who are taking small villages and farmsteads captive as a threat for the town to give them some book, a book they believe holds power over the creatures loosed from Darkmith.

We end our session there.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Not sure how anyone else is doing this but I though I’d share as I know one person at least that does something similar to what I do.

I use the Monster Builder to create the player’s foes and then use the Export as Rich Text in the app to get the data.  I paste that into a page in MS Word where it looks all nice and neat.  Unfortunately the monster colors are far from printer friendly (massive green, well cyan and magenta, ink usage) and they’re not all that legible when printed.   It’s impossible to apply a theme to them due their oddities in format so I came up with this macro to strip out all the coloring and set the text all to black.  Now they’re very printer (and eye) friendly.

Sub RemoveShading()
‘
‘ RemoveShading Macro
‘
‘
With Selection.ParagraphFormat.Shading
.Texture = wdTextureNone
.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
.BackgroundPatternColor = -603914241
End With

Selection.Font.Color = -587137025
With Selection.Cells
With .Shading
.Texture = wdTextureNone
.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
.BackgroundPatternColor = -603914241
End With
End With

End Sub

Continue reading »]]> Something I’ve been tossing around in my head today is a way to have the group actually try to use stealth from time to time.  Successfully I mean.

As it stands, only one person in the group is actually trained in stealth and the other four have pretty low Dexterity all things considered so it makes it simply impossible aside from unusual luck to sneak anywhere as a group.

This train of thought was kicked off by something Chris Perkin’s did in the third Penny Arcade podcast Sept 25 section (I think, could be wrong).  I’d been up 38′ish hours without sleep at that point so I wasn’t tracking 100% but at one point he had one person make a stealth check and the rest just made Assist rolls.  I’m not sure if he did it by accident or what since he makes a lot of mistakes about the game’s rules during the sessions and not 5 minutes later he had them all roll individually again instead of as a group.   [For someone who apparently helped write the game he's not very familiar with the basic mechanics of the game.  I think he does a wonderful job as a DM please don't get me wrong.  But he's failed to correct a lot of mistakes the players have done like Aoefel forgetting to use his weapon proficiency bonus on attack rolls over and over and over.  Oman not getting his Wis bonus on any cleric power with the keyword healing in it.  Just basic game mechanic kind of things.  But then maybe he's not used to having players that don't know what they're doing.]

This started me thinking.  Every time I’ve heard on someone’s podcast about a stealth check being needed, invariably one or more people fail it.  This also has happened every time I’ve done it in my own games.  It gets worse if the group is having to roll against more than one perception check.  This devalues stealth completely except in those instances where the one guy with stealth essentially plays by himself for awhile.

I don’t like that.  I don’t like that the characters don’t have a stealth option, a viable one anyway and I don’t like splitting a party up because it reduces the fun for everyone.

Do I have an option?  Well just now in asking on the forums if someone else had come up with anything my fingers typed out something to the below and as I’m typing this I just came up with another two options which I’ll type down there when I get done typing this.

And this only applies when the game is not in initiative, i.e. out of combat.

Out of Initiative Stealth –

Note: This assumes the group is moving as a group.  If they split up then each group would need to use the appropriate option.  Individuals would be back to making individual checks of course.

Option 1 – Stealth Master – One person is designated the Stealth Leader and they make a stealth roll based on their abilities.  They suffer a -2 penalty on their roll for every untrained person in the group that’s moving with them.  This simulates the master stealther telling the others where to move, what to avoid, fixing their gear so it makes the least amount of noise etc.  Optional – Each untrained member of the group that’s involved other than the Stealth Master makes an Aid Another check.  If they succeed they add +2 to the master’s roll, if they fail the -2 still applies. A member trained in stealth would roll Aid Another and if they succeed they add +2 to the master’s score but if they fail they don’t add -2.

Option 2 – Mini Skill Challenge - Everyone in the party rolls their own stealth check.  As long as they have more successes than failures they succeed as a group.

Option 3 – Cumulative Totals - The party members each roll their own check and their rolls are added together.  If this number is higher than the opposing number they win the check.  The opposing number is generated by multiplying the number in the party by either a flat DC or totaling up all the opposed check rolls.

Thoughts –

The base part of Option 1 is fast, the total number of untrained people is going to be known so it’s one roll for the party, quick and easy.   If you add in the Aid Another then everyone has to roll but it allows each party member to contribute to the success of the endeavor, never a bad thing to promote.

With Option 2 I don’t feel it adds what I’m looking for.  At least in my situation.  With 4 untrained people with low dex in the group they’re going to fail the check more often than they’ll succeed.  I want it to be possible for the group as a whole to sneak onto the castle grounds, over the walls, and into the keep before they’re discovered.  Without just saying “Okay you managed to sneak into the grounds, up and over the walls and are now in the storage areas on the second floor.  Now make stealth checks to avoid getting seen.  Ooops Biminey you must of stumbled into a pile of broken glass, metal and loud noises piled precariously next to you.”

The problem with Option 3 it’s not much better than option 2 and you also have to do math.    But seriously, on the plus side it lets a high ‘overkill’ roll help a lower roll but by the same token a low roll pulls a high one down.

Anyway, that’s how I spent a bit of my afternoon while staring at progress bars.  Comments and thoughts welcome as usual.

[Edit Afterthoughts: The DMG I've been told suggests for a group roll having the lowest skilled person make the roll. While that might make sense, it simply means that we're back to the group not being able to stealth and that's not my point to all this.  So this is what I'm going to start with and work from there -

The party divides the party into groups as they wish each group has to contain at least two people and can contain the entire party.  One person in each group at the players’ choice makes an initial stealth roll.  The remaining members of the group impact this roll as follows – each character Untrained in stealth makes an Aid Another check.  If they fail, they add -2 to the initial roll.  Each character Trained in stealth makes an Aid Another check.  If they succeed they add +2 to the initial roll.   The group has to move as a unit or reasonably so.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> After having DM’d a lot of encounters now in 4th edition and using roughly 90% custom monsters (10% customized) and 100% home brewed encounters I wanted to put my thoughts on the process to paper.  Figuratively speaking of course.

Unless you’re planning on a encounter string, i.e. at least 3 encounters back to back, plan on building your encounter at the far side of Medium or short side of Hard.  You have to adjust this of course for the abilities of both your players and your player’s characters.  So start with medium hards before you go into hards.  I can realistically and demonstrably give my group, warden, avenger, ranger, artificer, warlock(barbarian) level+3/4 encounters.  And yes they’re hard but they’re doable for the most part. I’ve only had one character death from tossing the party into this mix as their sole fight for a day.  And that was due to bad death save rolls as well as heal checks.

