in the swamp

Ya well I had a nice post all written up about the second part of the last play session but god damn blogger god damn ate it on then god damn auto saved a god damn blank page then I lost my god damn browser page cache.  This was on Tuesday and I didn't have the motivation to rewrite it before.  Here is the less flowery version*.

So lets just say the party ended once the guards arrived.  The gang took the captured bad guys and poor despondent (and drunk) Henril back to their room in the inn.  Brother Tim kept watch on the bound baddies, and in the wee early morning hours the guy in the red cloak turned into a hobgoblin.  This caused all kinds of trouble but in the end they determined that one of the bad guys was a fresh recruit, the sneaky bad guy from the tavern was a recruiter, and the hobgoblin (who could only say "Margesh") had been as far as they knew, the bandit leader.  They released the recruit and killed the recruiter and kept the hobgoblin tied up.

The next day they visited the sage and got the skinny on the old shrine in the swamp, apparently a evil hag has desecrated it many years ago and on occasion clerics or adventurers would try to explore it and they would never return.  They also found out that the word "Margesh" was hobgoblin for "boss guy".  Since that and "imlori" were the only words they could get out of him they figured he wasn't a wizard and more likely a pawn.  They thought about going to the city watch with the hobgoblin, but decided instead to go hire a boat to take them to the shrine.  No one would take them all the way but after they agreed to purchase a boat they convinced the merchant to let them hire a guide to take them to the mouth of a river which was about half a day away from it.  So they rowed across the lake and down the river mouth until they came to a sand bank where the locals came to catch crocodiles for meat and skins.  Their guide left them there with their boat and rowed away with a nervous glance into the swamps.

I'm not so cute now eh you little bastard!

So the best thing about swamps was I got to use my Swamp Encounter table.  First they got into some quicksand, then they were attacked by an assassin vine in the trees, and finally they ran into some giant frogs.  Giant frogs are great - because frogs are pretty mean looking with the eyes and the big mouth and the tongues - and just like rats and spiders - giant ones would really be terrifying.  The frogs were chewing on Tim's arm and Henril was all getting his angst out ramming his sword through one's spine and trying to pull it's brain out through it's eye-hole.  Good times.  After that battle, Tim cast a heal on himself (the new cure light wounds spell seems to be working OK BTW), and then realized that he had Comprehend Languages.  Well never too late to interrogate a prisoner, he cast it and started asking the hobgoblin questions.  They figured out that the Hobgoblin was one of many band leaders who would be visited by a "magic lady" called Imlori and made to look like the red cloaked bandit leader everyone was looking for.  Shouts of "Margesh" by during fights seem likely to be the source of the confusion among the bandits and on the reward posters.  He didn't know anything about the swamp or the shrine except that he didn't like it.  Since the hobgoblin didn't know who the magic lady was, where she was or when she visited specific hobgoblin bands, Henril killed him.  The party was a bit disappointed that the swamp shrine didn't seem to have anything to do with the hobgoblins.

Come on in folks, free cake and pies!

They finally came to a clearing and saw a statue and an alcove which seemed to be the entrance to a ruin of some shriney place.  They also found two old corpses, one badly burned, and one with a backpack which had some old coloured candles in it (and lots of mold and rotted paper too...).  When they entered the alcove to check it out, the statue began to steam and heat up.  Figuring that this might have something to do with he burned corpse, they pulled a hasty retreat and slowly investigated the alcove.  Thedric** figured out the answer to a secret riddle which disarmed the trap and the stone doors slid open.

And now we're all caught up on the situation.  I would have liked to get further sure, but I wouldn't have missed that wedding.  It was a pretty good session and everyone seems to be enjoying it still.  Talking about our plans at the end of the night, we decided to do a short one off of Trail of Cthulhu over October (for Halloween!) and then everyone seems to think we'll probably be squeezing in at least one or two more sessions of this game before we hang up the Beacon for the winter.




*Note version contains just as much flower.
**Note, I've been calling Thedric, Theodric for some weird reason so I fixed up all the posts.  It's all the same dwarven enchanter folks.

