The Group
Halvar, a level 1 fighter who arrived in Utböle (a frontier town) from Castle Bloodthorne.
August-Wilhelm, Cleric of Helm.
Gullvar von Drax, another level 1 fighter.
Lafirth, torchbearer.
Lergax, racist man-at-arms.
Muir, man-at-arms.
Loldox, torchbearer, whines a lot.
I usually require clerics to come up with a clerical vow; something that their god requires of them. August-Wilhelm's player decided that their character obeys all laws and cannot tell a lie.
The Delve
The party made their way down the hole; nobody fell. They decide to check out the green glow first, and make their way through the thieving roots ("Just like being in a halfling village", grumbles Lergax). They opt to head into the faun spiral, steal some coats and hats before vicious upholstery attacks. They almost die. They torch the place and retreat back to town. At the entrance, they run into 4 lizard men, but they seem to be in a good mood and let the players retreat safely. I have not prepped a town, but now there's a town named Utböle. The Golden Goose, the only inn in this frontier town, welcomes them with open arms... as long as they pay for the privilege. Everyone is dirt poor, but they manage to trade their newly acquired coats for room and board.
For the second outing, they instead head north up toward the round room with the teleporting circle. They roll up the rug, head further north, and find a locked door. They waffle a bit, and head back and check out the room with lilliputians in glass jars. They find the scroll and the story in the vinegar bottle. Heading northward again, they come to the pit trap. They trigger the illusion with a pole, drag the chess piece into the water, and then... try and figure out how to convince a hench to fetch it. Eventually, Lergax volunteers (for higher pay), the party lowers him down with a rope tied around his chest. He immediately falls into a coma.
They head further north and come across a blood trail going from the Troglodyte room toward the ghouls. They enter the trog room but retreat once they're given the option, opting not to fight. The trogs lock the door behind them, the PCs spike the door from their side.
They head toward the ghouls. Taking it carefully, they poke all the corpses and then send Muir to check if any of them carry something worth... acquiring. The ghouls leap into action! Muir gets their throat ripped out, the rest of the party is surprised except the cleric, who valiantly strides forward. The front ghoul gets the initiative though, and as the meatgrinder they are they almost pulverize him. The cleric is paralyzed and falls over. Halvar is paralyzed. A ghoul starts dragging the corpse of Muir back, away from the fighting.
In the next round, August-Wilhelm dashes forward and gets the holy water from the paralyzed cleric. Throws it on the front ghoul, who falls over clawing at their face before eventually ceasing movement. The 2nd-row ghoul takes a big splash as well. The ghouls retreat a small distance and the party rushes forward and drags their paralyzed members back to the teleporting room.
Both Halvar and Gullvar are in bad condition. Lergax wakes up from his coma, and the party retreats back to town to lick their wounds. They bring the rug, which they sell to a local noble, Baron Guste von Platen. They also take on a new henchman, Polbash, whose main feature is a nasty rash but, he stresses, he can read. Meanwhile, Lergax has decided that he's not interested in staying with the party, which is where we'll start the session next time. And with that, we leave our brave (eh) adventurers for now.
What worked and what didn't?
Combat
The combat rules I came up with before the session didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Or, rather, I don't rightly know if they did, because the party never really got to actually attack. If a monster wins initiative, they automatically hit which in turn means that they get to roll damage. I bumped all the damage up 1 die, so the ghouls do 1d4 damage. I also rolled crazy high for damage (4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2), so that's part of the problem.
The initiative works well, but David Schirduan's turn tracker does not. This is because of how Troika does initiative values. In my system, each player acts once per combat round. In Troika they act twice (I guess), and so there is twice the number of player tokens in there than there should be. Doubling the number of monster tokens doesn't help either. I guess I'll write my own turn tracker this week.
There were no attacks made by players, so I can't say how the Let there be blood weapons would have played out. We agreed to drop the test at the end of the session, so next time we'll go with regular OSE rules for attack and damage.