When you’re building your monsters, remember that they’re going to be alive for all of maybe 5-7 rounds for the most part.  In the interests of making them interesting give them all 2 or 3 encounter only powers and give them a little bit of synergy among them. 

Example: A standard skirmisher might have his basic +7, 1d10+5 Warclub attack, then encounters of Smashing Blow +7, 1d8+5 and target is knocked prone.  Head Blow: +7 2d6+8 and target is dazed.  Target must be Prone.  And finally Aim Low: +7 1d8+5 damage and target is Slowed.

Then drop them in pairs or trio’s.  One of them does a Smashing Blow on a PC and another one follows up with a Head Blow now that he’s down and the last one Aim’s Low and slows the PC.   So now you have a PC that’s dazed, slowed and bleeding on the ground.

Typically that means he’s going to be able to stand on his turn or attack from the ground.  If you have a trio of these guys then they can simply alternate their three encounter powers over three rounds and beat the heck out of the PC.

The point of this is not, well mostly not, to kill a PC but to force others to interfere on his behalf.  A defender marks the attackers, a warlord pushes one, two people bull rush two of them, a wizard thunderwaves, an artificer thundering armours, whatever it takes to get them off the PC they’ve singled out.  In all things you as the DM should be striving to make them work together as a team, watching out for each other, buffing each other, taking hits for each other.

4th Edition is a balanced edition, significantly more so than any previous edition (please keep the 4e hate spam down about that).  As long as you follow the general guidelines or the Adenture Tools (well worth a one month subscription to get it and the Character Builder) it’s hard to build an unfair monster with just a tiny bit of common sense.   Some combination can be wicked hard, a creature with a minor action to knock prone and a bonus to damage on prone targets is harsh (Needlefang Swarm).  Creatures with auras that stack can be really harsh (Chillborn Zombies) or creatures that have resistances to damage and reduce damage at the same time (Wraith).  These are all examples of monsters that are significantly tougher than their level or exp value warrants as a result (and just bad monster design IMO).

Also as a general rule I really think monsters that Stun should used VERY sparingly.  I don’t use it all, forcing a player to skip their turn “Is Not Fun”.   Dazed is as much of a screw over as I will ever give a player in terms of costing them their turn.

But over time this balance design can lead to encounters that feel the same.  So don’t be afraid to take those guidelines and manipulate them a bit.  With just two or three tiny changes you can drastically alter the feel of an encounter.

By changing the hit points or attack bonus in conjunction with the damage dealt with a power you can rachet up the tension of an encounter in many ways.

As an example, let’s say I build an encounter that’s designed to depict a bandit party that’s venturing into hobgoblin lands to negotiate a deal and the players have been chasing them.  I put in one elite, 5 standards, and 5 minions and generate roughly a level+2 encounter as the culmination of a 3 encounter string, the first two encounters level/level+1 encounters with hobgoblins.

I take the elite and drop his health by 20% but I boost his damage output accordingly.  So he goes from 200 hit points to 160 hit points.  His average damage per round per attack goes from 15 damage to 19 damage.  He’s got a shorter lifespan but hits for more damage so it should equal out assuming no major ‘swinginess’ in the attack rolls.

Two of the standards are his body guards.  They’re not ‘elite’ but I want to show them as being highly trained.  I boost their attack chance by +4 (20% more likely to hit) and drop their damage output by 20% (15 damage becomes 11 damage).

3 of the standards I want to be really annoying as a whole but individually they’re not much.  As a group of highly trained archers who go for the sure shot rather than the damaging shot,  I up their attack by +6 and drop their damage from 15 down to about 8.   So they’re a steady unswerving health bleed on the party.

You could also model the boss of this encounter as a little more brutish but not a true brute, a giant of a human who’s armed with a big slow greatsword, easy to get out of the way of but don’t let it hit you whatever you do.  Let’s decrease his attack chances by -6 and boost his damage by 30% instead.   So he doesn’t hit often but when he does, a player REALLY feels it.

As a DM if you take this to an extreme in terms of damage per hit and 30%+ is bordering extreme then you HAVE to keep an eye on your dice and your players.  You’ve changed the encounter from a fairly steady progression of damage sinking on both sides to something that with a little good/bad luck can be very swingy and really hammer your players and you’re not there to do that.  Or if you are you probably won’t have players for long.

With these simple few tweaks though you can have players leaning forward when the boss rolls, wincing as you roll high and breathing a sigh of relief when you roll low.   And cursing out loud as ‘those %$(!*% archers are chewing my ass off.  Would someone kill those little @$@*(*!s?!”

In terms of encounter make up, make sure to mix things up.  Sure throw in the encounter that’s six giant slug like abominations and make it a straight forward bug hunt.  Easy, simple, not complicated, something every group needs from time to time.

But your encounters that are comprised of intelligent creatures are very likely to run something like boss, bodyguards, guards with optional groups of support and minions.   Or that’s how I see it.  The boss is going to want at least one or two people dedicated to his survival in my opinion.  Warriors or casters that stick with him, intercept attackers that kind of thing.  Then there are the general purpose guards, standards that keep the attackers occupied while the boss does his boss thing, they’re the defensive/offensive line of your encounter.

Then you have support groups that consist of artillery, control and/or healing. Typically these should be the smallest presence on the field as they’re the ones that usually sit in the back and go with range powers, they die easily but sometimes getting to them is just flat out hard.

Minions are just that.  Masses of incompetents who die in a loud messy fashion to the enjoyment of the players.   And once the group gets past level 4 or so, plan on your minions having little to no impact on the battle other than to waste a round or two as the party AOE’s them down.   Any more I don’t even count them against the XP budget of the encounter unless they’re artillery that is going to be widely spread out.  It’s realistically impossible to spread out melee attackers, they have to bunch up to get at the players who typically hang out fairly close together. They’re there to make the heroes cool as they kill six guys with one blast, that kind of thing.

I’d also advise you not to get too crazy on your encounter makeup complexity.  The more creatures with different powers you throw out there, especially if you take my advice and give them all some ‘fun’ powers for you to play with, the more likely you are to forget to use them.  I regularly forget to use Immediate powers that I give to my creatures for instance.

Trying to keep track of multiple powers on multiple types of creatures in one encounter servers not much more than to slow things down. Any more I strive for (but frequently fail to accomplish) no more than 3 types of creatures per encounter although with humanoids it’s hard to do.  My bandit, slavers and hobgoblin tribes just like to cover their bases, they want front line, back line, support, artillery, control, pure power and leadership in every fight.  And it’s hard to say no to them as they make sense when they send in their manpower requests. 