The Wedding

Friday's game ended at the door to a dungeon.  I didn't want to end it there, I like to have the party back in town because it makes things a lot easier.  You don't know when someone is going to be unavailable or if you are going to have a new person at the table.  Players forget what was going on between sessions.  You can't get XP in the field (usually) so I have to note what the XP for the session is and wait till the party gets back to town (usually).  I also thought that this was going to be the last session.  I had a pretty good idea that the players wanted to check out the old shrine in the swamp.  This shrine was on the original maps I showed them from the first session and many NPCs had talked about it.  Since I knew they had gotten it into their heads to go there and investigate if the old shrine was somehow the cause of the plague. I had selected what I thought was the perfect short adventure for this shrine.  I wanted something that would take one session including travel time and (and random encounters in the swamp!) thought I had the perfect send off adventure all ready.  But naturally things did not go as planned.

Things started off innocently enough and the party wisely decided to go visit the old sage Polat and ask him about the shrine, gather supplies and such.  Then Henril decided that he wanted to go meet with Marjia the barmaid and potential bride with whom he had visited the day before.  Initially this seemed a good idea, and the party members started spending some of their had won coin.  Because of the banditry and the recent sickness, Milham was seeing some hard financial times.  Trade merchants were few and prices had been rising, so when the coins started flowing and the word got out that there was a group of adventurers at the Seven Stones tavern who were buying rounds of ale and casks of whiskey, many began to show up for the party.  As the drink flowed and the party got more inebriated, their requests became more extravagant.  What I had thought was going to be a 10 minute diversion had turned into a full blown event.  By this time I had decided to just run with it.

They hired a fiddler and a piper to play for them and told them not to stop until morning.  Henril especially was trying to impress Marjia, and Colin and Thedric were eager to help him spend his coin - despite the mild protests of Brother Tim.  The tavern owner quickly saw that Marjia was bringing in more custom as a companion than as a server and so she and Henril soon became quite drunk and quite friendly.  Thedric left the tavern to visit the Waggon and Horse Inn where he was lodging, when he saw a familiar person skulking away from the party and towards the lakefront.  It was the shady fellow who had tried to recruit Henril some time ago, and who they had scared off in an very botched rendezvous/sting operation.  Thedric collected Colin and they trailed the guy to a warehouse by the docks.  They looked in through a small barred window and saw the shady guy meeting with two fellows, one of which wore a red cloak and matched the description of Margesh the bandit leader.   Meanwhile Henril had decided that this was as good a time as any to get married and he asked Marjia if she would do him the honor.  She was drunk and delighted, but needed a dress.  She went off to get one while Henril badgered Tim to perform the marriage ceremony when she returned.  Henril bought the clothes off a well dressed local and was trying to jam his burly frame into a pair of hose and tunic three sizes too small for him. Level heads went unheeded and gold pieces were flying and the shindig was in full swing when she returned with two bridesmaids and a fine wedding gown, the whole neighborhood (and much of their livestock) was there to applaud the couple.

Thedric and Colin returned to the tavern to collect Tim and Henril and hopeful that they would also be soon collecting the 500gp reward for the bandit leader.  Being a bit drunk, they were of a mind to burn the warehouse down to flush out their prey, much to the horror of Brother Tim.  Once they saw what was going on in the tavern however, they decided to try to just move the whole party to the warehouse instead.  Marjia was delighted that her suitor and soon to be husband was so rich as to have 'bought a warehouse' and agreed that the wedding should take place there.  So soon the whole procession, some 40 drunken villagers, including the piper and fiddler were marching down the street towards the docks.  As the revelers burst in upon the shady men, Thedric cast Hypnotic Pattern and mesmerized them.  They were quickly subdued and tied up.

Finally after much convincing, Brother Tim was persuaded to perform the marriage.  The two were married but then in burst the captain of the guard and his men.  It appeared that Marjia was already married and to him, the captain of the guard.  He was ready to lock them all up and throw away the keys but Tim used all his considerable charms to smooth things over.  Marjia was led away shrieking curses at her former husband and pleas for her rich new husband to take her away from 'this crappy little town'.  Henril was heartbroken and could not be consoled even by the pretty little bridesmaid who had carried his sword for him from the tavern and had assured him that she at least was not already married.

