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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.

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In SWEX if you achieve your to-hit roll by 4 over what you needed to roll to achieve success you get to add an extra 1d6 damage to your damage roll. You then take your total damage output and compare that to the target’s defenses. If you meet or exceed the defense you can start applying damage to the target.

What this can result in, is that a player might roll really well on a to-hit roll and then roll not so well on damage and have the end result that they do zero damage to the target. No effect what-so-ever. This can be aggravated on the player’s side if they roll REALLY well. Although the developers recommend you stop rolling exploding dice once you’ve achieved 4 over your target number on to-hit rolls, since I use an App that does give you totals, rolling a 22 to hit versus a target number of 4 can really have a “That suxx0r’s” moment for the player if they don’t get decent damage.

This is worse, in my opinion, than rolling well in DnD and then rolling low damage. At least in DnD you feel you’re having ‘some’ effect even if it’s minor if you roll low damage. Also because of the flat adds in other systems the die roll isn’t the only source of damage, you’re guaranteed a minimum value of the lowest die result possible + the additional damage. In part to eliminate the ‘lows’ of combat this is why I implemented using average damage for our 4th edition game and I do believe it helped significantly in many ways and making suck rolls impossible is one of them.

But with Savage Worlds you can’t really use average dice or you might as well throw away the entire dice based system or at least the exploding die part. And that exploding die part is in many cases what makes the system work where anyone can in theory damage anyone with any given attack. And of course exploding dice are fun.

In thinking about this I’ve come up with some possible options that I’m going to consider further.

Option A – Average Joes – Use average damage as a minimum value for every attack. So if you roll 2d6 damage the least amount of damage you can roll is 7, 3d6 is 11, d4+d6 would be 6 and so on.

Basing the chance to hit and the chance to do damage IF you hit on random rolls is a little… random and creates situations where too many possible outcomes yield no combat effect. Making a change like this long term will have the effect of shifting the average upwards and reducing the ‘spread’. To be fair it would have to be applied to both sides equally. This is the most ‘equal’ option of the possible options I’ve come up with I believe although it does favor the PC’s but less so than the others. This would remove the high to-hit roll, crap damage roll turn a hit into a miss syndrome although it doesn’t guarantee that the hit is going to have an effect on the wrong end of the bell curve where something is trying to get through a really high toughness factor.

Option B – Always Shaken – Any critical hit has the minimum effect that the target is shaken if it’s not shaken or inflicts one wound if it is. In essence the minimum damage becomes the target’s toughness.

This means that every critical effect has an ingame impact rather than just a chance to actually have the attack have any effect. Never a bad thing. This is going have a broader and wider spread impact as a result It means that a child armed with a pen knife could in theory roll two critical hits in a row and kill an Extra simply by Shaking it with one hit, and Wounding it with the second regardless of damage output. This one is going to favor the Wild Cards significantly more than Extra’s since they’re much more likely to get critical hits. It could also have absurd situations where a guy with a toothpick can kill someone as easily as guy with a sword although GM fiat could fix that.

Option C – Critical Joes - This would work the same as Option A but only apply on a critical hit. i.e. only if a creature’s T0-Hit roll is 4+ what they need would they get to use average damage on their die rolls as the minimum value.

Again this one is going to favor WC’s more due to the increased crit chance they get and it would have less game impact since it would apply is a lot fewer attack rolls.

Option D – To the Max - This option would let the character choose to either roll their dice as normal including the bonus 1d6 OR simply take the maximum amount on their normal dice pool for a regular attack. In other words if they roll a critical hit and they normally do 2d6 on a regular hit, they could either roll 2d6+1d6 or take the max of the base damage, in this case 2d6 = 12 damage.

This in many cases is going to be close to taking average damage but it does eliminate the math. Not sure it’s variable enough to keep for consideration but there you go.

Option E – Edgy – Just give every creature the No Mercy edge which lets them re-roll damage with a Benny.

This gives everyone a chance to recover from a bad roll but it adds yet another thing to spend Bennies on and could disrupt the Benny mechanic. A Benny spent to re-roll damage is a Benny lost to try and soak damage. Also this yet again favors the players over the NPC’s due to the fact that PC’s have a lot more Bennies than the GM does.

I think they’re all viable, some have a greater impact than others in different ways so I’ll probably just put them all out there for my players to peruse and get their input since they’re the ones that are impacted the most by this.

And just so you know, I don’t think every person who enters a contest should get a blue ribbon, but every person who enters a contest with a really great entry should at least get an honorable mention.

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.

If you’ve seen my 4th Edition Player Bonus cards they’re the same kind of thing, each player gets to draw one card at the start of the session (or some other interval as deemed appropriate by the GM/DM) and can play them during the game to gain a bonus of some kind.

These are my first pass at cards applicable to Savage Worlds, feel free to take them as is but they’re still a work in progress.   If any of them copy a commercial product then it’s pure happenstance, there are only so many mechanisms in Savage Worlds so there is bound to be cross over and great minds think alike and all that.

NOTE: Some of these are setting specific and not necessarily appropriate for other settings.  They’re all first draft and subject to revision, removal, replacement.

Image Credits

1. Bad Karma – Take a Benny the GM just played and add it to your pile.  If applicable any roll gained by the GM with this Benny becomes a critical failure.
2. Just What I Needed – You find a minor item that helps you in the current situation.  Spend a Benny: You find a major item that helps you.
3. It’s a Miracle! – 1d6 Extra’s die due to some freak accident or outre incident at the GM’s devising.  The GM gains a GM Benny.  Spend a Benny: Double the extra’s that are affected.
4. Rally Cry – Allies within earshot are no longer Shaken.
5. Seat Cushions – You recover 3d6 rounds of ammunition that fit one weapon you carry.  Spend a Benny to double the amount found.
6. Last Action Hero – If you are last in initiative you may ignore MAP penalties due to Multiple Actions for this round.
7. Boom – Head Shot – You may ignore any Called Shot penalty on your next ranged attack.
8. Berserkergang – Triggered: When you or an Ally you can see take one or more Wounds.  Effect: Deal +2 damage with Melee attacks for the remainder of the scene.
9. The Cavalry – 1d6 Extras show up and aid you against a common foe.  They have a neutral rating to you.
10. Hand of Fate – Trigger: An ally misses or an enemy hits  Effect: The miss becomes a critical hit, the hit becomes a critical failure.
11. Voice From Above – Play this card to obtain a hint from the GM about the current situation.
12. Piece of the One True Cross – Play this card to negate all damage from one attack.
13. 30 Pieces of Silver – Play this card to have one non-wild card enemy turn traitor to their own side.
14. That’s Crazy Talk Mister- Play this card to cause all non-wild card enemies suffer a -2 MAP as they stop to listen to your jabbering for one round.
15. A Team – Play this card to grant +4 to all cooperative trait rolls for one round.
16. Second Wind – Play this card on a character to negate a Wound and or Shaken status.
17. Take A Bullet For You Dave – Trigger: You are hit by an attack.  Effect: An adjacent Ally or enemy Extra takes the attack instead.  Must be played before damage is rolled. Spend a Benny: May be played after damage is rolled.
18. Eureka! – Play this card to roll a d8 on one skill test even if it’s untrained although untrained penalties apply.  Spend a Benny: Gain +4 on the roll.
19. Deja Vu – Play this card to take one card from the discard pile.
20. Megakill! – Play this card to add 1d6 to the damage from one attack.
21. Ultrakill! – Play this card to add 2d6 to the damage from one attack.
22. Godlike! – Play this card to double the damage from one attack.
23. Inspired – Play this card on any character to roll an additional d6 on one trait roll.  This dice may ace.
24. Rub Some Dirt On It – Play this card on any incapacitated character and allow them to re-join the fight at the end of the initiative order.  Spend a Benny:  Allow the character to join the fight at the end of the current character’s turn.
25. Triple K – Play when an adjacent ally is damaged, you take the damage instead.
26. Monkeywrench – Play on a character to cause some item in their possession to break or malfunction.  They may make an appropriate trait or skill test to fix the item as an Action.  Spend a Benny to incur a -4 penalty on this repair test for the remainder of the scene.
27. To B or not two B – Play this card during an scene.  All Wild Cards in the scene gain a Benny. If there are no GM Wild Cards then the GM gains 2 GM Bennies.
28. You Killed My Father, Prepare To Die – Play this card on a character.  Until the end of the scene you gain +2 on trait rolls made against that character.
29. Rabbit Out Of My Hat – Play this card to gain +2 on any Trick test until the end of the scene.
30. Florence Nightingale – Play this card to gain +2 on heal checks on the current patient.  Spend a Benny: Gain +4 on heal checks on the current patient.
31. Mulligan – Re-roll any one trait or damage roll.
32. Cutting in Line – Draw 3 initiative cards and keep the highest.
33. Head of the Line – Move to the start of the initiative order regardless of cards dealt.
34. You Look Familiar – One non-wildcard in the scene turns out to be an old friend and joins your side as an Ally.
35. Speedy Gonzales – Expend this card to gain +2 to your Pace for the rest of the scene.
36. Scenic Route – Expend this card to move again on your turn as a Free action bypassing the one action of a type limit.
37. Duck And Cover – Expend this card to prevent all attacks caused by withdrawing from close combat for your current turn.
38. Murphy’s Law – Play this card to cause something major to go wrong with the current scene. The details are between you and your GM.
39. Can’t We All Just Get Along – Play this card to call a cease-fire between hostile groups for one round allowing diplomatic talks.   This does not guarantee hostilities won’t continue.
40. Follow My Lead – Trigger: You hit and cause damage to a creature.  Effect: All allies within visual range gain +2 on their next attack.  Spend a Benny: Bonus increases to +4.
41. My Feet Are Killing Me – Play during any rest stop.  Find 1d4 Fuel Levels.  Spend a Benny: Double amount found.
42. Twinkie Cachet – Play during any rest stop.  Find 2d6 meals worth of food.  Spend a Benny: Double amount found.
43. Lip Balm? – Play during any rest stop.  Find 2d6 medical supplies, each suitable to help heal one wound. Spend a Benny: Double amount found.
44. Circle The Wagons – Play during any rest stop.  Enjoy an uneventful night’s sleep.  Spend a Benny: This can be played after any random  encounter scene has been generated negating the scene.
45. And Now For Something Completely Expected – You are surprised by 1d6 hostile Extra’s per player as a random scene.  All Players draw 1 Adventure Card
46. You always were an asshole Gorman – Play this on an Incapacitated Ally, must be played as soon as they’re incapacitated.  Ally sets off a Grenade or Molotov centered on their location.
47. I Ain’t Got Time To Bleed – Play this card to ignore wound penalties for the remainder of the scene.
48. Still Civilized – Play this card to encounter a random friendly group who provide aid and shelter for the night.
49. Spill Your Guts – Gain as much knowledge during an interrogation as the target possesses.
50. Syndrome syndrome – Play this on a character and force them to spend an extended action monologuing about their evil plans, or that one time in band camp incurring a MAP of -4.
51. Abandon All Hope – Play this card during a combat scene and each player may choose to draw one adventure card.  1d6 hostile Extra’s enter the fight on the next round for each card drawn.  All characters must decide to draw before any cards are drawn.
52. Joker’s Gone Wild – Play this card to swap your initiative card with any Joker drawn for initiative.
53. In The Zone – Gain +1 to Shooting, Fighting, Throwing rolls until the end of the scene.

The sounds are around a dozen dice sound bites from our various podcasts.

The other keys remain the same, d20 = 0, d12 = 2, d10 = 1, d8 = 8, d6 = 6 (or any key), d4 = 4 on either the number pad or the main number keys.   Using any key for d6 as default is because I’m going to be running a Savage Worlds session or three which has a lot of d6 rolling.

If you have a player who’s vision impaired then I can’t recommend enough getting them this app (or something similar if there is such a thing) on a PC so they can roll their own dice.   Being blind sucks enough, having to depend on someone else to read your dice on top of that is just ass’ing on the cake.

D

Noir

The Case of the Foot Race

Scene:

Our fearless trio has been canvassing a seedy side of town looking for one Lou “Lucky Lou” Wilson a small time fence that’s come into some property the agency has been tasked with tracking down and returning to its rightful owners.

The purpose of the scenes – Gain familiarity with the chase rules as they apply to foot chases, expand combat familiarity, expose just how bad it is to go up against melee numbers when you only have a gun, that kind of thing. Working up a beginning set of adventures.

Things learned – Chase rules make sense but could see how a chase could drag out with a lot of catch up a bit, lose ground due to rolls.  Gang Up bonus plus unarmed defender bonus is very nasty.  The original last fight scene had the three Wild Cards versus 6 Extras and 1 Wild Card.  Combine that many attacks on top of the bonuses and it was a complete TKO.  Removing two of the Extras eased the blow somewhat and it went from a Game over man! to a “Tough but doable.”

Note: It’s a Pulp setting so there are some things that Heroes get like the police rarely show up until after the fight, they get Bennies more often as Pulp has a bit of an over top to it and the like.   This was written piecemeal over the course of several days as I found time so there may be some inconsistencies.

Our Cast –

Three members of Danger Inc. “Danger is our middle name.” private detective agency -

Jack Antonelli –
Agility d8 (2), Smarts d6 (1), Spirit d6 (1), Strength d4, Vigor d6 (1)
Toughness 5, Parry 6, Sanity 6, Pace 6(10)
Fighting d8 (3), Perception d6 (2), Shooting d6 (2), Streetwise d6 (2), Guts d6 (2), Athletics d6 (2), Insight d6(2)
Edge: Well Adjusted
Hindrances: Big Mouth, Loyal
(Think Tony DiNozzo from NCIS)

Mary Alice Dougherty –
Agility d6 (1), Smarts d8 (2), Spirit d8 (2), Strength d4, Vigor d4
Toughness 4, Parry 5, Sanity 6, Pace 6(9)
Fighting d6 (2), Shooting d6 (2), Stealth d6 (2), Thievery d6 (2) Perception d8 (3), Investigation d8 (3), Guts d6 (2), Insight d4(1)
Edge: Common Bond
Hindrances: Quirk: Prim and Proper, Cautious
(Think Evie from the Mummy)

Pyotr ‘Pete Jones’ Rashnikov –
Agility d8 (2), Smarts d4, Spirit d4, Strength d8(2), Vigor d6 (1)
Toughness 5, Parry 7, Sanity 4, Pace 6(10)
Fighting d10 (5), Shooting d8 (3), Perception d8 (5),Taunt d4(1), Guts d6(3)
Edge: Two Fisted
Hindrances: Phobia: Rats, Wanted: Russian Mafia New York City Based
(Think Pete of BCjr)

Setup –

GM: “It’s late evening, the wind is picking up and it’s a cold one. The streets and sidewalks have been steadily decreasing in traffic for the last couple of hours as the late fall sun sank below the horizon. Trash swirls down the street and there’s a hint of possibly the first early snow of the year, the old timers have been saying this is going to be a cold winter but then they always say that don’t they.  As you’d decided, Jack you’re on one side of the street part way between Pete and Mary Alice on the other. Give me an insight roll with a -4 penalty.”
Mechanically: This is a setting specific skill added to my game with SW to simulate a character’s ability to make a leap of deduction without a lot of facts, to ‘read’ people and to gain clues through intuition on things they may not consciously know.  And to pick up on creepy vibes. The penalty is pretty high for this check but it’s a very hard thing to pick up on hence the -4.

Jack: “Right, I use any reflective surfaces and the occasional glance around to keep an eye on the other two.”
Mechanically, rolls d6 and wild d6 for rolls of 2,6.  6 aces for a total of 5 (9-4).  Success.

Mary Alice: “I keep an eye on Jack, I don’t like him over on the other side of the street by himself.”
Mechanically, rolls d4 and wild 6 for rolls of 3,6.  6 aces for a total of 3 (7-4).  Failure.

Pete: “I stop to check out a window display using it to glance at Mary Alice and Jack casually.”
Mechanically: Rolls a d4-2 and wild d6-2 for a 3 and a 6.  The wild aces for a final total of 7 (13-2-4).

GM: “Well well, at roughly the same time Mary Alice and Pete you both get the feeling that someone has painted a bulls-eye on your back, that feeling of being watched by someone with intensity, possibly hostile intensity.  Good work Pete, you’re typically about as insightful as a rock with a blanket over it.”

Pete: “Ugh, I don’t like this, something’s wrong. Not sure what it is but it’s gotten partly creepy out with a chance of sudden violence.”

GM: “Ahead on the street on the same side as Pete, a man bundled up against the cold steps out of a building with a package under his arm.  He glances both ways and then heads north in the same direction you’ve been going.   Perception checks please with a -1 penalty please.”

Jack: “I give him the once over.”
Mechanically: Rolls a 5 and a 4 for a total of 4 (5-1).  Success.

Pete: “Must need to be somewhere important if he’s heading out into this cold.”
Mechanically: Rolls a 6 and a 3 for a total of 5 (6-1). Success.

Mary Alice: “He’s carrying something I see.”
Mechanically: Rolls a 7 and a 3 for a total of 6 (7-1). Success.

GM: “Although he has a muffler around his face and a snap brim hat pulled down enough of his face is showing that all of you recognize him as Lou Wilson.  He’s about 100′ ahead of you almost to the next intersection.”

Mary Alice: “Bingo, that’s our boy.  I pick up the pace to catch up to Pete.”

Pete: “Should I cross the street?”

Jack: “No no, I give Pete a discrete wave to stay on that side of the street.  We need to see where he’s going and if he crosses over he might wonder why Pete is going back and forth.  We all walk faster but not running yet to close the distance.”

GM: “You see Lou shift the package to his other arm, it’s about the size of bowling ball although squarer in shape and bundled up in gray cloth or canvas.  As he does a low warbling whistle echoes between the buildings coming from, you think, an alleyway ahead on Jack and Mary Alice’s side of the street about 50′ ahead of them.  Lou’s step falters and his head whips around, scanning the street behind him.  He turns forward and breaks into a run.  At this point he’s roughly 30′ ahead of you or 6 squares putting him at extreme range plus for a foot chase.  If he gets 11 squares ahead of you, you’ve lost him.”

Start of Chase: [Lou] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [Pete, Jack, Mary Alice ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ]

Note: Lou isn’t a full Wild Card but isn’t quite a lowly Extra either and has the ability to suffer one wound and gets his own Benny.

Pete: “Crap, what the hell is going on?  I start chasing him.”

Jack: “Son of a bi[bleep]! I cut diagonally across the street.”

Mary Alice: “Good thing I’m not wearing high heels.  I chase after them.”

GM: “And the chase is on!  Mary Alice your sustained pace at a run is a 9, the boys run at 10.  Lou seems to be hoofing it about the same speed as Mary Alice.  This is going to give Pete and Jack a bit of an edge in catching up Lou as they’re just slightly faster over the long haul than he is.  Let’s pull initiative cards shall we?”
Mechanically: I’m using a House Rule from the savage pedia that run speed equals Pace+1/2 Agility die.  This makes some sense to me as barring Obstacles (dealt with by a separate mechanic) a persons running speed isn’t going to vary between 15% and 100% of their walking speed and eliminates one roll per person per round so time saver as well.
Initiative order ends up  Mary Alice KC, Pete JS, Lou 4S, Jack 2C.
Since Mary Alice and Jack were both dealt clubs they have to avoid obstacles.  Given the situation they’re both crossing the street the obstacles are obvious.  Moving cars…

GM: “Mary Alice as you dart out into the street you hear a screech of brakes from behind you, apparently you forgot to stop look and listen. Give me an Agility test at -1.”
Mechanically: The GM has assigned the obstacle density of the area as Sparse which is a -1 penalty.

Mary Alice: “Darnit, I could have sworn I looked.  Okay I try to avoid becoming a bumper sticker.”
Mechanically:  Mary Alice rolls her Agility d6 and wild d6 and gets a 6,3.  The 6 aces for a total of 9 (10-1) and she got a success and raise.

GM: “You put on a burst of speed and get out of the way of the sedan as the driver whips the wheel to the side ending up smashing into a light pole, bringing it crashing to the ground in a screech of metal and smashing of glass.  Give me another Agility roll to see how well you’re doing with the chase.”

Mary Alice: “That roll doesn’t count?”

GM: “Not as far as I can tell, the clubs card means you have to make an obstacle roll.  I assume if you make it then the chase continues.  If you fail it then you have to take damage from the impact.”

Mary Alice: “Okay, I keep on running then.”
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d6 and wild d6 for a 1,6 which aces to 9 for a success and raise.  Mary Alice closes the gap by 2 putting her 4 squares on Lou.

Pete: “I see Mary Alice is okay and keep on running.”
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d8 and wild d6 for 8,1.  8 aces for total of 10 (9+1for being faster than Lou). Success and a raise. Pete also closes the gap by 2.

GM: “Jack as you’re moving across the street you hear the squeal of breaks and it distracts your eyes away from the pothole in front of you.”

Jack: “Whoa!”
Mechanically: Jack rolls Agility d8 and wild d6 for a 5,4 for a total of 4 (5-1).  A success.

GM: “You narrowly avoid the pothole and continue running.”

Jack: “Good thing, that might have broken an ankle.  I shout back, ‘Watch out for potholes M.A.!’”
Mechanically: Rolls his Agility d8 and wild d6 for his chase dice for a 3,6.  The 6 aces for a total of 9 (8+1 for being faster). Success and raise. He closes the gap by 2 squares.

Lou: Yells, “Back off!”
Mechanically: Lou rolls his Agility d8 and gets a 7.  A success and he increases the gap 1 square.

Round 2 Results: [Lou] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [Pete, Jack, Mary Alice ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ]

GM: “You’ve managed to close the distance a little but Lou’s running scared and he’s pushing hard to get away.”
Mechanically:  Initiative cards dealt Jack AD, Mary Alice 5H, Pete JH, Lou 8H making the order Jack, Pete, Lou, Mary Alice.

Jack: “If I pass by anything I could easily grab and throw I want to do so.”

GM: “You’ll take a multi action penalty on your chase test and the grab.  If you wanted to throw it in the same round that would be a -4 to all rolls…”

Jack: “Hmm, okay I’ll just grab something if I can and throw it next round.”

GM: “Not a problem, yes you pass by a garbage can on the sidewalk and an empty beer bottle catches your eye.”

Jack: “I grab it then as I run past.”
Mechanically: Jack is doing a grab action and his movement is an action so he’s going to suffer a -2.  He rolls Agility d8 and wild d6 and gets a 8,6.  The 6 aces for an 8.  He ends up with a 8-2 or 6.  Success on the grab.  His chase roll is also a d8 Agility and d6 wild for a 4,4 for a total of 3 (4-2+1).  Failure so he doesn’t alter the distance between him and Lou.

Pete: “I zip past Jack as he slows down to grab the bottle.”
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d8 and wild d6 for a 6,5. The player spends a Benny to roll again hoping for better results and gets a 8,3.  The 8 aces for a total of 16(15+1).  A success and 3 raises.  Success he closes the gap by 2 squares.

Lou: The fence keeps running.
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d8 and gets a 3.  Failure.

