[Thugs and Thieves] We're off to save the princess

[Rich Stokes]

Advance appologies for all the typos I'm about to commit, I'm really busy at work and don't really have time to proofread this.

Having recieved the playtest version of T&T last week, I ran a session this Tuesday.  I ran the playtest adventure, so anyone planning to play that might wanna skip this post!

3 players in attendance, all of whom immediately "got the vibe" of T&T as a slightly silly fantasy game with a definate theme.  The players confered and decided that we needed the following characters in order to fullfil the cliche:

A big tough guy
A skillful swordsman
A sneaky thief[/list:u]

What we end up with are:

Ben playing

Nox Bastardson AKA "The Kneecapper"
A midget barbarian.
From the character sheet:
Shortarse barbarian with massive warhammer
Vice - Always losing temper and breaking other peoples stuff.
**basically he loses all his money through fires and compensation payments**

Beast Lore 5 - Curious affinity for wolves
Charisma 8 - Bloody good at scaring people
Cunning 7 - Excelent vision
Physique 8 - "Leaping Bash"
Thievery 5 - TBA
Thoughness 9 - Almost impossible to knockout or stun

Notable kit is a "Bloody huge warhammer", leather kilt and a braided tash.

Cass playing The Black Stoat
a "fackin' thief int I?"
Vice - cheap hos

Beast Lore 5 Gets on with rodents
Charisma 5 repulsive **after some discussion we decided that yes, this could be an advantage under certain circumstances.
Cunning 8 Old languages
Physique 9 Very agile
Thievery 9 Traps
Thoughness 6 resistant to poison/disease

Notable kit here is blades which pop out of shoes etc and a "3 bladed throwing dagger thing that comes back like a boomerang".  While nobody here has any clue how such a thing might realistically be caught without the loss of fingers, the idea seems to fit and we go with it, assuming that it's a bit like the thing in Blade.

Stuart playing Dash Swiftblade
A dashing swordsman
Unfortunately Stuart took his character sheet away with him, so I don't have the stats, but his vice was "Bad gambler" and he was very good a swording it up and looking cool.

Notable kit was a seemingly endless supply of throwing and parrying daggers.

Play starts with the classic Tavern scene which I stole straight from Xena or whatever: Dash loses his last hand of cards and Stoat realises he's skint too.  Nox comes back from the town gaol and uses his last gold piece to buy a beer.  Kings messenger appears nad anounces a reward for heros willing to take on a dangerous quest and we're off.

The overall tone of the game was one of light hearted parody and high adventure.  On their way to the castle of the cultists I had the players encounter a pack of criters (which I made up on the spot called Spider Wolves, huge spiders with wolf's heads, I figured they'd look suitably awful in cheap stop motion) in order to put the combat system to the test before the real action started.  The general consensus was that the integrated attack/initiative rolls worked really well.  Also it gave me a chance to set the tone for fights (ie players ought to be able to defeat such mooks without much hassle).

I think I statted these critters to high, giving them 7 physique.  A sample beastery would be helpful, but can be thrown in as a freebie later for instance.  Only needs to have say, 5 monsters, a puny one, a less puny one etc.  Just as a starting point.  There is a bit about monsters, but perhaps a little elaboration.

I found that the easiest way to deal with all the rolling was to pick a different colour dice pair for each bad guy and roll them all at once.  That worked fairly fast.

Later another issue arose in a later combat:  What if one of the combatants tries to run away?  During a fight with some Goblins in a cave in the mountains, once it became obvious that the goblins were going to be defeated their chief ran away.  Nox Bastardson tried to Leaping Bash the chief before he got away.  Both succeeded their rolls, Nox with more margin but a higher roll.  So in theory the Goblin successfully runs away and acts first, but Nox succeeds with more margin, which takes precident? Does Nox hit the Goblin (because he has more Margin) or does the Goblin escape first (because he rolled lower)?  In the end I rules that the Goblin became a victim of the Leaping Bash because it just seemed that since the fight was already over (the other goblins were either dead or routed) I couldn't see any further use for their Chief.

