[Circle] Venture talk! (Reposted from teh Plus)

[Paul B]

Per Ron's request, here's a thing I wrote about my second Circle of Hands venture on Google Plus. There's a lengthy discussion following, including a few rulings and clarifications by the big dog.

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Our second session was pretty good. Dunno who read the setup but it was kind of a milk run: go check out the Valley of Scrolls, way up in the mountains in ogre territory.

We added a fourth player, who added two knights to the Circle (for a total of 10). Everyone played someone different from last session; no repeat performances.

Everyone nailed every Charm roll all night long, which was interesting. The soap opera never really caught fire with the PCs, but what can you do? Honestly the bulk of the action was driven by one player deciding his female knight would not be talked down to by the captain of the guard in the Valley, who was won over by her Charm roll but wasn't obligated to treat her with respect. One quick punch later, he's out like a light, humiliated in front of the rest of the town goons.

The characters looked around at the scroll library (interesting to the King in Rolke; probably can't be moved out of the mountains) and listened to stories about the guards flushing out ogres from the cave network. The lady of the guards is sweet on the librarian, eh, okay. The priest hates the librarian and is sweet on the lady, eh, okay. Not a lot of fizz.

Well, so we did get a really unpleasant fight in though. After his humiliation, the guard captain gets his homies together to uh...teach the female knight a lesson. There are five of them and one of her, so we're already in the "run or you're dead" zone of the rules. I ruled that another of the knights came across the beginning of the fight, so we queued everyone up by Quickness and got to work.

Even without the instant-death rules, being ganged up by a bunch of knife-wielding thugs is terrifying. Way worse than the big monster component (ogres are terrible sissies, oh god, more on that in a bit). There are just so many of them and they can all burn just a little bit of Brawn to wear you down so you can't make your "run the fuck away" roll. Well, with two knights in play it was much more even, although it did end in the death of one of them (who Blasted a mook before being cut down as suddenly way more dangerous than the lady knight).

Both knights in that fight felt compelled to make Oaths; both rolled sad 1s on their bonus dice. Womp womp. The fight was close-ish but largely because, at some point (which is not really defined in the rules), the bad guys got scared off. In our case, it was when the fallen Knight came back as a wraith and started Blasting mooks from beyond the grave.

The rest of the Circle got together, got everyone healed up, and decided to make an object lesson of the goons who ran away from the fight. We just kind of jumped ahead and declared it "done" since the gentry lady was still firmly on the Circle's side and would not be having any of her sworn men pulling that shit.

Other stuff: finally they went ogre-hunting. But man...when you're fully prepared and you've juiced up your knights, an ogre is a pussycat. The knight (who had previously been jumped by the gang) was doubled in size, wrapped in armor and Envenomed her blade, and then one-shotted the ogre. Total anticlimax.

Rules things I can't figure out even after two plays and several readings:

* How do you do non-combat things inside the combat queue? Like, specifically, disarming someone? Once the goons had taken out the "black wizard" (i.e. the guy who shot Blast) they were feeling sassy and wanted to just disarm the lady knight. Possible? If it's just a Quickness roll or something, does the other side defend themselves? What about knocking people to the ground or any other positional moves? Does the narration just kind of come along for the ride if you also do damage? Dunno.

* Peasant Knights continue to be weird for me to deal with on the NPC side. I suppose they are weird to deal with. I feel like there's conflicting advice in the rules about how to treat peasants, but also the fact that they're recognized as a sort of meta-gentry. I'm actually okay with the ambiguity, because it allows me to rationalize pretty much any play I want.

* There's also a bit of ambiguity about Charm rolls, and the circumstances under which they are penalized (which looks to be quite often if you're playing RAW). The deal is, you always make Charm rolls upon first contact. But later, there's talk about how you're penalized by a die if you're not living up to your social class expectations. Well...which is it? First contact or after being observed? Dunno. Twice now, it's felt like there's just no time for that penalized Charm roll to happen.

