[Circle of Hands1.1] Playtest 3: The family dinner

[Moreno R.]

Hi!

This evening we platested for the third time CoH using the Draft 1.1 rules. Of the three times I think it was the most frustrating one. But let's start from the beginning.

This time I was the GM (again, for the second time). Ron's questions lately were about the end of the adventures, and the previous times we rushed at the end because we were late. By the other hand, I felt that the fictional parts of the game were rushed the other times and I wanted to dedicate more time to them. And, third, I still spend way too much time to prep (this happen with every game) and I wanted to cut back on that. For all these reasons, I wanted something simple. So when the roll of the dice gave me as component 1 and 7 (Humanitarian crisis and Amboriyon interference) I decided to "cheat" and use 1 and 5 (monster), because I did not want to rush the game this time, too, and I didn't want to complicate things with npc wizards.
...and at the end, this was the session where we were most late, and where we most rushed in the fiction. And I think I made a lot of errors in the preparation, for the hurry.

For the first component (the humanitarian crisis - in Rolke) I decided to use a isolated village with an outbreak of a plague, and as monsters, a "family" of Ghouls.

In detail:

First component:  the people of a little village begin to fall prey to an illness that kills almost a third of the victims in a couple of weeks, highly contagions. The local baron post armed men around the village to keep the population in quarantine and avoid the spreading of the illness, with orders to kill anybody who would try to leave.

Named characters: the head of the village, and the baron himself, stationed with his men-at-arms on the road.

Dangerous terrain: the woods around the village, no maps (I did not have the time).

Tripwire: if even a single person try to flee from the village, the Baron will order to kill everybody.

Second component: a family of villagers still follow a much older tradition, they are the last descendant of the old dwellers in these mountains, and they follow a kind a ritual cannibalism where they eat in secret ceremonies their own dead. They live in the woods a couple of miles from the village proper, and are very reclusive. When the plague struck they try to "protect" themselves eating the dead, so they are among the firsts to get ill, and everybody dies (father, mother and the two oldest sons) apart from a younger sister (12 years old) that go ill but survived, and a still ill 4-years old that did not take part in the ceremonies and got ill very recently. After the death of their parents these two relocated to the village, but their family returned after a few days as Ghouls, feeding on the vast amount of corpses generated by the plague.

Named characters: the 12-years old child, Klara, and his father, Egon, now a ghoul (the most problematic individual, with 9 9 7 7 as stats)

Dangerous terrain: the old underground temple where they celebrated their rites (their "house of stone", says the daughter, to differentiate it from their "house of wood" where they live normally). I had a very simple map but it was not used.

Tripwire: the start of the session arrived and I was still thinking about this, but I didn't find anything satisfying, at the end I did chose to play using as tripwire "any Ghoul get to flee from the area" but I still think it's weak and probably not a tripwire by the rules

Characters:

Astrid
Brawn 6
Quickness 9
Wits 8
Charm 7

every days and night cast on herself:  Perfect senses (1w)

Ambitious (+1 Q +1 W): toward achieving the social rank just above one's own
Cunning (+2 W): surprise and deception, every time

From Famberge, where people fight to live

Outdoorsman
Martial (high)

Freeman

Demeanor 12 Fierce – not hostile or angry, but clearly ready for action
Feature 12 Emblem – (never described)

Spells
Cat (1w)
Perfect senses (1w)
Vine (2w)
Cloud (1b)
Trailtwister (2b)

As Outdoorsman, I'm familiar with staff sling, bow, and hand axe; moreover, I'm good with the knife and spear. As a knight, I was trained in mail, cone helmet, buckler, and parma.

Key event: A young woman from a small village, Astrid was caught by warring faction attacking her village, and brought away from her native land. During the voyage she was freed in a fight, and hid herself in the woods, living in small wood communities and learning a way to survive there. One day she was leading astray an armed group, but she was cornered and had to fight her way out; when she was outnumbered and nearly defeated, a group of Circle knight helped her to save her life, and the wood communities.