Mary Alice: “I try to run faster.”
Mechanically: She rolls Agility d6 and wild d6 and gets a 4,5 for a 5.  Success.  She closes the gap by 1 square.

Round 3 Results: [Lou] [  ] [  ] [ Pete ] [  Mary Alice ] [ Jack ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ]

GM: “Pete is closing in quickly, that bottle grab cost Jack some time though.”
Mechanically: Initiative cards result in Jack 7S, Mary Alice 8C, Pete 9D, Lou 3D or Pete, Mary Alice, Jack, Lou.

Pete: “I’ve almost got him now!”
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d8 and wild d6 for a 7,4 for a total 8 (7+1), success and a raise.  He closes the gap by 2 squares.

GM: “Mary Alice someone exits a building opening the door right in your face.”
Mechanically: Mary Alice’s club card results in an obstacle check at -1.

Mary Alice: “Oh this is going to hurt if I don’t pull off a high speed maneuver.”
Mechanically: Rolls her Agility d6 and wild d6 at -1 to avoid the obstacle and gets a 2,4 or total 3 (4-1).  She elects to spend a Benny and rolls another set for a 3,1 or total 2(3-1).  She flinches and spends a second benny for a 1,1 or critical failure.  Sighing heavily she tosses in her last benny and gets a 5,4 or total 4(5-1) and avoids the door by a miracle.

GM: “Tough one Mary Alice but you pulled it out of the fire!  Great job.  You swirl and side step, catching the door just slightly and knocking it out of the hand of the gentleman coming out who shouts in surprise, ‘What in bloody hell miss?!’”

Mary Alice: “‘Got a white rabbit to catch dear boy’ I shout back at him.”

GM: “Heh, good one.  Here have a Benny for that one.  You still need to make a chase roll.”
Mechanically: The GM appreciated the reference to Alice and Wonderland and awarded the player a Benny for it.

Mary Alice: “I’m feeling good about this one.”
Mechanically: Rolls a Agility d6 and wild d6 for a 3,6.  The 6 aces for an 8. Success and raise she closes the gap by 2.

Jack: “I wind up and let the bottle fly, trying to nail Lou with it.”

GM: “Okay as an improvised weapon let’s give the bottle your str+d4, probably a little over the top but what the heck there’s nothing in the rules that I can find. You’ll use your Throwing skill.”

Jack: Looks at his sheet. “Oh you mean my lack of Throwing skill?”

GM: “Right, that one, d4-2 plus a wild die -2.”

Jack: “Here goes nothing.  And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
Mechanically: Jack is going to be a -2 for his Throwing attack and his chase roll and because he has no Throwing skill that roll is at another -2.  The GM (not finding any reference in the manual declares the bottle will do Jack’s Str+d4 in damage, they seem to knock the heck out of people in bar fights in the movies anyway.  He rolls his Throwing d4 and Wild d6 for a 3,6.  The 6 aces for a total of 6 (10-2-2).  Well what do you know, he actually hit with it.  He rolls a Strength d4 for damage and gets a 4. It aces for a total of 9 damage!

GM: “Not sure how you pulled that off but you actually hit him hard enough to matter.  Great job! Lou is though going to try and soak the wound. Here have a Benny.”
Mechanically: The GM spends a Benny for Lou and makes a Vigor d4 test and gets a 1, failure. This causes an Out of Control check which typically results in a Skid of 1d4 (2) inches but the GM rules that the -2 increments from getting shaken override this on a foot chase and everyone moves up the chase chart by 2 inches instead.

GM: “The bottle clips Lou on the side of the head and bursts into shards of glass one of which opens a slice in his scalp and blood starts to flow freely and he’s shaken and stumbles quite a bit allowing you all to catch up.  Continue your run now.”

Jack: “Sure, I’m pumped, we got this son of a [bleep]!”
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d8 and wild d6 for a 7,5 or total of 6 (7+1-2). Success he closes the gap by 1.

Lou: “OUCH!!!  You [bleep]er!”
Mechanically: Lou rolls his Agility d6 at a -1 due to his wound and gets a 4 for a total of 3.  Failure.

Round 4 Results: [Lou, Pete , Mary Alice ] [ ] [ Jack ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ] [  ]

GM: “You’ve closed the gap by quite a bit mostly due to Jack’s making him stumble, Pete, you and Mary Alice are now in the same increment with Lou and this opens up quite a lot of maneuvers you can try when you’re within one increment.  You could for an example try to force him into an obstacle, distract him somehow and make him potentially stumble, maybe make a grab and tackle on him.  Let’s see how the initiative plays out.”
Mechanically:  Initiative Jack 7C, Mary Alice 5H, Pete KS, Lou 9D resulting in Pete, Lou, Jack and Mary Alice.

Pete: “I give him a little shove and let him make acquaintance with the next hard thing in our path.”
Mechanically: Pete and Lou make opposed Agility checks,  Pete rolls d8 and d6 for a 2,6.  The 6 aces for a total of 11.  Lou had better hope he aces his own rolls.  Lou rolls a d8 Agility and gets a 1 for a total of -3 (1-1 for the wound and -2 for being Shaken ).  Pete gets a success and 2 raises 11 vs -3.

GM: “Before you do that, Lou is going try to shake his head to clear it out.”
Mechanically: GM spends a GM benny to see if Lou can clear out his Shaken status.  This is primarily so Lou has a better chance to avoid a second wound in the looming future where a hard object introduces itself to his face.  Lou rolls a Spirit check of d6 and gets a 1 for a total of 0 (1-1 for the wound).  He fails to recover.

GM: “Pete you flail out a arm and tip Lou straight into the path of a light pole!”
Mechanically: Lou is going to take 1d6 damage from the impact and takes 4 damage which is a success and because he’s Shaken he suffers a wound.

GM: “Lou smashes into the light pole and rebounds straight back and falls backwards, his head smashing into the pavement and he stops moving except for his breathing, out like a… well unconscious.”

Jack: “I assume we have to finish this round?  I’m talking about whatever it is I’m about to dodge nimbly out of the way of because of my club card.”

GM: “Good question.  I don’t know officially but I’ll rule that as you see Lou go down you’d slow up and that would help you avoid anything.  You all slow down and then trot over to Lou.  He’s laying on the sidewalk, blood is pouring freely from his nose where he hit the pole face first as well as the lacerations on the side of his head.  A quick check of him and you don’t think he’s in danger of dying.  In fact he starts to groan and seems to be coming around.  A couple of onlookers are looking in your direction but seem reluctant to interfere.”
Mechanically: GM makes a Vigor d4 roll for Lou and gets a 4 which aces to a 10 for a total of 9 (10-1 for his wound).  A success and a raise means the wounds while bloody enough for sure are not life threatening.

Pete: “I look around for the package.  When I find it I unwrap it a bit to see if it’s the bust we’re looking for and tuck it away under my jacket.”

GM: “It does in fact look like the object you were paid to recover.  A primitive arts looking thing carved out of some dense black stone, obsidian or basalt maybe. It’s quite ugly and unattractive and for the life you you can’t imagine why someone would want to steal it much less pay to get it back.”

Mary Alice: “Lou’s going to be okay?  Are we sure?”
Mechanically: She makes a Healing d4  and wild card d6 check at -2 because it’s untrained and gets a 1 and a 6.  The 6 aces for a total of 7 (9-2).

GM: “You believe so.  Scalp and nose wounds bleed like enemy of Capone’s but they’re not fatal. He’ll live although he’ll have one heck of a headache for a day or two.”

Jack: “I rifle his pockets real quickly and let’s get the hell out of here if he’s going to be okay on his own.  I don’t want to explain this to the cops.  Again.”
Mechanically: Rolls a Perception (aka Notice) d6 and wild d6 for a 4,1 and gets a success.

GM: “You come up with a wallet and a crumpled fragment of paper tucked down into the bottom of one of his coat pockets. It’s got an address on it about 3 miles away.  The way he’s stirring you believe he should be fully conscious in a few minutes.”

Pete: “Good work, let’s get back to the car and get out of here before trouble shows up.”

Players: [Discussion on the chase, the ugly bust and the client.]

GM: “It takes you a couple of minutes to get back to where you parked your car, a side lot.  Can I get Perception checks at -2?”
Mechanically: One of the tires is flat on the far side of the car and the car has a slight tilt to it which might be picked up by a perceptive character. The final rolls were Pete 3, Jack 2, Mary Alice 10.

GM: “Mary Alice there’s something a little off and then it hits you the car is tilted slightly, looks like the driver’s side rear tire is flat.”

Mary Alice: “I stop walking. Guys, was the tire flat when we parked?  Anything else odd going on?”
Mechanically: Rolls another perception check to scope the area out and gets a total of 3, failure.

Pete: “I look around.”
Mechanically: Rolls Perception and gets a total of 3.  Failure.

Jack: “Me too.”
Mechanically: Rolls Perception and gets a total of 3. Failure.

GM: “The side lot has a few empty cars in it and one panel truck with the logo of one of the shops that opens into the lot stenciled on it but otherwise is empty.”

Mary Alice: “I don’t like this, I don’t believe in coincidences.  Let’s get out of here, catch a bus back to the office and come back later for the car.”

Pete: “Yeah I hear you but I don’t want to leave the car.  It could just be a flat.  It happens.”

Jack: “Yeah we don’t want to leave the car here.  There’s too many things that might raise an eyebrow in the trunk if you know what I mean. You two wait here on the corner.  I’ll go change the flat and pull around and pick you up. Anything bad happens… I want you to come and save my ass.  No running off.  You hear me?”

Pete and Mary Alice: Simultaneous innocent ‘who me?’ looks.

Jack: “I’m not kidding!”

GM: “The wind’s picking up a bit and blowing street debris around and the first fat drops of a cold rain start to fall.”

Jack: “Freakin’ awesome.  Okay I move to the car keeping an eye out and take a quick glance at the tire.  If it’s not been slashed or anything I’ll get out the spare and change it.  If it looks suspicious then I’m backtracking and getting back over this way.”
Mechanically: Jack plays out his actions and rolls a perception check getting a 15 from a double aced d6.

GM: “The tire doesn’t appear to be damaged that you can tell, no obvious holes, nails or screws in it on the sections you can see.  On the far side of the street a woman bundled up is hurrying past, she doesn’t appear to even notice you much less be paying any attention to you.”

Jack: “I give them a thumbs up and change the tire then.”

GM: “As you open the trunk, the man hidden in there lets loose with a shotgun blast aimed at you…”

Players: [screams of outrage]

GM: “…And yet it happened.”
Mechanically: The man hidden in the trunk was on Hold, on a hair trigger to shoot whoever opened the trunk. As this is a Wild Card, he rolls his Shooting d8 and wild d6 and gets a 4 and 6.  The 6 aces for a total of 10 (8+2 shotgun bonus).  A success and a raise so he gets 3d6+1d6 damage or 5,5,4,6, the 6 aces and adds another 3 for a total of 23 damage.  OUCH!!!.  Jack has a toughness of 5 and is wearing a heavy leather winter coat AP2 for a total of 7 toughness.  Jack is Shaken and is going to suffer 4 wounds (23-7 = 16/4 = 4).

Jack: “Holy [bleep]!  I try and soak that!”
Mechanically: Jack spends a Benny to try and soak the damage and rolls his Vigor d6 and wild d6 for 1 and 3 and fails to soak even one.

Jack: “I’ll spend another Benny and re-roll the vigor check.”
Mechanically: Although you can only soak once per wound, you can re-roll your Vigor roll by spending a benny.  Jack Rolls a 2 and a 2.  He spends yet another Benny and rolls a 1 and a 2.

Jack: “Ohhh, you wanted me to make a soak roll.  I thought you said suck roll…”

GM: “You’ve really got to listen closer.  Here, have a Benny to make up for me being unclear about that.  And no you can’t use it right now. So, thanks to your suck rolls you’re going to take 4 wounds.”

Mary Alice: “Hell, does that mean he’s dead?”

GM: “Jack you’re Incapacitated.  Make another Vigor roll to see how badly you are incapped. You’re going to be at -3 due to the wounds.”

Jack: “Not -4? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with -3 over -4 but I took four wounds.”

GM: “Nope, a wild card can only take 3 wounds, anything over that and it doesn’t matter as far as penalties go although you still have to try and soak all the wounds you take from an attack, its just the excess only counts for that one soak attempt.”

Jack: “Okay as I go flying back from getting a load of buckshot in my chest I try to convince myself it’s only a flesh wound.  I bet the the son of a [bleep] is using one of our shotguns to boot.”
Mechanically: Jack makes a Vigor test aces with a 3 and a 6.  The 6 aces for a total of 6 (9-3).  A success.  This means he’s Unconscious but not bleeding out.  He’ll wake up in an hour or after someone successfully heals him.  But for all purposes he’s out of this fight.  Rolling on the Injury table results in normally his Strength being reduced a die type but he’s already at a d4 so there’s no impact.

GM: “The deafening boom of a large calibre shotgun echoes off the buildings and you see Jack stagger back, the chest of his coat ripped into bloody tatters, a man nimbly leaps from the trunk of the car and stands over Jack and ratchets the pump shotgun and looks around.  Let’s draw some cards…”
Mechanically: The GM decided that Pete and Mary Alice are too far off to be dealt into this round even if they’d of made their perception rolls.

MS: The man looks around and spots you, the shotgun barrel rests against Pete’s head and he shakes his finger at you and then beckons you forward.

Pete: “Well that was unexpected.”

Mary Alice: “Does it look like Jack’s dead?”

GM: “You’re really too far to tell but your gut is telling you he’s bad off but probably not dying.”

Pete: “How far exactly are we from them?”

GM: “Roughly 20 squares.  The man arches an eyebrow and gestures at your friend with a nasty smile.”

Pete: “Crap, I hand the bust to Mary Alice and walk over to him.”

GM: “He makes an ‘uh uh’ gesture with his finger and stabs two fingers toward you and then at the ground in front of him.”

Mary Alice: “I reach through the slit in my skirt and pull out my Shank Special.  Pete he’s going to kill Jack if we don’t do something but we don’t have to be defenseless.  We split up and make it harder for him to hit us both and stop about 50′ away.  We both get ready to shoot him if things get nasty.”

GM: Trivia note, the ‘Shank Special’ is a 4 shot revolver on a small frame of the Webley break open design in a .44-40 calibre, designed and built by an Ally character associated with the group.  Small enough to be easily carry concealed with the disadvantage it only holds four shots.  As an aside I do find it interesting that almost universally pistols in Savage Worlds deal a 2d6x damage, typically 2d6+1 and the only real difference is range and whether it’s a revolver or semi-automatic, even the .22′s which I’d have to disagree with.  A .22 can kill but your odds of surviving it barring a shot in a few critical areas (heart, skull, liver) etc. is pretty significant.  As a result to not offend my sensibilities I’m probably going to make it a 1d6+1 weapon for my world.

Pete: “I knew I liked you.  I pull a revolver, I’m carrying the colt peacemakers today and I’ve got a big fat 255 grain slug for this joker.  We spread out about 10 feet as we get into the lot and stop like Mary Alice said.”

GM: “The man’s hand and shotgun are steady on Jack’s head, as you get closer you can see Jack is stirring slightly, he’s not dead and the coat and the cold are both working to keep him from bleeding to death.  The man is white, dressed in dark clothes, a woolen pair of pants and dark turtleneck sweater with ankle high boots of black leather.  The shotgun looks well cared for, in fact it looks identical to one of the shotguns you keep in the compartment in the floor of the trunk.  When he speaks his voice is cultured and smooth, ‘Put the artifact on the ground, you can do it there and then back up out of view.  Don’t do as I ask and your friend is going to die. Take a few moments and decide but not too long or I kill him and take my chances with you two.’”

Jack: “I say we *cough cough* do as the man *coughing blood* asks.”

GM: [Slips Jack a Benny for the humor value.]

Mary Alice: “Shut up you’re dying.  Pete?”

Pete: “I ask the guy, ‘What’s this ugly thing to you?  It can’t be worth much, I know kids that can make better in kindergarten.’”

MS: “That is not a concern of yours.  Please, if you would make your decision?  It is getting cold and I fear the rain is going to start in earnest soon.”

Pete: “I take Aim at his head. ‘If he dies you die friend.’ I want to Intimidate him.”
Mechanically: Pete doesn’t really know how to Intimdate someone so he rolls a d4 and d6 at a -2 penalty and gets a 4 and a 2.  The 4 aces for a total of 5 (7-2).  The Mysterious Stranger rolls a d6 Spirit and a d6 wild and gets a 5 and a 5.  The GM rules the guns make no difference since both of them have them and in fact would possibly give the nod to the MS since he not only has a shotgun but has it pointed at a defenseless bystander who’s a friend of Pete’s and grant him a bonus for it.

Mary Alice: “And if he doesn’t kill you, I will. I cock my gun, yes I know it’s a double action and doesn’t need to be cocked but it sounds cooler.”
Mechanically: M.A. is in the same boat.  No intimidation skill.  d4 and d6 roll a 1 and a 1, critical failure.

GM: “He looks amused by your attempt to get tough Mary Alice and obviously doesn’t find you threatening.”

MS: “Please, no one need die here.  Is this really worth dying over?” he points to the package and then glances at his wristwatch, a large gold plated one, “I’m afraid I really can’t dally here any longer. Please set down the artifact and walk back around the corner and I will depart.  You can then come back and tend to your friend.  You really should hurry, he’s not looking at all well.”

Mary Alice: “Crap crap crap.  Okay I burn this guy’s face into my memory.   I set the sculpture down on the parking lot and motion for Pete to back away with me.”

Pete: “I do so but I don’t like it.  I keep my gun aimed at him.  Mechanics wise, what are my chances to kill him before he pulls the trigger?”

GM: “You suspect he’s not an Extra.  That means you’d have to hit him for enough damage to blow through his toughness and deal 4 wounds in order to incapacitate him.  I’d say a called shot to the head for +4 damage and hope for roughly 3 raises on your damage…  At a -4 penalty to hit because of the called shot.”

Pete: “So you’re saying there’s a chance?”

Jack: “*cough* don’t do it *cough*”

Pete: “Fine, I follow Mary Alice but I’m really not liking this ass right now.”

GM: “You retreat around the corner and wait a few seconds and then come back to see only poor Jack laying on the pavement, the man and the bust is gone.”

Mary Alice: “I hurry forward and check Jack out and do what I can to help him.”

Pete: “Do it in the car, we’ve got to get out of here.  I’m surprised no one’s come by yet.”

GM: “All the stores in the area are closed already and there are few pedestrians.  And a single gun shot in this area is more likely to send people scurrying to turn up the radio than come and see what’s gong on.  The shotgun is also laying next to Jack by the way, the only thing he seems to have taken is the bust.”

Pete: “I don’t want to take any chances.  I help Mary Alice get Jack in the car where she can work on him out of the rain and I change the tire as fast as I can.”

Mechanically: M.A. has no healing so it’s another d4 and d6 at -2.   Jack is in the Golden Hour for healing and the GM rules that they’ve lost 10 minutes with the talk and conversation and movement leaving a maximum of 5 attempts left.  In addition any healing attempt is going to be at -3 due to Jack’s wounds.  Luckily they keep a first aid kit in the car so she’s not at another -2 for lack of supplies.   Mary Alice rolls a  4 and a 5.  The 4 aces for a total of 4 (9-5).  Success and Jack recovers from one wound.

GM: “Pete the tire’s changed and you can get in and drive away while Mary Alice continues to work if you want.  This is going to give her the unstable platform penalty although if you take it slow I’ll reduce that -1.”

Pete:“Sure no problem, I drive as slow as I think will avoid notice and head us over to the safe house on Brown, I want to swap this sedan with the one we keep in the garage there.”

GM: “Okay, you drive through the dark streets as the now steady rain falls down from above.  In the back seat Mary Alice continues to administer to Jack, cleaning his wounds.”
Mechanically: Mary Alice continues to work on him, getting a 1, 6.  The 6 aces for a total of 10 (14-4) for a success and raise.  Jack recovers another two wounds and with a good night’s rest will be stiff, sore and in pain but able to function normally.

Mary Alice: “I really need to learn how to do clean wounds a little better.”

Jack: “*cough* Don’t worry about *cough* it.  You did fine.  I feel *cough cough* great.”

GM: “Thanks to Mary Alice’s prompt attention Jack’s going to be fine, most of the buckshot was blocked by his thick coat apparently and the few pellets that went through didn’t penetrate very deeply and you were able to remove them all.  A few band-aids and some bactine and maybe a wrap or two and he’s good to go.”
Mechanically: Since M.A. recovered all his wounds this makes for the most plausible colorization as to why he’s fine game mechanic wise.

Mary Alice: “I slide in to the front seat giving Jack room to stretch out.”

Players/GM: yak yak who was that mysterious stranger yak yak what’s going on yak yak GM gives them details on certain things.]

GM: “You make it back to your safe house and exchange cars without a problem.  I assume you call the office to have someone come out and clean up the car?”

Jack: “Yeah get Tweedle Dee or Dum out here.  I’ll tell them I cut myself shaving.”
Note: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum aka Tim O’Malley and John Terrace are Ally’s that work for the Agency in the capacity of high level gophers and interns.

GM: “When you call your answering service you find that Tim is on call this week for general duty and arrange for him to come out and clean the car.  What are you going to do now?”

Jack: “I want to get the mother[bleep]er that shot me!”

Pete: “Forget about that, the S.O.B touched my shotgun! You know how I feel about people touching my stuff.”

Mary Alice: “Lighten up Francis.  Let’s see what we know.  He was a pro, no doubt about that.”

Jack: “Expensive one too.  That cologne he was wearing costs the average Joe two weeks salary.”

Mary Alice: “I don’t want to know how you know that.”

Jack: “I enjoy the finer things in life when I…”

Mary Alice: “Enough, whatever.  Okay it’s late.  Let’s table this and meet  tomorrow and figure out where we go next.”

Pete: “Sounds good to me.  Come on, I’ll drop you off at the office and you can get your cars.”

GM: “Okay you take the clean car back to the office, the night is quiet, filled with the drone of rain and the back and forth of the wiper blades.  It’s cold but not quiet cold enough to turn the rain into something nastier so the driving is easy enough if a little wet.  You pull into the garage of your building and get out to go your separate ways.  As you do you pull up short as several shadowy figures step out from behind cars, support pillars and the like.”

Jack: “Owww my ribs, it’s going to be one of those nights. I hug myself and hunch over a bit, hands under my obviously ruined and bloodstained coat and only by coincidence do I happen to grab the revolver in my shoulder holster.”

Pete: “I move around the car if I can to stand by the others.”

Mary Alice: “Anyone look like they’re in charge?  Are they actually coming toward us?”

GM: “Yes, they were scattered around but all circled on your agencies parking spaces.  You hear a scritching noise and a light flares up as one of them lights a cigar with a lighter.  In the flame you can see his face well enough but you don’t recognize him.  The light goes out with a snap as he closes the lighter and the ember of his cigar flares a bit.  ‘You mugs got sumptin.  A rock of some kind.  I want it. Give it to me this’ll go easy.’  The others have moved closer and have paused about 10′ feet away from you. You can make enough out of them to know they’re all men, bundled up in heavy overcoats. Each of them is carrying a clubbing type weapon, pipe, bat, nightstick, one guy has a pair of heavy brass knuckles.  There are four of them along with what you assume is the boss.”

