Pages

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Crogar the Cursed

In our last session, Crogar hit himself on a critical failure and crippled his own leg (5 on the Critical Miss Table.) He also tried to parry a bite from an ankheg and got his arm crippled.

This is hardly the first time. Crogar has been critically hit a number of times, and it feels like it's been a remarkably high number of initial hits in a fight. Fight opens, something attacks Crogar as he's always among the first to fight, and I roll a 3 or a 4 and paste him but good.

It's happened so often I feel like he deserves the nickname, "Crogar the Cursed."

His player keeps on trucking. He groans, complains, hangs his head, and so on . . . but does stick it out.

On some level, I feel kind of bad. He's an elementary school kid playing with a group where the next youngest is college-aged and working. So naturally I show him the favoritism of ruthlessly enforcing the rules on him no matter what because that's how we do things. I'm a big, "You'll learn by doing it wrong and then doing it right" kind of guy. But the dice seem to hate him, in the same way that they hated to have Hjalmarr go through a whole fight without dropping a weapon. It's not just Crogar, though - the same player ran Dave the Knight, currently known as Dave the Dead, who once tried to end-run around a Black Reaver to grab some treasure. Not his best decision, in that it killed him. But he also took a number of fight-opening critical hits that suck much of the enjoyment out of a big donnybrook.

The solution?

He's saving up for Luck. It might not be enough, but it will certainly get rid of one of those nasty fight-starting critical hits against him. Hopefully for him this last delve without it - he just needs to get sufficient loot and sufficient exploration. That should be doable . . .

8 comments:

  1. Yes! Luck would be good for Crogar. Hjalmarr's purchase of Luck was largely due to constantly dropping his weapon, hitting himself, straining his shoulder, failing consciousness checks...often with 18s (because he rarely dropped below 16s on attacks), or, on health/consciousness rolls, often missing by one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My daughter did the same—start saving for Luck—after a near-fatal critical failure on Major Healing.

    Many years ago, I was in Doug Cole's Black Ops campaign, and consistently rolled so bad that the other players would ask me to look away when they rolled.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I noted to someone long ago that the Luck advantage generally doesn't really function as good luck (that's Serendipity), but rather the absence of bad luck. It functions sort of like Common Sense, but for die rolls rather than judgment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a very accurate description. It rarely causes you to pull off something amazing, but rather gets used to avoid something bad. And it's still a bargain for all of that.

      Delete
    2. Yes, it's typically used to avoid bad luck instead of, for example, crit fishing (although Hjalmarr *may* have used that once, not sure). It's a tough choice--in a *super hard* fight, you might be better off trying to crit fish against a glass cannon type foe, but they often hit so hard, you want to save it for defense. That's why you need Ridiculous Luck!

      Delete
  4. My son had the same issue in the last campaign. His cleric was constantly eating turf on critical failures.

    I am the new referee, and I don’t use crits for anyone except for Fighting-Men, and they only get critical hits, not failures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That makes sense if you're running OD&D or a D&D-based game. With GURPS, it's a more difficult issue, because critical hits and failures are necessary to the proper functioning of the system. Without them, you can get actually impregnable defenses and unstoppable attacks and that's not good for play. D&D assumes you don't have them, so adding them on makes for a potentially big swing in how the game plays.

      Delete