Anselm
Brawn 7 [in the night of the battle he had a +2 by the spell stimulant]
Quickness 5 [in the night of the battle he had a +2 by the spell bless]
Wits 5
Charm 5 [in the night of the battle he had a +5 by the spell glamour. The day before that he had a +6]

cast every day and night on himself: Glamour (2w) + Bless (2w) + stimulant (2b) + Perfect Sense

Brave (+2 Q): retreat is not the first option
Brutal (+1 B +1 C): at home with physical and emotional pain

From Tamaryon, whose people have broad backs

Priest, Wizard
Freeman

Demeanor 7 Blunt – not vicious or insulting, merely lacking in graces
Feature 7 One piece of bright clothing – not necessarily always the same one (bright hat)

As a Priest, I'm familiar with staff and knife; as a knight, I was trained in As Freeman, I'm familiar with staff sling, bow, and hand axe; moreover, I'm good with the knife and spear. As a knight, I was trained in mail, cone helmet, buckler, and parma.

Key Event: Anselm is standing on a mountain pass, Rolke in front of him; he looks behind himself the land he jsut left, scarred by dark and light magic alike, men fighting each other, a shadow of grief on his face; he turn towards Rolke, his few belongings on his shoulder, and resume his journey towards his new king.

Tally: Effective Mind Rip by tasting another's blood, living or dead  [Anselm had the lesser total, so he had a tally item from the start]

It was the first venture played by these characters.

QUESTION: there was a discussion at the start about the interpretation of a rule: I remembered that a single player can't play the same character he did play the previous Venture, but another player can choose that same character. Another player remembered instead that the rule is that the seme character can't be played two times in a row, no matter by whom. What is the right rule?

---------

Right at the start my intentions to concentrate more on the fictional aspects did crash and burn. Almost an hour was spent at the beginning to explain the changed rules, the changed spells, to choose the new spells for Astrid, to choose the spells to cast every morning, to choose the armor, to roll the bonus and modify the stats, etc.

I noticed a sort of ironic counterpoint: the rules for the details about arms, armors, traveling entourage, etc, instead of making us concentrate more about the fiction, tended to do the opposite, turning the game in a calculation of numbers and modifiers.

With the "glamour" spell on, Anselm had "charm" at 11. So I did not even bother to roll even with a single die: if it was possible to convince someone, he did it, if it was not possible, he didn't. All without rolls.

At night the spells were cast again, and at the morning, and the following night, with tallies increasing hourly, (especially when Anselm began to cure people of the plague with 3-points spells) and again this was more a "Oh, great, another interruption" for me that some sort of noticeable moment in the fiction. At the time I confess I had already lost most on my motivations and after a while I stopped even trying.

When they did meet the ghouls, the knights had added the following tallies:

Anselm:
- Effective Mind Rip by tasting another's blood, living or dead (this is the only omne he had at the start)
- Bestow instant recovery as per three meals and a night's rest with a B vs. 12 roll; a given  person may benefit this way once per day
- C vs. 12 for effective Restore Dead, upon successfully harming undead in combat
he rolled:
6: Voice becomes two-toned when raised or emphatic
4: Hair turns thick and silky, becomes nearly impossible to cut

Astrid:
- Shape-shift into small silver dragon once per adventure, +1 to both B and Q
rolled a 1, no change.

About the first component: everybody did trust Anselm, especially when he did start to heal people, to talk in two-tone and promise to save everybody. The Baron trusted him and did let them enter with no hassle, the villagers in practice adored him, and nobody even thought to flee after his arrival. Klara trusted him totally after he did cure her little brother, and told him that her parents were still alive, but they were strange and still ill. And agreed to take them to the "house of stone" during the night.

During the night, they went there, they did meet a couple of ghouls (the father and the older brother). At that time it was already rather late, I was tired of crunching numbers so I really decided to try to simplify things with two ghouls instead of four.

Astrid did roll over 12 against the howl and was unaffected, Anselm instead did fail the roll and suffered the consequences (this has a bad side effect, I noticed, the player is not incentived to try to get the advantage, if he can't get it because of a spell). Astrid was able to hid successfully, Anselm not, so both the ghoul attacked Anselm. The knight had a round to cast spells before the ghouls arrived but they did choose to not cast any (there a lot of questions about this at the end of this post). During the first two clashes Anselm did lose a lot of BQ, and he did lose all of B he had left (2) by casting "blast" trying to activate the Restore Dead Tally, but the ghoul pumped B and Anselm had none left. It seemed that the adventure could have the first dead knight when Astrid turned into a Silver Dragon, attacked a ghoul with advantage and killed it, and then killed the other.

