[CoH] Let's playtest online (in English)

[Vernon R]

Hmm, that's interesting about only killing people with names.  I hadnt conciously noticed that.  I did note that it was more difficult for me playing Gerhart to deal out death to Aghi after having dealt with him and his gang but absolutely no care about bashing his unnamed gang members with my shield.

On the C vs 12 roll being done up front, I think our experience supports the notion that sooner is better.  We were doing it wrong at first, waiting until we asked something of one of the NPC's and using to see if they gave in felt a lot like hunting for bread crumbs like Ron put it.  When Joshua decided it was probably time to roll and we all went back to check the rule and realized it should have been done up front it seemed to propel the game forward.  The npc's became more active in my mind anyways, Aghi and his band tried to get Gerhart to give them weapons and help them in taking on the demon worshipping women, not sure that would have moved forward as quickly if we handled it differently.

[Joshua Bearden]

I'm going to repeat myself for emphasis. The early, practically immediate Cv12 roll, as described in the text was one of the most exciting details about the game to me. I thought "this is a little tiny engine or story reactor".  During our play-test, the fact that I forgot about it on entry to the town was sheer bad luck.  My NPCs were primed and ready to go, they just needed that roll to clearly tell me which direction they were going to go in.  First impressions are bloody important. In a world like the Crescent Lands they are crucial. 

When I realized my mistake my first impulse to erase the last 20 minutes of direction-less dialogue and start fresh.  I then realized there was no reason not to let the PC's simply choose to go back and make their "real" first impressions a little later in the story.

I completely forgot that we even did the 'wits' rolls when the PC's came to town.  I certainly didn't mean them to be necessary in order for the PC's to meet my named NPC's. I'm afraid they were more or less 'roll to notice' rolls with me thinking a successful roll means I need to make up something for them to notice.

What I'd like to do in the future with exploratory wits rolls is have the player describe a thing or person or fact they wish to discover in town. Then roll. Failure simply means failure. And there has to be a significant change in circumstance justify a new roll.   Success means they either find what they are looking for or determine conclusively that she/he/it doesn't exist.  This essentially makes wits rolls an authorial tool for players with GM creative veto.  Not sure if that's what you intended, Ron, but I'm eager to give it a try.

[Justice Platt]

Joshua, I apologize for coming off like that.  My misreading of the wits roll rules was the only issue I was trying to get at.  No other reflection was intended, and it was hasty posting on my part.

[Ron Edwards]

I'm thinking the Wits roll is going to need decent parameters, so people can't "Wits" any damn thing they want into existence. I could possibly adapt the no-new-information concept from Trollbabe into this game, which is to say, you have to work with what's been said and not invent ninjas. Two concepts should be at work for those parameters.

1. If there's a village in the mountains and everyone has iron heads on their spears, then you don't need to use Wits to find the smith, or to find that he's a couple of villages away.

2. If there's a rivalry between the smith and the toughest fighter-guy in terms of village leadership, then Wits will help you spot it - but you need to be acting on something you're observing, not making it up as if you were "scanning for life-forms" looking for social dynamics. The GM can say, "The smith and a tall guy shoot one another looks, briefly," and the Wits roll can help you spot what it's about ("they hate each other") and some immediate social context for it ("everyone else is studiously not getting in the way"). So the skill for the GM is to provide a lot of descriptive material for those rolls to riff off.

I am pleased to find in my sessions that "every score is the most important," as the old Amber rulebook said. It's one of my design goals in general, and in this case I was concerned that the fight-oriented attributes would be the biggies. But with Charm there for crucial orientation for the GM's way to play his or her characters, and with Wits there for crucial orientation for the players' understanding of what their characters know, then these attributes are just as important.

[Joshua Bearden]

We finished the first adventure, playing on google hangouts tonight. 

The details of my prep are available in this thread.  Though I took Ron's feedback to heart, I was unwilling to retcon the scenario enough to remove all traces of the supernatural.

The knights regrouped in the guest house and decided to stake out Hulda's long house. While there, Guntram arrived and chastised the knights for having slain Aghi, saying that now Ina is without a husband and her children lack a father.  You should do the honourable thing and offer to marry her and stay here.  The knights stiffly demurred to this suggestion and returned to the guest house.  The women game back looking 'radiantly dishevelled' and dispersed about the town in the early pre-dawn twilight.

