I ran StWT for a pickup group last Friday. We themed it around centrally Germany with a fairy tale touch to it. Players are Ben R, and Ping.

Some weird stuff happened that was maybe me, and maybe the game system.

There are two PCs. One's a wizard with magic and maps. The other is a royal guard with arms and gear. Their city is great in magic, but poor in most everything else. They've just enchanted a crown for the King of the Great Horde, but it's been stolen by goblins. The goblins presented it as a trinket to their goddess, a mummy-queen who sits eternally enraptured at the image of her husband captured in a magic mirror these 1000 years--but that's another story.

There's a lot of confusion when the PCs try to use heated conversation and command at the same time. The wizard's trying to wheedle the truth out of a goblin sentry while the guard threatens with her sword. It's classic good cop-bad cop, and it should work great, but somehow it's not working at all. In part, I'm GMing it wrong. In part, the PCs are confused about how to use their dice. This confusion has arisen before. This would be a great thing to target with a good extended example in the final rules.

Later, negotiations with the goblin chieftain break down, and it turns into a fight. The royal guard is a blue dice maven with daunting presence. The goblins have to get pretty lucky to hit her, especially when she figures out their weakness, which is that they can't walk on bare earth without pain (the whole village being a maze of wooden walkways and balconies). So she's using terrain to make it even harder for them to hit her. The wizard, however, is getting smacked around.

There's a weird space here where the royal guard is nigh unstoppable against this group of foes. If she doesn’t have the wizard to worry about, the fight is hardly worth playing out. The optimum strategy here would be to just send the guard in and let the wizard watch from the trees or something.

As a GM, maybe I'm not too worried about this. It's not like fighting a group of miscellaneous humanoids is all that common in Storming, as opposed to, say, low level D&D. But it did concern the players.

So the wizard is getting smacked around, even with the guard's help. He's taken lightning as a spell, but he can't get it off because goblins are hitting him. So he's passing up the miscast. Then his miscast rolls are hitting his arcane down with great regularity, making it even harder for him to cast. He's caught in a bit of a death spiral, and there's nothing he can do about it. Maybe if he could restore his arcane with a rest or something it would be OK, but it's gone for the rest of the session.

So the Wizard uses magic to distract the Goblin Chief and sprint past him into the maze of wood and stone that is the goblin tower. The maze inside the tower is a terrain monster with bind. It quickly beats the wizard badly and has him entirely tied up. We could keep rolling dice, but it's not going to help. Ben’s frustration with wizard-dom goes up a notch. Eventually the guard arrives and cuts him loose.

In the uppermost chamber, the PCs elect not to fight the mummy-queen, instead, convincing her that they can trap her in the mirror forever with her lover (conveniently leaving them in possession of the lost crown). Magic and heated conversation mesh perfectly in this final scene, and it ends quite well.

Some of the frustration in this session came because we were deliberately pushing hard in order to give a good playtest. My one big critique, however, is the miscast table, which I think can be better.

So someone has miscast a spell. There's a lot of tension, fear, and interest here. It's a great playing moment, and we want to capitalize on that. I have some opinions and suggestions. Looking at the table of possible results:

No miscast: everyone breathes a sigh of relief. That was close!
Spell goes off next round: This fizzles a lot. If we're not in combat, it's like "something happened! Oh, never mind, nothing happened."
Spell takes 2 rounds to cast: This is annoying, but not particularly interesting and can also fizzle.
Drain arcane: This is hugely painful. It's a very bad result, compared to the other results, none of which have much teeth.
Take damage: This is medium bad, but still not that interesting.

None of these is really surprising or interesting. I compare this with John Harper's Warhammer fantasy campaign where spell miscasts are a huge deal and a focus of much interest and excitement. Ask him if you want to know more; he probably has some useful insight.

A more interesting result would be the spell hits a different, randomly selected target. Then you can get a range of results, some of which will be wild and unexpected, some of which won't be a big deal. If a range of results are possible, then a result that doesn't cause much mayhem doesn't feel like a fizzle, it feels like a lucky break.

When I read "the spell hits you for 1 damage", I see a bare mechanical effect. It doesn't give me much clue that something's actually happening in the fiction. I want to see something like "the spell blows up in your face", with an additional note that 1 damage is caused. It's an invitation to elaborate on what happens. Maybe mention the possibility of minor side effects as well.

Some other suggestions:
The spells effects are the opposite of what's intended.
The spell is delayed, but the effects are doubled.
The spell creates a sudden connection between you and the target, or some other magical creature or thing in the immediate surroundings.
The spell explodes and you're sent flying through the air.
Spell has some permanent effect.
Maybe you define some town-specific misfire event during town creation, like demon infestation, or chaos mutation, or something.

Hey Tony,

My immediate thought for another miscast table effect would be to allow the GM to "complete" one (more?) miscast boxes on the character's spell sheet.  This would be a great substitue for the loss of arcane.

Also, I think that an exploding table would be cool.  Oh shit, I rolled a six...the 7-12 table is where all the bad crap is.  Oh noes!  That's where the doozies should be.

I really think that the main table should be mostly colour (some minor mechanical effects, like spells going off late, at -1 hit, etc).  The exploded table should be where the seriously bad doo-doo is.

D

This is great. I made up the miscast list at the table, the first time somebody miscast a spell, when half the game's rules weren't set. I'm excited for the nudge to revise it.

Exploding tables is a good idea.

I'll be sure to write a solid good-cop bad-cop example.

2 PCs, one a wizard, is grief! I played one time where I was a warrior and my kid Elliot was a wizard, and we were the only PCs, and we got hosed. Elliot's wizard got taken out by a 1XP encounter with some poisonous sewer rats, and no way I was fighting on without backup.

I'm not sure what to do about that, or even if anything needs doing. It is a thing, though.

-Vincent

Yeah, part of the frustration was a matter of expectations. If you want to be dropping lightning and fire on stuff, you should be a combat mage. I think I needed to understand the difficulty of mages and set appropriate expectations through the character class. If he'd even taken a weapon of some sort, it would have helped a lot. Our mage in the other game is a combat mage, and he lays down some considerable hurt.