More Donjon Post Apoc

[Matt Wilson]

Donjon continued last night with special guest star James, who was the only person present from his group. James whipped up a quick talking animal (a crow named Vosco) and jumped right into the game, which fared much better than last week's.

Best of all, I had no prep notes.

The game kicked off with James making a phenomenal perception-related roll (the abilities that I like to refer to as "find encounter") and getting 4 facts out of it. With his facts, I whipped up a scene where rival motorcycle gangs faced off in a territory dispute (badders and dabbers, if you're familiar with Gamma World). I had 'em looking very Wild One-ish, and Chrysler commented, "these guys are trouble. Back in the old times they were called 'teens.'"

To summarize, the group steps in to help champion the dabbers (raccoons) by racing the toughest badder (badger). There were plenty of supporting rolls made, and some winging it rules applied to figure out how to have a Ben Hur-style race. For some reason we chose not to use initiative for it, but I suppose it might've worked. In any case, the group saved the day and hung out at the dabbers' pad (an ancient gas station) to trade for provisions and just chill a bit.

Then some crazy fightin' action with mutant radioactive zombies. There were falling awnings, gas explosions, and zombies running around on fire. Good fun. Thanks to my new dog getting me up at 6 every day, I started to wobble a bit at the end of the night, but I think it went much more smoothly than last week.

[Mike Holmes]

"these guys are trouble. Back in the old times they were called 'teens.'"

Very nice Mr. Harper, very nice. :-)

Mike

[Hafaza]

(Cut and paste from email discussion.)

Ok, I am a little slow sometimes, but I am getting up to speed now. Many things that I just waded through before have become clearer. I had fun and thought it was a good session that everyone got to contribute to at one point or another.

I so wanted to see Chrysler ride the damn motorcycle and worked to set that up instead of cleaving the damn badger's skull straight away. Also, later in that encounter we all started thinking about how to effect the action that was taking place so far from our characters, unlike the week before (I speak for myself here)  where I sat feeling hopeless on the river bank. I failed the roll to state facts about the guard rail that the motorcycle was heading towards, but James and Wil picked up the intent and stated the sign into existence. Later I was able to influence the end of the action by winning a roll and stating into existence the truck ramp that helped save Chrysler from becoming a post apocalypse motor vehicle statistic. Winning and stating facts is good. More fun, more better.

I fell off the reality wagon in the end when I won a 5 fact intimidation roll. When called on it I was in the midst of playing through in my mind the sequence of intimidated zombie back peddles in fear, running into other zombies, all zombies fall against structural component holding up precarious awning, awning falls, zombies are crushed. The burning zombies were so much better! Thanks Wil.

I thought the way we dealt with initiative was better. Every player should have the same number of actions in a combat round. It felt much fairer and did not seem to deter from the game in any way that I could see.

In combat rounds we were just kind of blowing though without much narration. We were just stating, "You take 2 Flesh Wounds." and then moving on instead of narrating how the wounds were taken. This did not bother me really, but did anyone else have an opinion about it?

Favorite moments:

- Vosco spots two surly gangs of varmits on motorcycles preparing to joust. (Chrysler labels them "Teens". Hehe)
- Chrysler screaming down the road atop a motorcycle he does not know how to ride waving a toy gun in the air.
- Able cleaving the badger's helmet in two while still on it's head.
- Zombies in flames. Priceless. (Kudos to Wil!)

[rafial]

I had fun and thought it was a good session that everyone got to contribute to at one point or another.

I agree, but at one point I was concerned I was contributing too much.  I noticed that I was spending alot of time jumping in and suggesting to other how they should use their facts, or how they should set up their rolls.  I want to make sure that I wasn't coming off as too pushy in that regard.  I actually felt I like spent more time scheming on things other peoples characters could do than on my own.

Indeed, but this also bring up a point that was
In combat rounds we were just kind of blowing though without much narration. We were just stating, "You take 2 Flesh Wounds." and then moving on instead of narrating how the wounds were taken. This did not bother me really, but did anyone else have an opinion about it?

I think this is just how Donjon works.  Somebody else pointed out (I believe in the Anvlilwerks forum) that Donjon is really two games, the "combat game" and the "everything else" game.  In the "everything else game", facts provide a broad brush, and narration is extensively spread around.  The "combat game" emphasizes more detailed mechanics, and the scope of what can be done with successes is much more narrowly defined.

[John Harper]

Good comments, everyone. I agree that the session was loads of fun and an improvement over our first game. I didn't feel like you were stepping on toes, Wil. Sometimes it's hard to come up with a lot of good facts on the fly and it's nice to get help from the other players. It's a Social Contract issue, of course and I think we're all above-board enough to squawk if we're feeling pushed around. The ebb and flow of the session felt just right to me.

I really appreciated how everyone got involved in a scene that was essentially my character acting alone (during the motorcycle duel). I was concerned that I might steal too much spotlight there, but you guys were so active in adding ideas, and bonus dice, and whatnot -- it felt like we were all involved in the scene as players. This kind of play is very satisfying and is the sign of a highly functional group, I think.