They did eventually go off to explore the shrine that session, but that's another post entirely.

Beacon Screen

On Friday I got a chance to try out my new GM screen which is the Savage Worlds customizable game screen.    And I like it, it's really pretty nice although it's vinyl and so toner transfer is going to be a problem.  I was trying to research if there was a way I could prevent printer toner from sticking to the vinyl.  Maybe I can buy some plastic sheet protectors at the office supply to slip over the pages before putting them into the screen pockets.  Most of the ones I've seen would be a bit too thick or have too much friction to slide into the screen pockets easily, but they might have something out there made of light weight plastic and toner safe.   I thought it would be great to be able to use a clear spray paint or something (I have some for miniature finishing I guess I could try) but so far haven't come up with anything.  Does anyone out there know any tricks for this - like some kind of hairspray or lemon pledge preventing toner transfer to vinyl?

Anyhow, since it's a horizontal screen, I whipped up some horizontal page layouts with some of the few charts and random encounter tables for it and had my own Beacon GM Screen!  I got to use it in this session and I have to say it was great.  It was especially great to have the critical hit and fumble chart right there in front of me.  It was also nice not to have random encounters written on sticky notes but actually printed up nice nice.  I'll have to make a more generic version with empty lists for the random tables and maybe more rules on the pages, but really it's not like there are that many rules you need to look up on the fly in Beacon.

Combat tweaks

During Beacon play test there were a few things about combat that came up that I'd like to deal with in the rules.  A lot of stuff didn't come up, or if it did come up seemed to work out. Grappling came up one time and it appeared to work OK.  Some other stuff came up and either had to be dealt with or was just hand waved.   I want combat to be fast as possible but I still want a bit more tactical combat than the simple 'you can do one thing per turn'.  Two things I'd like to discuss are initiative and changing/dropping weapons in a fight.

Initiative
Beedo over on Dreams in the Lich House was playing Adventurer Conqueror King and wrote about his experience.  I find this interesting, specifically this part:

"One thing I found interesting - Individual Initiative!  Okay, I know this has been an optional rule in many variants (and LOTFP used a version of it), but I've used the Moldvay BX style of Initiative by Side for as long as I can remember, with different combat actions happening in sequence - movement, missile, magic and melee, and then the other side goes."

I'm coming from the opposite side of the revelation here.  When I started working over Beacon I figured it was a D20 system and I should use D20 style initiative - otherwise known as individual initiative with DEX bonuses.  Man after about three games we cut that shit out because it was taking longer to do the initiative rolls than most of the rest of the combat.  We switched back to D6 per side - where side was determined by me, but usually 2 of them.  That's how I did it back in the olden times and it's working out pretty well for us now too.  I didn't think of having a "movement, missile, magic and melee" sequence however, that's something I didn't recall from the olden times.  Looking at it now I think it would be a good idea to try this.  Putting these phases in might solve some of my issues with not using minis and keeping track of where folks are at.  It also means player would have to decide what they were doing before they acted and that might be fun.  You want to move - well you have to do it now, no you don't know if Thedric is going to take out that archer, you will have to chance it.  Well maybe not so much what they were doing but what type of thing they were doing.

I play a board game called Game of Thrones by Fantasy Flight games.  It's very much like the game Diplomacy in that you give orders to all your armies ahead of time and then afterwards you carry out all the orders.  Unlike Diplomacy the orders in Thrones are not specific but simply a type of action; movement, support, raid, etc.  When the time comes to resolve these orders you can carry them out in which ever way you think best at the time - which direction to move the army - which territory to raid - but you must carry out that order with that army.  It simulates planning but allows for the effects of actual situations to be processed.  Best of both worlds I think.

