[Great Ork Gods] Oh that poor little goblin!

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

 So let's see.  For players we've got:  Vincent, Emily and Corrie.  We also had Bryant, but he showed up late and got to watch (I mean, we could've let him play an orc but he woulda gotten *hosed*).

 I ran the sample adventure out of the book.

 Gods:

 Vincent got:  Slashings/Slayings  and Lift Stone/Pound Rock and Obscurer of Things.

 Emily got:  Guards the Gate and Lying Tongue

 Corrie got:  Flailing Limbs and Sneakings and Peekings


 Funny stuff:

 - Emily (who controlled That Which Guards the Gate) got spacked by the Elf round one.  Vincent threw in the boot to make her fail.  The two of them had some bitter, bitter rounds of payback throughout the game.

 - Vincent, true to his idom of violence, picked up a jagged rock and ran down the hill to bash in the nose (and head) of the elf who'd been knocked off the mayor's house with an earlier throw.  To make handling the rock easier, he used a goblin like a potholder.

 - Corrie played a scrawny ork who was pretty much a coward.  She tried to garrotte the elf with a goblin and when that failed, she tried to backstab the dwarf, but got scared and ran away.

 - Meanwhile, Emily is after the mayor's daughter.  But first she has to find his house.  I call this a sneakings and peekings roll, she says "Then I'll climb to the top of the highest building and toss a goblin in the air and he'll point it out to me."  Since the mayor's house *is* the tallest building in town, I abort the roll and we just go for the funny scene of her looking for the mayor's house by standing on top of it.

 She gets to the house and dispatches the Halfling without a moment's hesitation.  Then she tries to open the door, which is locked, and fails.  So she resorts to glib cunning.  She knocks on the door and begs for help because this poor little gobblin is hurt--  *snap*  I mean this poor little goblin has broken it's leg and needs help.  It works like a charm and one of the daughters opens the door to rescue this poor little goblin.  Normally the success means the gobblin gets killed, but I think it's funnier if the daughter swoops up the gobblin and dotes over the poor little creature.  A bit of a backfire since Emily kept wanting to use that gobblin later on (I fixed it though).

 Side note:  Emily won't kill puppies for satan, but she'll torture gobblins for Great Ork Gods....I find that interesting.

 With one daughter accounted for, Emily spins up this huge tale about how all these sick/injured little goblins back at the cave need the daughter's loving help and easily cons all the daughters into coming with back with her.  Emily is frantically cutting deals around the table to get the daughter's home alive while I remind people she could knock them all off and claim all the Oog for herself.

 -Vincent's first character takes out the Elf and then goes down before the dwarf's axe, but his second character comes back and claims revenge.

 - Corrie runs back to the Elf corpse and picks up the bow.  She first tries to shoot the dwarf, misses and nearly kills Vincent's character.  Then, through the judicious use of goblin spotters, she starts pegging the daughters.  The first one she kills is the one holding the gobblin with the broken leg which takes him out as well and firmly removes him as a free goblin opportunity.  The daughters start to scatter, but Corrie pegs another one.   Note that all of this was done via the elven bow despite the highly justified hard rating that Vincent applied to this un-orky task.

 - Unhappy at this state of affairs (and hey, anything holding a bow must be an elf).  Vincent throws an axe at Corrie.  Thanks to the Goblin riding the axe, it takes down Corrie's character and puts an end to the development of archery in orkish civilization.  

 - Corrie promptly creates a new character named Pansyflower Poopybottom and starts setting fire to a couple of buildings.

 - Vincent throws another axe and kills the last daughter -- so Emily winds up getting nothing off of them.

 - With all the sentient targets dead, Vincent decides to flatten a building.  "How would I do that?" he asks.  "You know what'd be funny?" I say, "It'd be funny if you tried to push it over."  Vincent is the god of strength and that seems really funny so he runs over and starts pushing on the mayor's house.  He utterly fails.  It's very funny.

 -  Emily tries to find a catapault and in the process invents the sign language sign for "gazeebo".  She tries to flatten the mayor's house with it, but simply sends a rain of boulders and goblins down over the town.  Everyone survives.

 -  Corrie pipes up and says "To prove how Orky she is, Pansyflower Poopybottom runs over to the other side of the mayor's house and pushes it over on Vincent's guy."  Vincent makes this really, really hard.  Corrie sends some goblins around to kick Vincent's guy in the shins.  Pansyflower Poopybottom shoves the mayor's house over.  Vincent's guy dies.  We all laugh.  A half-dozen goblins go "oooooooh!" and join Corrie.

 - Emily shoves the catapault into a house and crushes it.

 - Pansyflower Poopybottom just kills Emily's guy.  (Very cold.  Corrie didn't even get Oog off it).

 At this point, we called the game cause Pansyflower was just unstoppable and it was either kill her or try and flatten some buildings which didn't seem much fun.

 My thoughts:

 -  I should've had Bryant make up a guy and had Vincent give him Obscurer of Things.  Bryant could've played and Vincent wouldn't have lost too much.