Also keep your players’ characters’ abilities in mind.  A group with a lot of radiant output is going to rip your undead encounters to shreds.   A group without any way to control creatures should run into encounters with fewer but tougher creatures.  A group with massive amounts of AOE’s shouldn’t get encounters comprised of mostly minions as a steady diet.  A group without a lot of ways to spend surges during an encounter needs smaller easier encounters but more of them during their ‘work day’ or few but tougher encounters per day.  Things like this keep in the back of your mind as you’re planning their almost but not quite demise.

And the flip side of that, keep your players abilities in mind as well.  A group who’s sole tactic is “I got this one, you go get that guy.” needs a lighter hand on the encounter difficulty than a group that knows exactly how their powers mesh with the powers of the rest of the team and acts accordingly.

So to wrap this up -

• give all your creatures some nifty encounter powers because that’s fun for you
• don’t be afraid to deviate from the monster building guidelines but do it in a balanced fashion because that’s fun for the players
• don’t make your encounters too simple or too complex, not fun for you
• keep the abilities of your players and their characters in mind, not fun for the players
• and most importantly make sure you and your players are having a good time or you’ll be putting your books away to gather dust and that’s a very un-fun thing to have to do…

I hope this is of some benefit to someone, putting it down at the very least helped solidify it for myself and that’s never a bad thing. Next week (or month or whenever) I’ll try and come up with some thoughts on how to actually run the encounter and give you some excuses for why the archers are all focus firing on the cleric for the 800th time.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]>

[DM: I want to point out that I rolled like utter [bleep] this session.  My miss ratio was pretty far on the wrong side of the standard deviation on a d20. I only had one natural 20, on T’Balktu of course, and a bunch of 1′s, 2′s, 3′s. ]

The tower taken from the forces defending it our band of heroes takes stock of the situation.  And the phat lewt.  They recover a magic staff, set of robes, some fire arrows and bolts, a couple of healing potions, a stack of what they’ll eventually discover are alchemical bombs and a set of signal flares.

Based on Keri’s notes they know the cave trolls are sent around the island around dawn to help with the construction efforts.  This gives them about 6 hours before then so leaving Biminey to begun work on repairing and re-tuning the airship.  A couple of hours into it he realizes he’s going to have to replace the broken boards of the ship before it’ll be flyable again.

He wakes the others and gives them the bad news.  They decide to go back to sleep and deal with it later.  Biminey joins them in sleeping leaving Torn, Kane and Dash on watch.  Hirelings work well for that.

As the sun peeks up Torel and Stak go look at the avenues of approach to the tower.  On the far side of the chasm separating the tower side from the rest of the island is a extending bridge.  They crank it over and investigate the far side. A couple of smaller buildings are under construction on that side.  Torel preps the area by liberally splashing gallons of oil in the places where attackers might take cover.   
A couple of hours after dawn, the compound forces start wondering where the cave trolls are and send a couple of sailors up to find out what’s going on.  They holler and hullabaloo for awhile but the good guys don’t respond.  One of the sailors twists a rod like the ones that are in the tower and a flare of light flies way up in the air, sparking and sputtering, visible for miles in all directions and then head back to the compound at a jog.

[DM's Comments: I'd planned out a number of scenarios, even had maps ready but the group's actions as happens quite frequently took a turn that I hadn't planned.  Their scheme for the lumber was sneaky and scheming and my possible scenario's didn't quite get that sneaky on their behalf.  I'd envisioned them possibly ambushing the first people up to see what was going on by either setting up in the partially built houses on the far side of the bridge or leaving the bridge down and luring them over to the tower.  But it just really proves yet again one person will never be able to accurately predict what other people will do, 100% of the time no matter how long they've known them.]

Now that the bad guys know something is up, although not what, the group decides to hunker down and prepare to repel an attack trying to come across the chasm and wait in vain for rest of the day with nothing happening although they do spot a sneaky person scouting them out.

[Torel rolled a natural 20 on a perception check or they'd of not spotted him.  After the slavers knew something was up they sent up an assassin who wisely decided not to try anything during the day.  The slavers are expecting another ship of reinforcements which would include at least an overmage if not another ubermage. They also have some high level captives that they've been lead to believe will be highly ransomable. The captives lied by the way to gain time, there's no one left to ransom them.  Hence they're not going to try to frontal attack a tower that they have to try to cross a 25' gap with a 50' fall into jagged rocks.  They're going to wait for nightfall and sneak across under the cover of darkness.]

As the day continues to wind down the group decides to send Stak and Dash, both fairly sneaky bastards over to scout the compound.  They know from Keri’s notes that there is a building under construction over there which should mean there’s lumber.  The two are supposed to try and steal the lumber.  And rather than going around the island they cut across the harbor, using a small cask to carry their gear and to rest with on the mile or so swim.  They’re given two signal flares to use if they need help.

Stak and Dash get over and find no way to get to the lumber, the slavers over there are scattered, hiding in nooks and crannies while several are guarding a building that Keri marked as holding slaves.  Discretion prevails and they return the way they came.  Stak unfortunately failed in his attempt to climb the cliff so they shout for help and then are pulled up the cliff.

They report their findings to the rest.

Our five leave Kane, Dash and Torn to watch the tower as they’ve come up with a plan to not go after the lumber at the compound but instead take the ship and de-construct part of it for the lumber they need.  They get ready and slither down the rope and into the warm salt water and start dog paddling.

[It's about this time that the assassin makes it across and starts scouting the tower section of the island.  He's not sure what to make of the three men that he can find, assuming they must be tougher than they are if they were able to take the tower and goes back retrieves most of the quality forces from the compound and they assualt the tower while our group is slowly swimming across the harbor.  The attack on the harbor kicks off about the time that the group gets to the ship.  The three hirelings immediately know they're heavily screwed and set off two flares.  They three are all level 6 though and they do cut a swath through the attackers but are eventually taken.]

The group reach the ship, Stak going further to steal the longboats from the shore.   Elisssa hits the deck of the ship first due to bad timing on their part but has no trouble killing both slavers on board.  One swing of her axe at the end of a charge cuts the slaver’s arm off which is holding a signal flare.  She spins and takes the head off the other one in the same motion.

The rest climb on board to find the ship is theirs and Stak comes up with the longboats.

The signal flares go up from the tower but there’s just not much they can do for them except continue with the plan.  They wait till down though which isn’t far off and use the ballistae on the ship to let the forces on the shore know they’re there.  Keeping the slavers on the shore occupied, they strip lumber off the non-visible side of the boat.

Lumber in head they set the ship afire and start rowing back to the tower.  The tower forces are waiting for them but aren’t too concerned as the cliffs are almost impossible to climb and it would be very easy to just drop rocks on anyone trying to climb them and knock them off.