In this fight I decided to see what would happen if I ran the horde of Goblins as one enemy.  I didn't fancy trying to roll 40 pairs of dice.  This actually worked fairly well.  Since the players managed to sneak around the goblins and then make loads of noise due to a botched plan they were essentially surrounded by many, many goblins.  The way I envisioned the fight working was that the goblins en-mass would get hits in on any character they surrounded.  The character surrounded might be able to parry the blows and even kill some goblins, but more would take their place.  I was quite happy for the characters to outrun the goblins, but what happened was Nox immediately decided to attack their leader while Dash covered Stoat's escape.  Rolling all the Golins into one enemy with 9 physique worked rather well: Every round, if Dash rolled lowest he got to attack.  If he rolled higher, he was defending because the chances were that the goblins would hit him.

Other highlights included me spilling Cass' wine on my carpet by moving the whiteboard suddenly.  D'oh!

All in all, fun was had, largely due to several pisstakes of the genre and a system which was simple and generally elegant enough to keep itself hidden.  

Nice one Ethan!

We'll be playing again next week.

Rich

[ethan_greer]

Wow, cool!  You don't know how glad I am that the flavor "worked" for your players. I like the characters you came up with.

Questions I have for you:
Your group decided to go with a light and fun style, which is definitely a style I want the game to support.  Do you feel that the game as written would work with a (slightly) more serious style?  For example, while there is a definite silliness to the first Conan film, I always get the sense that it takes itself rather seriously, in a rollicking, adventury sort of way.  Would T&T support that more serious style, do you think?

There will be more info included on scenario prepping in the published version, but was the information provided for the sample scenario enough? In what areas would more info have been helpful?

How far did you get into the adventure?

Answers to your questions:
Yeah, 7 is pretty decently tough for mooks.  For mook monsters, I'd have gone with 5 or 6.  Did you have Beast Lore info for the spider-wolves?  If so, what was it?  If not, for shame, sir!  :)

Running away: Your handling of the running away worked for your game, so no problems there.  Personally, I would have handled it differently.  Whoever rolls lowest goes first, period.  So, the goblin runs, and Nox lands his leaping bash perfectly, except the goblin chief has vacated the target area.  Or, Nox could change his action for a penalty to his next Mastery roll, and give chase to the fleeing goblin, or if he had a ranged weapon available, he could try that instead, etc. etc.  Lots of options there.  After the dust settles, if the goblin ends up escaping, he can potentially become a recurring baddy.

I'll put in a few sentences on dealing with pursuits as situations in the game, and I'm glad you pointed this out.

Multiple opponents: Yeah, good call.  For some reason, I didn't envision the sort of grand melee you depicted with the goblins.  Sounds like you handled it well.  I'll take notes and do some testing myself, and I'll definitely be adding a section on large numbers of combatants.

Thanks for posting your experiences, Rich!  I'm glad you had fun with the game!

[Rich Stokes]

Wow, cool!  You don't know how glad I am that the flavor "worked" for your players. I like the characters you came up with.

Questions I have for you:
Your group decided to go with a light and fun style, which is definitely a style I want the game to support.  Do you feel that the game as written would work with a (slightly) more serious style?  For example, while there is a definite silliness to the first Conan film, I always get the sense that it takes itself rather seriously, in a rollicking, adventury sort of way.  Would T&T support that more serious style, do you think?

I think the system could work for a more serious tone, but not with my group.  I cannot think of a single system that would though.  We're all too jaded about fantasy cliches.  We didn't so much decide on a silly tone, it just happened.  But it was a subtle parody, not a blatant silly one.  Some people observing might not have noticed.  We've never played a "fantasy" game before as a group.  In fact I was thinking that there ought to be some rules for MST3K style ridicule of the GMs characters and bad acting/voices.

There will be more info included on scenario prepping in the published version, but was the information provided for the sample scenario enough? In what areas would more info have been helpful?