Matt struck an interesting chord as GM during the session. He was 1 part ruthless/gamist Donjon DM and 2 parts protagonizing "friend of the players" GM. At first I wanted him to be more "evil genie" and play to the Donjon text (as I understand it) but as the session progressed I was impressed with how Matt managed a level of gamist challenge for us while not screwing us over just because he could. It resulted in lots of tough action and also made us the heroes. It felt like some kind of hybrid "Donjon Action Cinema" style and that was just right.

Oh and Mike: Thanks. :)

[Matt Wilson]

Since this is still on the first page, I'll add to it from last night's session.

As usual, I showed up like the lazy bastard I am with nothing prepared except this idea that it'd be cool to have some vultures in the game as villains.

So John rolls his new ability, "detect hazard," and spends facts to state that it looks like the party is walking between two thick metal rails, and another fact regarding this chugging sound that's coming from behind.

And thus was born an encounter. Ah, Donjon is so easy.

So I put some vultures on the train (a very scrap-together sort of train) holding crossbows, and then further facts declared that the vultures were in fact chained to the locomotive, and there was some sort of mechanical spider thingy involved.

So I had the mechanical spider actually be a walking machine for some sort of intelligent evil lobster, who stopped the train and then released the chained vultures to attack.

Serious mistake on my part: not noticing that the lobster had way too much armor protection. As usual, my dice were burning hot, and at one point a player rolled sixteen dice of damage against the lobster's 8 and I still beat him. It was pathetic.

Some cool narrations came out of the session, though. Wilhelm's character, for example, pulled a steam hose loose from the locomotive in an attempt to cook fresh lobster for dinner.

In a very satisfying Donjony sort of way, I whittled down a bunch of the characters' attributes. Next week should be some sort of climactic point (which I'll probably do some actual prep for), and they're all looking like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard.

So far my highest praise for the game is that out of this crazy player vs. DM relationship, there's an even crazier synthesis of great story.  A whole lot of sharing of creative energy is going on.

[Hafaza]

...As usual, my dice were burning hot, and at one point a player rolled sixteen dice of damage against the lobster's 8 and I still beat him. It was pathetic...

Actually I rolled twice with a 16 die pool and once with a few die less and came up empty all three times. I beat on that NPC for the entire session, abandoning the fight at almost the very end. I had really fallen into a rut and was just repeating the same action over and over to really no great effect. It was my mistake for not realizing this earlier and bailing out to find some other more interesting way to take down the bad guy.

I am torn about the die roll mechanic once again. On the one hand I like that there is a possibility that an amazing thing can happen but on the other hand get depressed at the continual whiffs that seemed to happen. After striking out so many times I decided to use an action to do something that I might be able to state facts from. Whiff again, hehe. On the good side, I (and the others to I think) began to really revel in my failures. Instead of focusing on defeating the bad guy I started to focus on narrating my defeat since that was obvious where I was heading. Hence:

GM - "You take two flesh wounds from the crossbow bolt"

Player - "Actually, the bolt missed me and hit a hose on the engine releasing scalding steam and burning me for one flesh wound. I madly scramble away from the steam only to stumble in front of Kain, who is busy hosing down the bad guy with another steam hose. Ouch! One more flesh wound as I run screaming and flailing about."

I think all the player characters ended the session at 0 Flesh Wounds. Wil and I were down one ability point as well and John was down 3 (!) ability points. I anticipate the session next week being a slow spiral down to destruction since we are in such a weakened state now. I guess we will have to figure out ways to defeat things without challenging them physically. Hmmm..

In any case, the ideas thrown about in this thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6071">"Rolling gobs of dice... yet another alternative"
seem interesting.

All in all I had a good time as always. Love learning new stuff like this.

[rafial]

I am torn about the die roll mechanic once again. On the one hand I like that there is a possibility that an amazing thing can happen but on the other hand get depressed at the continual whiffs that seemed to happen.

It's combat that is the worst offender, because you have two chances to whiff.  Once rolling to hit, and again, rolling for damage.   One thing you could do would be to convert damage to a straight (weapon + vitality + bonus) - (armor + werewithal).  And it'd speed up combat to boot!

The thing I noticed is that frankly, the effort of thinking up clever things to do rarely seems to be worth the bonus dice you get.  If you are lucky, you'll generate 2 or 3 bonus dice, and in the sorcerer/donjon die mechanic, that may be worth extra 5 or 10% on your odds of success if the pools involved were already large.  Whoop.

In any case, the ideas thrown about in this thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6071">"Rolling gobs of dice... yet another alternative"
seem interesting.

I think this may yet turn out to be the way to go.  Suddenly a few dice of difference between pools really counts.  This is great when you are on the upside, and sucks on the downside.   On the other hand, getting even a few bonus dice to roll over can suddenly make a big difference.

I'm planning to run a no-frills Donjon one-shot at Monday nights some week soon, and I'm going to use the written die mechanic, but if that winds up showing the same problems as our Donjon Gamma game, I may switch to even/odd dice in the future.

[Matt Wilson]

Session 4 of Donjon Gamma wrapped up last night, with a pile of bonus dice being provided by the group to a single player to have his character pull off a whopper of a stunt a minute before the host needed to kick us all out.