* Has anyone come up with a better way of tracking fatigue Brawn vs damage Brawn? It's seriously bumming me out that it's all just one number on the sheet.

* The wizard got his first Amboryon gift! He can get the spirits of the fallen to come fight for him for a scene. He's also big on raising corpses. Double the fun!

* The spell cards were awesome. My buddy +David Lely put them together and is polishing them up for final release ASAP. Very helpful to have.

Since we've played 7 of the 9 surviving knights, that means third session will require some repeat appearances! I'm pretty stoked to see that happen. The stokage is not universal, and that's okay. If we get our minimum 4 sessions in, I think it will have been a worthy time.

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If you want to see the conversation, it's herehttps://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulBeakley/posts/B66nRqQFdoE If you can't see it, follow me and I'll stamp your hand.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Paul, and welcome! The school district has blessed me with yet another day of children at home, so my posting and general work is going to be hiccupy ...

Most of these topics were discussed at G+, so I'll summarize – correct me if I misrepresent or forget anything.

Disarming. After scratching my head a little, I realized that the mechanics for unarmed combat are the way to go here. If you want to take someone's weapon away, it's going to be a deliberate grab-and-strip, or bonk the person's head against a door-frame until he or she lets go of it. So it's the same old clash rules, nothing special about it, treating the damage as unarmed damage, and then the "what do I do with him" once he's down, is defined in the moment as "take away the weapon."

In other words, there's no elegant, "whisk away his weapon, now he stands gaping and awestruck, and the fight is over." There's no way for a fight not to be about hurting people.

In combination with the mishap rules, in which one's weapon might go spinning away after all, but the character is still in the fight, I think the circumstances of disarming are in good shape.

Peasant knights. I think Paul's own text summarizes the situation well, as intended by me. My only little comment is that, given the ambiguity, you can let other factors of the situation tip the scales one way or the other in terms of interpreting Charm rolls.

Charm rolls. Some folks' comments in the G+ thread resolved this pretty well. One doesn't have to roll these instantly for unnamed characters and groups; the knights have time and room to fit in and do stuff, so the one-die roll is reserved for worst-case scenarios when they don't do that for some reason. Only when a named character is involved is a nearly-instant roll required, and I stress that this roll concerns that one person's opinion, not a whole community's.

(This strikes me as important: in many games I've played, your Diplomacy roll or whatever with the king suddenly dictates whether his guards surround you or not, as the guards are basically the king's instruments. That's not the case here.)

Tracking Brawn. I know some of the sheet drafts tried to break it down a little more completely, along the lines just discussed in a current thread here, but it doesn't seem to have shown up in the final sheet. I think I'll be relying on different colored pencils for different ways to lose Brawn – three, if I'm counting correctly.

[Ron Edwards]

Also, a player in Paul's group, David Lely (Paul, that's the spelling you used, is it right?), has provided awesome spell cards for the game! I've included them at the Learn about the game page - they're the first pass, so let me know about any typos or whatever.

I'm not sure if everyone knows I did this fun thing with TV Tropes for the game, but the list of them is available at the same page ... take a look and sacrifice some of your life-time if you want to find some more for the list.

Oh yeah (editing this in): I'm also working up a questions-and-answers section for that webpage too.

[Paul B]

Yup, that all looks good. Correct spelling on David's name.

I feel like there's something else important that we covered in the thread but heck if I can remember. Must not be that important! I think you've caught the salient bits in any case.

[John W]

I want a "Like" button for this forum.
Thanks for posting this, Paul and Ron,
-J

[Ron Edwards]

I'm glad you like it, John.

Paul, in reviewing the G+ posts, I see a couple of things which I couldn't address in G+ format. I apologize for the delay but a couple of other writing gigs took up my time, plus a kid-heavy weekend.

I'll list these as thoughts you prompted, not as criticisms or any specific claim to knowing exactly how your game went.