Unfortunately for the slavers they don’t know about Biminey’s Ladder ritual. As the ladder springs up and Torel starts climbing his butt off the two at the top realize that things may not be going as planned and start yelling.  They drop rocks but they miss and Torel is able to reach the top of the cliff, Biminey right behind him.

A fight breaks out and both sides are reinforced as forces rush in from the tower and up the ladder but when Torel uses the Deamon Heart to walk the assassin off the cliff and Biminey drops the ladder as he’s trying to climb back up.  Battered, bruised, ribs cracked and leg broken the assassin limps off vowing to come back and kill them all in nasty ways.  Right as Biminey’s firebolt, charged with lightning enters his skull from above.

The fights just clean up this point between the guys the hirelings killed, the loss of the ‘boss’ of the island forces and the fact that the slavers can’t seem to hit a damn thing it’s quickly over.

They capture one of the slaver alchemists and get information from him.  They go back and strike a bargain, one sided, with the remaining neophytes in the tower (all minions) and make them leave.  They recover their battered and beaten hirelings.

Hauling up their construction supplies Biminey and a couple of others get to work repairing the airship while the rest traipse across the island and intimidate or kill the remaining slavers.

In the captive hut they rescue a dwarf noble woman and her retinue.  She has a tale of her city being overrun by hobgoblins and her father putting her and the rest on a boat with a few guards while they stayed to defend the city.  They were picked up by slavers not long after setting sail and brought to the island.  To buy time and preferential treatment they let on to the slavers that a huge ransom would be possible.  The other slaver ship on the island went off to collect said ransom.

Air ship repaired and drivable they take a minor detour to burn the slaver compound to the ground from the air and head back.  They try to investigate one of the small farming villages on their way back, one of the ones that has lost contact with the city and Biminey has a test of wills as something tries to take over control of him through the airship control amulet, forcing him to land the ship.  He breaks free and they flee back to the coast.

Leaving biminey and most of the noble woman’s following on the ship the rest are dropped off outside of town walk in.  They get inside and learn news of the hobgoblin threat and get information from Sushanna of good news.  The Eris researchers are constructing a battle standard that will duplicate the weakening effect of the Larkson wardings for a small area.  They also find out from Sushanna that the wardings of the city are powered  by the life force of people born in the city.  This was uncovered in the research into the standard which after use requires a ritual and life force to recharge to enable it to work again.

We leave our group getting cleaned up in the temple’s sauna’s and breaking the fast.  They have plans for to meet up with  Biminey in two days time, who’s currently flying the ship out of sight of land and above the clouds and making offers of employment to Visra’s, the noble dwarf’s retinue since she obviously won’t be able to pay them.  On the flip side, Visra is going to try and find them employment in the town.

Elisssa, getting a little tired of the group’s actions preventing her from killing who she wants to when she wants is going to depart the group for at least awhile, taking the gold and valuables she’s garnered from their adventures.  She has thoughts of packing up her relatives adn friends on a ship and sailing away from this danger zone now that she knows there are cities to the south, albeit under the threat of hobgoblin attack but at least she won’t have to worry about her mind being consumed and her body used to kill innocents.

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Continue reading »]]> Since I don’t like players able to survive just flat out silly falls I’m changing the falling rules to make them a little more drastic.   As an example a level 6 character can survive on average a 100′ fall.  That’s just silly to me.

To offer an anecdote, I’m specifically working to avoid a recurrence of a scene in years past where a player, to get away from a particularly gruesome fight metagamed and said, “I can survive an 8 story fall, I jump out the window.”

So I’m making falling damage cumulative and discounting the first 10′.  So anyone can fall 10′ or less without an issue.  For every 10′ farther than that, that they fall, they take 1d10 damage cumulative.

So a 20′ fall deals 1d10 damage.  A 30′ fall deals 1d10+2d10 damage.  A 40′ fall deals 1d10+2d10+3d10 damage.  A 100′ fall deals 1d10+2d10+3d10+4d10+5d10+6d10+7d10+8d10+9d10.

Falling onto a hard surface adds 50% damage.  Falling into a soft surface reduces damage by 50%. An acrobatics roll versus DC 15 can reduce the distance fallen by 10′.

This will very quickly make long distance falling deadly even for high level characters.

[Edited]

Per the comment associated with this I offer up the following alternative which I’m consdering -

For every 10′ after the first 10′ falling damage costs a falling character a healing surge value in damage. So a fall of 50′ equals 40′ of ‘damaging’ fall and kills a healthy character.  This has the benefit (depending on your point of view) of removing level from the equation.   The downside is that this would greatly increase the lethality of even short falls.  Teleporting a creature 30′ up would cost it half it’s health with one power regardless of how much half it’s health is.   So this might end up being a player’s rule only.

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Continue reading »]]> Quote of the day – “How much does a weretiger weigh?”

Our group starts off in the warehouse littered with dead bodies, the bodies they’ve slain.  Deciding that the’d be better off if they got the hell out they do so and retreat back to their tavern.  The next day Biminey vists the temple of Eris where he talks with Sushanna and the new high priest and finds out information on their possible foes. Â  King Hesh’tar, his queen Liloth, his adviser Phy’el Fleshwalker and their enforce Krag the Butcher.  Tales of their powers are legendary only surpassed by the tales of their evil.

After telling the high priest they’d already killed Krag, Biminey was a bit taken aback at the priests quesiton, “did you burn the body and scatter the ashes?”  Which they didn’t do.

Other information learned is that the town is a mystical anchor point that keeps Larkson’s curse alive and well on the city of Darkmith.  That the prince’s True Name is located in the city of Larkson and that the very stones of the city are warded against the powers of Darkmith and for one of the creatures of Darkmith to enter the town would render it significantly weaker than it wold be outside the town.

Torel meets with the Captain of the Watch and discusses events.

Shuk meets up with Stak in their tavern and gives him a device that she’d had created in Anvil by an high level artificer there to help with Soozin.  She seems distant to the Stak and doesn’t wish to talk much. It’s obvious that the loss of Dra’kin has hit her fairly hard.

They meet up and compare notes and Biminey leads them to the temple of Eris where they stashed Soozin while they went out to the temple of healing to cure Torn.

Biminey activates the device and it enters Soozin’s throat to go after the parasite.  It warps out and something goes wrong and the parasite splits up the way it’s created to do but lightning flares and the several small parasites swell to the size of large dogs.

The group defeats the giant slugs and Soozin is now healed. [Note: Wasn't planned to be a hard fight unless for some reason not everone in the group happened to be there but as it turned out they were.]

After everything that’s happened to them they pressure the high priest of Eris to allow them to stay on the grounds and he doesn’t take much persuading.  The group has proved formidable to hostile creatures and having them around he can’t see as a bad thing.