I had the idea I might put Missile attacks before Movement as that seems more appropriate and might solve some of the issue I have with characters dancing around and firing off missile weapons in close combat.  Before I do this I'll have think a bit more - no point changing an old standard without due consideration.


Replacing a weapon

Crap!

Over the course of playing, there were quite a few times where a weapon needed to be changed or replaced in combat.  The Critical fumble table causes dropped or broken weapons, and in other cases the players were expressing their desire to maim something more by going for a bigger weapon.  It was mostly hand-waved or counted as a minor action, but I do want to have a more chewy rule for it.  I want this to have an impact - but not make the players miss a whole attack.


What I'd like to do is to make drawing, changing out or picking up a dropped weapon the same as a move in turn.  Since you get one move in a turn or two if you forgo combat, you would have to use one up to change out your weapon or pick it up.  If you had to change or replace a weapon you wouldn't be able to do a full turn move, and you wouldn't be able to move and attack.  Right now drawing a weapon is a minor action and that doesn't seem to be enough.  I want to reward folks who ready their daggers before opening a door.

Another look at the skills pt. 2

Stats are something you are born with.  You are large and in charge or you grew up with wits or reflexes that were quick as lightning.  Pretty much stats don't change.  In Microlite you can raise your stats as you level, but I didn't want to go with this in Beacon.  Certainly you can have magic items or special situations that raise stats, but generally this can't be done through normal means - you keep the stats you were 'born' with.  Skills on the other-hand are primarily raised through effort and practice (read XP).  If you are an average Fighter you can't become innately 'stronger', but you do increase your physical skill which means you get better at using what you have.  In the long run this pays out better anyway since stats and their bonuses are limited where skill bonuses are not so much.  I like this, Beacon advancement is based on this idea.  I rejected the idea of class based saving throws because I wanted players to be able to build their reactive checks based on what was important to them.  You want to be excellent at tracking or facing down charming vampires? Work on your survival skills.  If you want to be good at keeping your footing on a slippery roof work on your physical skills.

I've already explained some of the reasons I am considering adding to or changing the skills.  I think in these posts, I've set out how I want the skills to work mechanically and how I want them to impact classes, character advancement, and game play*.    Different games will have different skills that are relevant.  A psionic based game under this philosophy might have a skill for Concentration, a sci-fi  based game might utilize Science instead of Survival.   I have to say that the original 5 skills proposed for Microlite were pretty good ones and I'm having a hard time picking better substitutes.  I am going to take a stab at introducing one more to the bunch however.

So last post I mentioned Fabrication.  What I was originally thinking was that I wanted to contemplate a skill to be used for mechanical skills.  I wanted something that could be checked for disarming traps or for repairing a wagon wheel.  I saw this as a skill that could be used for players wanting to barricade doors or control a ship in a storm.  Or maybe building a ship.  Mechanics didn't cover enough ground however.  It wasn't something that could be combined with stats in interesting ways.  I realize that Knowledge can be used for these things - certainly Knowledge should be used to see if a character knows how to do something.  But this was something different - there is a big difference between knowing what things are and being able to make things.  On my bike ride home the other night it came to me that what I was looking for was the creative force.  That's where Fabrication comes from.

You can mix Fabrication with STR if you were a smith or were building a wall.  You could apply it with MIND if you were writing a book or researching a new spell.  You could use Fabrication with CHA if you were telling a story in a tavern - or trying to explain why you were in the Vizier's harem.  Use it with DEX if you were disarming (or setting) a cunning alarm trap that involved string, oil and a falling torch.  One problem I can see is that the short form of Fabrication is Fab - that's going to cause some chuckles around the table.  Other names for this potential skill could be Creation (Cre), Making (Mak) or something.  Whatever it's called, I'm more interested in if it works for Beacon.  I know I would like another sphere for character development, what I don't know is if I want player characters building boats or constructing fortifications.  It's an adventure game, if you needed to build a boat you should have become a shipwright and not an adventurer.


*I have a lot of worries that doing too much with skills will lead to the wrong types of game play.  Read this for another good description of how skills can impact play.