Jack: “What the hell?  Did we find the Maltese Ugly Duckling or what?  It’s just a crappy piece of art that someone is now paying waayyy too little to find and return for them.”

Boss Thug: “I don’ care about your problems mack.  Give me the thing or my boys will have to take it from you.”

Pete: “Would you believe me if I told you we don’t have it?”

Boss Thug: “No.  Hand it over or the little girl gets hurt first.  Now!”

Jack: “‘Oh you done [bleep]ed up ‘mack’.'  I pull my 45 and level it at his head.”

GM: “This seems like a good time to deal cards.”
Mechanically: GM divides the thugs up into 3, the boss, and two groups of 2 Extras.  Dealing cards yields Jack JS, Mary Alice 10H, Pete AC, Boss Thug Red Joker, Group 1 7C, Group 2 AH resulting in the order of Boss Thug, Group 2, Pete, Jack, Mary Alice, Group 1.  Seems like the thugs were ready for any funny business.

Round One – Order – Boss Thug, Group 2, Pete, Jack, Mary Alice, Group 1

Boss Thug: “The boss re-acts like greased lightning and shouts out ‘Take them down and find it!’ as he moves and ducks behind a car and then comes up with a pistol blazing away.”
Mechanically: The boss is performing three actions, move, draw his pistol and shoot so he’s going to be at -4 for the quick draw and the shot.  But as he’s drawing the weapon from under a bulky coat he has to make an Agility roll to get it out this turn and be able to shoot it.  He rolls his Agility d8 and wild d6 for an 8,1.  The 8 aces for a 10 (14-4).  He pulls it easily. Then he sticks his hand over the edge of the car and shoots at Jack, double tapping with a Shooting d8 and wild d6 for a 1,5 for a 2 total (5+1-4).

GM: “Two shots ring out as the boss levels a 45 semi automatic at Jack but he was in a hurry and they go up into the ceiling.

Pete: “Son of a [bleep] he’s fast.  The others aren’t carrying guns?”

GM: “Not that you can see, looks like they came to beat the [bleep] out of you rather than kill you.  These two here charge forward at this time and head toward you Pete.  Each one is going to try to hit you with their weapon of choice.  They’re going to get +1 to their rolls as a Gang Up bonus which balances their multiple action penalty.  In addition they’re going to get a +2 Unarmed Defender bonus since you don’t have a melee weapon in your hand and no a pistol doesn’t count.”

Pete: “Crap!”

Thug 1: “You’re going down!”
Mechanically: Swings his billy club with a Fighting d8 and gets a 2 for a total of 4 (2+2+1-2) versus Pete’s Parry of 7. Missed.

Thug 2: “Quit ducking!”
Mechanically: Swings a lead pipe at Pete, Fighting d8 and gets a 5 for a total of 7 (5+3+1-2) vs 7.  Hit! Rolls damage of Strength d8+d6 for a 5,5 total 10 damage versus Pete’s toughness of 7 (5+2armour).  Success.

GM: “The two thugs quickly move adjacent to you Pete and attack, you duck and dodge one of them but the other nails you with a lead pipe getting a success which will shake you.”

Pete: “Hmmm I’m going to try and recover on my turn rather than spend a benny to get rid of it.”
Mechanically: Pete could spend a Benny now to remove the Shaken status but he’s going to conserve it for now.

GM: “The pipe hit is only a glancing blow but it shakes you up a bit. Your turn.”

Pete: “I shake it off.”
Mechanically: Pete makes a Spirit roll d4 with d6 for 4,5.  The 4 aces for a total of 9. A success and raise.  Fate’s looking out for him and he gets rid of the Shaken status and can go normally.

GM: “You recover quickly from the blow!”

Pete: “Bringing a stick to a gun fight isn’t the smartest idea.  I pull out both peacemakers and put a slug from each into the boss.”

GM: “Drawing both guns is going to require an Agility roll and an action.  Shooting with both is going to give you -2 penalty for each shot.  And the boss has heavy cover so that’s another -4 so you’re looking at -8 to hit….”

Pete: “What I meant to say is, I put one slug into two of these thugs, no that’s still a -4 on both isn’t it.  Okay I pull out one gun and put one bullet into one thug.  -2.”
Mechanically: Pete is readying a weapon on the same turn he’s going to use it which is an action and he’s going to shoot once which is an action which gives him a MAP of -2.  He rolls his Shooting d8 and wild d6 for 2,2 for a total of 0 versus the Thugs Parry of 6.  Because it’s an adjacent target the pistol goes versus Parry and not a 4.  Miss.  He thinks about spending a benny but decides against it.

GM: “You dig the Peacemaker out and it bellows forth a tongue of flame and the heavy slug whiffs past one of the thug’s heads and flattens against the garage wall.”

Jack: “I pull out my pistol and double tap the nearest thug.”
Mechanically: Shooting d8 and wild d6, 8,6 at a -2 for the multiple action penalty.  Both dice ace.  Final result is 12(11+1). Success with a raise!  He rolls damage 2d6+1+1d6, 4+5+1+3, 13 damage.  The thugs have a toughness of 6 so a success and raise.

Thug 1: “‘The darkness descends, for I am mortally wounded, I fear, this day.’ The pedantic thug goes down as blood starts to spread out from the hole in his coat, the sawed down lead weighed baseball bat clatters to the ground.”

Mary Alice: “I start screaming and shoot someone.”
Mechanically:  Pulling the pistol and shooting costs her -2 penalty.  She rolls Shooting d6 and d6 for a 6,1.  The 6 aces for a total of 5 (7-2).  Success.  She rolls 2d6+1 damage for a 4,6 for a total of 12 (4+6+1+1) versus the thugs Toughness of 7.  Success and raise.  Another Extra goes down as Thug 2 expires.

Pete: “Ummm why screaming?”

Mary Alice: “Figure people might actually come to help a lady in distress rather than running from gunfire.”

GM: “Good thinking Mary Alice, here’s a Benny. The other group of thugs charges forward rushing toward Jack and Mary Alice.”

Thug 3: “You shot Big Bill!”
Mechanically: Thug 3 swings his tire iron with a Gang Up bonus of +1, -2 for MAP, +2 versus unarmed defender.  Rolls d8 for a 3 for a total of  4 (3+1+2-2) versus Jack’s Parry of 6.  Miss

Thug 4: “Sorry about this ma’am, just following orders.”
Mechanically: Thug 4 swings his pool cue at Mary Alice.  d8 at 2 yields a total of 4 (2+2+2-2) versus Mary Alice’s Parry 5.  Miss.

GM: “The last group of thugs, perhaps a little disconcerted by seeing two of their friends go down have trouble hitting Jack or Mary Alice.  But let’s see what the future holds…”
Mechanically: Cards are dealt – Jack 7D, Mary Alice, 6S, Pete 3H, Boss AD, Group 2 8S.

Round Two – Order – Boss Thug, Group 2, Jack, Mary Alice, Pete.

Boss Thug: “‘Will you incompetents take them down!?’ echoes out as he levels his .45 at Pete.”
Mechanically: Boss Thug is going to take Aim, he does like his boys and doesn’t want to kill them with a stray shot if he can help it.

Thug 3: Grits his teeth and tries for Jack again.
Mechanically: Gang up bonus of +1 and then +2 versus unarmed defender, no penalties. Fighting d8 of 6 yields a 9 (6+2+2) versus Jack’s 6 Parry.  Success.  Damage is d6 for a 6 which explodes for a total of 13 versus Jack’s Toughness of 5.  (13-5) = 8/4 = 2.  So Shaken and 2 wounds unless Jack soaks it.

GM: “It looks like that incoming tire iron is going to clock you a hell of a wallop Jack.”

Jack: “Soaking here boss!”

GM: “You’re out of Bennies Jack…”

Mary Alice: “‘Watch out Jack!’ I give him one of mine.”
Mechanically: Mary Alice lets Jack use one of her Bennies through her Common Bond Edge. Jack spends the Benny to soak and rolls Vigor d6+d6 for a 2,4 for a success which reduces it to one wound.

GM: “Jack you take a wound and are Shaken.”

Jack: “Crap, I spend a benny to get rid of the shaken… oh right.”

Thug 4: Tries to take Mary Alice out and not for a date…
Mechanically: Rolls Fighting d8 for a 1 for a total of 5 (1+2+2) versus Mary Alice’s Parry of 5.  Success.  Damage is Strength d6+d6 or 2,3 total 5 versus Mary Alice’s Toughness of 6 (4+2armour) and the blow bounces off her thick leather coat.

Mary Alice: “I shoot this S.O.B!”
Mechanically: Shooting d6 and d6 for 5,5 versus his Parry of 6. Miss.

Pete: “I put a hole in this [bleep]er!”
Mechanically: Pete rolls his Shooting d8 and d6 for a 8,6.  Both ace for a total of 12 (8+4).  Success and raise versus the thug’s 6 Parry.  Damage 2d6+1+1d6 for a total of 9 damage (4+3+1+1) versus the Extra’s toughness of 6.  The Extra is shaken but not out.

GM: “You grazed him but didn’t draw much blood.  He’s still very much in the fight. Let’s recap.  Jack’s taken two wounds, Pete and Mary Alice are doing okay so far.  One thug is fine, two are down and one’s shaken.  And then there’s the Boss who’s got a bead on… Mary Alice’s head.  Let’s deal’em…”
Mechanically: Jack 8S, Mary Alice 4S, Pete 3C, Group 2 KH, Boss 6H.

Round Three – Order – Group 2 (#3 Shaken), Jack (shaken, 1 wound), Boss, Mary Alice, Pete

Thug 3: Goes for a knockout on Jack and does a Wild Attack hoping to get a critical hit even though it’s going to make him easier to hit.
Mechanically: By doing a Wild Attack thug 3 gains +2 Fighting and continues to get the Unarmed Defender bonus and Gang Up bonus.  Rolls Fighting a total of 9 versus Jack’s Parry of 6.  Success.  Damage is Strength d6+d6 for a total of 7 versus Jack’s toughness 7.  Success.  Jack’s Shaken so he takes a wound and is out of bennies to try and soak them.

GM: “He’s going to town on you Jack, take another one for the team.”

Thug 4: Follows his buddies lead and tries to put Jack down for the count.
Mechanically: Rolls his Fighting with the Unarmed Defender, Gang Up and Wild Attack bonuses (+2,+1,+2) for a total of 7 versus Jack’s Parry of 7.  Since Jack’s shaken this is another wound, putting Jack at 2 Wounds.

Jack: “Damn, what is it?  Someone tie a pork chop around my neck?  I put two rounds into Mongo here.”
Mechanically: Rolls his Shooting and Wild and gets snake eyes 1,1.

GM: “Only as you pull the trigger do you realize that one of the cartridges from the last shot has stove piped Jack.  You’ll need to spend a moment to clear the jam on your next round. If you make an Agility roll you’ll be able to act normally but clearing it will count as an action.

Jack: “Son of… I tilt my head back and expose my jugular to make it easier on them.”

Boss: “Snarls at you, ‘Hard way it is then!’ and then his pistol bellows forth its owner’s anger in a orange red flame of death.”
Mechanically: The boss has taken Aim at Pete which gives him a +2, double taps for an additional +1 and shoots for the head which is a -4. He rolls a 3 and 4 for a total of 3.  The GM spends a benny for him and tries again and gets a 5,5 for a 4 total which is a hit.  He rolls damage 2d6+1 with +1 for the double tap and +4 for the called shot to the head for a total of 18 damage… (3+6+3+1+1+4).  18 damage versus Pete’s Toughness of 7 yields a success and two raises.  (18-7 = 11/4 = 2).

GM: “Pete the 45 careens off your skull.”
Mechanically: Unless Pete soaks the damage he’s going to be Shaken and take 2 wounds.

Pete: “I try and soak it.”
Mechanically: Pete spends a benny to try to make a Vigor roll to soak the wound.   He rolls a d6 and a d6 for a 5 and a 1 which would reduce it to Shaken and 1 wound.  He decides to reserve his last Benny and take this result and hope he goes first in the next initiative order.

GM: “Okay you take one wound and are going to be Shaken.”

Mary Alice: “I look behind the thug and scream ‘Come over here and help us!’ and then I put a 44 calibre lead filled invitation to die into one of the thugs.”
Mechanically: She’s attempting a Smarts trick to try and make it easier to hit the thug. Although this costs her a multi action penalty of -2 if it succeeds it’ll cost the thug a -2 to his Parry until the thug can go again. That might help the others out and there’s a chance she might go before the thug in the next round and get the benefit herself.  She rolls Smarts d8 and d6 for a 2,5 versus the thugs d4 for a 3.  Success, the thug now has -2 Parry.  She rolls her Shooting with a -2 penalty for the MAP versus the Thugs 4 Parry (6-2 from the Trick) and gets a 3,3 and misses.

Pete: “I put a bullet into the thug fighting Mary since he’s not adjacent and I get to shoot at a 4.”
Mechanically: Pete has 1 wound so he’s at -1.  He rolls his shooting die d8 and d6 for a 4 , 6 which aces to a 8 total versus the TN of 4.  Success and raise.  Thug #4 is Shaken and takes a wound and expires.

GM: “Let’s see where we are, Pete has a wound, Jack has two, Mary Alice is still unscratched, the thugs are down to #3 who’s Shaken and the Boss. Pete and Mary Alice both have a Benny.  And next round we end up with…”
Mechanically: Everyone is dealt a card [NOTE: This is being written at a different time and the deck has been reshuffled as a result.].  Jack 6C, Mary QS, Pete QC, Group 2 4D, Boss 3C.  The Boss has the Quick edge and pulls the 4S, 3S, 4H and finally a 6D as a result.

Round Four – Order – Mary, Pete, Boss, Jack, Group 2

Mary Alice: “I put my last bullet into the guy attacking Jack.”

GM: “Before you do that I’m going to spend a Benny and he’s going to get rid of his Shaken status.”

Mary Alice: “Ass.  I drop prone here which should give me cover from the head monkey and then I put a slug into his chest, he’s going down and then we deal with monkey boy.”
Mechanically: She rolls Shooting d6 and d6 for a 3,6 which aces for a 9 total versus a 4.  Success and a raise.  Damage is 2d6+1+1d6 for a total of 8 damage versus the thugs toughness of 6.  Success and he’s re-Shaken.

Pete: “I finish him off before he can hit Jack again.”
Mechanically: Rolls shooting d8 and d6 and gets an 8,6.  After acing the total is 11 versus 4.  Success and a raise.  Damage is 2d6+1+1d6 for a total of 9 vs 6.  Success and since the thug was already Shaken he goes down.

GM: “I’m going to spend a GM Benny to have him try and soak.”
Mechanically: GM spends one of his ‘anyone’ Bennies to try and keep the Thug up.  Rolls Vigor d8 for a 3 versus 4.  Thug doesn’t make it…

Jack: “Boooyah!  Your turn next fatso!”

Boss: “He drops back behind the car and you can hear him swearing and the rustle of movement before his head and pistol pop out by the front of the car.  His pistol belches fire once, twice at Jack.”
Mechanically: He moved his pace at a crouch to get around the front of the car where he has a better shot at Jack.  Shooting yields a 1,2.  He spends a WC Benny and tries again, 2,2.  +1 for the double tap for a 3 total is a miss.  The GM has one last Benny and decides to save it for a soak roll.

GM: “Round recap puts pretty much the same except we’re a thug shorter.  Jack has 2 wounds, Pete has 1, Mary Alice and the Boss are doing well. Let’s draw cards.”
Mechanically: Jack 2D, Mary Alice Red Joker, Pete 5C, Boss AS.

Round Five – Order – Mary Alice, Boss, Pete, Jack

Mary Alice: “Sweeet, I go in front of the monkey.  I need to reload my pistol, how does that work?”

GM: “Since your pistol has essentially a speed loader it’s an action for you.  Speed loaders, clips, magazines etc are one action.  A single round is a free action or you can reload half your agility die in single rounds as an action.”

Mary Alice: “I reload and then shoot him.  He’s still go cover right?”

GM: “Yes, from your prone position you can go for his legs/feet where you can see them under the car.  You actually have a better shot than someone standing up since it’s only medium cover for you.”

Mary Alice: “Cool, I put a bullet into whatever I can see.”
Mechanically: Shooting d6 and d6 for a 6,5.  Total after acing and penalties is 6.  Success vs 4.  Damage is 2d6+1 for a total of 8 versus the Bosses 8.  Success and the boss is Shaken.

Boss: “He tries to recover the bullet that just burned a hole through his calf.”
Mechanically: The boss is Shaken so he makes a Spirit d6 and d6 to try and recover for a 3,4.  Success but he loses this round.

Pete: “I drop my pistol, grab one of the many melee weapons laying around and move to the car and slid over the hood and smash it into his skull.”

GM: “Cool, pull this off and you got a Benny.  So dropping pistol is free, grab is an action, make an Agility roll and it’ll be a free action, the move is within your pace so that’s free.  So, make an Agility roll and you can make the attack without penalty, get a 1 and you end your turn there trying to grab it.”
Mechanically: In the interests of Cool the GM is rewarding the player with a chance to make the attack without a multi action penalty but with the downside that if he fails with a 1 on his trait roll he was just too clumsy and actually knocked the weapon to the side and has to scramble for it costing him his turn.

Pete: “I’m going to put a General Lee style slide to it.”
Mechanically: Rolls Agility d8 and d6 for a 4,1.  Success! (since the 1 was the wild die and not the trait).  He reaches the car and makes an Fighting attack d10 and d6 for a 10,3.  The 10 aces for a total of 16.  Success and a raise against the boss.  Damage is strength d8+d4+d6 for a 8, 4, 1.  The 8 and 4 ace for 7,4.  The four aces again for a 2.  Total is 8+4+7+4+2+1 or 26 damage versus 8 toughness.  Success and 4 raises.  (26-8 = 18/4 = 4)

GM: “You scoop up a club as you dart across the garage and hop up on the hood of the car, sliding on your ass you drop down next to the boss and bring the club around in a 2 handed swing!  The boss tries to block some of the blow….”
Mechanically: GM spends his last benny for the boss.  Vigor d8 and d6 for a 4,5.  He soaks one wound but that leaves 3 wounds to go…

GM: “With a hollow thunking noise the bosses head snaps to the side and his eyes roll up as he slumps to the floor.”

Aftermath:
The GM rolls Vigor rolls for the Thugs and 2 of them have died from their wounds but 2 are alive although unconscious.  The boss rolls a success with a raise thanks to an aced vigor check and recovers consciousness fairly quickly.

GM: “This guy and this one have seen their last sunset.  These two, although they’re unconscious will probably survive the fight especially if they get some medical care.  The boss very quickly rouses even though the side of his face is already turning interesting shades of purple and he doesn’t seem to be tracking very well.”

Players: [Typical player babble as they survey the wreckage, bullet holes, dead bodies, bleeding bodies and gunsmoke...]

Image Credits

Pulp Noir

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going over the rules and running ‘test drive’ encounters where I run both sides of the combat and add in additional rules as I uncover them.   I plan on doing something with the system in the next month or so, something that starts off as Pulp Noir and descends into Supernatural Horror set in the roaring 20′s where there was no gun control, crime and corruption were rampant and the mafia was just hitting it’s stride along with union bosses.

The version I’m working off of is the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition, Third Printing available for $9.95 from Amazon or some ridiculously low price like that.  I picked up a deck of cards and some Cthulhu tokens by Fantasy Flight Games for their Arkham Horror game to use as Bennies at the same time so I could get free shipping.  And as I have Arkham Horror I can use them for their intended things like Doom tracking for that game.   The book is the size of a large format paperback, not sure what the technical term is but about halfway between paperback and manuscript and is in full color and quite well done. A terrific value for the price and I’d recommend picking up a couple if you actually plan on running Savage Worlds.

I would like to reiterate, I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it, that I do NOT like cutesy page backgrounds in game manuals.  Ripped edges, stains, textured vellum, whatever the design, I just want plain black text on plain white paper.  If you absolutely must have nifty graphics then keep it on the periphery and not under the text.

After going through the rules and reading them in a casual kind of way, at this point I’d like to say that it could use some editing and proofing by people unfamiliar with the system.  I spotted a typo or two without going into copy edit mode which is more than acceptable for a blogger but in a printed product it comes off as a little sloppy.  But then any update is bound to include its own typos even when all the existing ones are fixed and I’m fully aware of that, I mention them here only in passing and wouldn’t downgrade them for it.

As far as the understandability of the rules as currently written, I’ve had to resort to searching the forums to get clarifications and all modesty aside, I have a fairly decent general knowledge skill on gaming systems.  Certain things simply aren’t clear in the wording of the edition I have or appear to be something that’s so basic to the system that the writer(s) didn’t even think it might not be known.

With that said I must say their forum and moderators are insanely good.  Every point of minutiae that I didn’t pick up from the core book I was able to find easily and quickly through their forum search.   Which leads me back to my comment about the book not being clear.  Every question I had, had already been asked time and time again on the forums.   Taking all those frequently asked questions and adding in the extremely clear and concise explanations by the moderator Clint would resolve every complaint I have about the rules as written.

I don’t want to give a bad impression of the system or the printing I have, for the most part it’s clear enough, there are just a few places where a simple example or an expanded example or another sentence or two would alleviate the few confusions or omissions.

The system itself purports to be Fast, Furious and Fun which is their slogan.  As a newcomer to the system I can see where this could be quite true.   Combats are both completely open and fairly simplistic.   The rules are few, elegant for the most part and at the same time keep a skies the limit option open.

Combat comes down to the Player deciding what their character is going to do and then breaking that down into separate actions with the caveat that each additional action over the first one adds a penalty to ALL the actions taken and that a character can only perform one action per ‘type’ per round with the exception that they can make two attacks if they have two weapons which includes bare knuckles.

For example: Biff Strange could on his turn say “I’m going to throw this chair at the thug fighting Nancy to give her a better chance to hit him as he ducks it, punch this guy in the throat,  reload my .45, double tap the third thug and scream insults at that guy to try and taunt him to come after me instead of ganging up on Nancy with the first guy while I run around the room like a Loon.”

This breaks down in game mechanics as an Agility Trick, Reload, Fighting, Shooting, Taunt, and a Run action.  That’s six actions though and that adds up to a -12 on EACH of them to succeed and an additional -2 on the off hand assuming the character doesn’t have some edges that allow them to attack with both hands without penalties.  With the exception of the Run, that action doesn’t require a roll, barring some unusual circumstance.

It’s open ended in that it encourages players to have their characters do things outside the box through the inclusion of Tricks and Will Tests, Ganging Up on someone, making a Wild Attack or taking Aim while giving them realistic gamist limits to prevent them from getting goofy like the above sequence of events would be.  Sure a player could try that but they’re going to fail 95% of the time to perform any of them much less all of them.