I described the fight in a few words because not a lot happened, fictionally, but it lasted a long time. In part was because of the number crunching and the rolls, but there were rules debates and a lot of consulting the manual in the middle too. At the end it was really, really late, so this was the most rushed of the endings: the Silver Dragon simply killed the other two ghouls "behind the scenes" and we wrapped the session in a few minutes, with the only important decision left about the future of the daughter: she had eaten human flesh as the others, but she was not an undead, so they simply had a talk explaining that it was wrong and it caused her parents to become monsters, and the knights did take her way, alive, to be raised elsewhere.

The other two sessions, even if rushed, were much more enjoyable. This time I was rather frustrated at the end. I wanted to play it better and it was worse instead, and it's clear that I still need a lot of time to prep these kinds of games, or I lose too much time searching and checking things during the game (and when things begins to go wrong, it's like a sponge on a blackboard, I forget everything, even the page to look for the rules I need in the manual)

This session confirmed to me that the constant morning and night power-ups are very disruptive, and confirmed even another thing that I said: that you can't avoid them by making the spells weaker.   What does it matter if "righteousness" is not the powerful spell it was in the first draft? The morning and night constant power-ups are still the same, simply with a different spell. Change these spells too? No matter, there is always a different spell. Until you have only useless spells. And people would still cast them every morning and every night simply to get the tallies...

Some question that came up during play:

1) The "Vine" spell: can it be used to immobilize a foe? (in particular, a Ghoul that is running toward you in a forest). At the moment I said no, the text talks about nets and walls, not about grabbing running people.

2) The "Suck (p)" spell: the text says "The caster must touch a target person". Not beast, or undead? In general, if the spell doesn't mention "undead" as a possible, they are immune? (I decided that in this case, you can't suck life from a corpse, undeads are immune from that spell)

3) Same problem as above, with the "Blast (i)" spell: "The target person, beast, eidolon, or avatar suffers 1d6 BQ damage...". It doesn't say "undead". This time I provisionally decided that they were simply left out by mistake and allowed it.

4) Anselm did hurt a Ghoul using "blast" and then tried to use the tally power "restore" on it to kill it. The spell is a 3-point spell but used in that manner doesn't cost B. The Ghoul pumped B to avoid being killed. So.. how much B the ghoul has to spend? 1 point (because he pump 1 point and Anselm has no more point to use) or 3 points (because it was a 3 point spell)?

5) More in general... if that was a normal spell and Anselm had really spent 3B casting it, how many B the ghoul would have had to pump to survive?

6) Turning into a Silver Dragon using the tally power is an action? (I decided that it was, so Astrid had to pump B after activating it to attack right after that)

7) Apart from being smaller, a wizard-turned-into-a-silver-dragon can remove black tallies and do the other things real silver dragons do?

8) Situation: a ghoul reduced to 2B and 2Q is fleeing as his action during a fight. How does it work? He can make a roll vs12 to flee? he flee, period, if somebody doesn't pump B? (for this battle I simply said "no way he can get away, you flee and he is wounded, get him", but I was tired and frustrated and I simply wanted to end the battle quickly)

After this time we will stop playtesting CoH for a while, I have to start a sorcerer saga I promised months ago and another player has other commitments too. It's for this reason that we needed to finish the venture this evening, there was no time for another session. We will try it again this summer probably, hoping to get a better grasp of the rules and the setting at that time.

[Mitch R]

Had some similar issues as well (just hijacking this thread so point some things out).

As for the prepping spells to last all day and night: I tried this in our second session, seeing as I was now playing a wizard with unlimited access to the spell list.  Some issuses . . .

- I can't remember the name of the spell, but I enchanted both my armour and then my staff (using the spell twice)
- As a result of these two spells and some stuff that occurred early on in the night, I earned the "silver dragon" tally
- Next fight, I use my tally to see how that works out - OK, now what?  I'm not using my armour or my staff as weapons any more - those things were useless to me in the fight right now.
- Do I play (in terms of fighting) the silver dragon exactly as the beast that is described in the rule book with all of its powers, or as myself with the additional B and Q, or as some sort of hybrid of the two? (we decided on the latter, and allowed the armour bump from my previous spell but not the staff (used dragon claws instead), but didn't let me use dragon special powers.
- I decided to "turn off" (for lack of a better term) the permanent staff, and eventually the permanent armour spells because they weren't doing much for me, and as I had interpreted the rules I couldn't attack with something like "vampirize" because its effects are permanent (p. in the book) and those "slots" were all used up
- I then "freed up space" which we interpreted to mean that I could cast any other number of permanent spells costing up to my B - so then I was able to cast vampirize in the fight.
- when I lost the bonus B that vampirize gave me (lose those first before losing my "actual" B), does that then free up more "max B" so that I can cast more permanent spells costing up to that value?  We decided that we could, and so I was able to cast vampirize again, but only once I had lost those extra B again.