Inventory
Something I didn't mention in the initial post was the fact that I've also ripped out the encumbrance system of OSE and replaced it with a much simpler system. Here's a good series of posts about resource management:
Within those three posts are many interesting thoughts, but this passage from part 3 struck me, in particular:
Torches burn down at a predictable rate, typically 1/hour. If characters know in advance how long they're going to be in the dungeon, they can pack as many as they need, with a healthy margin for error. Torches are so cheap that they're essentially free, so aside from encumbrance, the only restriction on how many torches you can carry is the limit of your own imagination. You would only run out of torches, essentially, if you failed to plan properly, and stayed in the dungeon longer than you thought possible.
I have also literally never heard of a game session where the characters actually ended up trapped in the dark, truly unable to see anything for the rest of their delve. There's probably a reason for that.
In any position of authority, it's probably wise to make sure that no "punishment" you give out actually hurts you worse than it hurts the person you're punishing. It's probably also wise to never threaten a punishment you aren't really willing to administer. So the problem with torches is, I would rather rule by fiat that all the characters just die than be forced to play out a session where I have to describe the characters feeling their way along the wall and groping blindly through pitch blackness because no one has a light source. I would rather end the session right there, send my friends home, and never run a game of D&D again rather than risk having that happen more than once.
So truly running out of torches, with no possibility of obtaining more, mid-dungeon, is basically a non-starter for me. And I'm skeptical that there are many judges or player groups, even among those who really care about resource management, who would answer differently. Are there any interesting uses for temporary darkness? Maybe. It's a question I'll come back to another time.
The most important part of this series of posts, however, is this: the biggest resource is the players' time, and how you manage it is paramount. Do you want to spend time on counting torches or calculating how many arrows you should bring?
It's like the movies, they don't show you the hero taking a dump because that shit's not interestingMy wife, when I explained the idea behind my ditching the coin weight counting rules. She does not play RPGs, although I think she should.
I opted for "no" as an answer to if I wanted to do "serious bookkeeping", and so I looked for solutions to this. LotFP has a decent encumbrance system, but it's also very fiddly. You get slots and some items are big and you add your CON modifier I think and dwarves can carry more and... it's a whole thing. It's better than counting coin weight, by far, but it's still... not great.
I'm using this system.
The biggest takeaway from using it was this: the party cared about henchmen. Not to the point where they're not using them as guinea pigs, but they actively wanted to hire more because they need to carry stuff. I think that's a big win. Definitely keeping that.
The Henchmen
They're okay. Each player is taking care of one or two of them; I rarely have to do much about it. There is the usual idea of using them as guinea pigs, but I've rolled loyalty for them and I roll a morale test whenever they're demanding something outside of what's expected of them. They've rolled surprisingly well on morale during what few fights there's been. Since we kind of rushed the start of it, there wasn't any roleplaying for the hiring process, and I also skipped the retainer hiring reactions. I'm going to have a think and a read on henchmen and how to make them better, and see what I come up with. For now, I've done some bookkeeping, checked who's staying on and who isn't. It is definitely a part of the game I've little experience. Hit me with your best blog posts or thoughts about henchmen, please!
The Money
Everyone is still dirt poor. I need to push more for actual pay per day for the henchmen, but overall it doesn't matter as such. It's nice to hear the players gripe over how expensive they are and so on, though. But as soon as the group gets into a little bit of cash, I don't think the "money game" is going to be interesting on its own, though.
The Dungeon
Personally, I really like the dungeon. I'm going to write up a quick generator for encounters, so that I'm not stuck rolling d8s for HP every time it's a mob encounter, but other than that it was fairly painless to run.
The group really enjoyed it, especially the fact that there's so much other shit going on than just walking and prodding things. A lizard that runs by and burps "Kezek" becomes a whole thing. They liked the faces in the moss, but only paid for it once (the PCs were poor, but even so they didn't like the "secrets"). The roots pointing and laughing made them double back and take stock of the situation.
I thought it'd be a slaughter when they were heading back after the vicious upholstery and met a group of lizard men. I rolled a 10 on the encounter, so it wasn't a problem. It was tense for the group, though. The trogs I rolled a 12 for, and I should have played that encounter better. Live and learn.
Prep for next session:
What else is out there?
What bigger city connects to Utböle?
What bigger city connects to Utböle?
Answer Jeff Rient's 20 questions.
Map a hex next to Utböle.
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