This also though limits the player, especially those coming from say 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons with all the specific powers those characters have.  Those powers in 4th are a bit of a straight jacket in their own right of course.   In Savage Worlds a player in combat, which is the biggest part of any mechanics because honestly mechanics to define roleplaying should be simple and behind the scenes for the most part, anyway in combat in a Savage World, a character can essentially Shoot someone, Fight (melee) them or Blast (spells/psychic/supernatural etc) them.   The system doesn’t have a lot of conditions, in fact it has only a couple, a character can be Normal, Shaken, Incapacitated.

Normal is obviously that, they can act normally.  Shaken means they can only walk slowly no other real actions allowed.  Incapacitated means just that, they’re unconscious.   There is no Dazed, Immobilized, Stunned, Restrained, Bloodied, Blind, Deaf, Ongoing Damage, etc and so on.

Wounded I suppose might be another condition but it only has one effect, the more wounds you have (up to a max of 3) the more penalties you take on all your rolls and movement.   Again a simple, elegant system.

Combat and especially the wounding/incapacitation rules overall, while a bit slippery to get your head around at the first read through is pretty Fast.  The Furious and the Fun part are too GM/Player dependent to say it’s always going to be that way but Fast definitely fits the bill.

Much like old school 1st and 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons was Fast.

oDnD: “I roll to hit with my sword.  I hit?  I roll damage.”

SW: “I roll to shoot with my gun. I hit?  I roll damage.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, nor is it necessarily a good thing at all, it just is what it is.

After playing some trial combats I can see though where the combats can lend themselves to more narrative/story style easier than something like 4th Edition.  But the proof of that will indeed be in the pudding and obviously is fairly group dependent.  But I believe that it might lead those that tend to go, “I use Righteous Brand on him.” to be a little more descriptive in their actions because by their very nature the actions in SW are very generic.

The magic system which can be used for everything from fireball casting wizards to mind blasting psychics to ego blasting super heroes is much like everything else with the system, simple and broad in scope.   It uses Power Points that the player spends to use each power with subsequent effects.  The basic core rules in the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition are fairly… well basic.  They include things like the Armour and Blast and Telekinesis and is a pretty similar list to other universal systems.

Savage Worlds has an Extra’s and Wild Cards system, much like 4th Edition has Minions and Elites to make it as close an approximation.  Extra’s/Minions go down once they take damage regardless of the amount.  Whether you call them Extra’s, Minions, Mooks or Redshirts, they’re there for cinematic effect to make the players feel powerful as they mow down the thugs to get to the boss.

But where there’s a difference is that in Savage Worlds, dice can ‘ace’ or ‘explode’.  If you roll the highest number on a die, you get to keep that number and roll again and add it to the first.  You can in theory continue to do this for infinity but odds are you won’t do it more than a once or twice most times, odds being what they are.   This means that unlike 4th Edition, in Savage Worlds its quite possible for an Extra to take down a healthy Wild card (Minion kill a PC) in one attack.    Which is inherently impossible in 4th edition.  Now it has a low percentage chance to happen.  But the risk is there and something to be considered.

As an offset to making bad dice rolls or one shotted by an Extra players and GM’s both have Bennies that they can use to reroll or buy a roll to avoid that one shot.  Similar to Luck points,  Fate chips, Destiny perks and the like they allow the player and GM to dial the difficulty of an encounter one way or another.  If the GM has misjudged the relative toughness of an encounter he can spend Bennies to save his bad guys or give them a Mulligan on that big attack roll.  If he’s kicking the group’s ass then he can hand out some extra Bennies for good roleplay, playing in character, making a joke or whatever and ease the players troubles.

Savage Worlds has a ton of campaign settings although I’ve not looked at them all that much.  I’d have to be really interested before I bought one.  But you can get all kinds of things that a lot of people really seem to like a lot.   Zombies, Apocalyptic, Supers, Victorian Age, World Wars, Westerns,  Steam Punk, InterDimensional, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Modern Day, all kinds of source books are out there and because they all use the same core rules you can mix and match them as you want for the most part.

Savage worlds uses a unique, at least to my knowledge, system for dice.  Typically a game system seems to use one basic die for skill checks or combat tasks  with the variable dice pool being used to denote different degrees of damage probability.   A Savage Worlds character might have a d4 in Strength and a d10 for Smarts and a d8 for Fighting.  And those are the dice you roll to see if you succeed or fail at something.

In a way I don’t like this system as it’s a slow way to roll and determine things.  Player/GM has to check what die they need to roll, pick it out of the pile, roll it and read it, determine if they succeed or not and then roll any axillary dice as needed.   One of the simple things that really helped out with 4th Edition for us in terms of combat speed was the player only needs one die, a d20.  They do average damage on regular hits and max damage on critical hits.  No digging out and rolling 3d8 or 2d12+1d6+2d8  for damage.   It seems like a little thing but it really adds up over the length of a combat.   Especially for the GM who might be rolling 5, 10, 20 attacks and for each successful attack another 2 to 4 dice rolls to roll, count up and add bonuses to on their turn depending on how many bad guys there are.

But everyone who plays it and proselytizes says it’s Fast Furious Fun so we’ll see. Once I present it to a group of players and have them doing things with it I’ll report back.  Actually you’ll be able to listen to it first hand as I’ll most likely be podcasting it just like the 4th Edition sessions.

Like other universal systems Savage Worlds can handle any genre but unlike most it does it with simplicity and sleekness of rules rather than needing a Hero Builder or coming up with an archaic formula in a spreadsheet cell to compute things.  It’s simple enough and cheap enough and in my opinion elegant enough that any GM should at least give it a look.  If you don’t want to spend the $10 on the printed copy you can pick up the Test Drive rules, a subset that allows for decent experience of the system for free.  Hard to argue with that kind of pricing.

I will offer though that you really do need to read the system before you scoff and toss it aside.  I know at first glance, and second for that matter, I didn’t give it a real chance to catch my attention, the wacky dice set up, the simplicity of it, the overall broad scope didn’t catch my interest.  Indeed it is only with my 4E campaign going on hiatus for the summer that I picked it up again to give it a serious read through as I was looking for a new system that I’ve not used before.

Time will tell if it’s right for me and my group and I’ll post an update once we get to the dice rolling.

Until next time, as they’re so fond of saying, Stay Savage….

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Now you could of course just use a piece of paper or draw it on your battle mat but since I have Hirst Arts molds and the adventures I’m going to be doing are set in the 20′s and primarily urban, making a section of street and sidewalks seemed a lot cooler than a simple piece of paper or some dry erase marker on a battlemat.  Or at least I think so.

As a result, after a couple of hours work gluing and painting I have my own custom chase chart. (Molding time not counted here.)  The paint job is rough of course, this is an ‘actual play’ piece and not a display piece and spending hours of work detailing it would be wasted for the most part as it’s handled and scuffed and all that.  This way I won’t mind if the paint gets chipped or damaged.  Well I won’t mind as much.

It’s pretty simple and basic.  You press the appropriate number key and you get a dice rolled for you and the result spoken out loud.

It as written suits our purposes but if there are minor changes you’d like to see with it feel free to ask, just don’t expect miracles.

You can find it here: Blindroller (97)

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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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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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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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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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.

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Dragonborn with Maul

“You smell that?  What’s that remind you of?  Smells like… snake.” a harsh voice cut through the evening air.

“Hells no Marti, it’s something with scales alright but I’d say it’s more like dead rottin’ fish.” a sardonic voice replied loudly.

Elisssa shook her head slightly. On the whole living in Larkson was enjoyable but of late the Bain followers seemed to be getting more overt about their humanistic beliefs.

“Oh yeah Jakia, fish might be right. Something smells fishier than an unwashed doxie’s crotch.”

Elisssa snapped over her shoulder without slowing, “Don’t badmouth your birthplace, you’ll make your mom cry.”

There was a startled silence and then, “What the fuck?!  What did you say?”

Elisssa sighed, turning as she heard footsteps hurrying toward her.  Two humans were moving toward her from the mouth of an alley.  The one in front of medium build, hair tied back with dirty blue rag, the other one stockier with broad muscled shoulders.  Thugs the both of them was her first impression.

“Snake bitch you want to be repeating that?  I don’t think I heard you right.”

The stockier one spoke, “Marti, I done think she called your mom a whore.”

The other thug snapped his hand sideways and a iron club grew out of it, fashioned of linked steel piping. “Whore she may have been but she was human and no fuckin’ snake bad mouths a human.”

Jakia’s hands disappeared into his tunic coming back into sight with small metal cylinders that snapped open with a jerk of his hands into twin clubs. “Snake gotta know it’s place Marti and that’s down in the dirt on it’s belly.  You want to get yourself down and apologize now snake bitch and we might let you walk away in one piece.”

Elisssa heaved a deep sigh, sending a mental plea to her goddess, the mother of her race for the strength to not kill the fools in front her.  She eyed the approaching men, slowly counting to five to calm the heat that roiled just below her surface.  ”We can do this hard or easy.  Easy is we both go our separate ways now, no harm no foul.”

“Oh I think you like it hard there snake bitch.  How’s about we give you the hard way.” Jakai leered, holding one of the clubs suggestively at his crotch.  ”This ain’t nothing to what I got for you.”

Elisssa felt her thoughts bubble toward rage and opened her mouth, lightnings playing off her teeth as her inner energies began to race.  With a new found trick she snapped her own hand out and there was a sound of ripping leather ties as Rock Crusher leapt into her hand, the red runes on the flawless black iron maul’s head glowing with a dim light.

“You sure you want hard fuck face?” she snapped, lighting arcing from her teeth onto the maul.  ”You really really don’t want to fucking push me….”

The two thugs faces tightened and they started to spread apart in the street when a voice, tone casual, almost bored spoke, “Hey girl, who are your friends?”

All three of them glanced sideways to see another human coming out of a doorway, dressed in the red trimmed chain and leather of the city watch, the hilts of two swords rising up behind his shoulders and a long bladed knife on each hip.  He leaned against the door frame, cold green eyes boring into those of the two men. His arms were scarred with the reminders of over thirty fights in the pits and a jagged slash rand down his face.  The savage scarring detracting little from his otherwise good looks.

“Hey Torn, I see that the watch took you in.” Elisssa said, after the first glance she’d returned her gaze back to the men.

“Yeah, wasn’t hard, Hells if you defeat all their trainers in one go, they even make you a officer and put you in charge of shit.”

“You sidin’ with the snake?” Marti spat out.

Torn stepped forward, with a blurred motion and rasp of metal on metal he held a short sword in each hand.  The one in the right of arctic blued steel, the razor-ed edge crackling with lightnings identical to those dancing over the great maul in Elisssa’s hands.

“No, I’m siding with my friend.  Now get the hells out here before I have to call a corpse cart.  I hate the paperwork and reports I have to give when I have to do that. Just the thought of it really pisses me off.”

The two men glanced at each other then glared at the dragonborn and the veteran pitfighter. “We’re going. The stink here is about to make me vomit anyway.” Marti growled out.  He jabbed a club at Elisssa, “Just a little advice snake, mind your manners next time a human talks to you. There’s bad things other than snakes sometimes in the dark, you might just run into them.”

The two men turned and stalked away, Elisssa and Torn watching them go.

“What was that about?” Torn asked, sheathing his swords in a smooth crisscrossing of his arms.

Elisssa shrugged, “Bain followers I think.”

“Bain?”

“Pissy little god that thinks humans should rule the world and everyone else should be dead, pets or unpaid help.”

“And here I thought you had such a nice little town.”

Elisssa snorted, the remnants of lightning flaring out to light the minuscule blue tinted scales of her face, “They’re nothing, just some lowlives that need someone to blame for their shit.”

“Seemed rather more than nothing.”

“Nothing to worry about, all talk, they’d of threatened, I’d of warned them off and life would have gone on.  How’s Soozin?”

“Don’t think I don’t know you’re changing the subject El.  She’s fine, I got her a little room over on the east side of town, as a watch leader I get a house allowance and the gold that Torel loaned me she’s not going to need to work for awhile and I’ll start getting a pay sack in a week or two.”

“And how are the two of you doing?”  Elisssa chuckled as a rose of color bloomed on the fighter’s cheeks.

“Wha…what do you mean?”

She reached out and clasped his shoulder, “I may have scales and breath lightning balls dear friend but once you get past that I’m still a woman.  I see the way she looks at you and you her.”

Torn grinned, “I guess we’re going okay.  I was going to wait till you guys get back from that job you’re doing for the Council but I might as well tell you now . We’re going to have a binding ceremony next month after I get a little more gold saved up and I want you all to stand Witness for us.”

“I’d be honored Torn.” she replied leaning forward to brush his cheek with a kiss and give him a hug. “And the others will too or they’ll answer to me.”

“Such a fierce one you are Elisssa!”

Elisssa’s belling peel of laughter rang out through the darkening street, “Come and we’ll tell them now, we’re meeting now at our inn to discuss our trip.”

“I cannot,duty calls El. But look me up when you get back and we’ll make arrangements.”

“The gods themselves couldn’t stop me.  I’ll see you in a few days friend.  Take care of the little one.”

“With my life, El, with my life and more.”

With a final clasp of forearms they split up, the dragonborn warden heading north to meet with her companions…

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As much as everyone gives lip service to a ‘sandbox’ world, “OMG you’re railroading them!”, etc. as a DM you, IMO, HAVE to railroad to some extent in order to give them the best possible gaming experience you can.  Mature, complex, interesting campaigns have a hard time finding fertile ground in a sandbox.  Sand just isn’t conducive to growth.

A sandbox is “Hey peasant, where’s the nearest dungeon?  No we already cleared that one, where’s the next one.” typically.  Or out of character, “Okay guys I have three modules for your level, which one do you want to do?”.  These can certainly be entertaining at the player level, social dynamics, the mechanics of the fights etc. But they’re hard to engage the characters.

I can improv aka play in a sandbox as good as many, better than most I think but I can certainly tell a difference in the quality of experience I can give the players by just spending a few minutes each day thinking on how things are going in the world.

By devoting a few minutes going over current events (assuming you’re doing more than dungeon crawling, a fine past time in and of itself) and putting yourself in the shoes of your NPC’s and their interactions with the PC’s you can come up with some pretty cool stuff I believe. Â  As an example, Biminey has transcribed details of their trip through Darkmith and sold it to the Temple of Eris (god of knowledge). As I was documenting his payment (125gold for the curious) on the campaign sheet for Biminey’s character I thought about one of the high priests reading these descriptions and realized from my one line personality note I’d scribbled out on him weeks ago that this could have a profound effect on the man. Â  And that effect is now going to flavor and color multiple interactions  that deal with the PC’s in specific and the NPC’s in general that might be affected.  And flavor and color add a LOT to a session.  No one likes bland white toast all the time.

Your own content also really really has to be flexible. Case in point the group in our last session derailed my story arc by getting captured. [Through all fault of their own. ]

Luckily this happened at the end of our session or it might have either resulted in less interesting events than I think it will now or I’d of had two options. Either called a time out while I rapidly regrouped or improv out the remainder of the session, the first has the advantage of better results, the later of keeping the flow of the game going.

Drastic events like the party getting captured by the bad guys when you’re not expecting it can certainly throw a kink in things. Or perhaps you have one key character in the group that your story arc is founded upon and that character dies. Do you have a backup plan to keep the story on track? Or do you toss out what you have and work out another arc? Do you sink to the level of “A wandering healer comes across the scene and agrees to resurrect the poor man if only you’ll go fetch him 10 belts from the orc tribes in the next canyon.”?

You have to consider these things when you’re working on your storylines. And you cannot possibly consider everything that a group of players might do or things they might simply not figure out, or figure out wrong and be unable to see other clues as result of their wrong conclusion.  But by taking the time to build up this gestalt image of your world between sessions you have a much better stronger tapestry that you can reweave around snags in the thread that might occur.

That’s not to say though that as a DM you don’t have to be prepared to lose work, some things you’ve worked so hard for just can’t be salvaged after the party goes off on a tangent. And that’s okay. There’ll be other times, other places, other campaigns if needed for those events to happen.

Look at every side trek, every derail not as an issue, but as  an opportunity to weave a stronger storyline that integrates the characters’ actions into your world. And integration is something that will involve your players.  This issue with the players being captured in my personal campaign is going to I think really expand some NPC’s in an interesting way, create at least a couple of memorable encounters and has sparked an idea that will have a domino effect that might see wrack and ruin in the region from yet another possible source than those already planned and that might actually cause a redirection of a regional force into a force of while not good, at least not evil.

All this because the players split up like so many chickens with a weasel dropped in their midst during a fight and got taken out by a group they should have been able to beat.  Players definitely get a ‘we always win’ complex and as a result not really take tactics or even thought into consideration.  It’s nice to throw them a curve like this and drive home the fact that they’re not always going to win and there are going to be consequences to losing even if it was unintentional. Â  In this case they’ve lost 1000′s of golds worth of magical gear, not to mention their basic gear that will have to be replaced from very limited funds.

Improving though with 4th edition can be hard, especially if you lack experience with the system in specific or gamemastering in general. With older editions it was pretty easy to ‘fake it’ with monsters you had to add at a certain point. You just needed a to hit number, a defense and some damage. Monsters were boring, the vast majority of them simply swung, bit or clawed at the players for ex damage in a Flinstones Boxing methodology (aka stand there taking turns swinging till someone died) And those were very easily faked, especially if you had any experience with older editions as faking things is mandatory for a DM as the math was so broken overall.

But 4th edition improv is harder. Sure you can come up with a basic creature fairly easily, just use the basic monster value formulas and you’ll have balanced monsters quickly. They’ll just be a bit boring until you have enough experience under your belt to knock them out.  And remember battles that contain a single creature type can also contribute to boring battles so you have to knock out, print out, look up several creatures per battle.

As a result of the more interesting monsters in 4th, it helps if you have some basic creatures printed out of an appropriate level range for you group, pick a couple of of each type, then just ‘reskin’ them as needed. A level 3 orc can just as easily be a level 3 guard, a war dog, an undead abomination, whatever. Just print out a few in preparation just in case.

So to wrap this up, remember, think about your campaign when you’re not playing it, just a few minutes a day can work wonders.  Think about your NPC’s and what they might want and their reactions to the actions of the PC’s.  And be flexible, be prepared for the party to jump the tracks by having a good idea of the world in general and being prepared with materials as filler/stop gap to give you time to work the derailment into your campaign and make it stronger as a result.

A derailment doesn’t always have to mean a train wreck….

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Shük

[DM's Note: Overall this was a really good session, lots of character involvement, dialogue, sleuthing and clues and all that. We learn a little about the character's past lives, they learn about their city, there's intrigue and mystery, all that kind of thing.  You know, the stuff that 4th Edition makes impossible according to some people because it's just warcraft on paper.  This is one episode of the podcast that I'd recommend you download when it's available if you like that kind of thing.]

We open our movie with our vaunted cast, Torel, Dra’kin, Elissa, Stak, Biminey continuing their journey homeward.  Biminey glad to be alive on this fine day, feeling like he might have almost been dead just moments earlier.

The terrain grew rougher as they continued moving north toward home.  Small rolling hills turning into craggy ravines and cliffs.

It is one such ravine, almost a canyon that they run into their first major issue. A band of goblins trying to be sneaky and the group spot each other at the same time about 100′ between them.  The goblins scream and shout and attack.  Moments later a giant rounds the bend in the canyon, all 11′ of him and the 8′ tree trunk he’s using as a club.  A club that hurts a lot for those that try to stop it with their chests.

Boulders fly, clubs swing in might arcs and goblins die in rapid succession. Deep rough breathing from a nearby cave is heard as Stak passes near and when Dra’kin is knocked flying by a blow from the club landing in the mouth of the crack in the cave wall.

The hill giant retreats from battle leaning on his club, using the language of the goblins he asks if the group wants to join him, “Yu tough’ens, me yu jone up, we split 50/50.”  Torel and Biminey are the only ones that can understand the large creature and Biminey translates the conversation to the others.

But dragonborn fury is not to be denied apparently and Elisssa cuts the discourse short and attacks the giant who roars out in fury and slams Torel back in righteous anger.  The avenger goes flying through the air landing heavily on his ass.  Regardless of their own inclinations the rest of the group backs the dragonborn’s play the giant soon lies dead at their feet.

A giant wineskin filled with the finest dwarven ale is recovered from the giant, a wineskin that they discover much to their delight refills every day with ale.  In addition a magical belt is removed from the hill giants, a belt that Biminey re-sizes to fit Torel.

They continue their climb up through the mountains, avoiding or appearing too tough to take on and the rest of their journey, although tense and eventful yields no further obstacles and within days they arrive at the gates of their home town.

They’re welcomed as semi-heroes for having escaped the slavers and bought drinks and food and lodgings provided without cost to them.

The town Council summons them and there they meet Garon, Lerik and Teagon, the councilmen.  Also, and un-coincidentally, they’re also the three richest men in the city.  Lerik owns merchants and shops, Garon owns the majority of the fishing fleets, and Teagon runs the shipping, primarily by boat to the cities further inland but with some wagon trains.

During their interview it becomes obvious quickly that Lerik, a middle aged human male, doesn’t appear to like non-humans and in fact later on they discover that Lerik is a follower of Bain, a human-centric god who’s teachings propose that humans should be in charge of anything important.

Garon, another older human male, is intensely interested about the group, his daughter and son having also been stolen during the slaver raid during the Spring festival. Unfortunately the group does not recall his children, both in their early 20′s as having been part of their group although it’s possible they were among those first lost in the sealie attacks. Â  Those first couple of days after waking on board the ship were hectic and many people died, unknown and buried at sea.

Teagon, an eladrin also male, age unknown but mature seems indifferent to the group.

The group told their story, changing details and saying they sailed the slaver ship they’d woken on to the coast, landing it in Darkmith and then glossing over the details of their journey.  Specifically keeping all details of the elemental ship out of their story.

Part of an old argument among the council comes out during their interview, Garon wants to hire mercenaries from the the mostly dwarvish settlement inland.  He doesn’t want anyone else lost or to lose someone to slavers ever again, Lerik believes it would be a waste of money, the slavers have already hit the city and undoubtedly will have moved on.  Teagon seems to be worried only about the cost, how can they afford it now. Perhaps after the fishing fleet’s harvest starts up in earnest.

Garon gives each of them 100 gold of his own money, assuming they have no money of their own after their harrowing escape to purchase necessities.

Torn steps forth and tells the group he’ll take charge of Soozin’s protection, as it turns out she’s an orphan now, her father was one of the one’s taken by the slavers and her mother died in childbirth.  He intends to join the guards, his skills with a blade should be of use to them.  Torel steps up and gives him 50 gold to provide for the two of them while the group figures out it’s next moves.

They decide to stay together, their thoughts on that elemental ship they left back in Darkmith.  They spend a few days in town, getting reacquainted with old friends and lovers, Dra’kin renewing his relationship with Shük, a half-orc girl that favors her human side, while Biminey visits Sushanna, an acolyte of the Temple of Eris that he’s friendly with from his visits there going through the god of knowledge’s vast collections of scrolls and manuscripts.