Elissa finds Keri waiting for her in her new room in the temple.  Keri has a tale of having been on a boat for three weeks scouting the charts that she lifted from the slaver ship while it was in the harbor.  She reports finding the stronghold listed on the charts and reports that there is an airship attached to a keep on the island.  She also tells Elisssa that the free ride is over now with Dra’kin dead and any future services will be cash in hand.

They discuss further the murders taking place and finally [after DM prodding] determine that the murders are taking place in houses/buildings that are newly constructed, not part of the original town’s construction, wooden.  With the new knowledge of the warded stones and construction it’s not a big leap of deduction to figure out that the wardings are keeping the murderer out. Â  Which they have determined is possibly Krag in spirit form trying to recover his lost corpse.

They take their findings to the Captain of the watch and lead him to make the deductions on his own.  He takes them to the Council who decrees that it would be prudent for citizen’s that are in new construction to find a place to stay that’s part of the original stone construction.  As the group determines that people aren’t yet for the most part taking the warnings seriously they decide to head out after their air ship after making plans for their assault.

They arrange for passage, their money is rapidly depleting.

Arriving at the island, to everyone’s astonishment their plan works, they get on the island and defeat the forces at the keep which is where we leave them.  They have several hours most likely before someone might question why no one has come down from the keep with the cave trolls but they still have the air ship to repair, the master override amulet to tune and unfortunately Biminey is only one man.

[Note: I had a timeline of the coming's and goings of the forces on the island and by chance or luck they hit the island when it had minimal forces.  Also their plan bypassed the forces on the keep and made what might have been a fight that could have seen the loss of some of the group into a fight that while knuckle biting wasn't white knuckle.  At least yet.  But rather than a fairly large fight they managed to defeat the forces in waves due to their actions and negated some of their firepower by a pretty plan and good reaction to the situation at hand.]

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Continue reading »]]> Thanks to the gods of whimsy the groups warlock, a ‘conlock’ by the name of Dra’kin died last session.  Unfortunately there just wasn’t much that could be done although much like the death of Aoefel it might have been preventable.  But we’ll never know.

At any rate the net result is T’Balktu has joined the group.  He’s a younger goliath barbarian.  Think of the goliath in my world more as a Hill People than some half elemental race.  Lots of muscles, outdoor types with a hunger for living as large as their view of the world from atop their mountain fortresses.

He was made in a hurry Saturday and I’ve since cleaned it up a little, swapping a couple of things out that didn’t work for a 2handed great axe wielder.

The end result is a veritable damage machine.  If he crits his Ragestrike power he’ll be doing 60 damage.  Not half bad at all.  And with multiple ways to get temporary hit points he should make up a little for his lower defenses.   With low reflex and willpower he’s going to get whacked a lot by critters that attack those defenses.  And unfortunately as I happen to know, more than one of the bosses of this campaign have powers against those.

Against masses of mobs his total damage output should go through the roof and he should be a minion killer from hell.  An at-will that has a blast 3 component if he hits with it?  I’ll have to seriously ramp up the minion count just to break even.

I’ve started him out with Bleeder, his father’s greataxe, that spurs him onward to greater displays of glory as well as an Ironskin belt made by his grandfather out of materials no one in the family likes to talk about.  And I think he may be a good candidate for the Cape of the Red Path they recently found as mobility for him would be a good thing so he can get to the best position on the field to unleash his burst/blast attacks against swarms of bad guys.

Too bad though about Dra’kin.  But failing 3 out of 4 death saves and the healer failing 2 out of 2 stabilization checks?  His death was meant to be.

But T’Balktu should be able to pick up the slack and then some.  And as a front line striker it should help keep the others alive and in better shape a little more.

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Continue reading »]]> This was mainly a combat session with two boss battles and was marred by the fatality of one of the group.  I’m not ‘doing’ resurrection in this campaign, so a death is the final curtain, not a revolving door.

We pick up with our heroes after the end of the fight in the Temple with the demonic goddess.  They decided to go try and save Torn by taking a simulcrum to the temple of H’Estar, a goddess of healing, sun and all that.  The temple has been abandoned over time as the area controlled by the hobgoblin hordes to the south have encroached and overrun the area.

Acquiring horses the group heads to the temple where they perform the ritual of healing for Torn, channeling their own life force into the simulacrum they’ve had crafted, the ritual lead by Sushanna, acolyte of the temple of Eris and Biminey’s snuggle bunny.

As the ritual ends the release of magic breaks the illusion that’s been crafted on hobgoblins that are sneaking up on them from four directions. The fight was rough, Stak performing exceptional work thinning the hobgoblin grunts two at a time per round until there were no more, dropping them with a single arrow to a vital location each time.  The remainder dealt with the wardogs, soldiers and the hobgoblin fleshcarver.  The fleshcarver and two other hobgoblins escaped with their lives.

[It was a tough fight - 16 grunts, 5 soldiers, 3 archers, 4 war dogs, 1 fleshcarver, divided up in groups of 4 sets coming in from four different directions. I'm become not a fan of bad guys fighting to the point of stupidity and needlessly sacrificing their lives, at least the bosses of the fight and once the boss breaks and runs there's going to be one or two underlings who are going to see it as their duty to follow after him to keep him safe...]

Unfortunately their healing shortage cost them this time dearly.  Dra’kin, normally safe in the rear, but now up in front due to the four sided attack.  This provided to be ultimately costly to the warlock and left him with his life’s blood draining away on the battlefield at the end of the fight.

[In Dra'kin's defense (and mine), he failed 3 out of 4 death saves while Biminey the best healer in the group, failed two out of two healing checks to try to stabalize him. Apparently the gods of luck, whimsey and statistics wanted him dead.]

At the end of the fight they recovered and performed a second ritual for the simulacrum of Soozin, hoping that it would deal with the parasite lodged in her belly.

They fled home making the trip safely.  There they found Torn recovered, no longer a vegetable although still missing his hand.  Apparently regeneration wasn’t part of the package.  He’s a pit fighter though and while it sucks he can deal.

They find out that there were three days without murders but the last three days there have been a murder a might.

They also found [not sure if anyone actually heard it] that another farming village hasn’t had anyone come into town in awhile which while not unheard of is viewed with suspicion these days.  Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe it’s some evil influence spreading it’s power base.  Who knows?

They contacted Meri and informed her of Dra’kin’s death and told her they had something to give Shuk (the good luck amulet she gave Dra’kin on a braid of Tanner’s hair).  Meri passed on information that an eladrin was in town meeting with strangers in a warehouse in the dock area.

