[Storming the Wizard's Tower] They come from the land of the ice and snow

[Jay Loomis]

This (undoubtedly very long) post is an account of my first two sessions of StWT. You can find the rules here.

I set up my group with a small village at the base of the Jutland peninsula (in what is now the Holstein region of Germany). The village grows barley and rye, has some minimal livestock, fishes in the saltwater inlet that it sits on, and sends amber south to a thriving trade route to the Mediterranean. They have a lot of bog land nearby, and they harvest the bogs for peat and iron. I chose this setting because we no very little about the people that lived in this region in the first few centuries BC. What we do know suggests that they might have had things in common with Nordic, Germanic, and Celtic cultures. They (as far as we can recon) practiced some sort of ritual human sacrifice which ended with bodies buried in the bog, which I also found intriguing.

Creating characters was a fairly straightforward thing. It's a matter of rolling for your six stats and then deciding on a character type and picking stuff from lists depending on the type you chose. We got a bit sidetracked because I had mentioned the part about the setting being a fantasy iron age, so there was quite a bit of discussion about how many things on the equipment lists were not appropriate for the period. I think I know why Vincent has set the setting up like he has, but it should be something that GMs internalize and then don't talk about with the group (Vincent himself mentioned a game he ran and said he didn't tell them where their town was--he just described it with good in-fiction perspective).

We ended up with a Warrior, a Scholar (mage), and a Ranger. I started this game before Vincent decided on town-specific character types. I would have set some of those up had I started later, as I think they add to the contextual color considerably (to give you an idea about how this works, had I set up types for this village they might have been: Warrior, Matriarch's Guard, Hunter, Bog Runner, and Druid). So instead of characters colored with their local setting, we got kind of generic D&D archetypal heroes.

One of the things that people liked was that nobody is prohibited from doing anything based on type. Your stats tell you what you're good at. Your type tells you what kind of stuff you get. The player with the warrior was seriously considering buying a spell or two.
The first adventure was straightforward. The setup is that someone or something had been removing the bodies of sacrifices made in the bog. This had angered the spirits of the bog, which manifested in a giant shambling creature that sucks the life out of people. On a rampage, this monster had sucked the life out of some of the local bog people (2 1/2 foot tall, friendly bog dwellers) and turned them in to tainted undead monsters. The bog itself was teaming with angry energy and I made it into a terrain monster.

In keeping with Vincent's guidelines, I set the situation up and just let the PCs do what they wanted. In this case, the village matriarch asked them to go look into the bog situation after one of the villagers was slain while out gathering bog iron. They obliged and went straight to the spot in the bog where the villager was attacked. The bog as terrain monster was easily defeated (I think it took them two rounds as a group) the "big showdown" was to take place at the holy place where the druids performed their most sacred rites. I had the map drawn up of the mound rising out of the bog with standing stones and large trees (the only of these around for a quite a distance). The monster rose out of the bog to unleash its fury and...was almost instantly slain by the heroes.

After they had already taken care of the big encounter the heroes went to investigate the bog people (it had been revealed earlier that they had been conspicuously absent when the iron-gatherers had looked for them. The heroes walked in to the quiet (and very small) village to be ambushed by the zombie boglings. This time there were three weak monsters against three PCs and I did my only damage of the evening--1 hit to the ranger before the heroes dispatched the monsters.

The adventure being over, the heroes went back to town bearing the goodwill of the boglings and the pulsating stone heart of the giant bog beast. The experience and advancement process went pretty well. Everyone found things to do with their experience.

The second adventure was a little less direct. It suffered a lot from me making mistakes about rules, but went fairly well anyway. The matriarch called the heroes to her and told them that, with winter coming on, they were in desperate need of firewood. The woodcutters that normally traded with them were a month overdue. The heroes were to go and find the woodcutters and get the firewood delivered.