Stak and Torel, both mostly alone in the city venture out together several times, gathering news of current events while Elisssa visits her clan, enjoying several celebrations of her safe return.

Stak and Torel among other things learns of a trader ship in the harbor which is rare in these times of unsafe travel, a typical year might see 4 or 5 trading ships from up or down the coast.

Dra’kin asks his sometimes girlfriend to look into Lerik, the man’s non-human bigotry bothers him, while Biminey uncovers in his trip to the Temple of Eris that all information on Darkmith is in the forbidden archives, Merkin, high priest of the temple blatantly refuses him access to those scrolls saying some knowledge should not be known.

A few days after their arrival they’re summoned before the council again, the council is obviously in disagreement but Garon informs the group of the losses they’ve taken on their trade ships returning from inland being taken by bandits and the gold taken. Â  He proposes that the group recover the gold if they can and he will keep 10%.  Larceny is in their hearts as they ponder this, “Who’s to say how much we recover exactly?”.  Lerik, the bigot, seems in favor of the idea only after his associate, a slightly oily human by the name of Tanner whispers to him about how “wouldn’t Bain approve if these beasts and snakes were killed trying to recover it? ” referring to Stak and Torel, both shifter born and Elisssa obviously.  A whisper overheard by a couple of the sharper eared members of the group.

Teagon seems almost against the idea, saying it’s a waste of time, and they’d be throwing the groups lives away in vain.

The group tells the council they’ll consider the idea and give them an answer in a couple of days.

The ship in the harbor is visited, found to be carrying a high number of skilled fighters, perhaps uncommon or perhaps necessary for any ship to be able to sail the seas and make it safely from port to port.  None of the group who see the ship can say for sure if it’s a slaver ship, a suspicion born of paranoia perhaps as Garon tells Dra’kin when the warlock visits him, pressing for Garon to get on board and search the ship.  Garon agrees to consider the information and says he’ll try and arrange for a visit.

While discussing his inability to get into the archives he needs to get information on Darkmith and the elemental ships, Shük shrugs, “is that all?” and has one of her twin halfing lieutenants show up.  Meri nods, “I can recover items from there for you, it’s a bit of a hassle, hard to get to even for me and I can’t remove much without it being noticed.”

They arrange for her to remove one scroll from several shelves a night and in that way they can zero in on the area that they need.

Torel and Stak interview known survivors of the bandit raids on the ships, finding out that no one before seems to have done much in the way of information gathering and by getting maps they’re able to narrow down the area where the ships are taken by quite a lot.  They also find out that the ships that are taken are always ones in the top percentile of gold coins carried.

This arouse a lot of discussion and suspicion on who might be slipping information, or be behind the stolen gold shipments being stolen.

The group decides to go after the gold thieves, arranging for Meri to continue bringing out scrolls and a forger of Shük’s acquaintance to copy them for Biminey’s return.

After some discussion the group heads upstream to the area where the ships are taken and there Stak finds a trail that leads them to a hidden camp. Â  He sneaks close but not quite close enough to overhear an interesting conversation that occurs between a man dressed in city clothing who enters camp and appears to be warning the bandits that there is someone after them.  The leader of the group turns and starts barking orders for the bandits to break camp.

Stak sneaks out to tell the group, noticing in passing a hidden archer he missed on the way in.

The group tries to stealth up to the clearing but are hopelessly incompetant and find the camp deserted although the bandits gear is still around.  They circle the camp, spotting a couple of archers moving around as they do.  Stak cuts through the camp and the trap is sprung.  Bandits rise up out of shallow pits covered by bedrolls.

The group is dispersed in all directions while the bandits tend to focus their attacks better and although the bandits take their losses in the end Elissa is down, a glaive at her throat while another rests over her heart and a razor tipped arrow is pointed at her left eye.

The eladrin, seemingly bored, speaks loudly enough to be heard across the clearing, “Surrender now or the dragonborn dies.”

With Elissa down and certain to die, Biminey down, bleeding from multiple wounds, Stak with a growing puddle of blood growing under his feet and Torel facing two more archers solo and bloodied, the group drops their weapons and is captured.

They’re expertly tied up, all their gear except clothing removed and bags put over their heads and that’s where we leave our party to await their fate at the hands of their captors.

[DM's Afterword: This outcome was unexpected although at one time I did have some thoughts on increasing the size of the force to make capture a higher percentage chance that I was thinking it would be.  As a result I can work with this outcome, just didn't expect it to happen.  It does show the necessity of focused play in 4th edition.  ALL of the bandits were hurt, most approaching bloodied status but the damage was simply too spread out.  Since even someone down to 1 hp still deals full damage, hurting them doesn't do much, removing someone from the battle is what makes a difference.

The aftermath of this is that, obviously, the group is going to lose their gear.  I'm so NOT a believer in captors conveniently storing all the capturee's gear in an unlocked chest in the next room and leaving a key hanging just out of but not quite reach to the cell door.  I think that's lame.  But because I'm granting bonuses to the characters inherently as a function of being heroes, it doesn't matter.  Gear only gives them gimmicks the way I do it, it doesn't impact their base attacks and defenses etc.  Sometimes gimmicks are useful but this way they're not necessary.

Because of the holidays the next session will likely be on January 2nd.  Stay tuned to see how our plucky but disorganized heroes get out of this mess. ]

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And I’m not saying that if you did run into one of these you wouldn’t find them in pairs or even trios…

Or for the worst offenders, say perhaps a group that killed a high ranking hobgoblin officer that was out gathering toys for the grand hobgoblin marshall’s birthday present, you might run into a whole herd of the things.

You can get a PDF and the monster builder filer here [Download not found]

Darkmith by Day

[Warning this is a rambling post that doesn't stay on topic very well or at all really...]

I was explaining my style of DM’ing to someone and thought it might be something that someone else might get some usage out of.  Or might just rile them up if they think differently but I’ve been riled up by the ‘wrong’ way that other people play only to eventually make a change in the way I play. [Ramble Alert!] As a prime example, I had a long discourse with someone about when to grant experience in Neverwinter Nights modules.  I was still very much in the ‘per monster killed’ mindset.  You kill a monster, you get experience.  His was you awarded experience when the players reached a certain point in the game.  Eventually, not then because he was being an ass about it but eventually, I decided that made a lot more sense to me as a DM.  It takes away the [True Story Alert] meta-gaming aspect of XP “I only need 10 exp to level?  I lean out the window and throw a dagger at someone on the street.” and makes it easier to balance things out if you have any kind of branching encounters planned.  If there’s no way the players are going to be anything but 5th level by the time they make it to the Sacred Tombs you can build the Sacred Tombs way in advance and not risk them being 3rd level or 7th level.

I really don’t do trivial encounters; even back under older editions I stopped pretty early.  I lean heavily toward combats that mean someone might get really hurt. (And yet I’ve killed fewer characters in 3 decades of GM’ing than I have fingers).  My harshness is I make the players work for their victories and I enjoy the reputation I have as being harsh and deadly in spite of the fact that in reality I rarely kill anyone.  I just make them know they were in a fight.  You do have to kill someone every now and then though just to show them that they’re not immortal…

4th Edition really lets me go to town in this regard.  Since the players are back to full after each fight and with limited options for them to spend their ‘working resources’ aka Healing Surges this means a) their work day is long enough that sleeping periods fall naturally rather than being forced by lack of resources and b) they can keep going typically for a few encounters even at the level+3, 4, 5′s that I toss at them.

Granted I haven’t really used a ‘dungeon crawl’ yet with 4th edition.  Where there are encounter after encounter after encounter.  But I have problems with those anyway.  I’m as guilty as the next person early on in my career of having a series of rooms connected by passageways with essentially random monsters tossed into each one.  Each battle very sandboxed, you fought these creatures and the ones just down the hall ignored the fight and patiently waited their turn to be slaughtered.  Part of that was definitely a bit of “Oooh the party hasn’t fought one of these before, or this, or this, or this.” and I’d munge them all together.

Then I started doing themed dungeons, waaaaay back in the day when even the commercial modules were still very much a list of encounters built by rolling percentiles.  The Swamps of [Clare] Grogan (Scottish actress that I thought was hot and I thought the name was very dungeony) which was a swamp themed dungeon, lizardmen (and women), giant snakes, crocodiles that went down for like 5 levels.  The Lair of the Eternal Trickster, a dungeon comprised of probably 50% traps combined with creatures.  Party would find or trigger a trap that alerted mechanical guardians or undead, creatures that could be ‘realistically’ parked in an alcove to wait for their queue and didn’t have any intelligence or programming that would allow them to respond to anything other than their set queues.

It was about this time that I started making dungeons smaller in terms of overall population and larger in terms of encounter population. Â  Or I’d do the ‘obvious’ and stream the bad guys in as a seemingly never ending fight.  Attack the guards in the front room and the guards down the hall would take a round or two to wake up, grab their gear and charge up, yelling for help which would get the guys in the next room up etc and so on.

I find myself now with fourth edition expanding further on this.  Fewer encounters but more meaningful encounters.  Perhaps I’m merely playing to my thoughts or the inclinations of my group but a series of trivial, everyone is down a surge or the cleric used up a couple of CLW’s fights bore me and I presume/assume they bore the players if there’s no story arc reason for the fight.

With 4th Edition I can fairly safely assume that the party will have a full set of hit points after each fight, when they reach the point they don’t then they’ll rest and recover them.  Sure they might be down a Daily power or out of their Action Points but numerically Dailies just aren’t that big a deal, sure they can cut a round or two out of a fight or if everyone burns them on one boss cut that fight out of the day in short order.  But they’re not a valid excuse to have a 5 minute work day.  The only real valid reason to extended rest IMO is when you’re out of surges, not because everyone’s burned their daily powers.

But I digress. [Hence the disclaimer at the top of the article now]

To get back on point, I don’t personally see a need for trivial encounters.  They spend valuable limited game time on something that is a foregone conclusion that the players will win and win without threat. Â  The only time I plan on using trivial encounters, trivial meaning anything that’s not on the Moderate difficulty scale at least, is when they’re strung together as a series of encounters without a break or when they forward the storyline or add another element to the story.

Case in point, the [I've Got Crabs] encounter in session 2 of this encounter (yes I give my encounters goofy names in my notes), it was a fairly trivial encounter, the party was never in any real danger.  But their focus on dealing with the crabs charging them rather than the crabs menacing the other huddled survivors of the slave ship on the beach cost one of those NPC’s their life.  Perhaps a point lost on the group but still a point that I wanted to make an effort put out there and try to broaden their scope and awareness.  Did it work?  Doubtful.  But I feel better for making the effort.

In my upcoming session I’ve got a skill challenge among others where the characters will try to escape the city.  If they fail on any of the three rounds (I use my own skill challenge design) then it triggers an encounter or two with the ferals of the city.  But these will be narrated out and the party will simply start the next round of the challenge a couple of surges lower.  This will continue throughout the skill challenge. Â  The only times I have planned to break out the miniatures is when it’s a fight worth playing through tactically. Â  There will be days in their overland trek that will have them facing encounters but these are again just narrated out, “Over the last three days the lands have changed from tundra to low hills as you continue your homeward bound journey.  Through the use of your skills you’ve managed to avoid most of the dangers of the lands although dusk of one night found you battling for you lives against a wolf pack lead by a strange black eyed wolf with boney spikes protruding from its joints.  They were fought off through the use of your talents and the black wolf seemed to really fear the Torel’s abilities that were infused by the power of his god.” [Just made that part up but now I'll use it Saturday.]

In this particular instance the success or failure of the challenge will cost them surges that they won’t have for the next round.  And of course, obviously?, there will be a tactical encounter at the end of the skill challenge and their success or failure at the challenge will have a direct impact on that encounter.  (in more ways than one but I won’t spoil that right now in case they read this before Saturday).

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I’m glad there weren’t any Windows ME visitors or I’d have to really question whether hell actually did freeze over.

This is just an example of tweaking an existing creature.  I took the Hill Giant which is a level 12 brute, dropped his level in the character builder, reset the damages a bit to nudge him closer to a soldier while keeping the defenses and hit points etc of the brute, and added in a couple of powers as the default Hill Giant would be boring as a boss encounter.  With the other things I’ve got planned for this encounter I think it’ll be a good BBEG level encounter for the group.

You can grab the monster builder file here [Download not found] and an image of the creature below you could print out.

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Hill Giant Runt

Thorns x 4
Dark moon monk
Larege water elemental
Human bandit x 8
Quickling runner x5
Medium air elemental
Human rabble x3
Halfling tombseeker
Grimlock barbarian x 2
Grimlock minion x3
Orc wizard x2.

I’ve literally done the a wizard has called you to the tavern to discuss a proposition with you approach but that was decades ago before it became a trope and number 1 on the “Ways you should never start a campaign.”

Another time I had the players start a campaign dead.  That was fun writing their charater background stories.  I can be vicious when I need to be.  Actually I should post those campaign background stories here.  It might be interesting to someone.

Let’s see, I’ve had the town attacked by some kind of attacking attacker and the members of the party were the best of what’s left to go rescue the captives.

They’re all strangers to each other in a caravan heading to somewhere and it’s attacked and they’re the only survivors and band together for strength in numbers.

They’re strangers or acquantances that are pastsies for a regicide and are forced to band together to clear their name.  Oh and escape very painful deaths at the hands of prince’s torturers.

They already are a adventuring band although that obviously takes pretty much no thought or planning.  “Okay you’ve all been adventuring for awhile now.”

Hmmm in all these years I guess I haven’t really started too many campaigns.  But then it wasn’t unknown for my campaigns to last 18 months of 4-6 sessions a month. Â  Long sessions, like 12-16 hours.  Long gone are those days though.  That kind of thing is for the younger ones without lives filled with outside demands.  Sometimes I miss those days.

I believe a campaing should have a good start, something unique, tailored to the characters and the players, a strong middle point that perks up the players after they’re starting to get blase about things and a very memorable ending that the players will be talking about 2o years later.

As a DM / GM that’s your job really.  To provide the framework that the players build on.  And a shoddy foundation is no way to build anything although with enough mortar and duct tape you can certainly add support to a shaky start.

If and that’s a damn big IF, if you can get it from your players, try to get them give you some idea of what they think their characters are like prior to starting on the heroic path.  Some event that occured during their characters life that is a high or low point.  Honestly it takes just a few minutes for a player that’s truly interested in their character to come up with this kind of thing.  And your campaign should be the better for it.

Have an idea where you’re campaign is going.  I know players tend to ‘miss the island’ and a campaign can definitely derail into another direction you didn’t expect at all but if you start with an idea where the players are going to be about midway through the campaign you’ll end up with a better one.  If you’re good at improv you can improv the whole thing but having the luxury of time to work on the midgame gives you a better campaign.

And definitely have an ending to it.  Whether they get their own castle, save the world, recover Vecna’s left testicle, whatever, have an ending to the campaign.  Don’t drag it out past your’s and the players’ enthusiasm.  Things need to have an ending or all the struggles along the way are pointless except for the purposes of survival.  And just surviving isn’t really all that interesting on a global scale.

Anyway, lacking anything better to post about, I thought I’d share this. As always it’s personal opinion and your opinion could and probably will and honestly should vary to some extent.  Don’t be a sheep after all.  If they spark an idea for you awesome.  If it wasted your time reading it, well not much I can do there.

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And why even bother buying that level 30 magic item when you can save 2 million and buy a level 28 magic item and hire several kingdoms worth of armies to keep the riff raff away.

I’ve always thought the economies of any system where you can live fairly well for about 20 gold a month and very well for 100 gold a month cannot easily absorb the influx of wealth that occurs because of treasure seekers.

Even if the merchants have two pricing schemes, one for normal people and one for adventurer’s they themselves will swiftly gain money to the point where other merchants will charge those merchants adventurer’s pricing and then so on.

A classic real world example is the issues of the U.S.’s Gold Rush in the 1800′s where gold miners (read: adventurers) brought in a lot of gold and destroyed local economies, towns sprang up just to deal with the miners at crazy prices.

A classic semi-real modern example that a lot of people might be familiar with is World of Warcraft.  I quit back during the Burning Crusade expansion and even then I could farm someplace like Shadowfang Keep for Assassin’s Blades and get two to three hundred gold for them for level 19 twinks.  Why?  Because the economy was screwed due to the influx of gold from long established characters raking it in at the high levels.  Low level gear was crazy priced to the point that new players couldn’t afford anything ‘cool’.

That same thing would happen across any fantasy world as adventurer’s hammered the local economies with gold without such modern miracles as global banking institutions.

Is there a solution?  Of course, hand wave it out the window and ignore the real world issues in buying and selling of things that cost more than a kingdom might have in total coinage.

Is there a solution that fits a fantasy setting?  Separate magic from gold completely.  Have your dragon hordes with 100′s OR 1000′s of golds, not 100′s of thousands.  Put in place rituals that let the characters power up their swords and turn them into something that grows with them or use any of the ideas to remove magic bonuses from items and give them to the characters innately and the magic items become flavor gear with bonus abilities.   The character has a flaming sword, not a flaming sword +1.  I understand the DMG2 has some guidelines on this now as well as the community stuff.

Anyway, that was my random thought about something to post today.

But harsh?  Definitely.  I once had a specialist archer lose half his hand to critical fire damage (because he thought the flames were illusionary) and be unable to use a bow for half a campaign.  I once had a fighter lose his bonus attack for several episodes because he lost ‘his’ sword and had to make do with substitutes that weren’t as balanced or designed for him.  I once had a paladin pick up a cursed box and become a fighter until he atoned for his ‘sin’. Â  I’m harsh, there’s no getting around it.

Players as a rule tend to push the boundaries of what they can and can’t do.  DM’s tend to push back to keep things in check.  It’s a lot like the parent – child synergy.  No you can’t stay out till 3 in the morning.  Yes if you’re back by 9:00 you can drive the car.  The primary reason is, or at least for me is, to keep the party in balance so that it doesn’t devolve into one person doing everything and the rest sitting back and playing second fiddle. So when the problem child wants to do a triple back flip through the bar and be able to backstab the BBEG because ‘he’d never expect it’ I have to raise the eyebrow and go “Orly.  You think that would really work? No.”

But I’ve mellowed with age. Or perhaps more factually I’ve got more experience at what will really unbalance a campaign and block it and what would simply be unrealistic, cool certainly, but unrealistic and go ahead and allow it.

And you should try to hit the same balance.  It can be a hard line to stick to and fraught with peril.  Allow something too overpowering and the player is going to want to do it all the time.  Don’t allow anything and you’re stifling the creative flow and removing those ad hoc high points that get talked about for years.

Sometimes you don’t see the ramifications of your actions and have to retro them out somehow. As a example is the one time I actually played in a campaign the DM gave the dagger specialised fighter a ring of vampiric regeneration.  This made the fighter invincible as long as he hit about one out of two times he’d get back any lost hit points.  This nullified both the encounters and the other players as it became a “Let Temple get them all, we’ll sit back here playing chess.”  The DM solved the problem by having a fish leap up while were were crossing a lake and bite his finger off taking the ring with it.

As a general rule, you should try very hard not to lock a player out of playing.  This means no long term stuns or disabling conditions.  Don’t kidnap one player and not the others.  Don’t ‘steal’ items from them for anything but very short term.  Keep an eye on your monsters so that they don’t have uber defenses against what the party is putting out.

A player’s turn shouldn’t consist of making a saving throw or worse being able to do nothing but wait for someone else to get to him.  Granted this is going to happen from time to time but do what you can to reduce the frequency of it. You can’t always save the stupid though. Some players (or characters) are just not bright and as a result they will through their own actions lock themselves out of playing.  And that’s okay.

I’m very much not a fan of the Stun condition in 4th Edition and I’m retconning it out as dazed on every monster power. I’m not a fan of the Dying condition and the death saves to be honest which is why I came up with the Weebles Wobble rule where I came up with a Mostly Dead condition.  This lets a player be dying and still be an active participant in the game.  I’ve had a couple of notes from people that have tried it with pretty good success and their players reportedly really approved of it. And it makes for a pretty cinematic visual.  Rarely in action movies do you have people laying around dying and not doing anything.  But tons of examples of the heroes limping forward barely concious, blood streaming off them but refusing to lay down as they blow some rubber suited monsters cojones off and snap out a one liner as they do so.

So in closing, don’t screw your players.  Let them play, it’s why they’re there after all.

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Curse you Evolution for continuing to raise the stakes with your evolving diseases!

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  You’re not going to be the sole focus of attention so when it’s not your turn let someone else have a bit of spotlight. It’s discourteous to the other players to not give them their chance at the mic.

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  Step up and be heard, get involved.  Don’t just sit back observing or staring off into space. It’s really discourteous to your DM who’s gone to the trouble of creating something for you to ignore it.

I’ve had to deal with both types in my career as a DM/GM.  They’re both more than a bit of a pain after months and years.

Things I’ve found annoying from players in large quantities, and that based on the voice inflections and reactions from Dm’s in the podcasts might be fairly universal.

Constantly going “No he can’t/doesn’t/wouldn’t” to the DM in any form as a common reaction to the DM.

• DM: “Okay the fell necromancer shifts his gaze at you, Alofel and necrotic energies flare up and blast outwards at you.”
• Player: “No he doesn’t.  He doesn’t have that power any more.  It’s a typo.  Wouldn’t he hit Steve instead?  He misses.  I duck out of the way.  I’m immune.”

Once is okay, twice is within reason but constantly over and over ‘retorting’ with some variation on the above every time the DM announces a NPC’s attack gets old fast.

Immersion breaking ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ between a character and an NPC.

• DM as Necromancer: “I shall have your soul chained in a everlasting fire for daring to interfere you pathetic mortal.”
• Player: “U r gay.”

Once in a while, sure it CAN be funny.  But constantly chanting how gay what is supposed to be some scary evil dark wizard is, gets very unfunny pretty quickly to most DM’s I’m betting, myself included.

Most DM’s do what they do to bring to life a cooperative story set in a ‘real life’ world where characters, pc and npc, act in realistic ways.  It takes interest and energy to do all the extra work involved.  Players who show up so they can be the asshole (or pschopath/klepto)  in the game they can’t be at the office tend to be a bit of a burden on the creative energies and interest required to be a DM.

What I call psuedo-cheating (don’t get me started on real cheating).

• DM: “Does a 22 hit you Barkil?”
• Player: “No.”  a minute goes by, “Yeah it hits.”

• Player: “I rolled a… 23.”
• DM: “Okay that hits.”
• Player: “No it was really a 3.”
• DM: “*sigh*”

Please remember during my little mini-rant, that I’m ranting about consistent, frequent, constant behaviour of this type. Like any decent DM I can overlook, ignore, or go along with a reasonable level of this kind of thing.  But constantly doing it gets old.

And no this isn’t some sly subtle jab at my players, due to RL, lack of interest, medical reasons, I don’t have enough consistent players to have a group of players that I can enjoy being with to have a RPG group going on.  At best I get to DM the occasional one-off or playtest or ‘delve’.