Overall observations of play:

Bonus dice are cool in the two incarnations of the Sorcerer system. Ron talked it up at GenCon, and it's really a nice feature when it gets rolling. The situation noted above was really cool because everyone at the table got in on the action of helping Wilhelm with his character's task.

My lazy side emerged as I rolled pool after pool of dice in a combat with 4 robot automatons fighting the characters. Everyone else rolls 5 times a round. I roll 20 times. Then again for damage if I hit. If I were to do it over again, I'd have smaller numbers of bad guys at a higher level.

Being able to eyeball difficulty and damage numbers is still a bit beyond my capacity. The group came up with crazy ideas, and I was never sure what numbers to assign things. I would like to see a Donjon Pak with a whole pile of sample numbers, or maybe a free downloadable pdf.  Hmm...

Anyway, I think everyone dug the game, especially the ability to create the story on the fly by generating facts.

Some highlights:

A manhole cover that conveniently read: access passage to Vault 23.

Blind, albino plumbers living deep under the ruins of Seattle.

"That card is the sign of the evil one. Where did you get it?"
"Got it off a teen."

A really devious fact that made the enemy robots' self-repair fluid flammable.

[John Harper]

I agree about the bonus dice. Next time I run Donjon (which hopefully will be soon) I'm going to add a rule: Once per flurry, you can do a free action to add bonus dice to a fellow PC's roll. You can do this just before the other PC rolls, during their turn. Also, once per flurry, you can perform a free set-up stunt to add bonus dice to one of your own actions.

Since it's not often mathematically sound to give up a whole action to generate bonus dice I hope to encourage it by giving free actions.

Gamma World/Fallout is a perfect fit for the Donjon system. I'm gonna bug Matt about compiling that Donjon Pak so the rest of you can enjoy the radioactive goodness.

[rafial]

While I certainly had a good time in this game, it ended up being not quite as "hootylicious" as I had hoped.  I've been mulling it over and trying to figure out some of the reasons.  Here's what I've got so far:

1) Thinking up clever tactics to get bonus dice doesn't turn out to be a rewarding as it might seem, because the dice mechanic isn't very responsive to getting 1 or 2 extra dice, when you are already rolling 5 or 6.

2) The double to-hit damage roll pushes up the whiff factor, and takes some of the bang pow out of combat.  Yeah, it evens out eventually, but it can be quite discouraging to have characters simply sit there and hammer on each other over and over again.  Combine this with iffy results from alternate tactics, and combat can unfortunately get a bit boring.

3) The law of successes is really cool when you've got an idea about where you want to take the story, but a pain in the neck when you don't.  Several times, people added weird "facts" to the situation because they felt obligated to use up their successes, when then resulted in everbody sitting around staring at each other going "well that's weird, what do we do now?"

4) For something like Donjon to work well, I think the GM and the players need to have a very solid agreement on genre expectations.  I think we had a little trouble with this, as it was never quite clear what sort of post-holocaust game we were playing.

5) The GM needs to be ready to drop action on the players at any point when things start to bog down.  Furthermore, GM introduced action should push the plot back toward whatever is passing for a story line.  I think the difference in Matt's prep for the final sessions and the middle sessions did show.

[quozl]

For something like Donjon to work well, I think the GM and the players need to have a very solid agreement on genre expectations.  I think we had a little trouble with this, as it was never quite clear what sort of post-holocaust game we were playing.

Yes.  I think something akin to octaNe's first chapter would work well here.

[John Harper]

I agree that for a combat-focused game series, the combats were a little boring in spots (though not overall). I don't blame the system for this, though. Exciting combats (IMO) require two very important things from all the players: Energy and cool narration. Both were lacking during some parts of each combat scene.

In several cases, the dice alone were used to move the combat along. They hit the table (several times), someone said "Okay, that's 2 flesh wounds," and we moved on. Nothing was narrated. No cool action was described. Boring. In order to avoid this, everyone really has to be on top of things and ready to jump in with some energetic narration when the time comes. Donjon's system provides all the handholds you could ask for in this area, we just weren't using them effectively.

I have run *tons* of action RPGs, though, so maybe I'm extra sensitive to this issue. I probably should have been more of a procedure-nazi and really called for narration when the system indicated it (when a PC fails, the player narrates. When a PC succeeds, the GM narrates). This was glossed over way too much for my taste.

[Matt Wilson]

In several cases, the dice alone were used to move the combat along. They hit the table (several times), someone said "Okay, that's 2 flesh wounds," and we moved on. Nothing was narrated. No cool action was described. Boring.

I'll plead guilty to that. It partially came out of rolling five times for every one roll you guys made. That, and I was so entertained by what the players were doing that I wanted to get the mooks done and over with so I could hear what you guys were doing again.

It was kind of a lazy game for me, and I didn't get as revved up as I wanted to.

[John Harper]

Fair enough, Matt. However, in Donjon the amount of excitement is the responsibility of all the players, not just the DM. Much more so than a lot of "standard" RPGs. So, if the combat ever got boring it was just as much my fault as anyone else's. I didn't intend for my criticism to sound like a slam on you as the DM.