I really screwed up the non-combat rolls. Vincent had several good suggestions about how to adjudicate them. The first is to count successes as things that the GM owes that character. So that, when the ranger was tracking, I could have had him roll once and then track those successes as he proceeded instead of what I did, which was have him make repeated rolls. Anyway, they heroes travelled to the village of the woodcutters, which had obviously been abandoned after some sort of attack and was partially burnt to the ground. They tracked the villagers to their hideout in a cave and learned that some sort of magical creatures spouting flame and shaped like very large wolves had attacked the village. There was a fair amount of tracking through the forest until the heroes finally stumbled into the village of the forest people who live in a giant magical tree (corny, I know, but I like it).
Anyway, after some negotiation with the forest people, the heroes got an escort to (or near to) a place where strange spirits dwell. It's a barrow from before the forest people can remember and their people won't go there because there are some angry spirits about. The heroes got into an epic battle with skeletal, flaming wolves of great stature.

There was one big one that breathed a deadly cone of flame and two smaller ones with vicious bites. I had learned my lessons from the first adventure and crafted these beasts to be more formidable. They were. The whole party got knocked out (after killing the big bad and one smaller one).

This combat gave us some things to chew on, because it lasted longer than a round. People found the core tactical approach to the game a little hard to grasp. Vincent has built the game around the idea of using the shared imagined battle situation and individual creativity to come up with tactical constraints. That is, instead of having a bunch of specific maneuvers and special rules, he has a generic framework that is flexible enough to be used for almost any conceivable situation. After using it (albeit badly) I am really impressed with the core battle mechanics. I'm not sure how to better lubricate a group that's not used to this kind of flexibility so that they'll get into the spirit of it, but once people started getting into it, it worked admirably. The main downfall of the group was that they didn't protect the mage. He got the brunt of pretty much every fire blast and was taken out before he could do much damage to the monsters.

So what does all that mean?

First, the game does a really good job of capturing what I liked about D&D before I tried to learn the official rules: have a bunch of maps and stuff to refer to while making up cool stuff with your friends. The core is all there for a game that I will happily play over and over again.

Second there are some pretty big holes in the rules as currently written. This is a rough first draft I'm playing with, so that's understandable. However, there are some fundamental issues that I think need to be addressed:

• Monster creation, while clever and fun, is badly unbalanced and unstructured as it stands. The monster abilities are all worth a single experience point for their base effect, but they are not equal. Then, adding efficacy to an ability costs an experience point, but that addition is rarely on the same scale as a new power. Further, some abilities are deadly when combined. As a GM, I should have confidence that monsters of a given experience value are roughly equally effective. As it stands, I am not. There should also be some guidance as to how many experience points an encounter should have to pose a given level of threat to heores given their number and experience level. This kind of math goes part and parcel with a game that is tactical and about slaying monsters, and it is largely hand-waved at this point.
• Some character abilities are wide open to abuse. Yes, the GM can always say no, but in a system as encouraging to thinking creatively as this, some care must be taken. One of my players has a Guiding Spirit (map) that he's defined as a hunting spirit that helps him on the hunt. A Guiding Spirit enables a player to roll Command and add any hits to his Perception roll. He also got the "Wild Instincts" power which enables him to roll Perception in setup and add any hits to his red or blue die total for that round. When combined, these two make a very potent, unbalanced situation. Maybe that's OK, but I haven't done the math to see how out of whack it is.

[lumpley]

Thanks, Jay!

I propose that once you're creating all your monsters well, with only effective combinations of abilities and solid coordination between the monsters in a given encounter, the XP scale works fine. What you're doing now is giving XP away for free sometimes, because you're still learning how to make and play the monsters well.

In other words, not every 5-XP monster is equal. The rules don't prevent you from creating weak high-XP monsters, by giving a monster an ineffective assortment of abilities. However, all the optimized 5-XP encounters are equal, or close enough to it. Learning how to optimize an encounter is part of learning how to GM the game, and it's perfectly fine if it takes you a few sessions to do it. So the players get some easy XP? Perfectly fine in the early sessions, when they're learning how to play too.

As far as killer player combos go, I'm comfy with them too. A ranger with a familiar spirit and wild instincts should roll serious dice.

I play with a couple of logistical load-lightening rules (they'll be in the book, eventually). First: supporting rolls only 1 deep. Rolling a familiar spirit to support your wild instincts = cool; rolling empathy to support your familiar spirit to support your wild instincts = too much. Second: for supporting rolls in combat, pretend you rolled half hits (rounding up). So in combat, don't roll command for the familiar spirit, just add 2 or 3 dice to the perception roll for wild instincts.

