[Cold Iron] New Campaign

Back here I was talking about starting a new campaign. We ended up settling on Cold Iron after some hashing around between Cold Iron and RuneQuest. The players weren't really invested in either choice, and while RQ was more favored, there were some issues I touched on in this thread.

While the D20 campaign was finishing up, I was updating my Cold Iron character generation to fit the Blackmoor setting that we chose, and to deal with some issues that arose during my Tekumel campaign. Basically I eliminated the character types that weren't actually going to be playable the way I run the game (they were all actually additions of mine - poluting a nice gamist supporting system with some simulationist supporting stuff). I set it up so there aren't choices that detract from combat/spell ability which will be the center of play. There is some non-combat fluff to round out the characters but it's pretty minimal.

We have now had two play sessions under our belt. It's going way better than the Tekumel campaign. The sim/gam incoherence of the Tekumel campaign isn't there. The setting is a typical D&Dish setting, so no need to read up on it (one player did borrow a setting book to read, but it's not necessary for play). The PCs are well focused.

The first play session produced three combat encounters. The first was a little warmup, a little frustrating because a lone undead ghoul wolf managed to run away from them (they couldn't keep up with it - and started out of range with it). A quick tracking roll failed.

So they continued on and camped for the night. They immediately looked to the trees for sleeping (though they had a donkey that couldn't get up in the trees and the Dwarf NPC didn't want to sleep in a tree, one of the PC fighters also slept on the ground). Some nice player level discussion about setting watches, my pointing out that I do run night encounters in Cold Iron (I basically ignored them in D20), and some good thought about options to minimize danger. The encounter they ended up with, several ghoul wolves, went well and everyone got a good chance to see the system in play.

In the morning, they tracked the wolves back to their lair (one had escaped) and fought some more ghoul wolves. A very different encounter since they were all prepared, and in the confines of a cave.

After that, they made it into the village they had been heading to and made contacts with the leadership, someone with a map to more caves, and someone offering a bounty on a necromancer.

Last night's session picked up with them heading off to the caves on the map. The first cave had a couple lions which they dispatched pretty easily. During this encounter, they did discover the cleric shouldn't fight... (she fumbled and almost injured another PC). They used up some magic. Then one player wanted to rest, another didn't think they really needed to rest, and I supported that (perhaps not a good idea - sort of a gamist challenge though).

The next encounter was a bunch of skeletons in a cave. The PCs rolled poorly, and the skeletons rolled well. And the result was a near total party kill. The one player said "See, we should have rested." We all agreed it was a bad dream. I asked them if they wanted to go back and try the skeletons again. Of course they did. So the next time, they went in rested, and with better tactics (and slightly better rolling on their part, and not nearly so good on the skeletons part). And they won (though it still turned into a tough fight with one PC going down but not dead).

And I think that was really cool gamism. I refrained from fudging like I would have years ago. And it was much more satisfying to say "oops, that was a bad dream" and try again, and get a legitimate win instead of cheating.

In A Plea for Gamism, we were talking about minmaxing and gamism. Cold Iron is a game where I definitely expect the players to minmax. In my character generation writeup, I point out the relative value of the attributes. I tell people, if you're not running a spell caster, don't waste any points on the stats used ONLY by spell casters. I help players pick good weapon choices (and aim them away from the bunk choices). With this current group, there has been no resistance to that, but in the Tekumel game, there was all sorts of resistance. One of the reasons I like Cold Iron as a gamist system is that it has already been hit pretty hard by hardcore minmaxing gamists (I'm not sure if my use of hardcore is exactly right here based on the glossary since there isn't a lot of competition between players, at least not overtly, but there certainly is minimized exploration).

If I have any concerns so far, it's that the point buy system I'm using leaves spell casters with almost no ability to fight with weapons. But back in college, when we did random rolls, I think the spell casters usually ended up with way better stats in toto than the fighters so while they didn't have as good physical stats as the fighters, they still had stats good enough to be able to contribute to a melee. But the roll up method was totally bogus because we had to discard so many sets of rolls. We could easily spend 30-60 minutes just rolling. And it was pretty unfair. I might have to revise things a bit, we'll see how it all works out in play.

The players have also expressed the expected dismay at some of the mathematics. That's a legitimate complaint, but I hate to change something that does work (and most of the time the math can be ignored, and when it does need to be done, I'm happy to do it). The normal distribution chart (which was discussed here), is a little intimidating (one player suggested rolling 2 d10, and subtracting them and making a 10 exploding. That generates very different probabilities (which are not transparent like the chart is) and is a little clumsy.

Last night, they also expressed a bit of frustration at how the open ended rolling can put a character down fast. It gets a lot better at higher level, but is also a significant tactical element (since if you set up the tactical situation right, you don't need that high a roll to get a nice deadly crit - because of the open endedness of the system). Part of the problem there is that skeletons require a crit to destroy, you can't wear them down like everything else - that means that the skeletons may land an equal number of crits (or more) on the PCs. Probably the way skeletons are set up is bad.

Frank