A mercenary showed up at the groups doorstep looking for work, T’Baktu the goliath barbarian.  T’Baktu came into town with the other mercenaries hired by the city but doesn’t really like the mercenary life.  He tried to join the City Watch but the Captain of the watch is suspicous of everything these days and turned him down.  The captain did though point him at our heroic group and offered to pay him gold if he’d spy on the group and inform the captain of their dealings and work.

The group showed up at the warehouse and found it guarded on the outside.  Stak with a bow shot from the gods killed the sentry on the south gate with a single shot through the head.

They crept up to the door and Biminey undid the barring and peeked inside spotting a large group of sailors, bearing tatoos like those they saw on the slaver sailors.

He stepped inside rolling one of his constructs of lightning into the center of the group, killing all six in one shot. [New record by the way].

The rest of the group rushed in and joined the fray.  A group of tougher thugs, two slaver and two bandits were spotted by a set of stairs.  As the screams started a slaver Overmage, and Warrick the leader of the bandits and his shaman stepped out of an office on the second floor.

T’Baktu took several hits in the opening round almost dropping him but he persevered and came back into the fight.  The thugs kept the group occupied while the  overmage, shaman and warrick’s bow decimated their health from above on the walkway connecting two upper level office structures.

Eventually the thugs were dropped as was the shaman.  The overmage descended to lower level to try and get a good usage out of his blast powers but was unable to without hitting his own troops.

Warrick seeing the way the wind was blowing tipped his hat in salute o the other bowman, Stak and fled through the office and up to the roof.  Torel was hot in pursuit but discretion proved the watchword of the day and didn’t follow the leader up to the roof where at least one other thug was on guard duty.

[As it was late and obvious the overmage was going to die I didn't play out the last round or two and just fast forwarded to his demise.]

The group recovered a Trishan Spine Bow from one of the hobgoblin archers and a Cape of the Red Path from the slaver overmage along with some gold  and healing potions.

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Continue reading »]]> Excuse the hiatus, we take one week off out of every four and last week we also had a huge snowfall to contend with that made it dangerous to get together.  With any luck we’ll be playing this weekend.

In  the meantime –

“Councilman with all due respect I believe the idea has merit.  Council Lerik’s idea of locking the 5 of them up for a few days to see if the murders stop will harm no one and it might help uncover the truth.”

“See, even the guard are smart enough to know I’m right Garon.” came the oily voice of Councilor Lerik as he leaned forward, thrusting out a finger to point to the chainmail clad form of Captain Warik, commander of the guard.

The creases of Warik’s eyes bunched slightly and then smoothed out at Lerik’s tone, insulting without giving cause for insult. A skill the man possessed in spades, one that Warik couldn’t help but wish would get the man… hurt.  Not killed, he wasn’t that obnoxious but Warik wouldn’t be unhappy to hear that the councilor had met with some mishap, maybe a broken bone or two.  It would be too much to ask that Lerik became a victim to the person or creature that was killing townsfolk each night.

“Captain! Did you hear me?” Garon asked sharply.

“Sorry sir, something occurred to me about the murders that distracted me.”

Garon shook his head, “I said no we won’t be tossing them in jail.  They’ve done well enough by us.  They chased that creature out of the Eris temple, were captured and almost killed trying to solve our gold thefts, we know more about the murders because of them.  No, they stay free.”

“You realize they ‘found out’ information on the murders because they committed them!” Lerik spat out.

Garon leaned forward, planting his palms on the table, “That’s enough!  I know you have issues with them Lerik.  You have issues with anyone who doesn’t fit your god’s image of the ideal.  Oh I know who or what you worship.  So far your belief’s haven’t interfered with your ability to keep the merchants happy and in line but don’t push things too far.  Without my goods to sell and Teagan’s boats and wagons to ship them you’d be a little unpopular with everyone both merchant and commoner so I suggest you give up this little vendetta you have against these people.”

Lerik dropped back into his chair, mouth open and then a look of furious anger crossed his face.  Without a word he rose and stormed out of the council chamber, Jan, the pretty young woman who’d taken Tanner’s place following after an uncertain pause, tossing an apologetic look around the room.

“What a pleasant individual.” Warick growled.

“That’s enough from you too Captain.  We all need to get along.  I know we’ve had our differences, I know you don’t like the changes we’ve pushed down your throat as it were about hiring outside help, which again doesn’t indicate a lack of confidence in your or the Watch’s ability.  But with the slaver raid, the murders and I know you don’t care to believe in them but of late all the temple priests have spoken of auguries that bad times are coming, very bad times.  Better poorer but prepared.  Perhaps if we’d of had these extra troops then my own… Never mind. As I say we need to get along with him and each other for the protection and benefit of the town.”

Warick nodded curtly, “Aye, I can understand your position Councilor.”

“I hear a but in there but I won’t push it.  Please go on, we’ll go over your report and see if we can make anything out of it.  Do what you can to catch this killer and keep our people safe.”

“Aye, that I can agree with.” Warick saluted the two councilors and their aides and turning on a heel left the room.

Teagan, the eladrin in charge of shipping who up till now had been quiet spoke up, “Berylon would you and Spar be so good as to wait in the other room for a few moments?”

The two aides glanced at each other and Berylon shrugged, “Sure, just summon if you have need.  C’mon Spar.”

After the room was empty and the door closed Teagon leaned back in his chair.  Face calm and impassive, eyes wandering over the decorative carvings in the ceiling of the council chambers he spoke quietly, “You know that one is beginning to overstep his bounds.  His hatred of all non-humans is affecting his dealings with me. I know he’ll be dead in 20 or 30 years and be out of my hair but it’s going to be a long 30 years at this rate.  Out of curiosity as he’s without heir or acknowledged relation as far as I know who would inherit if something were to happen to our fellow councilman?”

Garon shot a sharp look at the eladrin, “You know the answer to that and I don’t like where that question is going Teagon.”

Teagon flicked his eyes over and gave a miniscule shrug, “I’m not proposing anything Garon.  I’m just noting that the man has a lot of people irritated at him.  And ever since that deal with the slaver, if it was a slaver, he’s gotten a lot worse.  Did you know he’s pushing all the merchants under his control to get rid of their non-human employees?  I also heard that he wants to erect an altar to that banal spiteful god of his.  Yes you humans make up the highest proportion of the cities population but humans versus non-humans you’re in a distinct minority.  It’s irrational hatreds brought upon people by the ideologies of the likes of that one and his ilk that could end up destroying this town much less the slavers or reavers or whatever it is that the priests are warning us is coming.”