Another look at the skills pt. 1

I like the skill system that was worked up for Microlite, it's one of the primary reasons I was attracted to the system and I think it's one of the features of Beacon as well.  The key to it is of course that the skills are abstract enough to be applicable in a variety of situations and yet there is enough variety to differentiate the characters.  The skills have to be abstract so that you don't get into a situation where you need to keep adding skills in to cover situations.  I think that's one of the issues with a skill driven game is that if the skills are pretty specific you either have a situation where the particular skill is required by everyone all the time or is only used once in a blue moon.  You tend to have a lot of skill overlap anyway.  How many kind of vehicles can you drive with your 'driving' skill?  Can someone with woodworking make barrels as easily as they build houses or are those two separate skills?  If you have too few skills then they do double duty - too many and some never get used.  If the skills are too generic then anyone has a pretty good chance of doing anything (which is not necessarily bad) and it's hard to make characters who excel at different in game tasks. Too many and your characters are wasting points on rarely used skills.  Naturally you can make it work whichever way you go but it will impact the way the game plays.  Of the all the changes to 2nd edition AD&D, I think it was the bolted on skill system that I disliked the most and the one I had the most player issues with.  I addressed this in my campaign back then by switching to a system with better skills management (Rolemaster...) and then by creating my own game based on ranks ala the Marvel Supers universal table.  Ya it worked OK, it was pretty fun, but it didn't feel like good ol' D&D.  I found that players were always trying to leverage their highest skills in to all situations (why can't I use animal training to make the knight's horse throw him?) or wouldn't do anything unless they were very skilled in it.  That or they wanted skills that weren't in the book and so you had to keep making up new ones.  More rules, less rulings.

The better solution for me these 20 years later has been to co-opt the 5 skills from 'advanced' Microlite.  In Beacon I've taken a pretty broad approach to how these skills are applied. Physical represents health, training, exercise.  Subterfuge is stealth, trickery, guile.  Knowledge is knowing and all the skills that come with study and patience.  Communication is expression, attention to details, understanding.  Survival is the ability to find food and shelter, take care of yourself, the instincts and will to live.  They are almost 5 extra stats really, but they are stat levers not simply another measuring stick, and this is why it works well in the game.

Combining these skills with the Strength or Mind is where the characters start standing out from one another.  It influences the way they (should be) describing their actions in the game.  I liked this mechanic so much that I emphasized it in Beacon.   Microlite has a across the board or flat level bonus which is applied to all the skills and actions.  It's simple and its a feature of the game which makes it light - but it does tend to make all the characters similar to each other over time.  Beacon does away with the flat level bonus and instead puts the bonuses into the level up process.  Classes gain in certain skills and players can choose to apply a bonus to one skill per level.  This lets players pump up different areas of and it allows for interesting builds coming from the level progression.  You can have a fighter who spend everything on physical and is a beast for resisting poisons and pulling acrobatic stunts - or you can have a fighter who is more well rounded and is a good communicator and gets bonuses for dealing with NPCs and military hierarchy.  It is flexible.

I really agonized over using the Survival skill because unlike the original 4 skills it seemed to be there just to add wilderness skills for rangers and druids to exist and there was already a lot of ways to derive these from the original 4.  However, I realized that survival was not really much different than the subterfuge skill and in fact having some overlapping spheres or imbalanced combinations is OK.  For one, it made certain classes possible, and for two, having more skills but less universal skills is good for character differentiation.   Adding in new skills changes the game by making existing skills less applicable, by encouraging certain actions or directions  for players in game.  In some ways it limits or discourages certain existing combinations - like subterfuge will limit certain types of communication such as lying, or survival would encroach on many mind and physical based challenges.  In practice however the survival skill took on some aspects of willpower for me, adding a modifier for the 'spark of life' type challenges for example, and so it actually had a net sum increase.