As a player remember the DM is supposed to be having fun too.  Try to gauge his or her reactions to your behaviour and adjust accordingly.

Because if the DM isn’t having fun, especially over the course of several sessions, then you’re going to be looking for a new DM.

Any gaming group whether it’s chess, bridge or rpg’s is a social group with the implied social contracts that are always the price of being in that group. You have to be social and sociable.  If you like roleplay then deal with there being rollplay going on.  If all you want to do is roll dice then deal with there being roleplay going on.  And as a DM I know this can change per player on a session basis.  Sometimes a player just wants to roll dice and loot the corpses of the bad guys.  And sometimes they just want to sit back and have an animated discourse on the qualities of the rope they’re purchasing.  But remember you’re one of a group and they also vary in what they want to do.

Know what your character can do.  I personally find myself questioning why players want to bother showing up when they show no interest in the mechanics of their characters much less the game system that’s being played.  Constantly having to wait for a player every session while they ‘re-learn’ their characters abilities or worse, just ‘spam’ a single abilitiy over and over regardles of its effect or efficiency simply because they don’t want to be bothered to learn more can be annoying.

It’s not very enjoyable for DM’s who spend excess hours over and above the actual session hours coming up with the adventures, plots, hooks, bad guys, who have the not so easy task of juggling tens of ‘characters’ during every combat, of keeping things in balance for the players so it’s not a cakewalk as well as not instant death, of remembering what’s happened before, what they want to happen and steering a plausible path between those points to have players express a serious lack of interest in what’s going on at the table.  [Massive run on sentence of the day.]

I have a saying, “Looks like apathy has reared it’s head, we’re done for the night.” and it’s had to be brought into play more than once.  When computers started to intrude on gaming sessions, whether it was Doom when we first got PC’s or Ultima Online when we first got MMOG’s  or whatever.  Once the conversation’s saturation point became something other than the game at hand, I’d shut it down.  When I’m running something, I’m there to run it, not talk about the current hot topic.

So as a final wrap up, I think this can mostly be summed up with “As a player in a group game, be courteous.” or in layman’s terms: “Don’t be a dick.”

Or the odds are very good there won’t be a social group anymore.  At least for you.

Makes for some really good idea fostering since they’re easily ‘consumed’ and aren’t burdened with giant blocks of stats and all that so you can ‘microwave’ them in a minute or two and go “that’s cool” or “meh” without spending a lot of time at it.  Then you can go stat them up into encounters of your own tailoring.

All the listed ones are good but I thought this one in particular would have some really good ‘visuals’ and could be adjusted with custom monsters pretty easily for any level.

Image Credits

XP Encounter Difficulty: Level 7+4
(Used on a level 7 party, but it is a level 11 encounter)

Brief summary: Adult White dragon blasting the snow away from graves awakening the dead.

Area setup: An island in the middle of a icy river with precarious stepping stones. The island has a big graveyard, the graves are covered by snow.

Enemies:
Adult White Dragon Level 9 Solo brute with 20% fewer hp, so award 1600xp
3xChillborn zombie Level 6 Soldier
3xMad Wraith Level 6 Controller

Enemy setup:
The Dragon awakens as the party bicker like hell crossing the river, fights them as they come onto the island. It uses its breath weapon to blast the snow away from some graves awakening the chillborn zombies the following round. It stays flying and uses its breath weapon a few rounds later to awaken the Mad Wraiths in the same way

How it went:
The archer in the party was scouting and noticed the dragon, shot it and started the fight with only two PC’s on the stepping stones. Otherwise it went about as planned. One of the fighter pushed the gravestones over the chillborn zombies as they awakened, slowing them by one round. (I didn’t let them use the aura when they had a gravestone on top of them). The dragon never landed and flew away after getting down to 25% hp.

Actual Difficulty:
The encounter is a little easier than it might seem, as the dragon uses it’s breath weapon to uncover the graves and the undead used some rounds getting up of the graves. Difficulty about as a level 10 encounter. The players used all available dailies.

How well did it work(on a scale of 1-10):
The multiple enemies that had to be handled and the big bad guy made for a very interesting encounter for every character type. The encounter has plenty of suspense and the characters feel threatened but not overwhelmed. I would give it an 8.5.

This time let’s focus on a non-system, non-genre post intended to help anyone who’s going into the storyteller seat whether it’s Heroes or GURPS or Vampire or Top Secret or Warhammer FRP or FUDGE or… you get the point I’m sure.

If you’re wanting to know how to be a good or at least competent game leader (whatever the title might be) here’s some things that I’ve come to believe over the course of my gaming history that might help you.

• Know your material
• Do your prep work
• Keep things moving
• Be descriptive
• Give each player focus
• Don’t bog down
• Keep things moving (yes it’s important enough to list twice).
• Play to your players
• Get rid of distractions
• I am your father

Know your material – Know the adventure you have planned.  YOu don’t have to know it forwards and backwards but be familiar with it.  Have some idea where a creature might run for reinforcements if things go bad for him. Â  Have an idea of the capabilities of the obstacles that the players will face.  Is there an obvious synergy between some of the forces you have arrayed against the players?  If not an obvious one then try to figure out one. The start of the game should NOT be the first time you crack open the module if you’re using something you didn’t design.  Know the basics of your gaming system, again you don’t have to know every in and out but have a basic understanding of the game.

Do your prep work – Have cheat sheets (you can find them all over the place including this site) for the information you’re going to need all the time during the session.  Reduce the “Steve what’s your _____?” and “Does a 16 hit?” type questions to a minimum.  Make handouts of any ‘notes’ or clues the players might find so you don’t have to hold up game play to slowly read things out while a player writes it down.  Make loot lists on postit notes so again you can simply hand the note to the party leader and not have to wait for the party scribe to note everything down.  Yes this is more work for you but it’s work you can do in your down time aka non-game time.  Which brings us to…

Keep things moving – Don’t have long pauses of silence from you unless you’re listening to your players.  I HIGHLY recommend you listen to the various podcasts out there, RPGMP3, WOTC’s Penny Arcade, Gamer’s Haven etc.  Listen to them in the car or while you’re spacing out at your desk or before you go to sleep.  Take notes of when things slow down.  Inevitably it’s when the DM is reading his material, or looking something up or is just distracted.

Be descriptive – You shouldn’t go, “the goblin rolled a 13 and his damage is 2d6 and you take… 8 damage.”  Use something like “Iowna the goblin stabs you in the thigh with its none-too-clean javelin all the while yelling taunts at you in goblin most of which seem to be describing how unappealing looking you are.  Take 8 damage.”  Be descriptive, even if it’s the 8th office the agents have searched, add a little something, “Apparently Ms. Jenkins the CFO likes her pron because the screen saver on her workstation has a all nude chippendale’s slide show going on it.  A quick search though and you’re pretty sure the datavault is not in here. “  Give descriptors on the smells, the sounds, the visuals of the areas, the objects in them.  Paint a picture through the character’s senses for the players to be drawn into what they’re going through.

Give each player focus – Each turn focus on one player and draw them out about what they’re doing, get them to describe their attack or action in something more than “Does a 19 work for you?”.  Instead try to train your players over time to instead think more along the lines of “I parry the bastard’s blade and then try and gut him for what he did to the healer.” Don’t do it in strict order but more or less randomly but get the players involved.  And to do that you need to know your material so you’re not pre-occupied with trying to figure out what your guys are doing. The third installment of the Penny Arcade podcasts are a good example of Scott Kurtz seemingly to finally ‘get it’ or at least able to pretend to get it.  The interaction between Binwin and the boss Dwarf about Binwin’s ancestry/clans is awesome.  You want that from your players.

Don’t bog down – This is a sneaky way to reiterate keep things moving. Don’t let yourself or a player bog the game down for minutes long stretches.  If you don’t know a DC just use level + 5/10/15 for easy, medium, hard.  Hand wave the crap out of the game rather than let momentum die because someone spent 15 minutes trying to find some rule. Â  Either give it to them or don’t give it to them and just make a note to look up the real rule later.  This really a subset of Know your material but important enough to bring up individually I think.   Momentum keeps players involved and interested.  And interested players are what the whole point of being there playing these games is about.

Play to your players – It doesn’t matter if you spent hours and hours planning out an awesome murder mystery campaign.  If your players want a hack and slash campaign you’re screwed.  Go with it and give them their hack and slash.  You can’t fit square pegs in round holes. Â  If they’re playing some scenario they don’t want to they’re not going to be interested and uninterested players = epic session fail.  You can’t force a horse to drink and you can’t force players to enjoy something they’re not intersested in.  You need to be upfront though as to your limits.  I refuse to run evil campaigns for example and I refuse to allow evil alignment as I’ve yet to seem them used as anything other than chaotic psychopath justifications.  If you have limitations like this you just have to let them be known up front so everyone doesn’t waste their time.

Get rid of distractions – Turn off the electronics.  Cell phones, smart phones, pda’s, laptops, televisions, radios, turn all that crap off.  Put the pets outside or another room with door closed.  Get rid paperbacks and puzzle books.  Flat out tell people, either you’re here to play this game or you here to text, read, do sudoko or surf the web.  If it’s the latter there’s not point in us trying this. If you want music then use CD’s or MP3′s, commercials are distractions, distractions bog down game play and that leads to disinterest.

I am your father – Like it or not as the DM the role of parent typically falls to you in most groups.  It’s usually your task to keep people focused on the task at hand but you also have to allow them their dick tuna times as well.  Chris Perkins I think does a pretty good job of this, letting the players derail everything and then smoothly gets it all back on track again for the most part.  You’ll typically be the arbiter of “I don’t like how Bill is such a loot whore.” and “Steve keeps running off by himself.”  Just use your best effort in these situations.  Worst case you have to get rid of a player.  Worst worst case is you can’t get rid of a player for various social reasons and you have to quit playing.  Been there done that and it sucks.

These are a few observations I’ve made over the last 28 years of being a DM/GM in more systems than I can remember.  They might be nothing but ass or they might help you out, you’ll be the final arbiter there. If they do help then awesome.

Image Credits

You can use the images below or you can down the pdf’s [Download not found], [Download not found], [Download not found], [Download not found].  I’m also using the new Export function of the Monster Builder and you can grab the .monster files – [Download not found] if you kinda like these but want to tweak them to your own needs.

It’s interesting but for any non-published stuff I find myself just making my own creatures.  That’s another subtle but very huge draw/benefit of 4th edition.  That you can make almost auto-balanced creatures without any issue that are actually interesting.

Got to take my boys to a birthday party so I can’t really expand on this but surely these can give you some ideas…

Image Credits

Hanged One

Steel Thewed Zombie

Pyre Dead

Tortued Remains

I’ve used Rat Swarms and Drake Swarms to good effect, the adjacent attack can be a constant brutality if you’re rolling well against the players.

Image Credits

Swarm Template (Elite Soldier)

Vulnerability 10 close and area attacks.

Saving Throws +2

Action Point 1

Hit Points +8 per level + Constitution score

The creature gains the Swarm keyword.

Size increases by two steps (tiny > medium, small > large, medium > huge, large > gargantuan). Reach remains the same as that of the original creature.

Mounted creatures can be turned into swarms. Use the size of the mount (usually large) to determine the swarm’s new size. Use the mount’s speed to determine the swarm’s speed.

Powers

Swarm Attack
Aura; the swarm makes a basic melee attack as a free action against each enemy that begins its turn in the aura. The aura’s range equals the reach of the original creature.

Swarm Defenses
A swarm takes half damage from melee and ranged attacks. It is immune to forced movement (pull, push and slide) caused by such attacks.

Swarm Movement
The swarm can enter or move through an enemy’s space; this movement does not provoke opportunity attacks. An enemy can enter a space occupied by a swarm, but the space occupied by the swarm is considered difficult terrain, and doing so provokes an opportunity attack. A swarm can squeeze through any opening large enough to accomodate even one of its constituent creatures, i.e. it counts as two sizes smaller for the purpose of squeezing.

The idea is apparently one proposed by the DMG2 (don’t have a copy yet) where the actions of the players can earn them achievements.

If you’ve played many steam games (or most xbox games?) then you’ll be familiar with this concept.  I know I spent some time with L4D for instance getting the various achievements (PC version) and prior to that I enjoyed the random “You’ve earned the Rocket Man” or whatever achievement in Half Life 2 EP2.

Tracking the things necessary to unlock them though might be a big PITA.

Steam Like Achievment Unlocks  by King Nate

You could always assign RPGA-like Player Rewards benefits to the achievements.

Here’s some examples…

Giant Killer Achievement
If you slay a creature at least two sizes larger than yourself you unlock this Achievement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) when you encounter any creature at least two sizes larger than yourself, you can gain 1 action point.

Dragon Slayer Achievement
If you slay a dragon you unlock this Achievement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) when you enoucounter a dragon, you gain 1 action point and +4 bonus to initiative.

Fearsome Gaze Achievement
If you successfully make an opponent surrender by using the intimidate skill during combat you unlock this achievvement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) you can gain either a +2 fear bonus to your next Intimidate skill check (until the end of your turn) or you can attempt another Intimidate check on a target you failed to Intimidate during combat.

Opportunist
If you successfully hit 10 enemies with Opportunity Attacks during one level you unlock this achievement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) you can use the Rogue’s Sneak Attack class feature.

Feign Surprise
If you are first to act during 10 initiatives during one level you unlock this acheivement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) you can act during a surprise round in which you are surprised.

Twist the Blade
If you make 10 Critical Sneak Attacks you unlock this acheivement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) you can deal maximum damage with your sneak attack. You may do this after dice have been rolled. You may also spend an action point to roll an additional sneak attack damage.

Cheat Death
If you failed two death saves and succeed with the third you unlock this acheivement.
Benefit: Once per Gaming Night (Adventure) you can roll two dice taking the better result for all death saves until end of the encounter you use this acheivement.

Or instead of giving benefits like this you can also hand out points per achievement. Players can use these points for whatever you come up with or they can be bonus experience points. __________________

The idea is to print and cut these out and then fold them in half. Â  Fill out both sides of the initiative cards, one side that faces the players only has a name on it, the other has some fairly relative information, your needs may vary but this is what I want at a glance.

Drop the cards in initiative order on your DM’s screen, because of the table I use for gamin I’m going to make a simple upside down T out of some oak and plexiglass (mockup over there ->) and hang them on those.  Then you can slide them back and forth etc.

The status tokens are also printed and cut out and you just drop appropriate ones over the cards, that should make it pretty simple and braindead to remember who’s taking ongoing damage, who needs to save for something, whether a condition runs out on a save or end of turn etc.

Anyway if you like them then feel free to use them.

People are scared, and now few people dare to sleep alone.  Even so people are still dying.  Tales spread of a large cat being seen prowling around or even leaping from the windows of those found dead, a great beast of a cat with green glittering eyes that glow from the shadows. Â  As the days go on, cats are hunted down and killed of all sizes and still the deaths continue.

A call has gone out for any brave adventurer’s that can help the imperiled village and their rewards will be great (well as great as a village of sheep farmers can offer).

I forsee a party passing through and hearing of the troubles or actively seeking it out.  They’ll investigaet the area and if they have good nature/perceptions they might find odd prints outside the house of the most recent dead.  An arcana, religion or history checks might give them clues as to the creature they’re looking for and this might lead them to search abandoned houses in the village since the Breathstealer is nocturnal. Â  The searching of the houses could have some non-related encounters.  Perhaps that run across a small chapter of thieves or thugs. Â  A house with a small crypt below it that has something dank and gross in it.

I think I’d lean toward them finding out a potential target of the creature, perhaps they’re smart enough to spread some gold among the beggars and orphans to keep an eye out, or maybe they get a report that a giant cat has been seen stalking around a particular house.  The breathstealer would stealth attack one of them leaving him dazed and bloodied on the ground perhaps and then retreat only to attack again from another direction much later on another solo target.

Image Credits

Anyway here’s the [Download not found] in PDF or you can use the image below. -

breathstealer

But we also want high level monsters to be heroic in nature to take down.  A village should really PREFER to call a Hero to take care of their pesky dragon problem.

So what’s standing in our way?  The way Defenses and Attack Bonii go up primarily. Â  You need a +20 to hit an epic creature even after rolling a 20.

So let’s just yank that whole level based increase in defenses and to hits.  To avoid changing the base percentages we subtract the same value, in this case Level / 2 from everything.

BUT, this still leaves creatures, both PC and NPC getting tougher as they go up.  Their hit points go up, their surges go up, their repertoire in the form of increased power output in both quantity and quality go up. In addition for the PC’s gear will add up to +6 to defenses and attacks based on bonuses (another option would be to tie these bonuses to their level and remove +x from all magic items but that’s a modification for another day).

So let’s ‘do the math’ with a sample -

20th Level Soldier Ice Devil -

• Pre-Mod – AC 36; Fort 33; Reflex 31; Will 29. Â  Attacks: +23 – +27
• Post-Mod – AC 26; Fort 26; Reflex 26; Will 19.  Attacks: +3 – +7

20th Level Defender (auto build dragonborn avenging paladin) -

• Pre-Mod – AC 34; Fort 32; Reflex 29; Will 29.  Attacks: +12 – +31
• Post Mod – AC 24; Fort 22; Reflex 19; Will 19.  Attacks +2 – +21

Direct Comparison Player Versus Monster -

Paladin VS Ice Devil -

Pre-Mod -

• Valiant Strike – +27 vs 36AC  = roll 9 to hit = 60%
• Certain Justice – +31 vs 36AC  = roll 5 to hit = 80%
• Entangling Smite – +22 vs 29Will = roll 7 to hit = 70%
• Rule of Order – +27 vs 33Fort = roll 6 to hit = 75%
• Righteous Inferno – +12 vs 31Reflex = roll 19 to hit = 10%

Post-Mod (-10 20/2)-

• Valiant Strike – +17 vs 26AC = roll 9 to hit = 60%
• Certain Justice – +21 vs 26AC = roll 5 to hit = 80%
• Entangling Smite – +12 vs 29 Will = roll 7 to hit =70%
• Rule of Order – +17 vs 23 Fort = roll 6 to hit 75%
• Righteous Inferno – +2 vs 21 Reflex = roll 19 to hit = 10%

As you can see the percentages are identical.

10th Level Soldier Genasi Stoneshield

• Pre-Mod – AC 26; Fort 24; Reflex 21; Will 20.  Attacks: +14 – +17
• Post-Mod – AC 21; Fort 19; Reflex 16; Will 10.  Attacks: +9 – +12

10th Level Dragonborne Avenging Paladin

• Pre-Mod – AC 27; Fort 24; Reflex 20; Will 21.  Attacks: +6 – +18
• Post Mod – AC 22; Fort 19; Reflex 15; Will 16.  Attacks +1 – +13

Pre-Mod Player Versus NPC-

• Valiant Strike – +18 vs 26 AC  = roll 8 to hit = 65%
• One Stands Alone – +6 vs 16 = roll 10 to hit = 55%

Post-Mod (-5 10/2) -

• Valiant Strike – +13 vs 21 AC  = roll 8 to hit = 65%
• One Stands Alone – +1 vs 11 = roll 10 to hit = 55%

Again the percentages are identical for obvious reasons.

But by subtracting level/2 from everything we end up with an epic boss fight something like this that doesn’t require a level 30 just to be able to hit it with anything approaching regularity.

Ancient Gold Dragon Level 30 Solo (Monster Manual 2)

Post Mod – AC 29; Fort 27; Reflex 29; Will 27.  Attacks +17 – +20

A level 0 commoner only hits on a 20. Nothing changed there.  But if this was a level 15 dragon (or a level 15 player trying to kill the level 3 town guards) then the commoners would certain have a decent shot at it.

A level 10 Paladin at +13 vs 29 AC hits on a 16 or better and has a 25% chance.

So now we have heroic tier Heroes that could conceivably take on a level 30 solo creature.

They’re going to spend all day hacking at it given that it has 1088 hit points but in theory a ‘doable’ amount of level 10′s could defeat this thing.   And that’s what we’re looking for isn’t it?

I think by using one very simple change to the numbers we extensively broaden the range that any one creature is ‘viable’ and keep things balanced and allow for creatures to get tougher as they level by the very fact that they can take more damage and do more damage.

Obviously this would need to be played out but at first glance I’m not seeing anything that screams “Don’t bother testing, you’re just wasting your time.”

One thing to be aware of is that powers that grant bonuses are increased in value now, but I can live with that.

And just to get rid of my own beef with Skills in 4th Edition let’s get rid of the Level/2 bonus to skills.  If a character wants to get better at skills they can specialize in them through feats, increase the base stat of the skill, or use magic items. Â  This means that skill challenge difficulties are drastically reduced in complexity and are viable for the life of the character.  The same goes with traps and anything else that requires any kind of skill based rolling.

The Proposed Change –

Subtract Level / 2 from all Attack Bonuses, all Defenses and all Skill Bonuses for both NPC and PC.

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Conan wasn’t a god.  Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser couldn’t kick Orcus’ ass. Â  Elric, Doc Savage, Robin Hood, Arthur, none of these were demi-gods.  They were good, no arguing that.  But they still had something to fear from a village full of farmers and pitchforks.  A level 30 currently could take down a good sized city solo.

It’s been ‘threaded’ a few times off and on and I’ve probably linked it here somewhere but I thought I’d think about this -

What about removing the plus per level/half level?  If the +to hit and -to hit (aka defenses) both go up at the same rate does it really matter what that rate is?  If the player needs a 13 or better to hit at level 1 and a 13 or better to hit at level 30 has anything really changed at all?  What if we segmented attacks and defenses, skills by every 5 levels with some variance obviously.

Additionally this let’s us do away with +’s on weapons and armour and instead just add +1 to hit to the players directly every 5 levels and +1 to their defenses that these items grant?  This allows a character to keep that Flaming Longsword they found at level 2 and it’ll be relevant for the entirety of their characters life if they wish. Â Â  But if they for some reason lose their heirloom sword right before the fight against orcus they’ll be able to pick up something else because that +6 bonus is inherent in their skills, not their gear. Â  I do know you can use rituals to power up gear but that just rarely if ever happens in fiction.

Anyway, just a random idle thought on flattening the curve for myself. Â  DND is probably not the best system to promote such a radical shift and it’s definitely not for every player or group.

Image Credit

I do have some caveats -

The sessions are at my house and I have three small children that will be around during part of any session.  Not only do they like to observe gaming sessions their computers are in the same room that I game in.  As a result there are certain ground rules on behavior and what I’d be looking for:

• Language and social behavior is an issue in general with me and in very specific when my children can hear and observe  it.  If you can’t keep it clean then you’re not a good fit for me.
• Must be able to play without arguing,  cheating or lawyering up.
• Must be able to tolerate children in a civil manner.
• A relaxed casual player would be a much better fit than a hardcore.
• No mind altering substances tolerated.
• Must provide own transportation.