There didn't appear to be a whole lotta pointers on how to tell the players about things.  Like the cave complex/back door for instance.  I couldn't see an obvious way to let the players know about it.  My play group (and I suppose a lot of others) view a direct confrontation as something to avoid.  They'd see a sneaky back way in as a reward for legwork and research.  But it wasn't obvious to me how you'd do that in this setting.  In a "normal" fantasy gome I would have thought that the players would have done the rounds in the taverns and asked about, but it somehow didn't seem appropriate.  In the end I had the guardsman from the encounter with the Spider Wolves tell them about the cave in the hills, which worked fine.

You mention that there are Fell Beasts around, but none are listed.  Actually looking at the adventure I see that you don't mention them as such, but the word "Trecherous" is used to describe the hills and I wanted to run a fight so I guess that's me being trigger happy.  Might be an idea to introduce a "Mook fight" near the start, bandits or the Spider Wolves or whatever so that a GM can get to grips with the system with some bad guys that won't give the party too much trouble.

How far did you get into the adventure?

Snuck into the caves, got to the island and killed the snake (rather spectacularly I might add).  The guards have just started to arrive nad the players need to make a mad dash back to the castle.

Answers to your questions:
Yeah, 7 is pretty decently tough for mooks.  For mook monsters, I'd have gone with 5 or 6.  Did you have Beast Lore info for the spider-wolves?  If so, what was it?  If not, for shame, sir!  :)

Aha! Well actually:

Beast Lore: Spider Wolves spin silk webs to trap their prey, then jump in for the kill.  A successful Beast Lore check reveals the Spider Wolf's jumping tactic and gives characters the chance to defend against it's attacks +1 (by leaping to the side when it crouches down to strike)

I didn't want them to be poisonous because of the Blood Serpent.

Running away: Your handling of the running away worked for your game, so no problems there.  Personally, I would have handled it differently.  Whoever rolls lowest goes first, period.  So, the goblin runs, and Nox lands his leaping bash perfectly, except the goblin chief has vacated the target area.  Or, Nox could change his action for a penalty to his next Mastery roll, and give chase to the fleeing goblin, or if he had a ranged weapon available, he could try that instead, etc. etc.  Lots of options there.  After the dust settles, if the goblin ends up escaping, he can potentially become a recurring baddy.

I was going to have the Goblins be an obstacle on the way out if the players come back out that way.  But since they got mashed, it's not likely.

Might be worth pointing out that lowest roll supersedes biggest margin in these situations.  That works fine, but it wasn't clear.

Multiple opponents: Yeah, good call.  For some reason, I didn't envision the sort of grand melee you depicted with the goblins.  Sounds like you handled it well.  I'll take notes and do some testing myself, and I'll definitely be adding a section on large numbers of combatants.

I really wanted to give the impression of the goblins swarming towards (and then over) the players.  For some reason I think of those spider things in Lost In Space.

This would probably work well for LotR style battle scenes too, come to think about it.  Since the heros are so many times more skilled with the pointy sticks than the goblins/orks/barbarian horde/revolting peasants or whatever, there's VERY little point in actually bothering to play out every attack.  Treat the opposing army as one bad guy, every wound kills one opponent.  Eventually the battle ends say after Y rounds, if the players kill X baddies in that time their side wins.  If not their army is defeated.

Dunno if that'll work, but it sounds like it might.

Thanks for posting your experiences, Rich!  I'm glad you had fun with the game!

It was a blast!

Rich

[ethan_greer]

There didn't appear to be a whole lotta pointers on how to tell the players about things.

You're absolutely right.  I'll make a note of that.  Seems to me like there should be specific ways to disseminate information like that for this game...

Might be an idea to introduce a "Mook fight" near the start, bandits or the Spider Wolves or whatever so that a GM can get to grips with the system with some bad guys that won't give the party too much trouble.

Also a good idea.  I'll throw one in.  Can I steal your spider wolves?

Snuck into the caves, got to the island and killed the snake (rather spectacularly I might add).