So all that being said, I've still been tempted to add in another skill. I'm going to go carefully here and try to talk through it because it is a balancing act.   During the play test I've seen that the Rogue class really doesn't have as much going for it as the other classes and I thought a good way to fix this would be to make them skill boats.  Maybe I'm borrowing a page from James Raggi and his specialist class in LotFP here, but it seems right that the fantasy archetype of the Thief really needs to cover a broader scope to include a role for that fellow who is clever and good at things besides swords or sorcery.  A character based on stealing is OK, but a character based on solving problems is much better.  Theoretically, giving the Rogue class extra skill points to spend means they are more likely to increase things besides subterfuge, encouraging characters that are good at communication (con-men), or knowledge (the sage).  Having more non-combat abilities means that rogues would want to use them.  I am concerned however that there is not quite enough here to work with once you get outside the sneak (subterfuge) activities.  There's no point in pumping skills into knowledge if the party mage is going to have a high knowledge skill anyway.  So if you give the rogue extra points then they are just going to pump them into Subterfuge and eventually get +20 whenever they try anything sneaky.  That's not what I want.  What I don't want is for the skills to become entirely class defining, although I realize that some aspect of this is inevitable.  I also know that any new skill is going to direct the flow of the game.  If I put in a skill for say - Commerce it will encourage players to deal with money and business - and if I don't make that a common feature of my game, then it's a wasted space on the character sheet.  Any new skill would have to address a gap in game activities that you actually want addressed (so no bathroom based skills, and nothing dealing with taxation or writing performance reviews) and not take away from the existing ones.  It would also have to be something that could be mixed with the stats in interesting ways.

What I'm thinking is of is Fabrication.

On the Hunter and the Rogue

Coming to the end of this play test and I'm still reflecting on what I've seen and learned.  Admittedly we really only ran the gamut of levels 1-3, but those are important levels for a fantasy heart-breaker because they introduce the system and because most game mechanics are at least touched on.  In the future I will be happy to get into lessons from mid-level play but for now it's enough to process.  I think that the fighter class is pretty good and them fighters seem to be able to do some smash and bash.  The magic classes are pretty good I think - I do need to do more work on their spells but I think the classes themselves are mostly good.  I do know that I had some fundamental problems with the Hunter and the Rogue classes however.

Hunter

The Hunter class worked pretty good related to the Survival skill, but I have a problem with the combat bonuses. I think that without the second ranged attack it would not have worked at all but I can't help thinking that the hunter is too powerful if allowed to use a ranged weapon all the time in combat.  I'm seriously thinking of either removing the attack bonus perk for ranged weapons.  Barring that I have to figure out some way to limit the use of ranged weapons in combat because otherwise hunters will only ever use ranged weapons and so get all the benefits of a fighter in combat.  The problem is; without some sort of engagement and/or attack of opportunity rule it is hard to keep characters engaged in a melee and they can simply dance around the room each turn using ranged attacks.  I can try to discourage this or I can ignore it and simply give hunters two attacks but remove the attack bonus for ranged weapons - leaving them with the same attack bonus as a Cleric or a Rogue.  Simpler is usually better but I want to meditate on it some more anyway, maybe get some input from the players.

Rogue

As for the Rogue - they simply don't seem to have enough...something.  Of all the classes they get the least perks - the advantage of using DEX for any weapon is offset by the fact that most players will use a weapon suited to their bonuses anyway.  I even thought of merging the Rogue and Hunter class but I really want to avoid this.  I thought of a couple things I could try to make the Rogue work, one was to give the rogue more free skill points on advancement - this would reinforce the Jack-of-all-trades feel and lead to some interesting builds.  For example, instead of giving them one  skill point per level and a subterfuge bump every three levels, just give them 2 skill points to spend every level.  Rogue could be the super class for all the would be sages, the con-men, the merchants and the thieves.  They would be the most customizable class in any case as you would be able to sock points into any of the skills you wanted to bump.  Rogues would likely be the kings of the non-combat sphere, but that might not be bad.  The other idea would be to figure out another class ability like the sneak attack.  This one is more traditional (the old thieves skills bit) so would probably be easy to implement, but it doesn't fit with the design principle of streamline as much as the skill point idea, however it does fit with the other design principle of interesting .