I wonder if yet another change could be made in the rules?  I think that this would fit more with the way the game is intended to be played anyway, in my opinion.

Don't change the spells' power based on this problem - I do agree that you're just opening up a can of worms, and perhaps not making any real improvement to the game.  Instead, these kinds of spells (or ANY, for that matter) can only be cast in times of need.  Make it so that in this world, with this kind of spell casting, that someone can't just wake up one morning and say "geez, I might need to see a whole lot of stuff in the dark today" and cast perfect senses.  Instead, they're approaching a dark cave with very little light, and then at that time when the need was great, the power of magic would become available to them to cast the appropriate spell.  Same thing for all of the ones that are available for battle - unless there's a very real threat of being attacked (or you're preparing to attack), or you're in the thick of battle would you bother to cast one of these spells - and as a preparatory move let's say you'd only have time to cast ONE of them anyway (the rest of them - you've got to do it in the thick of battle or not at all).

The way it stands now, if you pre-cast these things (and always seem to have time to do it  anyway) then they're effectively permanent enchantments.  May as well write those bonuses directly to your character sheet as part of your character and be done with it.  However, I suspect that if this was the way Ron intended to play it, then he'd have made those aspects part of the character in the first place.

Making spells "in-the-moment" kinds of things, and simply restricting WHEN you can cast them puts something more realistic and exciting back into the game, reduces the maths and number-crunching that one must do, and will probably speed things up.  Especially because we're playing new characters every time, you don't want to spend the first 20 minutes of your game going over every single spell and optimizing your numbers.  This game seems to be more focussed on getting into the fiction as soon as possible.

- Mitch

[Ron Edwards]

The daily spellcasting is obviously dysfunctional, so everyone, please stop using it in your playtests. The exact solution is elusive but the hunt is on.

1) The "Vine" spell: can it be used to immobilize a foe? (in particular, a Ghoul that is running toward you in a forest). At the moment I said no, the text talks about nets and walls, not about grabbing running people.

It can immobilize a foe. I envision it as aggressive growth with inconvenient entanglement, rather than a actual grabbing, but the effect is the same.

2) The "Suck (p)" spell: the text says "The caster must touch a target person". Not beast, or undead? In general, if the spell doesn't mention "undead" as a possible, they are immune? (I decided that in this case, you can't suck life from a corpse, undeads are immune from that spell)

Person, person, person only. I have been very careful with stating appropriate targets per spell although I'm still refining them.

3) Same problem as above, with the "Blast (i)" spell: "The target person, beast, eidolon, or avatar suffers 1d6 BQ damage...". It doesn't say "undead". This time I provisionally decided that they were simply left out by mistake and allowed it.

Undead are immune to Blast - that is a deliberate design decision. I recently changed Grow to affect only beasts, and pending one more review of the spells, all the other spells have been pretty carefully revised to state their eligible targets.

4) Anselm did hurt a Ghoul using "blast" and then tried to use the tally power "restore" on it to kill it. The spell is a 3-point spell but used in that manner doesn't cost B. The Ghoul pumped B to avoid being killed. So.. how much B the ghoul has to spend? 1 point (because he pump 1 point and Anselm has no more point to use) or 3 points (because it was a 3 point spell)?

The "effective" concept comes into play here. The ghoul has to pump as if Restore has been cast. It would have to be 3 Brawn.

5) More in general... if that was a normal spell and Anselm had really spent 3B casting it, how many B the ghoul would have had to pump to survive?

Three.

6) Turning into a Silver Dragon using the tally power is an action? (I decided that it was, so Astrid had to pump B after activating it to attack right after that)

It is an action. To attack immediately requires pumping Brawn.

7) Apart from being smaller, a wizard-turned-into-a-silver-dragon can remove black tallies and do the other things real silver dragons do?

In consideration and in revision. The short answer is "not everything."

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!

What about this one?

QUESTION: there was a discussion at the start about the interpretation of a rule: I remembered that a single player can't play the same character he did play the previous Venture, but another player can choose that same character. Another player remembered instead that the rule is that the same character can't be played two times in a row, no matter by whom. What is the right rule?

[Ron Edwards]

The first player is correct. A character may be played in consecutive adventures, but not by the same player.