Nope, I can't let that one slip by. :)  How was it spectacular?  What happened?  Specifically, I'm curious if the snake was too tough, or not tough enough.

[Rich Stokes]

Can I steal your spider wolves?

If you think they're worth it :)

Nope, I can't let that one slip by. :)  How was it spectacular?  What happened?  Specifically, I'm curious if the snake was too tough, or not tough enough.

Wellllll, I can't remember the exact details, but the gist of it was that The Black Stoat got to the island ahead of the other two.  In fact, he'd snuck off successfully and swung on a grappling line over to the island before the other two alerted the goblins to their presence.  While they were killing off the goblins, he made it to the island and spotted the Serpent.

Rolled a 12 for his beats lore and promptly decided that it was, in fact, a harmless herbivorous slug which looks exactly like a Blood Serpent as a camoflage.  You can tell the difference by checking for eye flaps, which this one clearly has.

So he basically ignores it and walks straight past, right up to the princess and starts untying her fram the pillar.  Blood Serpent immediately leaps at him and misses.

"Bloody 'ell" he says and gets ready for a fight.  By this time the other players have dealt with the goblins and are on a boat approaching the island. They see the Serpent go for Stoat, and decide to intervene.

Scripting round:

Stoat "I'll leap onto the back of the serpent's neck and stab it in the head"
Nox "I'll Leaping Bash from the boat onto the island and I'm going to hammer one of my daggers through it's tail like a nail so that we can all get away and it can't follow"
Dash "I'll throw a dagger at the serpent"
Serpent attacks Stoat

All roll:
Serpent got an eight, I think,
Nox gets a 4
Dash rolls something like a 6
Stoat hits snake eyes, literally.

Serpent tries to defend and gets (funnily enough) less margin than Stoat.
Serpent fails it's toughness roll.

So;

"Stoat leaps into the air [with a margin of 8!], flicks out the blades in his shoes and wrists and lands square on the serpent's head/neck.  He plunges bothe his shoe blades up under the serpent's jaw and into it's throat.  One wrist blade slides neatly into each of the serpents eyes."

Basically it was downhill for the serpent from there.

In retrospect, this wasn't strictly correct, as I don't think you have any rules for totally fluffing a roll; you mention that a roll of 12 is always a failure, but not specifically a spectacular one.  Ditto with 2, but the high margin there implies that it's a great success.  I'm just too used to this type of rule I guess.

So with my group, the serpent went down rather easily.  The problem is that with 3 against one, the chances are that one of the players will get to act first almost all the time.  Therefore, the serpent has to either abort it's attack to defend every turn, or take it on the chin and hope that it's Toughness is enough.  The fact that the serpent attacks twice (mouth and tail) helps a bit here, but I can't help thinking that most groups are bigger than 3 players.  With 4, it's outnumbered 2 to 1 and as far as I can tell, doesn't have much chance.  Maybe adding all the players up as one opponent?  A bit like HQ?  Probably be a bad move dramatically.

Also, what happens if the serpent defends? Does that just abort one of it's attacks?  Or both?  In my case, since one character attacked the head and another attacked the tail, I just treated it as 2 opponents and it all worked out fine.  But I get the impression that it's really supposed to be a fight where the players gang up on the serpent, not where one of them gets a really good roll and the serpent never really gets a chance.  Maybe the serpent ought to have more WOUND levels?

In the end, I got the idea that the Serpent was supposed to lose anyway.  Maybe if it has more wounds the fight will last longer, but the players will (and should) win anyway.

[Rich Stokes]

Also, it would be a good idea to give some stats for the cult guards.  Not that it's such a big deal as there are generic guard stats in the main book, but it might make things easier.

[ethan_greer]

Sounds like it was a totally cool combat.  I'm tickled pink - that's the kind of thing I wanted the game to facilitate.  Sounds like that's working okay.

What concerns me is the outnumbering factors you mention, and how they affect combat against one big bad.  Hmmm.  Design thinking cap firmly strapped to my head.  Hmmm.

Thanks for the details, Rich!