Garon suddenly chuckled, “You know that’s the most I think you’ve ever said at one time.  Yes the man was never pleasant and lately he’s turned downright vile, even to his ‘own kind’.  I think though that you overestimate the draw of his beliefs and the power of Bain.  Did you know he already has an altar to his god in a cellar under his home?  Ahh, see, we both have sources of information.  And do you know how many people in his circle of ‘friends’ and acquaintances actually pay homage to his detestable little godling?  Only twelve that I know of.  Twelve followers out of how many people in this town?  Nay he poses no real threat to the security of the town.  And he’s brilliant at keeping the merchants in line, paying their taxes and not overcharging the commoners.”

Teagon’s lips curled up slightly, “I bow before your wisdom then Garon. Perhaps I shall learn somewhat of it during the time you have left on this plane of existence.”

“We live as the gods decree my friend.  Even your longevity might be cut shorter than you’d like as your gods wish. As for myself, I find it pointless to worry about it. Have you come up with anything we can do or have the Watch do to try and protect the people?”

Teagon shook his head, “Without knowing what we’re dealing with there’s little we can do.  Trying to ward every home, building and store against everything would be impossible.  But if we can find the creature’s nature we might be able to come up with something or so my people tell me.”

“The information that the group gave us was of no help?”

“Not really.  Necromatic arts are pretty far reaching.  We need to know the nature of the creature, if we could get something that belonged to it, an article of clothing or better yet flesh or blood then perhaps those skilled in the arts might come up with a way to track it.”

Garon snorted, “Blood? Hells we can’t even find the blood of the victims.”

“A chilling part of the deeds.  Where is the blood going and what is it being used for.  I fear the answer will not be one we wish to know.”

“Undoubtedly. Let’s get them back in here and start going over shipping needs.  The fish are pouring in from the boats and we’re going to have to get more barrels and crates to hold them.  I’d like another five hundred of the stasis crates as well, we should have planned ahead for this just in case.”

The two men, two of the most influential men in the city began studying the piles of documents that detailed the lifeblood of the city of Larkson, the fishing harvest and its dissemination.

Continue reading »]]> Found an interesting document about Taint which is similar to the Chaos of say Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  I was looking for some mechanics to help simulate exposure to the places and creatures of Darkmith and found this link.  There’s no author’ship noted anywhere so I can’t give any credit.  If you happen to know who came up with this document let me know and I’ll see they get credit for it.

[Edit: Per a reader's comments this is a take on the Taint system from Heroes of Horror, a DnD 3.5 supplemental book.  Thanks for the info!]

The base premise is the characters are exposed to something or do something that ‘bends’ them mentally and or physically.  This can range from pyschosis to turning bestial and many other things. Â  Perhaps wandering the streets of Darkmith and the aura of evil and power that envelops that city might plant a seed of evil in someone.  Or maybe the touch of Liloth’s powers driving one to stab a companion in the throat might leave lingering inclinations to repeat the action unforced.

We will see.

A few snippets from the pdf although a quick perusal shows some missing entries and some small typo’s that could be fixed as well as generalized overhaul to fit my personal needs.

The Touch of Taint
Characters in the Vale that venture into the dark places of the world, or dabble in the waters of evil, run the risk of their minds and bodies becoming poisoned by taint. Mental taint, or depravity, can eventually send one mad, where physical taint, or corruption, can transform a living being into an undead horror.

Acquiring Taint
“Sometimes one’s soul can be filled with evil because of the evil of their actions. Sometimes all it takes is for one to pick up the wrong book…”

Committing acts of unspeakable evil
In cultures throughout the typical D&D setting certain acts earn universal condemnation amongst races and peoples with even the slightest moral code: murder, torture, genocide, and rape as well as fouler acts warp the mind of those committing them and result in the offending character gaining depravity.

This does not represent external evil creeping into the character’s mind, but rather represents the wearing away of one’s moral compass as characters begin to treat others as pawns and toys rather than as individual creatures worthy of respect. Even characters that describe themselves as “hardened” or “jaded” are not immune to gaining depravity in this fashion; indeed, one could argue that being extremely hardened to or jaded about the suffering of others is a sign of one gaining depravity.

Exposure to areas warped by evil
Whether due to the presence of demons, foul creatures from the Far Realms, or simply areas forever marred by evil of a less supernatural variety (such as the execution of an innocent man by a corrupt court, or the shack where a serial killer went to hide his “conquests”) can result in character’s gaining corruption through no fault of their own.

Typically, there are only certain areas in the blighted zone that bestow corruption (the area around the altar where innocents were sacrificed to dread gods), but in the cases of extreme blights, every square foot of the area might potentially bestow corruption. This corruption is typically applied to a character after a certain length of time and isaccompanied by a feeling of instinctive disgust that warn both the player and his or her character that it would be wise to spend as little time in the location as possible.

Certain sanity-rending locations that warp the minds of those who travel through them, like an area tainted by the energies of the Far Realm might very well bestow depravity instead as character’s minds break under the strain of sights alien to any sane man or woman.

Exposure to dread items
While tools and weapons both magical and mundane have no moral significance in and of themselves, the uses they are put to or the techniques used in their creation can sometimes result in them being a vessel of corruption or depravity.

A blade carved from the bones of a whimpering slave carries with it an imprint of the suffering of the one who “donated” the material for the blade and might whisper words of condemnation and hatred to a character who chooses to carry it, slowly increasing his or her depravity. A weapon wielded by a demonic general or an unknowable Far Realm entity might have acquired some of its master’s inhuman corruption, and might plague a wielder with disgusting growths. Then of course, there are weapons and other items specifically crafted by mad cultists or vindictive spell casters that slowly drive their wielders insane with lust for power, or that cause them to rot from the inside out.

Mental Condition –

Treacherous
Foul whispers cloud your mind with images of what you could receive if you struck your companions down. Once per encounter when an ally leaves a space that you threaten, the DM may choose to roll an attack with an attack bonus of your level +3 vs. the will defence of your character to represent the urge to take an opportunity to strike. If the attack is successful, you must make an opportunity attack against your ally. The upside is that your treacherous leanings make it easier to stab others in the back-you gain a +2 bonus to damage against creatures that you have combat advantage against.

Physical Condition

Internal Corruption (Ranked, maximum 3)

Your body is slowly consumed from the inside out by the corruption growing within you. While others cannot see it, it’s effects are all too obvious-for each level of this symptom taken you regain 2 fewer hit points from a second wind and take a -1 penalty to endurance checks. However, the festering growths within your body make you unappetizing to creatures that might otherwise want to make a meal out of you. If a living creature makes a bite attack against you that deals damage, it takes a -1 penalty to all attack rolls and skill checks for each time you have selected this symptom, until the end of its next turn.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> “I see unsuccessful you have been.” spoke a voice that was filled with guttural rasping.  Image the sounds a person might make if they’d screamed for so long they were choking on their own blood, flesh ripped from the throat, vocal cords pulled so tightly they threatened to break with another sound, this might then be a pale imitation of this voice. The words spoken were in a ancient tongue full of harsh consonants and harmonics, living flesh cringing at the noise.