About the group/gamesstyle/times -

• Sessions are Saturdays from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. and 2 to 4 times a month.
• Location is in the Tulsa / Broken Arrow area of Oklahoma.
• Existing participants (3-4) are older, 40+ years old.
• Held at a private residence with 3 small children on site.
• Game system is 4th Edition DnD (no knowledge of system necessary).
• Dinner (pizza) and basic refreshments (tea, water) provided.
• Good aligned and action party only, no chaotic psychopath rogues or lawful stupid paladins.

So if you’re in the general area, think you’d be a good fit, then contact me and we can schedule a trial run.

keywords to influence searching returns:

Looking for players tulsa

Looking for DnD players

Looking for players broken arrow

DnD in the tulsa area

dungeons and dragons tulsa oklahoma

*Dick Tuna – Phrase coined by Wil Wheaton, Penny-Arcade and PVP-Online players during their podcasts. Funny but not appropriate for a 5 year old.

Tit

So here he is, nothing special really but if you need a fire based elite in a hurry he might work.  And here’s a PDF if you like that kind of thing. [Download not found]

Edit: Added image for him.

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Tit

I ordered ‘sample’ pack of the Alea Tools, specifically “One-Inch Neo-Markers – Game Master Pack 01″ and “One-Inch Neo-Markers – Red 10 Pack” along with some of “Miniature Conversion Circles – One-Inch”.  The order was shipped prompty and correctly.  Each set came in a clear plastic tube with a higher quality than average stopper.  Odd thing to notice I know but there you go.  The tube itself was typical of the type and if you’ve ever bought a tube of dice you’ll be familiar with it. Â  Each set of markers also included a few of the conversion circles.

Quality on the markers was decent but it’s hard to be awesome or crappy with what’s essentially a molded two part plastic disk.  Each has a ‘rare earth’ magnet inside that allows them to stick together.  The magnets are fairly strong and I had no problems with their stickiness.

The conversion disks are essentially the same flexible magnets you’d find in any craft section of a department store but with an adhesive backing that’s pretty good or seems to be.  There is an issue, not with the quality but with the purpose.  They’re designed to stick to the bases of the miniatures.  Well the bases of the miniatures are ANYTHING but standardized and on many (most?) you’ll find the magnet is too big and sticks out a bit.  That’s a fault with the lack of a standard base size on Wizards part and not with the idea directly.

Another issue that may come up is that the bases have a lip on the bottom of them.  So when you stick one of these magnets to it, you really have a very small surface area that is going to be attached.

But they’re cheap enough I suppose that eventually if you do lose some you can replace them.  I will offer the observation that if you filled the bases of your mini’s with something, maybe Mighty Putty (RIP Billy), they’d probably be a lot more secure and probably permanent.

All in all I’d recommend them, they make marks, status effects and all that very easy to keep track of.

Now on to the Magna Maps.  These were as well shipped promptly and correctly.  I ordered two of the 2′ x 3′ maps because that covers about 75% of my map surface. Â  My map level on my gaming table is roughly 35″ by 55″ so I did have to cut one inch from the long way but it cut very easily.  And now I have two two foot rows of 1″ squares I could use for something.

The material is very much the same rubberized substance that refrigerator magnets are made of. Except it’s not magnetic per se. It’s also not terribly ‘sticky’ in terms of magnets sticking to it. Â  The more powerful rare earth ones have a decent grab to them but the weaker ones like the conversion disks barely stick at all.  I think that’s a combination of two factors though, the material is just iron impregenated rubber, not iron and the conversion dicks are also just iron impregnated rubber albeit magnetic iron (or something to that effect).  Two weaks don’t make a strong in this case.  But if you’re using Alea’s Neo disks or something similar then they’ll stick well enough.

With all that said I think they’re both useful.  Are they worth the money? Meh, you can certainly get by without them.  They add a bit of geek chic to your table but that’s about it.  But sometimes geek chic is worth the cost to me. You’ll have to be the judge of that for yourself.

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I’m linking the two latest ones here -

I’m don’t agree, perhaps a tiny bit I can understand the basis of it but over all no.  But I’m looking at this as roughly a 99.9999% DM role of 25+ years viewpoint. Â  I think players should play their characters the way they want and build them the way they want (outside of high end power gaming builds).

If a player wants to play a ranged rogue for instance, I don’t have a problem with that.  Sure a ranger would make more sense, perhaps a lot more sense, but if that’s not what the player wants, it’s fine with me.  It’s the characters who can deal 49d6 at level 5 because they’ve found all the loopholes in the rules that I have a problem with.

Now the DM though should be aware there are other players at the table.  If one player is horribly sub par and the DM doesn’t take this into account when designing encounters then yes that can impact the other players entertainment but that’s on the DM to adjust to the players, not force the players to adjust to the game.

I put a lot of onus on the DM (and I’ve rarely played as a player) to insure that the game is fun for everyone and to adjust things, fudge encounters, dice rolls, add extra waves or dynamically add hit points or subtract them etc to make sure it is.  But I don’t believe it’s the DM’s job to ‘fix’ a player who’s playing a class in a manner that’s not ‘optimal’.

But I’ll give you an example of where a DM IMO should intervene – A cleric that decides he won’t heal or want’s to ‘charge’ the other characters for healing, that’s when the DM steps in and say, “No you can’t do that in the middle of this session while they’re in the dungeon.  Once they’re in a position, i.e. town, to make alternate arrangements for healing then yes what you decide is between you but you have to realize they’ll probably just get rid of your character one way or another under such an arrangement.  But right now you need to keep healing.”  <-  True story.

But DM’s, just let the players play, as long as they’re not cheating, being assholes or disrupting game play by playing their Chaotic Psychopath alignment, if they want to play a wizard that fights with a sword or a rogue that uses a bow all the time (without the Combat Advantage at Range  feat), or just a warrior who only uses a staff, far from the most ‘DPS’ build in the world, then let them.  They’re there to have fun too and until their fun seriously impacts the groups fun then it’s all okay.

At the very least, if their style of character building doesn’t fit your style of DM’ing then let them know that another group might work better if you or the group as a majority isn’t willing to make allowances.

Or that’s my opinion.  But then opinions are like assholes… 

Like the others I plan on putting together a small binder for the players to put these in along with their quest cards so at the end of the campaign they’ll have a nice log of their character’s lives and times.

You can grab it here – [Download not found]

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But for some people it’s not as great an experience.  They have the DM who TPK’s them their first session.  For other’s they have players who power game to the point of complete imbalance or just flat out cheat. Â  I really hope that most people fall at least somewhere in the middle if not on the good side of the curve.  When everything ‘clicks’ a PnP gaming session can be a truly awesome thing. Â  When it ‘unclicks’ it can end any chance of another one.

My last DnD campaign ended with a TPK because after several months I was tired of the cheating, the bickering, the attempts to not play nice with each other.  So I quit fudging the dice, this was under 3rd Edition and a DM who didn’t fudge dice invariably stood a good chance of wiping out a group when the group had no concept of being overmatched.  And that’s what happened.  I let the dice roll in the open and fall as they would and unsurprisingly enough the bad guys slaughtered them.

For awhile now my group is too small and sporadic in attendance to play anything RPG’ish.  I prefer 4 to 5 players + 1 GM/DM.  I’d like to add a couple of players.  But I cringe at trying to find two people who’ll fit our playstyle and not be asshats.  So I was thinking what about a not so implied social contract?  Something up front that both sides can actually read and have a good idea of what they’re getting into.

So I rough drafted the below, it could stand refinement, not so wordy and all that but at least it’s a stepping off point.

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Dungeons and Dragons – A Social Contract

As a DM I will endeavor to provide each player with an entertaining event.  I will strive to insure that all characters receive an equal amount of the spotlight and will do my best to provide sufficient variety to tax the needs of each characters potential and abilities.  I will work to corral players who go off on tangents to the detriment of the session.  I will show up on time and prepared to play, I will not let rules get in the way of fun and will use the rule, “Say Yes for now.”, in the case of a disagreement on rules.  I will acknowledge that without the players there would be no game.

As a Player I will endeavor to be interested in the events that are transpiring in front of me.  I will attempt to not waste time due to inattention, lack of preparedness or attempting to lawyer up on rules. I will show up on time and prepared to play.  I will make an effort to engage all players opinions on how the group should proceed and not attempt to overshadow any or all of them.  I will reign in my ability to design powerful characters for powers sake with the knowledge that too broad a disparity in power makes the game less fun for every one else including the DM.  I will not bend the rules or cheat.  I will acknowledge that without the DM there would be no game.

But at least they noted it, they admitted it and they attempted to fix it.  I’m not sure it’s ‘fixed’ as well as it could be, see my comments below the quote but at least they made an effort right? It’s not often you’ll find someone that comes out and say, “Okay you got us.  We pushed out some crap and we’re sorry.  Here’s something that we spent some time on instead.”  Kudos to them.

Now if they could just publically admit their forums suck as well and fix those.

Quoted Text Copyright Wizards of the Coast 2009- re-posted here without permission -

Today, we posted a new version of the Class Acts: Ranger article that originally appeared on July 13, 2009.

To put it bluntly, the previous version of the article was of unacceptable quality. You, the readers, correctly pointed that out and we agreed. Hence, these revisions.

We apologize for this lapse in quality.

Though we believe that this particular article is an isolated failure in our mission to provide D&D Insiders with high-quality, exciting content every month, we still take this failure very seriously.

We’re confident that the new version of the article adheres to our (and your) high standards for all published game material — whether that material comes to you on paper or via the digital format.

We’re also reviewing our process for designing, developing, and editing Insider content to identify places where additional time or training are required to avoid such errors in the future.

We appreciate the trust that you place in us, and we’ll strive to continue to justify that trust.

Thank you, and good gaming

I’m looking at it, the powers that is, and they’re still not… quite up to what I’d call good?  Example, the level 1 exploit, the wording in the last sentence should read, IMO, “If both attacks hit the second slide up to 3 squares”. Â  It’s a little bit of a silly power.  The power states you have to slide the creature adjacent to you.  So if you hit twice you essentially spin in place 180 degrees with your target impaled on your blades, you have to based on the original wording, slide the creature 4 squares.  No options, what if you just want to use the power to hit your target twice WITHOUT sliding him?  You can’t by RAW.

The level 7 attack, the last line IMO should read “If both attacks hit, the extra damage is equal to 2+ your wisdom modifier.”  Otherwise if you don’t have a wisdom modifier you’re actually hitting for less damage then if you hit with only one attack. Â  At the very least it should say “…is equal to 1+your wisdom modifier (minimum of 2)”. Â  It’s phraseology and terminology like this that cause all those RAW versus RAI issues.

The artwork is less than stellar.  It’s not horrible but the way the assumed ranger is holding those axes it’s like he’s hitting people with the flat of the blade, not the edges.

The first one was in the Tomb of Horrors.  Remember that Sphere of Annihilation mounted to the wall?  Got my first one there.  And by kill I mean permanently dead, ne’er to be seen again.

Then there was the campaign that all the characters started off by dying, it was a plot thing so I’m not sure if it should be here but I’ll include it.

The character I vaporized with flame by an ancient red dragon.  So much damage in one hit that we both decreed there wasn’t anything left but a pile of ash.

The warrior that was chopped to bits by monofilament wire set across a pit and he was pushed into it.  Ugh.

The warrior that was impaled on a iron spike that shot up his… nether region and out his head and to add insult to injury was then hit by a 10d8 surge of lightning.

The ranger that was blasted into nothingingness, not even pile of ash remaining.

The party that sacrificed their lives so that their paladin could cause the birth of a goddess and then go quietly insane trapped at the center of everything and nothing.

Yes I can honestly remember every one of them. Odd how that is isn’t it.

It’s a good read for most people I think, especially for those who say roleplaying is dead.  It’s only as dead as you let it be.

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Quote:

Here’s why minatures fuck up our roleplaying. Actually, let’s be precise: here’s why strongly tactical combat systems mess up our roleplaying. If you’re anything like me, and if a tactical combat system appeals to you, you’re going to get into the tactics. You’re going to want to think about the optimal choice, and you’re going to want to use your resources effectively, and you’re going to want to do the right things to win the fight.

Thus, a combat becomes an exercise in what you the player think you the character should do at any given point. The question of the character’s desires tends to fall by the wayside, since those desires do not affect the tactical situation in any way.

Making the right tactical decision improves the chances of survival for both your character and the other characters in the game. That makes the other players happy. You get the satisfaction of beating the GM, which is also kind of fun. The frame changes from whatever it was before (telling a story, exploring the world, whatever) to winning the fight.

Yup. Miniatures fuck up roleplaying.

Quote:

Step four: make your character do whatever your character would do. Fuck tactics. If your character wants to blow off the big bad because the guy he loves is at the other side of the room getting eaten by a basilisk, charge across the room and take opportunity attacks and save his lover’s ass. When in doubt, do the less tactically advantageous thing. Get used to screwing up, you big damn hero. Heros screw up all the time!

The most memorable characters that aren’t memorable for what they did are the ones with really lopsided stats.  But for every single memorable character of such ilk, there are 50 that are remembered for their actions, not their stats. Â  And is that a great way to be remembered? “Remember that character of Temple’s the wizard who had a higher strength and constitution than the fighter did?  Haha he rolled crazy stats!”  As opposed to “Remember that character of Temple’s, the wizard? And when he kept falling and taking damage as he was running from the Headspiders down that sloped cavern and almost killed himself?  Man that was funny.”

I’m not saying that having an 18 strength or a 8 intelligence is a bad thing, just that it’s not necessarily the greatest way to own a memorable character per se.

For most characters, barring random roll, fixed placement oddballs, you’re going to have your three best scores where they do your class the most good.  That’s a given 99.9% of the time barring a player who just wants to create something lopsided for dramatic or comic reasons like the 8 strength fighter or the 9 wisdom cleric. Heck this whole thing coined the idea of the ‘dump stat’ which used to be Charisma for everyone except Paladins.  In the past editions characters were as a whole pretty average looking at best.

So the question at hand is what if we just did away with hard numeric stats and instead the player described their character’s abilities?

So if instead of – “Hi, I’m Bob the stereotyped big dumb fighter cause intelligence is a dump stat for fighters and this is Steve the highly intelligent but asthmatic wizard who as usual put his good stats in something other than constitution.”

We had something a little more prosaic and less ‘fixed’, “My character, Kel of Clan Finnan, approaches and asks you about joining your group.  He’s a fit but not overly muscled man dressed in well worn leather armour.  At first glance he appears unremarkable but there’s something about him that catches your eye on a second glance, the roguish twinkle in his eyes that might indicate a keen intellect and cutting wit.  You’ve heard of Kel, he’s known to be impetuous and leap in head first when perhaps he should have thought things through beforehand.”

As for the stats we simply give everyone the same +x across the board, or slightly more favorable to me, +x to their MAD abilities and +x-x to their other abilities.  So the big dumb fighter while he’s roleplayed dumb actually has a reasonable intelligence. Because honestly how long would a big dumb fighter really survive adventures?  Barring luck he’d quickly sucumb to the first riddle trap etc.  And the sickly wizard?  Dead the first winter. Â  And everything between those is generic already.

In other words make the game about the characters not the numbers.

I’m ambivilent on this whole idea personally.  On the one hand I see it has potential to make the people make the characters memorable and unique rather than the numbers.  It helps even out the MAD aka Multiple Attribute Dependency issues of classes like the Paladin (arguably the worst case of MADness). On the other I can hear it mooing and by the gods you’re supposed to have numbers for your stats and all characters will be generic.  But for the majority they’re already generic to the point where it’s unmemorable in terms of stats.

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Because it doesn’t matter now, there’s no chance the people involved are going to read this before it happens and because someone asked, the upcoming “while you’re here” sequence synopsis is going to run like this:

1. Interlude 1 – Party uncovers a need for their talents (which I believe is plausible but won’t go into now, just in case).  The party is comprised of Pre-Gen’s although they did pick their classes/races/powers but I equipped and set them up otherwise.
2. Tactical Encounter 1 – Difficulty Hard – A mix of artillery and skirmishers and a bunch of minions.
3. Skill Challenge 1 – Skill challenge with a varied range of results that all have them getting where they need to be but with possibly depleted resources.
4. Interlude Two – Party finds a random descriptive event designed to illicit character development.
5. Extended Rest possible at this point (due to my house rule).
6. Tactical Encounter 2 – Difficulty Standard – A mix of Soldiers and Minions.
7. Tactical Encounter 3 – Difficulty Standard – Artillery, Brutes and Controller.
8. Extended Rest possible at this point (due to my house rule).
9. Tactical Encounter 4 – Difficulty Hard – Boss, Controller and Minions.  Tough fight but the party could retreat before engaging if they feel they have to after the previous two encounters.
10. Extended Rest possible at this point (due to my house rule and DM fiat exception)
11. Skill Challenge 2 – Same as the previous skill challenge really.  Just adds a bit of randomness to how the party shows up at the next major area.
12. Tactical Encounter 5 – Difficulty Standard – One brute/controller and an ASS load of minions.
13. Tactical Encounter 6 – Difficulty Standard – Artillery and Brutes fill this niche in the defenses.
14. Tactical Encounter 7 – Difficulty Hard – Solo and soldiers are the final combat in this sequence of encounters and events and will culminate in some Phat Lewt as well as a level after defeating all the encounters prior to this.

No meaning to this post, just thought it interesting.

Shade Master

And my printer decides to go tits up. And my laser printer doesn’t print colored monster pages very well at all.

So one dissection later and several wooden matches (W.T.F?!) removed later and it’s working again.  Yay!

This is the Shade Master, he’s going to show up with 24 minions of Shadow…

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Anyway a random off the top of the head list of things that can speed up play without major detriment to game play.  I’m sure there are other things but these are what I came up with.

The biggest thing is to find the worst offender in terms of time and fix that as best as you can, whether its one player who’s always slow, or the DM is always looking up stats or your battles are simply battles of attrition without any question as to the outcome, find the problem and fix it.

On the player side there are options -

• Each player should have power cards or a simple spreadsheet outlining their powers in a concise format.  In other words ANYTHING BUT having to look the powers up each time and then figure out what the attack bonus is and then figure out their damage. Â  The spreadsheet format is definitely the fastest option.  A player’s powers can be displayed on a single page with their Attack value, what defense the power attacks, the damage they do with their standard weapon, and a short sentence that outlines any special effects of the attack.
• Do the math ahead of time for ALL the player’s powers and basic repeating dice rolls.
• Each player should have a ‘worksheet’ that they can keep track of their surges, hitpoints, second wind usage, action points and death saves.  90% of the information on the character sheet is not needed 95% of the time.
• Each player who’s not ready on their turn reserves their action and the player is deal with while they figure out what they’re going to do or if they’re not ready then they use an At-will attack on their current or closest target if it’s possible to do so.
• Use tokens for things like hit points, surges, action points, etc.  A stack of white poker chips and red pokers chips (or nickels and pennies) for health (although this can get messy with high level characters obviously).  When they’re down to the red they’re bloodied.  When they’re out of yellow chips they have no more surges.  Three black chips (failed death saves) and they’re dead.

On the DM side -

• The DM should have all his material ready and printed out.  He should have cards or sheets that have the monsters he’s going to be using printed out and not be flipping back and forth through the books.
• He should have a cheat sheet showing the player’s base standard ‘all the time’ defenses so he doesn’t have to keep asking, “Okay the orc rolled a 15 Bob against your AC, did that hit?”
• Know your material. Plan ahead what tactics the npc’s are going to employ against the party.  Don’t spend 15 minutes figuring out what your bad guys are going to do.  If you don’t have a plan then just have them attack the nearest thing with their biggest damage.
• Have your mini’s or tokens or whatever you’re using grouped and ready to go.
• Buy a large sheet of 1″ chart board paper at your local office supply store and pre-draw your maps then whip them out as you need them.  They don’t have to be works of art but they’ll avoid that 5 minutes delay (or worse) while you draw the encounter area which can give players time to get distracted which takes time to get them back into the game.
• Look up the rules later, make a ruling now and retract it later if you need to. Keep the game flowing.
• Just say NO to toys.  Phones, laptops, handhelds.  Leave them at the door, incoming phone calls only.  No texting, no surfing, no playing super mario.  I can’t stress that one enough.  It’s just strikes me as disrespectful at worst and a major annoyance and waste of the other players time at best for a player who spends time texting with his friends/girlfriends or playing the latest ‘it’ game on his iphone etc.
• Reward speedy play don’t penalize slow play.  If a player is ready on their turn when their turn comes up give them a +1 to hit or a +1 on damage roll or a free minor action.

General -

• Roll your damage dice with your attack, saves you a few seconds each time that adds up over time.
• The DM should have several different color D20′s and roll them all at the same time, assign each player a color or just always use the same colors in the same order, whatever works for you.  Or go to random.org and generate a 1000 d20 rolls based on solar activity and just mark them off as you use them.
• 4th edition specific Combat speed ups-
• Increase all damage on the first damage roll of an attack by 1/2 per level.  (i.e. an AOE has one attack that does normal damage+1/2 level and the rest are normal).
• Reduce elite and solo hit points by 20% (easier math than 25%) and reduce the xp reward accordingly.
• Don’t use monsters that stun or reduce their stun to a daze.  It’s so NOT fun to have to sit out a turn because you were stunned.  Or stunned multiple times in an encounter.  This promotes players who aren’t interested in what’s going on which can distract other players and cause more delays.  Not to mention the damage or support value of the player who’s sitting this one out.
• If a fight is a forgone conclusion then end it quickly via narration and charge the party 1 healing surge per narrated away monster.  (or one for two or whatever seems appropriate).
• Don’t waste game time on easy fights, just narrate them out and charge the party healing surges as coin of the realm.   In MMOG parlance, don’t waste your time with yard trash.  Unless I’m showing new players the gaming system, all my fights fall on the high end of ‘standard’ in terms of XP budget. Â  You want each fight memorable.  Although some fights can be memorable by their ease, you don’t need to roll it out.
• Make fights interesting.  Get out of the mindset of older editions and games of “I roll d20 and do damage.  Monster rolls d20 and damage”.  Design the encounters with options, make them ‘action movie’ with chandeliers to swing on, barrels to roll, flaming braziers to tip over. And lead by example, have the npc’s do something other than stand there and swing.

Example Pointless Combat  – “Lara comes back and tells you there are two orcs dicing in the corner of the next room and another nodding off in a chair.  *party decides they’re going to attack and explains their battle tactics* The orcs are taken off guard easily as you flood through the doorway and although they fight fiercely for several moments your able to easily take the gamblers down and the sleeping orc never even woke up from the sword thrust through its throat.  Trask as the one at the front of the charge, you need to use a healing surge to recover the damage.  The fight seems to have gone unoticed thanks to the heavy closed doors leading out of the room although a distant rythmic thudding can be felt near the large iron door to the south.”

That fight although appropriate for the setting in that it made ‘sense’, took only a minute or so depending on how much the players talked about what their characters would do. Â  To play it out would have taken several minutes with the same result barring just silly ass dice rolling.

Unless your group enjoys the ‘fight’ keep pointless fights to a minimum. Â  Your fights should advance your shared storytelling, not just be a way to garner experience and loot.