 -  Spite pools were very low.  I should've chipped a few around to everybody to start with.  In a larger game, I think this might be worse.  I dunno.  Maybe it's supposed to be like that.

 -  Passing out the GM duties is great, but that means the GM (me) really needs to pay attention and do his darn job.  The right people get Spite.  The goblin lives or dies.  That sort of thing.

 - [edit] Also, people kept wanting to use the goblin as they initially described their action, even for things that their god controlled.  I need to firm that up a bit -- maybe have them just give a general outcome and then detail the process once difficulty and spite set in.


It was a very fun game
Tom

[Ron Edwards]

Yay! Three cheers for GOG!

I wanted to follow up on your point about Spite. In the two games I've run, Spite started low-ish, then pooled up fast for everyone (a lot of successful rolls, with varying degrees of difficulty), and then its spending rate was very different for the two groups.

In the first group, Spite tended to get spent more-or-less in the service of "make hard things really hard," and in the second, the open-field "Ack! You bastard!" effect came in. Yet oddly enough, Spite tended to stay high in the second group. Spite breeds more Spite ...? Quite likely.

Oh yeah, and in both games, the primary generator of Spite seemed to be the use of one's own specialty. It's a great trade-off: your ork is better at this kind of stuff, but the other players get Spite for it.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Aidley]

Hi Tom,

Poor little goblin! That's pure, unadulterated genius! I love it. I hope you gave her Oog for that.

Spite pools were very low. I should've chipped a few around to everybody to start with. In a larger game, I think this might be worse. I dunno. Maybe it's supposed to be like that.

It sounds like your players were stabbing each other in the back from the get-go - I imagine under these circumstances there'd only ever be a low level of spite, since it'd never have a chance to build up.

Just to check you were getting the rules right, though: a player gets a point of spite if someone else wins against their God, or if they win against their own God everyone else gets a point of spite - yes?

Cheers,

Jack.

[bluegargantua]

It sounds like your players were stabbing each other in the back from the get-go - I imagine under these circumstances there'd only ever be a low level of spite, since it'd never have a chance to build up.

 Oh yeah.  

 See, the big thing is that most of the Oog comes from killing things.  Since that's almost always a Slashing/Slaying roll, that means that Vincent was always on the verge of picking up Oog forcing the other players to spite in just to keep him from getting an easy kill.  But that usually meant that on his next go, Vincent had no opposition (because Emily and Corrie didn't pick up enough spite on their turns).  

 I should've tried to figure out more ways to force non-combat rolls to give other players a chance to pick up Spite.  

Just to check you were getting the rules right, though: a player gets a point of spite if someone else wins against their God, or if they win against their own God everyone else gets a point of spite - yes?

 Yup.  That was my bit, where I should've set up a more explict GM cheat-sheet to remind me to hand out the Spite and what happens to the goblins and stuff.  I was doing it right (or caught myself anyway), I just needed to be attentive to it.

 People tended to play to their own strengths.  Vincent usually had the biggest spite pool of anyone actually.  Which kinda made the situation worse.  When you played to your strengths you didn't get any spite, but when you needed to kill someone, you had to go against Vincent and his spite pool (which was 3 at the high end, but that was enough).  Plus, Vincent would usually only chip in a single spite point, so if you succeeded, he'd get the point back and not be down anything.

 Still, Vincent rolled for crap and it was Corrie who eventually carried the day.  So who knows.

Tom

[Eszed]

Great Stuff!

I ran into some of the same issues you did.  So as not to fill this thread with my play description I started another here.

[Jack Aidley]

Hi Tom,

Slashings and Slayings is a good God - no doubt about it. The way to reduce his influence is to make frequent use of Stunts and encourage your players to employ such tactics whenever possible: so, for example, you could kill the halfling by throwing him in the lake (Lifting Stone, Pounding Rock). At least, that's the intention of those rules.

Also, as a rough guideline, you should be awarding about as much Oog for the characters doing funny, clever or amusing stuff as for the stated goals. This should help reduce the dependence of Oog collection on combat.

Cheers,

Jack.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My play-experience so far (and there will be more, I'm sure) backs up Jack's points. The GM has a lot of power to inflict stunts on orks, just through local architecture and items. When they get going on building-razing, especially ... the tendency for orks to stand and admire the building they're smashing or burning certainly doesn't bode well.

Most people who've posted so far about playing GOG, me included, talk about how we all break up laughing in almost every scene. I suggest passing out Oog liberally during such moments, especially when they have an unmistakable spontaneous feel to them.

Best,
Ron

[bluegargantua]

Hi,

 Good points.

 I should've slung around the Oog for the funny.  That bit slipped my mind so there was a boo-boo on my end.

 Also, I had a scenario where Corrie said "I use Sneakings and Peekings to backstab the dwarf".  I split it -- one to sneak up, one to hit him, but I should've just called it a stunt and let the whole thing go on one roll.  Could've done that in a few other places.

Tom