“The wardings of that accursed place hold true still.  They sap my powers more than imagined I.”  A second voice was definitely feminine, a caressing shiver of a voice that spoke of silk and whispers and promises of shadows and touch.

The first figure shrugged with a sinuous wave of its body, “I do not know stay shall I.  My freedom is enjoyable.” The figure gestured idly and nearby a man dressed in the uniform of the Larkson Watch drew a knife across his throat, the cut joining many many others on his body.  As the last of his life’s blood fountained as a scarlet ribbon in the air he slumped to the ground.  Only to rise moments later, dead eyes focused on its master.

The feminine voice changed in a flicker turning into a thing of razors and pain, “Mine husband you shall see free or your usefulness is at an end, know this Phy’el Fleshwalker.”

The corpse white skin of the first split open as the second’s words played over it, bloodless flesh gaping open. With no sign of pain upon its face it smiled slightly and nodded, “An it pleases you my queen.”

The voice, once again silken caresses, “Keep up the pressure on the wards.  Use the humans as you can to subvert them.  The Accursed One’s guardians seek to undo our release and attend to them I need.” Wings of green fire erupted from the second’s back and the body elongated.  The grass for yards around wisped into ash as it rose into the air with a lazy beat of her wings.  Hovering for a moment the solid black eyes looked down at him, “And use your command over the dead and flesh to recover Krag’s animus and restore him.  I do not wish my beloved to be deprived of his personal guard.”

Phy’el turned his head to follow the figure, using the heat of it to track it while the eyes of his head, boiled and burst in the first instants of the wings coming out and caressing his body, slowly regenerated. “Some day my queen.  Some day…”

Ranks of motionless figures jerked in unison minutes later as a single cry of raw anger and rage ripped through the air.  With a crook of his finger he summoned one of them to him.

“I hear you’re asking for Shuk.” Dra’kin started as a voice spoke behind him, the staff of wood he was carving slipping out of his hand and rolling across the worktable. He turned to see one of Shuk’s halflings, Keri he was almost sure.

“Yes, I wanted to check on her, it’s been a couple of days since I’ve seen her and I wanted to make sure she’s all right.”

“That’s why she has me.  Me and Meri. To make sure she’s alright. She went up stream with Meri to Forge.”

“Oh?  Why?”  Dra’kin gestured to a nearby chair and sat on the edge of his bed.

Keri shook her head, “Guild business.  I’m sure you understand.”

“When’s she coming back?”

“Guild business.” the halfling thief replied.

“Uh, okay.  When she gets back could you tell her I’d like to see her.”

“I’ll give her the message.”

“Great.  Are you hungry?  My treat. The council came through with a little gold to thank us for our ‘efforts’ in looking into the murders and for driving the creature out of the temple.”

She shook her head, “No thanks, I’ve got to look into some things.  You can’t give people a chance to get momentum or your place in the order of things becomes at risk.”

There was a tap on the door and moments later it opened revealing Torel standing there, “Hey we’re going to go over to… Well hey there.  Meri?  Keri?”

“Keri.  Meri’s with Shuk who’s…” Dra’kin paused as Keri shook her head slightly, “…busy right now.”

“Mi’lady Keri would you care to join us for the evening meal?” Torel asked with a slight bow.

“Thanks but no, I must be off.” she replied.

“Perhaps next time then.”

“Maybe.  Later Dra’kin.” Keri said, flashing him a look, a warning in it.  Torel stood aside to let her leave, coming further into the room.

“So what about you?  Hungry?”

“Sure, let me get my pouch.”

“So what’s up with Shuk?”

Dra’kin grimaced, “Guild business. Don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”

Torel shrugged “Okay, just being polite.  We’re going to try some place that Stak found down on the docks.  Swears they have a fish stew to die for.  Personally I think it’s not the stew but the person bringing it that he thinks is to die for.”

Dra’kin rolled his eyes, “Okay I guess.  But if there’s another gods damned drunken brawl this is the last time I’m letting any of you pick a place to eat.”

Torel protested, “Hey those were all Biminey’s fault!  Him and that damn hand of his trying to steal drinks from drunks.”

“I’m just saying, your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault. I have to jump through another window to avoid being thrown through it and I’m going to burn someone’s pubes off.”  Hellfire flickered to life on the finger he was pointing at Torel.  A sympathetic light pulsed in red crystal in a silver mount on his worktable casting a red glow onto the room.

Torel held his hands up with an innocent look, “Hey hey watch that thing!”

Dra’kin closed his fingers into a fist, the action causing the flames to go out, “Just remember what I said.  Now let’s go I’m hungry enough to eat even bad food now.”

Torel clapped him on the shoulder, then pulling his hand back as Dra’kin stopped to look at it. “Right right, the warlock that walks alone. Come one.”

Dra’kin’s eyes narrowed as the avenger of Kord walked ahead of him, a thoughtful look on his face for a moment before clearing.

In the shadows across the street two figures stirred, one stepping out to follow the warlock and avenger down the street, the other slipping away down an alley.

Image Credits

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[Sorry for the delay on the session report and podcasts.  Busy at home and work and Life intruding and all that.]

This session saw the inclusion of a bard, a gnome by the name of Dash, seeking to record the exploits of the “only known survivors of a slaver kidnapping!!!” who met up with them at their tavern but I get ahead of myself.

Present were Biminey, Dra’kin, Elisssa, Stak, Torel and temporary guest star – Dash.

We start our journey with the quints getting back to town from their voyage down to darkmith.  There’s a lot of questions, answers, no answers and the like going on for the first few hours of the session.  The group discovers that for the last few nights a gruesome murder has taken place.  They’re unable to uncover any pattern to the murders, they seem to be random serial killings.  Each body and most times there were multiples, was dismembered and an odd lack of blood was found at each scene.  No one noticed the murders even though in one case it was performed at a whorehouse with thin walls and crowded clientelle.

They interact with the priests of Eris and the Captain of the Watch as well as the council about their past, present and future activities.

The researchers at Eris have a possible solution for Torn.  An old healing temple, now in Hobgoblin lands might be able to channel healing energies still through a simulacrum back to Torn.  Getting there might be a problem though.

A bloodied woman and child arrive at the town and they witness this and join in on the investigation. They determine that both woman and child have been impacted by arcane/necrotic energies and only after the energies are cleansed at the Eris temple’s circle are they able to get anything more than the White Man from the hysterical woman and catatonic child.  A ritual is performed and the woman reveals that a white figure she remembers it as a skeletal unearthly figure while the child remembers it as a man in white robes ent