Framing fights is way different in this game because they're impossible to plan. There's no speed-bump fight, no boss-fight ... it can't be judged on the basis of pacing, certain outcomes, or the role it's supposed to have in a longer series of events.

Some rules-use to consider includes ...

1. Unnamed vs. named. If the characters are unnamed, and if they're not in a group (formally speaking), or if they are, their individual opinions are not justifiably shared by the whole group, then they might well be reluctant to move toward open hostilities. They can more effectively put their hostility to work through more social, long-term means. And if this degree of agency seems like it's going to happen, then it's time for some ascension.

2. Failed Charm rolls don't have to result in a responsive attack. (Here I'm thinking more of the wizard in Bret's game, too.)

3. Every fight is a real danger, and the more motivated one understands one's NPCs to be, then the more easily one judges what they do in a fight. There's no morale roll, so in order to judge cutting and running, for instance, one must know who these people are and why they entered into violence in the first place.

4. Powered-up, armored Circle knights are horrifying murder machines. An ogre is a big, chubby carnivore, but a lot more people-like than it's comfortable to consider ... as an ambush attacker on, say, a hunting party in dangerous areas, then it's really nasty; as a straight-up target for an assault, not so much. Or maybe nasty, maybe not, depending on some dice. I'm saying this to stress the whole boss fight concept - just because a monster is in the venture doesn't mean it's the Final Foe who will pose the Greatest Challenge. The question is only partly can we kill it; it's really will we kill it and the events that lead up to that decision becoming rock-solid.

Anyway, I think you handled most of this pretty well by the seat of your pants, and as I now know, with a fair amount of your attention getting drained.

[Ron Edwards]

Whoo, questions!

]Enchanting

Last session we finally took the Enchanting rules out for a spin. It's a pretty compact section of the rules, just two columns, but it feels really consequential.

First question: What's the point of it all?

[recap snipped]

So here's where it gets weird: you can either spend the normal Brawn when you use the item, and the item remains enchanted. Or you don't spend the Brawn and the enchantment is terminated. But in any case, you get the black/white dots like always.

If you're earning the dots and spending the brawn (one assumes), how is it any different than just casting the spell in the first place?

I can only see two answers and honestly I hope this is all there is to it.

a) The enchantment can't be countered with magic (meh, edge-case-y) and

b) It lets a non-wizard use a spell on a later Venture that maybe he didn't pick this time. Ergo, really no point at all for a wizard to enchant anything, other than to not spend the Brawn in the future and treat the item as a one-shot Brawn battery.

That is all there is to it, but maybe there's a philosophical point at issue too. Not that I'm saying you're philosophically wrong, but rather, maybe a look at my rationale's foundation will be interesting.

It is that I specifically wrote the enchantment rules as in-setting phenomena, not as play strategy. In other words, I was thinking about wizards, about the forces they're messing with in-setting, and how those forces aren't themselves interested in "items." I'm staring from the proposition that the wizard wants some enchanted item around, used by him/her or by someeone else as the case may be, and some applications of enchantments are strategically sub-optimal, but hey - this wizard wants the fuckin' item, and that's the way it has to be if you want it.

Thinking in terms of "my sons will have this Envenomed sword at their disposal after I die," and that's why there's this sword leaving Stain all over this venture, is different from "so how can enchant my sword so I have a better tool than I did before." I'm not saying the latter is bad, but for this game, the logic of the former is what I went by in writing the rules.

Second question: Casting time for Rituals as Enchantments

I don't see any reference at all as to how long it takes to actually use, say, Storm as an enchantment. It's a ritual spell and 3 dots, so normally it'd be 3 hours to cast. So is it still 3 hours as normal even when it's an enchantment? That's fine but boy it seems to undercut the usefulness (again, unless the intent is to have this enchanted item on you between Ventures so as to expand your library of spells and/or not spend the Brawn in a clinch).

Your interpretation is correct. Again, this is about the way wizards use it in the setting, not about the way Circle knights strategize their abilities. Wizards are weird. One of them might want to keep a Storm going in an area forever (or as close to it as possible) for some reason, like the White WItch did.

