RoadTrip Inspiration

As may have been mentioned before, Shieldhaven and I go on a number of road trips, usually to Georgia, which involves many hours of natter. And not a little of this natter, of various sorts, is about random design ideas and the like. The chief topic of discussion this time were a pair of branching ideas, stemming from his thinking about how to make martial combat in D&D 4e feel more parry and thrust... have a certain amount of dynamic action, where one can actually respond to attacks in a way that is logical given one's particular class (read: Martial School). One hopes he will expound further on the topic, as it was a really cool idea, and I contend that it is not that difficult, in 4e, to do something like this by adding minor action powers to classes.

However, when he was first pitching the idea, I managed to completely misunderstand what he was trying to do, sticking on the point of, "a purely martial system." Which made me think about, "wait, why no mages? What if there were NOTHING BUT mages?"

Now, it occurs to me that most of the time, when one winds up talking about any given tabletop game system, one is actually talking about combat systems. There's a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that it is more clear-cut to reduce combat actions to roll something, do something, than the huge and open field of social endeavors that people can undertake.

And then there's magic. Magic, especially in earlier editions of D&D, is pretty much a box of tools a mage can use to fight, sure, but realistically they have a potentially huge number of applications, limited only by whether or not you're the sort of person who would do well in Spontaneous Competitions in Odyssey of the Mind. So what happens in a world where everyone is basically a wily tool-user, and there's none of the beloved hack-and-slashers to stand before our dress-wearing wimpiness and take the damage?

Well, first of all, rather than dispense with the question of why there are no fighter PCs, let's come up with some answers.

Session Roundup #3

The only gaming this week would have been the run of my game, in which we finished up an encounter that had been called in the previous session on account of snow.

It was a pretty darn elaborate set-up, and I tried a lot of fiddly moving parts for it. There was a big stage with a dias about 3 feet up, and large stone pillars. Two members of the party (The Rogue and the Avenger, my trouble twins) had been sucked into performing as the "Hero" Wizard who had built the dungeon and his sidekick, while the rest of the party were stuck in the audience. They could affect various things by making skill checks to interact with the Shadow Attendants who worked as stagehands.

In the meantime, the two actors made skill checks to carry out tasks narrated by a booming, invisible voice, in sort of a 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?' way. Successes gave them bonuses to successive checks, or affected the outcome of the play. Also, I had given them stage swords, which (though they weren't entirely aware of it), ignored the Insubstantial quality. This would be important later.

Or, pretty immediately, as they were attacked by shadowy-wererat minions pretty quickly. Yes, that means dire rats with the Insubstantial quality (though they did not regenerate). Fun! They dispatched them all right, and then were sucked into a plot where the Hero-Wizard was dragged off and forced to become engaged to a Shadow-Actor "Rat Queen," much to the Dismay of her "Royal Vizier".

According to the narrator, the Wizard had crafted a magic wedding-ring, which turned the Queen into a beautiful Eladrin woman, causing her to scream and faint dead away, and the Vizier (an Elite) to be pissed as all hell.

Roll for initiative.

The rest of the party then Diplomacied a Shadow Stagehand to take them to the greenroom, so they could "join the play".

Okay, so the setup.

First of all, many thanks to Shieldhaven for writing up the statblocks for me, as I was creating this stuff at the very last minute. Also, everything I've described so far happened in the previous session, more than a month ago. Yippee!

Anyway. There were more stage weapons available at the sides of the stage, which would solve the Insubstantial problem for the weapon users. The implement users however had a real problem. My solution was to have three spotlights, which moved around the stage, which allowed magic to do full damage. Also, I decided (though this could just be the case) that insubstantial meant that the minions just didn't take damage from normal weapons. Bad times.

The problem was getting the players to figure this out. Some really amazing Arcana checks hinted at it strongly, and one of the wererats was a standard Leader, who also had to stand in the spotlight to use any of his abilities The Vizier alone didn't have this problem. It wound up not mattering for the Vizier, for a couple of reasons.

At each quarter of health, the Vizier summoned 8 or so wererat minions and 2 standards-- a skirmisher and a Leader. So that was fun. The Vizier managed to do his first summon just before the rest of the party made it to the stage, which created some problems with the rats having advantage of position, and the newcomers not having stage weapons yet.

For starters, the Rogue used a sneaky trick, concentrating on a magic necklace in her possession, and changed into the fainted Rat Queen, bluffing the Vizier into believing that she was really said Queen. His insight bonus being all right, but not awesome, he fell for it hook, line and sinker. They managed to interrupt combat, and convince him to send the Real Rat Queen off for questioning with two of the standards, and to dismiss the minions. It also gave the Cleric time to filch some stage weapons for all the magic users. Once that was done, they got back in a fight and beat him down pretty hard, which piffed his bloodied summon of minions, and brought down the curtain on the first act.

Now, Minions that can't be killed are a pain in the ass-- since no one in the party figured out the spotlights in time to use them. However, I made a punt when the party entered the stage that wound up sort of invalidating, quite by accident, my previous mechanic.

So when the party came on stage, they wanted to wear costumes, which were available, though I had no idea what should be. I rolled on a random list of dungeon dressing for inspiration. The Invoker got a fiery gown (from rolling 'matches'), the Artificer got a cloud (from rolling 'pillow'), and the Cleric got a sort of faunish, leafy thing (from rolling 'pipes'). Once they were on stage, their costumes made them seem like elementals, and I decided that damage sources that worked with their costumes would ignore insubstantial.

Yeah, so the invoker can deal full fire damage, and the Artificer with the Lightning Spheres cam do full thunder/lightning. So... yeah.

After a short rest, they went back out for the second act, which involved fighting the Rat Queen-- a level 4 (I think) Solo. She got off one attack and a summon of a bunch of minions before the Rogue changed back to herself and convinced her, through bluffing hard, that really, all she wanted to do really was marry her, and the Vizier was a traitor. The Rat Queen's insight being even worse than the Vizier's, I gave them a round of skill checks to extract themselves from the battle. Yeah, everyone rolled like, 25s on each skill they used. Fully. So the end of the play had the Wizard-Hero properly marry the queen, and granted them a magic item of rat summoning pipes. It also gave them enough xp to level them to 4th.

Went pretty well, for being 2 sessions with a month in between, and the party really liked being able to get out of combat with a skill check. I do not have the crazy skill-check fu that Stands-In-Fire has, so I'm sure there were ways to make it a bit smoother. But once again, I do so love using skills in 4e.

Apart from that I've mostly been playing Fallout: New Vegas or watching Shieldhaven play Overlord, which are good times both. Sadly, since I am a sniveling, console-monkey weakling, I have to be content with the slim playlist offered by New Vegas radio and the few other stations offered by the game, and the damn bug that replays, "Ain't That a Kick In the Head?" all the time, when I'd rather hear "Mad About the Boy" or the one about the Ranger with the Big Bar on His Hip.

Tonight is another DtD Update, which is cool, as people seem to dig getting LARP rules/website patch notes. Who knew! Software Development Practices are awesome!