More notes on Session 190 - and Felltower in General

More notes on Session 190.

- I'm not saying this very old rumor is true, but I'm not saying it's not true, either. I'm just saying that, it's been said that "If you kill a troll with fire, it’ll come back as a ghost troll. You need to kill them with acid."

- The PCs pretty much mauled, probably killed, a pudding thorugh a lot of melee damage and some fire damage. The tough bit with oozes, slimes, puddings, and jellies in my experience is that in D&D there are special ways to kill them . . . and in GURPS, most of those ways suck against oozes, slimes, puddings, and jellies. Also, they tend to have other resistances on top of that. I don't blame the players for trying, but Sean Punch didn't program in a lot of easy ways to deal with his monsters.

Ultimately, they're a mix of predators and scavengers, and Felltower has plenty of places for both.

- The PCs had to deal with several entrances that have suffered from prior play.

The bugbear caves? My notes say Dryst collapsed that.

The well? The PCs used it to raid the orcs and helped damage it, and the orcs took care to block it off from there.

The main entrance? A mix of PCs, hobgoblins, orcs, PCs, other monsters, and PCs have mauled, mangled, and damaged the entrance until it's like it is. They narrowly voted against breaking the locks on the remaining intact door to make it easier to get in. That might be true, or it might not. Time will tell.

The spiral stairs down? It was locked by no fault of the PCs, honestly, although careful reading of the rumors, the game logs, and checking the dungeon might explain what happened. I'll admit I know the answer and the clues are quite weak - they weren't meant to be such. Anyway, there is a clue in an earlier delve how this ended up all rusted up and destroyed.

The cave mouth? The PCs don't want to go for the chimera and stone bull without a couple specific additional characters.

The river entrance? Rarely spoken of, probably because it goes so deep into Felltower that no one is sure what "level" that is.

Tough go, getting into Felltower these days. I've said that I should have made it more accessible but the PCs closed half of the entrances through their own intentions of making it easier to get in. Ironic.

- Nothing like a pointless fight to discourage exploration. In a way, that's what Wandering Monsters are for. I'm sure some of my players see them as a Fun Tax. They're mostly intended as a Don't Mess Around and Don't Brute Force Through Doors and Walls Tax. And a dose of logical consequence. The game is on Hard Mode after all. Still . . . I get the frustration of fruitless encounters. But I'm not sure from my side of the screen how to deal with frustration causing the PCs to derail their plans. Fruitless fights cost game time, and naturally the goal should be to avoid them rather than engage in them. Not always possible - the trolls came after the PCs, not the other way around - but it can be. Even if I took wandering monsters out, well, the PCs literally walked into the pudding and crushroom "lairs." It's tough to make fights appropriately difficult but always enjoyable to engage in and yet not all just be loot pinatas that reward fighting everything and anything.

I tried just giving extra XP for deeper exploration but the PCs speed-ran all the levels they can easily access to get them all in one session. I don't think there is another good way to encourage exploration of deeper levels or genuinely new areas beyond just giving XP for doing so.

The start-and-end in town thing also eats up time . . . but we've played that way for years and still had significant exploration of levels deeper than 1-3, and some gate transits that forced extensions.

- More than once, I've been asked, "Are we really going to sit here and ______ or can we fast-forward it?" Usually this is, "and roll to bash this door down" or "calculate how long it takes to dig out this well/through this wall/down to another level/shift earth into the dungeon/shift earth out of the dungeon" or something like that.

The default answer is YES. Yes, 100%. Especially if it's time spent digging, building, shaping, bashing, or otherwise dealing with obstacles with brute force and FP powered by casters using Lend Energy to keep laborers going or laborers getting energy siphoned off to keep casters going. I'm not fast forwarding things meant to avoid exploring dungeons and fighting monsters. I will always, always, always volunteer to speed things up that need to be sped up, or which will have no interruptions or consequences for failure. I'll just do it. No need to ask - the answer will be no, we're not speeding it up.

- All in all, this seemed like a fun session to me, but then it ended with an unhappy group after blundering into the pudding.