Usual Monday game notes

Here are a few more notes on our game session yesterday.

- The gnolls were somewhat tough, between fodder and worthy. In my parlance, they were "tough fodder." Their offensive was potentially potent, as they're strong, and they have a solid amount of HP and a typical HT score for a combatant foe (11-13.) They weren't skilled, but their shields helped them reach defenses that were above the typical fodder mark of 10 or less. Overall, they'd take a few blows to put down, but not too many, and they couldn't deal with PCs one-on-one.

Of course, there were a lot of them. More than a dozen is a lot, especially for a group of five. They didn't have great morale, except when they were winning. Even then, they were too chaotic and disorganized to press the attack properly. Without the wizards, they have been toast.

But then the wizards came.

- Doug put it the best. The PCs forted up when they needed to move out. They boxed themselves into a known dead end, in an occupied complex, after intelligent foes had escaped them. They stayed there a good 10-15 minutes or so.

The reliance of PCs on post-fight healing and rest - or let's say the expectation of post-fight healing and rest - has doomed a few parties now. "It's okay, monsters will show up and we'll kill and loot them" has been voiced a few times. This generally doesn't work out. I understand the drive. After a solid fight, you might have a few people who need to rest to recover from crippling injuries from critical failures, or your wizard or cleric might be down to a handful of FP, and you might have injuries to your fighters. But rest time is not guaranteed to be uninterupted. It's rarely a good time to rest, right after a big fight.

Still, the siren call of loot - "there must be some hidden here" - and healing - "we need to heal and recover FP" - means people take that risk very often. Most of the time, it works out okay. The times it doesn't are not always fatal . . . but this time they were. No one voiced a, "what else besides gnolls might come?" on this one. All I heard was concern about getting the line overrun by slams and dealing with gnolls in close combat. Those were legitmate concerns. But so was the idea that they'd have some ranged foes, too, and not ones you could ignore thanks to shields and Missile Shield.

- Those missile spells the cultist wizards threw cost a lot - 9d = 18 FP. Even with my generous per-second skill deduction a skill-15 guy needs 15 FP to throw one. It's why the next ones were still big, but noticeably smaller - 6d is only 12, or 9 FP for skill-15. 24 FP! It's not likely there was much, if anything, left in the tank after that. But it worked out - a PC line in a small hallway, tightly packed to ensure they can't be flanked or outnumbered, is a perfect target for explosive spells.

- Modified Great Haste seemed pretty good. It needs some notes on Ready and Change Position. It's still not smooth. Smoother might just be saying you get two of the same Maneuver in a row, but I do like the defensive bonus and reduced attacks (+1 attack instead of two turns worth of attacks from guys who might generate 3-5 attacks already.) It was hard to get used to at first, but I did like how it worked overall.

- Where next?

Up to the players. Their next crew can go for the complex again, or they can go for Felltower. It's been quite a while and Felltower will have some lesser things in the upper levels again. But I'm lacking the time for a new location so it's that.

Or we can take a slight detour from Felltower for a bit and play something else, but that'll take some consideration and agreement across the board.

DF on hard mode rolls on.