Target Key Words

So far I've seen the following referenced on spells: Person, beast, animal, avatar, eidolon, undead, monster, demon, caster

I can't tell if these keywords are meant as guidance or restrictions. I'm assuming restrictions! But then it feels like a lot of spells get nerfed, and man does it give me a headache to think through the taxonomy.

Sorry 'bout the headache, but you have it right. Those are formal targeting keywords, and I put a lot of thought into who gets what. Nerfing spells thereby is entirely and fully the point.

For instance, you can't Blast a creature of Rbaja.

Going through Light & Darkness, it looks like you've got the taxonomy built out. But there are implications:

Is a peasant an animal? Does that depend on the caster's own social rank? Example: could a non-peasant Wizard actually Sacrifice a peasant? If she's not a peasant herself, then that peasant is an animal and therefore not a "person or beast" per the target requirement. Interesting! It also means a peasant would be immune to Die, Drug, Confuse, Preserve, etc.

Tempting as it might be to say otherwise, the answer is no. I was careful in Chapter 7 to specify that peasants are human beings. Certain social rules treat them and animals the same in bounded (although broad) circumstances, but they are not keyworded the same in the spells. "Person" in the spell includes peasants.

Is a beast an animal? I think maybe not since they're both called out in spells like Pox (eg "beasts and animals are effected blah blah"). You can't Link to a beast, then? Stimulant otoh does imply they're the same, or it might just be sloppy language: the target is person or animal, but the effect refers to "person or beast".

Here, I'm referring to the distinction that defines a beast relative to animals as a named character is relative to unnamed ones. Stimulant should say "person, beast, or animal" for its target and just say "target" in the effect. I went through the spells to try to standardize that, so the target phrasing would be unspecified in the effect descriptions, but man - it's incredible how you can re-edit some of a list like that fifty times and keep missing other parts of it, and never tell which is which.

It appears that Monster includes Avatars, Eidolons, Undead, and Demons. Which means it excludes people, beasts and animals, yeah?

Yikes, I see the problem here, "monster" shifts its meaning here and there.

Your phrasing is too general. It  goes as follows ...

In Chapter 3, venture prep, "monster" includes avatars and undead, but not eidolons and demons (they're in Amboriyon and Rbaja, respectively). This is very much on purpose.

But in Chapter 7, monster is a category of its own, including the spider-hags, manticores, and so on, for creatures which are weirder/different from animals and beasts, but not of Rbaja or Amboriyon at all.

The magic rules were written with the Chapter 7 categories in mind. So no, "monster" as a spell keyword does not include any undead, demon, avatar, or eidolon, only the specifically designated monsters in Chapter 7.

Oaths

Last couple I think: "A Circle knight or named person may swear one oath per venture."

This implies that NPCs can swear Oaths. Is that the intention? Should my named NPCs be getting juiced? 

You got it. When that happens, keep your eye on Gifts too.

And finally re Oaths: If you can formally renounce an Oath during play, under what circumstances might one end a Venture with an unfulfilled Oath? (I didn't see anything specifically procedural about renouncing Oaths, I assume it's just a "we cool, the deal's off" type thing.)

By not saying you renounce it. It's pretty literal. As for why one would (not) do that, that's not the point, I'm saying if someone does it that way, that's all.

These are very helpful and important, Paul.

[Paul B]

Regarding named NPCs taking Oaths and your comment about "watch for gifts" -- I assume this is in regards to NPC wizards, yeah? You should be tracking their dot accumulation? Because unless you're a wizard, I don't know how else one might acquire dots other than via an Oath. Using Enchanted items I guess. Which implies my NPCs might be strapped with Enchanted items.

NICE.

Safe to assume named non-wizard NPCs who acquire Gifts during play will also be rolling at random on the appropriate lists?

[Ron Edwards]

Named people who aren't wizards can swear Oaths. They have a color dot scheme like everyone else.