The knights spent the morning poking around the grove and waterfall. Interestingly, Gisa, the knight who didn't know how to swim, chose to probe the aquatic cave beneath the waterfall.  As we reflected on the rarity of people in this setting knowing how to swim, the players remarked on the notable fact that all the women seemed to be excellent swimmers.  Gisa, clinging to the edge of a rocky cave wall edged further inward until the ceiling met the waters surface.  Daring all, she took a breath and risked herself to the deep.  Welcoming human-like hands grasped her body and gently pulled her forward. Quite understandably she reacted with considerable hostility and kicked out.  With some help, she made her way back to the waterfall where Gerhardt was able to assist her with a long pole to escape the pool.

They returned to Bekselle to confront Hulda with accusations of sacrificing the young women of the town to some subterranean deviltry.  Hulda, as well as Aghis widow, and a throng comprising the bulk of the town's populatoin were waiting for them.  Gisa 'glamoured up' and loudly announced her accusation.  Although her roll was positive, I couldn't see it convincing the women of town from disbelieving their life experiences - which was that the status quo, including whatever exactly they got up to in the cave, was by and large positive.  A positive charm roll only sufficed to discourage the throng from attacking, instead they quietly turned their backs on the knights and returned to town.  (Ina got the opportunity to tell Gerhardt that she was not interested in keeping him around as a replacement husband).

The only open ears to Gisa's speech consisted of a few of the young men who had been part of the fight in the grove the night before.  The stuck around to ask more questions about how awesome patriarchy was.  The knights on the other hand tried to pump them for information about the secrets of Bekselles prosperity.  Both sides were by-and-large disappointed with the outcome of the conversation.  The men wandered back to town prepared to resign themselves to a peaceful secure life of bounty and large families.

The players engaged in an entertaining discussion about whether to leave peacefully now, or raze the town to the ground as a gesture of some sort.  In the end they opted to live and let live.

(By odd chance they ran into some trouble on the way home, first scuffling with 3 spearmen & a manticore near the sea shore, and later being ambushed by 2 panthers in the jungle.  ) 

----

My reflections on the adventure prep & play process.

Had my prep been more orthodox, I wonder if there should have been any combat at all. Without the supernatural beings and secret liaisons in the caves, and without tensions being high the stakes were pretty low.  As it was, in this second session, the angry men faction was so reduced as to hardly provide any justification for the violence that went before.  This turned the majority of the town against the knights and probably made it difficult to learn much more about the secret knowledge.
As it was, the knights left with very fragmented insight into what was happening in Bekselle.

If I were to prep again an adventure in which the only component was "hidden knowledge" I'm not sure how I'd approach it differently. I'll have to think after a little more sleep.

* note for further discussion - the task resolution.  Eg. when Gisa was doing some rock climbing on a slippery cliff. I felt the craving for a finer tuned instrument than a 2d6 +Q (which was 8) - meaning she could only fail on a 3 or less.

[Vernon R]

Thanks Joshua, It was fun and I think it overall went well. 

I did feel a bit like we were in an investigative "Call of Cthulhu" mystery adventure and we were kind of trapped in a traditional mindset of finding clues to learn out who the big bad guy was.  I'm glad it didnt turn out that way, nobody was really the bad guy here. The most interesting aspect of play was the discussion at the end where the characters had an inkling of what was going on, suspected dangerous magic was in play and could either attempt to wipe it out by using destructive magic and let the town burn (seriously some of those spells are nasty) or accept the situation for what it was and go on peacefully.  I did feel we were free to choose whatever we wanted to do with the situation and it wasn't predetermined which was the correct way to resolve it.  Not sure how much of that was on the rules and how much was on how Joshua ran it.

We discussed it a bit afterward and I've read over the thread discussing the setup and the prep work that brought it up.  It did create a different situation than I was expecting in this game.  Much more subdued, little outward threat and more of a subtle judgment of what was going on.  Not sure if that different tone was intended with the scenario creation tools or just a unexpected twist of how the dice fell.  With just the one element and it not being overtly confrontational it was definitely a change up.  In a comic book or a tv series it would feel like a little side episode that cools off tension between big revelations. 

We played out a couple of the combat test scenarios afterwards.  We didn't take full advantage of the combat system, we didnt pump B at all but we did see once again advantage is huge and even a Manticore shouldn't charge up hill into a spear.  It could have been messy but an all out attacking knight vs an all out attacking Manticore left one dead Manticore and a slightly scratched knight (took 4 BQ).

[Vernon R]

The one rule question we had was about healing from injury.  One of our knights had taken a single point of damage earlier which resulted in taking the 1 damage to Q (odd numbers start on Q).  The healing rules only mentioned healing based on how much B damage had been done so we ruled it was like regaining B for cast spells.  Rested up a bit and next scene he was ok.

[Ron Edwards]

That's right. Taking a single point of real-injury BQ is the system's version of "just a scratch."