Notice that adding 2 or 3 dice to the perception roll will, on average, add 1 or 2 dice to the combat roll, which will, on average, add 0 or 1 hit to the outcome. All of the killer combos are about the same: good for about one hit.

-Vincent

[Jay Loomis]

That all makes sense. I think that, provided the final rulebook is filled with good examples (I'd like to see some contrasting well-designed monster and poorly-designed monster examples for instance) that should all work out. I'll give you another update after tonight's game.

It's hard to gauge whether my group is digging it (of course, they did have a total party wipe last week) but I'm having lots of fun!

[lumpley]

I'd like to see some contrasting well-designed monster and poorly-designed monster examples for instance

Great idea.

Do tell about tonight's game!

-Vincent

[Jay Loomis]

Last night's game went off reasonably well.

This was another straightforward (and slightly weak, plot-wise) adventure. Three new heroes were given the task of finding out what happened to the four that had gone off to get the load of firewood a couple of weeks earlier.

The color part of the game was not as full as the previous adventure, because the heroes were following in the footsteps of the previous party and all the players knew the landscape already.

The players have started to remember their resources. They used a Guiding Shadow spell to lead them to their comrades, which was a total cinch. They found that the fallen heroes were in the care of the forest people, who had dispatched the final spirit once they felt the strong spirit wane. The other heroes were all in a magically induced sleep while they recovered, but in the mean time, the forest people had a boon to ask of the new three. The sacred resting place of the forest people had become infested with angry spirits. The forest people themselves were reluctant to go and exterminate the maddened spirits of their ancestors, and they asked that the outsiders do the deed.

The monsters looked like this:
Maddened Spirits of Forest People (madness/wood) 4 HP base
Attack (Anguished Scream) - 2 Red, nerby
Drain (perception) - 2 Green, linked to attack
Dazzle - Perception vs. 4 to engage (+1 XP)
+1 White (+1 XP)
4 HP; 6 White; 2 Red; 0 Blue; 2 Green (drain); 3 XP

This is a little bit of cheating. First, in that I picked a material from the Scary monsters list and combined it with one from the regular monster list. I figured this was OK. More cheaty was that I made up an attack type. As I make more monsters I crave the ability to be more creative with attacks than the monster lists allow.

We really learned the ugly power of monster abilities that take away your setup. Luckily one of the players had his ranger take the "Quickness" power, so he got to engage and do a regular setup action. We also had a Command-based scholar who was our tank. He wasn't so lucky and spent a few unproductive rounds getting his white dice taken away with the double whammy Perception drain and mandatory Perception roll combo.

We had some discussion about how to get around this. I came up with two alternatives that I thought sounded reasonable and within the spirit of the game (both were intended to help him protect the mage, which was the primary goal):

• I told him that if he wanted to protect the mage without fighting he could interpose himself by taking an "other" action and using his Skill for Green dice.
• I decided that if he was fighting but not actively trying to hit the spirit, he could take his setup roll to issue to rally the mage, but that since he would be swinging at his attacker without really focusing on it, the monster would get +2 Blue against him.

This situation seemed pretty important. Setup is where the tactics really take place in the game, so taking it away every round not only seems mean, but it makes the game less fun. We used my second option (because his Skill was crappy) and it worked out OK.

The mage, meanwhile, was having pretty good luck rolling for attack spells. He managed to take down 3 out of the 4 monsters (with some help on one of them). The no-miscast rules had their desired effect as he weighed the gamble each time and made a choice.

The ranger was the only hero to go down, due to 2 unlucky rolls. My attack against him was a really high roll and his Endurance roll to stay up was really low. Those are the breaks.

Before combat started, the heroes were examining the sacred place from a distance. A giant, manicured tree that had been grown with deliberately radial branches forming distinct levels--each large branch providing an anchor for hanging mummified forest people all along its length. They were trying to figure out why the spirits were rampaging. They got so far that they were starting to talk about how they might avoid the conflict. Even though that become obviously not an option, I was happy that they had started thinking outside only killing monsters.

Another good note: I used the non-combat rolls more like they are intended. A tracking roll gave the ranger a number of details equal to his hits, for example. This system is really cool. As a GM working off the cuff, it's great to have it plainly stated, "tell me 4 details about this thing." It works like a charm.

Next week, the players will have their first chance to pick which character to play (well, two of them anyway). I'm interested to see how this dynamic works out.