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Sunday, June 25, 2023

DFRPG Felltower Adjacent - Session 1

We played a session of Vic's game today. I won't write a whole summary, because that's a lot of work and won't increase my enjoyment of the game. I'll give a brief summary. If Vic wants to write a summary I'll post it here.

- we met up in a town and headed off to find a missing mentor of our bard. Along the way, despite Per 14, Handsome didn't spot an ambush. Amusingly, the ambushers threw glue at him but missed and glued up our bard, instead.

- we slaughtered the ambushers, all except one. Sadly, they were kobolds. I don't like kobolds. On a 1-10 scale of dislike to like, they're a solid 2. Felltower adjecent doesn't mean you'll see kobolds in Felltower and I'm kinda sad they even exist in the same world as it.

- We made it to town and found there was a bounty on kobold ears of $5 per ear, so three of us went back and took their ears and brought them back. We also got $100 for the live kobold.

- We heard about a kobold camp, but also a ruins where we needed to look for our bard's mentor. We went there.

- We met some folks who wanted to show us a dragon's bones. Our bard told them it wasn't a dragon. Handsome spotted a hidden guy with a spear and went to shoot him, just as one yelled, "Just kill them already!"

- That's how it worked, except in reverse. We killed them all, including a gnome Heroic Pistol Crossbowman. He kept shooting his dinky crossbow with poisoned bolts at a half-orc and a dwarf. Hadn't he read DF3?

- We didn't kill one halfling who surrendered, after Handsome tried and failed to kill him (a clean miss, my only clean miss.)

- We turned the halfling in to town as a bandit, sold everyone's stuff, and saved the mentor of our bard.

- Handsome had a pretty good hit ratio. 14 shots, 13 hits, 3 of them dodged. So 10/14 damaging hits. That's because Scouts are good and I preferntially shot at foes least able to see the arrows coming.

- XP was 5 for sufficient loot, 1 xp for fulfilling a quest goal, 1 xp for the bandit fight = 7 xp. MVP was Handsome for killing a bunch of guys and for my crack about the idiot assassin trying to poison the two guys with Resistant to Poison 5.

I bought Slayer Training (Bow/Vitals) for 3, +1 to Bow skill for 4, and learrned Carousing because Handsome is a party orc.

Rules question of the day - is cancelling a spell a free action? The rules don't say it is, but they don't say it isn't, either. I'm 99% sure we've played it as requiring a Concentrate action, but it was run today as a free action. I think it should require Concentrate, since it's a non-trivial thing to do.

8 comments:

  1. > is cancelling a spell a free action?

    I did some more digging into this. GURPS Magic and DFRPG Spells use nearly identical language for "Canceling Spells" (p.10 and p.11 respectively) and neither specifies. Dissipating a held melee or missile spell is a free action during your turn with no FP expenditure (Magic p.14/Spells p.13). A dig into the forums didn't find any better answers (though it was by no means exhaustive). I can see ruling either way, though given that dissipating a missile is free, I don't see a pressing reason to require a Concentrate maneuver to cancel any other ongoing spell.

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    1. The big question for me is how we've done it before. If it's been a Concentrate maneuver in our game before, that's how I'll run it going forward. I need to check with two of our players who run a *lot* of wizards and will likely remember specifically how we've played it.

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    2. Kromm says it's a free action.

      http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=2239914&postcount=2

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    3. That might be the RAW but Felltower isn't often the RAW. It's just a question of what we've done in the past. We'll see what my players say. I'm 99% sure we've run it as requiring a Concentrate maneuver, and we even had to make a ruling on multiple cancellations at the same time.

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  2. I always thought it was an action because I remember you posting about people hoping their Created Servants got killed so they didn't have to cancel the spell

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    1. That was more about the 1 FP cost, funnily enough. Action economy was less important than the FP management. I candidly don’t recall either way because my casters rarely cancelled spells in combat (because typically that comes up when FP is running low anyway).

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  3. Ooph, both 1 FP and a Concentrate Maneuver? That's a bit rough.

    I could see doing one or the other, even allowing for a choice... though if I allowed for a choice I'd probably make it more than 1 turn. I'd have to think on it, look over a few things like how long it takes to cast the longer spells, how long those spells tend to last, etc... to see if "Concentrate as long as it took to cast it" would be a good fit or not.

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    1. It's that or suffer an ongoing -1. It's another tool in keeping a cap on "buff everyone always."

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