Miscellaneous -

Speaking of experience, don’t get hung up on it unless your players are pretty much tied to it.  Just decide at what point in your storyline the party should level and level them then. Â  Checkpoint based experience IMO feels better and works better in terms of “Hey Dennis, I know with that last group we’re well over into 6th level and even though we’re in the middle of the session I want to level up my guy.”   But if instead you reward experience by ‘quest’ and not by ‘grinding’ then it becomes less gamist.  A classic quote from my group from way back in the day, “Shit I’m only 5 exp short, okay I lean out the window and use a throwing dagger to kill someone. Â  *DING!*”

If you make experience goal based and not mob based then you can end up with a lot more creative ways to accomplish a goal from your players rather than “they’re like experience atm’s, let’s stay here and let the coffins keep spewing more skeletons out at us, we could level up in this room easy.”

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Anyway, along with Action Point tokens I’m going to hand out Recharge tokens.  You start the day after an extended rest with one Recharge Token (much like you start with one Action Point).  For each encounter you get another token (much like for each milestone you get another Action Point).  An encounter power takes 1 recharge token to recharge/untap, a daily power takes 3 tokens to recharge/untap.

This helps reduce the 15 minute work day or provides some incentive to do so, provides a way for the players to use an encounter power twice in one encounter (or more if they save up) and after their second encounter of the day they could use a Daily power twice. Â  Which is more valuable?  3 encounter powers or 1 daily power?  Depends on the situation I’m hoping.  Could the players just horde them and then nova on the boss?  Sure but at 1 token per encounter that’s a lot of fighting where they’re using up the Currency Of The Realm (aka Healing Surges) and is self limiting in my opinion.

I have friends coming in from Georgia at the end of June and I’m going to run a first level module for them of my own making.  Since they don’t read this, I don’t think they do anyway I’ll share some of the details.  It’ll involve a race of marsh/swamp dwellers known as Zissors (Hint: It’s the way my children used to pronounce Scissors).  These will be reptillian in nature and right now I’ve got the following creatures penciled out, Spinethrower (artillery), Gatherer (minion), Creepers (minion), Swarmlings (minions), Clutch Guardian (soldier), Slimecrawler (lurker), Clutch Master (elite controller), Clutch Mother (solo role still to be determined).

The area will be in a swamp of course if you haven’t figured that out.  There’ll be two major skill challenges involved, one to find something and the other to find something. (Just in case someone does read this who shouldn’t). Â  The skill challenges will entail Endurance (or lose healing surges), Nature (avoid dangers of the swamps which can lead to extra encounters, I’m thinking gators or giant snake like creatures), Perception (keep on track or increase the length of the challenge), Athletics (general ability to traverse the swamp’s obstacles).

I have plans for an initial encounter of primarily Gatherer’s with a couple or three standards in it, a secondary encounter with higher XP budget, the skill challenge, another encounter with a wave attack and then a Boss encounter with a solo, guards and minions.

This will lead to a second skill challenge and another set piece encounter that just in case I won’t be divulging much about other than it’ll involve some grotesqueries of the necromatic arts and culminate in a boss encounter.  I plan on making sure the party levels to 2 by the end of the second skill challenge regardless of how much XP they earn.  I hand out XP by encounter and by checkpoint at various times over the course of my DM’ing career.

The party currently will consist of 4 maybe 5 players.  A Razorclaw Shifter Druid, a Halfling Ranger (Bow), a Half-Orc Barbarian, a Gnomish Bard.  The fifth player to be determined but I have a Longtooth Shifter Shaman rolled up for whoever it is.

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Why not let your players try their hand at being business moguls and selling large gelatinous cubes to cities as sewer cleaners or coming up with the next widget you can’t live without in a medieval society?

Anyway the idea is to add a new condition called Sickened.  This prevents the affected character from using healing surges (Second Wind, ‘Word’ powers, potions etc.), and infers other penalties.

Sickened

• You cannot spend healing surges.
• You grant Combat Advantage to opponents.

Obviously the ability to not be able to spend a healing surge can be brutal and aside from a power that goes like “target is Sickened (save ends)” or “target is Sickened until the end of the [creature]‘s next turn” is as bad as it should get and I’d go so far as to say the latter option is probably preferred (after having seen players burn for several rounds because they couldn’t make a save).

An example critter -

Anyway, this poster offers up the solution, “Just use lower level monsters.”

The downside is this though, the DM has more monsters to run which takes more time, even for a good DM’s.  There are typically more hit points on the field to wear out even though the PC’s are probably hitting more often so that needs to be considered.  But since the players are hitting more often it’s probably more fun for them, their encounters and dailies hit more often with less chance of an “Awww crap” feeling so it might work out just fine.

Anyway, the thread is here and the pertinent (for me) bits are here -

n (many) other threads, a “math problem” (PCs’ attacks and defenses fall behind monsters’ so that players rarely hit while monsters rarely miss) has been discussed at length and there has even been published feats to remedy this.

Without having played at higher levels, it sounds like to me like the easy one-step solution is to just use monsters of slightly lower levels than recommended, say 1/2/3 levels lower from level 5/15/25.

This will
– give monsters lower defenses and fewer hitpoints so they go down faster
– let the DM use more monsters because lower-level ones are cheaper
– solve all math-problems wrt PCs and monsters ability to hit each other

Or did I miss something?

 

Not necessarily.

According to DMG pg. 174, if you’re only adjusting monster levels up or down by 5 or fewer levels you’re only going to end up changing the damage by 2 points at most if you are using Monsters as written from the MM and changing their level using the DMG rules.

Likewise, if you are creating monsters and want to change their damage expressions for level according to the chart in DMG pg. 185, you’ll only be changing the average damage by about 3 points or less so long as you don’t alter their levels by more than 5.

Of course, this may get a little hairy as you add more and more dice since the stats are going to get slightly more variable as you hit paragon tier, but the damage is similarly stable within 3 or 4 levels of each other.

So unless you feel the RAW on damge are already too low, low damage shouldn’t be an issue…

Also consider that you are adding more monsters. Which means that the monster party will A) hit more often overall (since there will be more attack rolls) and B) do more damage.

By way of example:
Let’s assume an Adventuring Party of four 10th level characters.

A normal 10th level encounter would feature four 10th level monsters doing 1d8+5 damage (according to DMG185) about twice a round, assuming they hit about half the time. This is assuming the monster are sticking to their normal at wills and that none of them are brutes (in which case the damage would be greater).

If you make that same encounter from seven 7th level monsters, all getting a +1 or +2 to their attacks and defenses (to make them about even with 10th level baddies) then the party will still be taking 1d8+5 damage, but now they’ll be getting it about 3.5 times per round.
You just increased your damage output by at least 50%.

Let’s say you want to have even more monsters on the field and you intend to make that same 10th level encounter with ten 5th level monsters. Remember, these are STANDARD monsters that are not brutes. Adjust their attacks and defenses to keep them near those of 10th level monsters (but they’d have 5th level damage and hp) and now they’re dealing 1d6+4 damage about 5 times a round.

Four 10th level mobs = ~18 damage/round (average roll for 1d8+5 x(4/2))
Seven 7th level mobs = ~27+ dmg/rnd (ave for 1d8+5 x(7/2))
Ten 5th level mobs = ~35 dmg/rnd (ave for 1d6+4 x(10/2))

And this is only at heroic! The damage dice and the size of the dice keep going up from here on out. There’s no way that adding more monsters to the field will somehow lower the damage rating if you make sure to adjust their attack and defenses appropriately.

To me, there’s two issues here.  Is the math wrong?  And if it’s wrong how do you fix it?

From those that care, the consensus is that the math is wrong.  And there’s two schools of thoughts on how to fix it, fix the players or fix the monsters.

If I fell into the side of the math is wrong and needs fixing and the feats that are purportedly supposed to fix it were too much of a feat tax, then I’d simply do away with those feats.  Expertise and defenses that is. Â  Next I’d not touch the players because it’s too much of a pain in the ass trying to have custom characters in the character builder and frankly I like using the character builder.  After putting characters created by hand into it and seeing mistakes everywhere from stats to powers to attacks from player created characters I don’t not want to use it.  So my fix would be a flat -1 to attack and defenses per tier for monsters.

Some people say, oh that’s too much work, you have to do that for every monster for every fight while the opposite, adding a +1 to hit and +1 to non-AC defenses at 5/15/25 only has to be done 3 times. Â  But FFS if you always debuff the monsters, all monsters, all the time, in the same fashion, -1 tohit, -1 defenses per tier how hard is that?  I can see possibly where it might take a few rounds to get in the habit of doing it but after that it should be automatic.

But that’s how I see it.  I’m still out on whether the problem is there as I’m not out of heroic yet.

In other news, Pandemic is a great game if you’re into board games.  Highly recommended for the more cerebral board game players as you really do have to think ahead a few moves but also be willing to change you tactics completely as randomness can shift the game dramatically.  It’s a coop game so that’s a huge bonus for me personally but the gameplay itself is simplistic yet complex.  In many ways it’s like chess but with killer diseases…

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For various reasons haven’t been able to play any the last three weekends and the forums are pretty dead even with the recent release of the PHBII.

I did find a copy of the World Day event module.  Not a bad little ‘module’, it’s in the same three fights and you’re out encounter setup that’s swiftly becoming the format.  I also really don’t like the flipping back and forth the official format is doing making you jump to find the information you need.  Honestly if the module is linear enough that tactical encounter 2 has to follow social/exploration encounter 1 then why not just put it right after that one?  This module is an extremely good example of having to go back and forth when the entire thing is extremely linear and if the various descriptions were simply in their proper order it would require a lot less page turning.

Okay so maybe I did have a little something to bitch about.

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Follow the link to see the thread in it’s entirety and read the discussion on it.

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Design Goals:

My goals in designing this system were as follows:

1. Create a system which is generic enough that it can be applied to just about any kind of business or market activity that PCs might want to engage in in a game. This means avoiding complicated rules about specific goods and services, and instead creating rules that can be applied to any good or service.

2. Make it so that all the choices in the system are fairly balanced, so for example, businesses mostly focused on sales won’t be systematically more profitable than businesses focused on crafting, or vice versa. While this can obviously be changed based on the needs of a particular scenario, we want to set up a starting “baseline” with no obviously superior choices, so that choices can be based on elements specific to the scenario.

3. The system should be a framework that it is easy to add elements onto, like “purchasable items” such as upgrades, special events like shortages of materials that affect prices, etc.

Overview:

In this system, there are three main categories of activities that players can engage in. They are:

Purchasing: Trying to purchase items, whether raw materials or finished products, and get the best price.

Production: Also known as “crafting” in some circles, this involves converting raw materials into finished products.

Sales: Selling your wares for money!

I did get a lot of “But you’re making the wizard do more damage than the [fill in the blank].” To which my non-polite reply, which I didn’t give, is “So?”. Â  On a personal note, I’m not willing to accept RAW as holy writ from on high.  The Rules are more guidelines to me.  Trust me, if you’d played under me for awhile you know just how… non-Monte Haul I am.  This site is called Key Our Cars and that’s based on a direct quote from a player of mine (20+ years he’s been a player of mine).  So if I actually give something to the players then you can believe that I feel it’s needed.  And no it’s not just because the wizard is my wife.

I’ve also done a little more work on the dice tool, image on one side or the other of this sentence.  Gave it 10 slots for powers, rearranged a bit.  I’ve also recorded dice sounds but haven’t included them as of yet other than a quick test to make sure they worked.

Hopefully should have another session this weekend barring unforseen events and perhaps try out having someone play remotely via the web cam / VoiP setup, using the KoC Dice tool of course.

I’ve also had a chance to listen to part 3 of the Penny Arcade pod cast and all I can say is I’d love to have Chris DM for me.  I think he does a wonderful job considering what he has to work with.  Honestly now, “dick tuna with mayo” and “vagina vagina vagina”?  Hmmm of course there’s the attack of the floor anus from my last episode so perhaps we have something approaching the same level of silly.  Although I think, like the last podcast, the players take at least an hour to get over their “OMG we’re playing this geek game and it’s going to be broadcast and everyone will hear us being geeks.”

Part 1 was very much a non-event, part 2 was getting better, approaching entertaining but part 3 where they’re once again starting to ‘get into it’ is significantly better.

Anyway these seem pretty useful and I’ve gone all this time without knowing about them so I thought I’d bring them up.

The cool thing is you can write on them in permanent ink and erase it with a dry erase marker.  So you could pre-draw them, shove them into your bag and take to the game location without fear of the map getting accidently smudge or erased.

Or in my case having someone draw on your chessex map with dry erase pen by mistake and having a permanent terrain feature…

I’m ready to show off the first rough draft of it, it’s not a lot of programming work, 3 or 4 hours, most of that learning how Purebasic does things differently than the other languages I know.  I settled on PB because I need to be able to use it in a variety of installs from craptops to a VM running on my desktop at work and Visual Studio wouldn’t be possible in those situations and it’s very light code, the client and server together are 54kb and require no installs on the client side, not support dll’s, no ancillary crap which is always a good thing. PB is a fairly decent RAD system although it’s weak on the application side although pretty nice from the games/graphic side.

Anyway, here’s an image of it in action well testing, both clients and the server are running on one machine but I’ve tested connectivity across the internet as well.  Things I’m going to do as well is add some sound effects, dice rolling etc. so the DM knows when the player rolls the dice so he can look up, maybe a “Waa wah wahhhh” sound on 1′s.   That kind of thing.

If you’ve had the urge to make your own classes, for instance I’ve jotted some notes down on a mental based class controller and of course have some concerns for play balance.  It’s for a race of people from the glass mountains to the far north.  They don’t get out much but each has a rite of passage where they have to go out in the world and experience life to see if they have a taste for the outside world or the seclusion of their mountain fastness.  Surprisingly few remain in the outside and as a result the Shar aren’t seen all that often.  Human race they fit the normal variations physically although they have a tendency toward red and blond hair rather than browns and blacks. Â  But their abilities to channel their mental energies and affect the physical world are definitely unique to the world of Karn.

Original thread is here.

Here’s my idea for a create a power system. Basically you take one of the power skeletons and add/subtract attributes whose points values sum up to a certain amount depending or the type of power.

There are 4 power skeletons. 1 for each attack type. Each attack gains a power source keyword (Martial, Divine,…) and an accesory keyword (Weapon, Implement).

Melee
Standard Action, Melee Weapon
Target: One Creature
Attack: Primary Attribute Modifier (PAM) vs AC
Hit: 1W + PAM damage

Ranged
Standard Action, Ranged Weapon
Target: One Creature
Attack: Primary Attribute Modifier (PAM) vs AC
Hit: 1W + PAM damage

Close
Standard Action, Close Burst 1
Target: Each creature in burst
Attack: Primary Attribute Modifier (PAM) vs AC
Hit: 1W + PAM damage

Area
Standard Action, Area burst 1 within 10 squares
Target: Each creature is burst
Attack: Primary Attribute Modifier (PAM) vs Reflex
Hit: 1d6 + PAM damage

2) Each power type has a different power modifier sum. Power modifiers may be taken more than once and the effects are cummulative.
At-will powers: 1
Encounter powers: 2 in heroic, 5 in paragon, 7 in epic
Daily power: 4 in heroic, 7 in paragon, 9 in epic

Sample Power Modifers

-2: No PAM damage on Hit
-1: Add damage type (fire, necrotic, poison)
-1: Remove Weapon or Implement Keyword
0: Attack targets Fortitude or Will instead of Reflex
0: Ranged 5 instead of Ranged weapon
0: Hit deal 1d6 damage instead of 1W
0: Add damage type (cold, electric, thunder)
1: Blast or Wall instead of burst
1: Hit also pushes the target 1 square
1: Hit also knocks the target prone
1: Hit deals an additional 1W
1: Hit or Miss also causes minor ailment (dazed, slowed, grants combat advantage) until the end of your next turn
1: Hit or Miss causes onging damage 5
1: Hit or Miss grants target -2 penalty to one defense or attack rolls until end of your next turn
1: Hit or Miss grants target -SAM penalty to one defense or attack rolls until end of your next turn
1: Increase damage dice one size
1: Increase burst or area size by 2
1: Increase Range by 5 squares
1: Ailment lasts until save ends instead or end of turn
1: Hit deals Secondary Attribute damage
1: Add damage type (radiant, acid, psychic)
1: Attack is Realible
1: +2 to the attack roll
1: Attack deal half damage on Miss
2: Attack targets Reflex instead of AC
2: Hit or Miss also causes major ailment (stunned, immobilized, blinded) until the end of your next turn
2: Additional 1W attack after primary attack

Of course it is up to the DM the allow the attack for balance or sense purposes (Martial attacks dealing fire damage etc).

Didn’t get much done over the weekend, Ryan’s 7th birthday party was Saturday which is pretty much a whole day affair with the cleaning before and after.

I did make a new ‘race’ of creatures to use as a general area environmental hazard.  The Katahn – (n: ka-tawn adj: ka-tawn-ee) who are nomadic tribals who tend toward evil at least against outsiders.  They’re a small active race, in battle they use lightning strike tactics, blow through an enemy camp each katahni doing as much damage in as short a time frame as they can and then they disapear into the night.  They respect a warrior and treat all others with disdain.  Each group is ruled by a warrior who rules by rite of combat and has a wiseman to advise him on the ways of life outside of battle but the ruler’s decisions are final and absolute.  At times the groups will band up together to go after the spoils of a larger target than they might overcome on their own but such groupings always fall apart once the battle is over and if the battle is going badly then perhaps before it’s over.

The katahn’s signature weapon, the jakar,  is a curved thick bladed sword sharpened on both sides, typically with a hooked notched on the top 2 or 3 inches from the point.  The typical warrior will either dual wield two jakar, or one and a wide bladed punch dagger in his weaker hand.  From a distance the katahn ranged warriors use talatls, short javelins that they fit into a 18 to 24″ throwing stick which lets them hurl them with greater speed and force than arm alone.  All katahn are also familiar with their shorter range throwing weapons, a heavy curved wooden shaft set with a piece of granite or metal used primarily to disable and wound rather than kill.  A common tactic for the katahn are to wound in their initial attacks and then harry their enemy and pick off the stragglers and the wounded as they can.

I’m not sure yet where I’m going to introduce these guys but they should form quite a signature enemy for the players.

In other news it’s been slow.  No new books out that I know of, the forums are pretty boring right now, it’s not uncommon for the first page of the various forums to have posts from a week ago.

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The duergar are if I ever run the module series that has them or just as generic bad guys too of course.

I really need to rebox them all, they’re kind of mixed up with character mini’s sharing the same box, in their own compartments though as monster mini’s.  My thought was get the tribes together as best as I can, bugbear, orc, goblin, kolbold, duergar, skeletons, etc and then have a box of misc and a box of female PC and box of male PC, that kind of organization.

• 1 #15 Spellscale Sorcerer
• 10 #41 Witchknife
• 8 #17 Tavern Brawler
• 1 #33 Dread Warrior
• 1 WotDQ #01 Aasimar Fighter
• 1 WotDQ #41 Witchknife
• 5 #38 Duergar Slaver
• 1 Unhallowed #15 Cleric of Sune
• 5 #04 Deep Legionnaire
• 1 Harbinger #16 Axe Sister
• 1 Harbinger #30 Wild Elf Barbarian
• 1 Harbinger #65 Half-Orc Assassin
• 1 Giants of Legend #09 Aramil,
• 1 Giants of Legend #02 Dwarf Sergeant
• 1 Giants of Legend #05 Sword of Glory
• 1 Dread #59 Spectral Panther
• 1 Dragoneye #19 Elf Spearguard
• 1 Dragoneye #17 Drunken Master
• 1 Dragoneye #27 Druid of Obad-Hai
• 1 #27 Blood of Vol
• 1 Desert of Desolation #12 Merchant Guard
• 1 Deathknell #09 Soldier of Thrane
• 1 Deathknell #10 Valorous Prince
• 1 Deathknell #23 Renegade Warlock
• 1 Deathknell #24 Undying Soldier
• 1 Deathknell #36 Grim Necromancer
• 1 Blood War #06 Half-Orc Spy
• 1 Blood War #16 Free League Range
• 1 Archfiends #24 Sage
• 1 Angelfire #12 Village Priest
• 1 #27 Orc Zombie
• 1 Against the Giants #03 Deathpriest of Orcus
• 1 Against the Giants #42 Chain Golem
• 1 Aberation #04 Cleric of St. Cuthbert
• 1 Aberation #11 Aasimar Favored Soul
• 1 Aberation #20 Sharn Cutthroat
• 1 Aberation #30 Emerald Claw Soldier
• 2 Aberation #58 Taer

So with that said I thought I’d go through a little more on some things at the local level.  There’s only so much I can post here to avoid spoilers for my players who read this from time to time.

The Fearless Foursome lives in Stark, a town that’s dying in a world that’s dying. Or at least running down.  If you’ve read the Gunslinger series by Stephen King it’s the same feel.  Things are just getting… worn out.

The FF’s are all low level (duh) members of their guilds or of society in general.  The guilds and other organizations have more members than they can deal with as it’s a way to eat and have some sense of belonging which is important to some. Â  They are still paying off their infractions and have been grouped together because they worked so well in the sewer mission together.

The area around Stark is also a dark place.  Orc tribes roam the flats while goblins infest the the hills.  Bandits camp the trails, preying on anyone who doesn’t travel in force.  Of late it’s gotten darker still.  The orcs have gained new powers, powers over death itself in some cases and rather than simply disappearing, some of the overrun communities have shown up as undead, driven by a mindless need for violence and attacking their neighbors.  The goblins have gained new allies as well, their shamans and hexer’s now appearing with pet deamons in tow when they attack.

What is the source of these new powers?  Are the stories of a new leader with purple eyes that’s forging the orcs into a war band larger than any ever seen true?

Have the goblins truly gained access to the subterranean Temple of Kys and unleashed the creatures that were locked within.   Will the humanoids finally grow strong enough to overtake the small specks of civilization that dot the lands?  We’ll just have to see.

The old harbor, especially Overlook Keep is going to be a place to venture for the Four.  Fallen into ruin now, it sits atop the large hill south of the harbor and those that venture near it have reportedly disappeared without a trace or have reported seeing dark shapes flitting through the ruins and hearing screams of pain and anguish.  Probably just typical peasant talk one might suppose.

What of the tomb that was opened deep under the city?  Captain Tarkus of the Watch who led the exploration has vanished it is said after killing his wife and his adjutant who the story says were discovered by the Captain in bed together. Other stories wonder at that as his adjutant was known to prefer members of the same sex in his dalliances.

People still continue to disappear from the city.  Are the goblins they uncovered in the sewers still sneaking in and kidnapping people?  Or is something even more sinister going on?

No traders have appeared on the great trade road leading north west to Price in over a year and only one small part of a large trade contingent has ever returned from that road.  And those had no recollection of their journey or their past and had a pathological fear of the dark.  None of the six lasted long, each killing themselves within weeks of being found stumbling mindlessly down the road to Stark. Â  What dark forces are doing away with those that dare to travel the