Topic: We played last night, and had a blast!
Started by: Jaif
Started on: 5/5/2002
Board: The Riddle of Steel
On 5/5/2002 at 9:48pm, Jaif wrote:
We played last night, and had a blast!
That's the first time my regular group has stayed up to 3am playing an RPG in a long time. We had a blast. I'm not going write up the whole thing - there's just too much backstory I'd have to put down as well. I'll say this:
1) I'm new to Riddle, and a bit rusty in general, but the game still went very smoothly. I'm happy with system overall. All of the non-combat stuff went very well, and our poor & ugly PCs were suitably punished<g>.
2) The hardest part of adjudicating combat, for me, was shifting the time scale. In the time a player took to sneak around a house, someone could fire a number of shots and a melee would be long, long over.
3) The optional rules I proposed in other threads worked well:
a) Using Perception/Battle to slow down combat sequences went nicely. Characters discovered this strange human device known as "the neck", and often spent several seconds looking around to see what's happening. I didn't toss it in all the time, just when time was a real factor.
b) I threatened to give a die to the defender for repeated attacks to the same zone, and players stopped always attacking the same spots like they always did in our mock combats. It's not a perfect solution, but if felt right to us.
c) I made characters in most situations roll Willpower/Battle to attack, rather than simply picking a red die. It actually didn't make a difference (only one person, an NPC, didn't make it), but it didn't interfere either once we actually did it once (right, willpower, hang on...).
4) That was the smoothest chargen I've done, and all players were pleased with the system. For certain background reasons, I reduced people's social stations by 1 and raised 1 skill package by 1 (e.g. 5/6, 6/6, 6/7 for A, B, C), but otherwise I didn't touch anything, even attributes. Everybody's character felt quite competant.
5) I used an evil NPC sorc, but I didn't realy use the magic system, just the feel. My (other nation) sorcerer was raiding a village for cash (guess who happened to be there?<g>) and I assumed that he was super-cautious and would favor his life over hijacking the tithe the village had collected. Basically, he waited until dusk (so he could cast magic without easily being seen) to raise a few undead from the cemetary (I assume some combination of spells would do this, I didn't work it out), and sent them as a diversion towards the local church. His agents, meanwhile, setup another diversion, then tried to ambush the cart. The sorc stayed out of it, and was only glimpsed by one player once as a figure on the horizon. Had anybody closed, I assumed the sorc had a teleport spell waiting in the wings to flee, but that wasn't needed.
Sorry I haven't talked about more non-combat stuff. The reality is that we spent most of our time outside of combat, and even the combat time was mostly planning & manuevering (retrograde advances, that sort of thing<g>).
Anyway, it was a good time.
-Jeff
On 5/6/2002 at 12:57am, Nick Pagnucco wrote:
RE: We played last night, and had a blast!
Grr
argh
...you wouldn't by any chance live near Albany, NY?
*hopes beyond hope*
On 5/6/2002 at 4:26pm, Lyrax wrote:
Glad you had fun!
Sounds fun! About the necromancer, it is certainly possible to imbue human bodies with spirits (thus animating them), but I haven't been able to figure out an easy way to do it.
With combat, I have found that it's usually best to simply go ahead with the combat if someone else is doing something time-consuming. If it's only semi-time consuming (like sneaking around the back), then I'd probably come back to him after each person has had about two short fights or one long one. Of course, combat is usually over by that time anyway...
Perception/Battle is a great idea. Also, it could be possible in some instances to use Per/Heraldry (who's fighting who), Per/Strategy or Tactics (who's winning), or even something like Per/Survival (incoming threats). All of this really depends on what your characters are looking around for.
Rolling WP/Battle to attack sounds interesting, but many people don't have the Battle skill (Like *MY* main character!). It somehow doesn't seem fair to not allow them to attack. I've noticed in my sword practice that it doesn't take much willpower to decide whether you attack or defend. Remember that a double attack should be a rare occurence (and one to be avoided!). The only people that defend more than attack are those who care about their own lives. However, if one is being pressed into a corner by a horde of knights and has to hold the flank or all is lost, then that is a WP/Battle roll, most definitely (failure leading to the character fleeing).
All in all, have fun. That's what these rules are here for. Whatever works for you is what you should do in the end.
On 5/6/2002 at 5:52pm, Jaif wrote:
RE: We played last night, and had a blast!
Sorry, long post. Many things to cover.
Sounds fun! About the necromancer, it is certainly possible to imbue human bodies with spirits (thus animating them), but I haven't been able to figure out an easy way to do it.
I've been thinking more of how I'll handle this in my world. I want my necros to be able to summon undead for quick & dirty stuff. I don't have numbers in front of me now, but it'll go something like this:
Abstract - If you want to animate a corpse and send it off to do something, you need corpses & spirits. This implies a graveyard. You can bring corpses somewhere and then summon spirits, but it's best to start where the two are co-mingling. Also, in Jeffland (a very important place<g>), spirits avoid the afterlife for the classic "died wrongfully" or "something left undone" reasons. However, spirits lose their memories very quickly, and soon just have a sense of wanting a body to do something, but may not know what the something is. (To continue the thought, eventually a spirit forgets its wants entirely, at which point it "crosses over" and John Edwards can do his thing.)
So, our necro needs a graveyard. He then uses vision to see spirits, and imprisons them in some handy bodies, summoning magic to sustain the spell. Bodies weigh much less after they're dead, so you can get 4 of them under 200lbs. Now that the bodies are animated, another spell is cast to give them a reasonably simple command and imbed an image: say, a picture of the church and the idea that you should attack. The necro may then cast a final spell to thin the ground somewhat so the undead can rise in a reasonable amount of time. As for the cost of imprisonment, that would be a health point to cast the spell. Seems appropriate to me.
With combat, I have found that it's usually best to simply go ahead with the combat if someone else is doing something time-consuming.
Yeah, that's what I did. My complication was entirely story-side, not mechanics. The characters thought that an artifact they wanted was being taken out of town on a cart, so 3 of them went to stop the cart, without actually killing the people inside. Since the loot in the cart was the target of raiders, there emerged a sort-of 3-sided battle, and it became very confusing.
Meanwhile, one PC had gone to the church, where the artifact really was. I wanted to run his combat and get it over with, but at the same time I wanted to preserve the suspense about the artifact's location.
I've noticed in my sword practice that it doesn't take much willpower to decide whether you attack or defend.
I've argued this elsewhere. In brief, there is nothing like the fear of death in sword practice. Period. Almost every single person who's been in combat mentions that nothing can really prepare you for it; fear of death, immediate and personal, is just something different. (Btw, I've toyed with fencing, done my paintball, and dressed medeival and clubbed people. It's thrilling, but not the same as a head-on collision at near highway speeds, and I assume not at all like the continued fear that people must feel in combat.)
Rolling WP/Battle to attack sounds interesting, but many people don't have the Battle skill (Like *MY* main character!). It somehow doesn't seem fair to not allow them to attack.
I told my players up front to expect it, so they picked battle. Quite frankly, if I had waited and sprung the rule on them, I'd have given them battle and knocked a level or two off it to represent usage. One skill more or less isn't going to 'unbalance' things terribly.
A couple general statements about using battle in the game:
I would not use it for small, clear fights. A duel, a 2 on 2, even the start of an ambush on the attacking side. There isn't much point, and the situation is different.
However, when the players are scattered over a village, zombies are attacking, arrows from unseen raiders are appearing, and some story-points are in conflict (you can't take that artifact!), then uncertainty rears its ugly head and I make'em roll.
-Jeff