It's Almost Time for Another Felltower Questionnaire

It's been, oh, 7 years or so since I last did a player questionnaire.

I discussed the concept here:

Player's Campaign Feedback Questionnaires

I was vaguely considering this around session 200. We're now on 201. So my plan is, after the PCs finish either this next session or finishing sacking the Brotherhood Complex, I'll hand out a new set of questionnaires. Much will be the same, but I may add or change some questions to reflect current questions I have brewing around.

It's really a good time to take the temperature of the campaign and survey the players. So be on the lookout for that. And I'll post a questionnaire link at that time for anyone who wants to play along at home, or use the concept with their own games.

Epic Games Free Game: Return to Moria

I haven't played it, but I grabbed it - Epic Games is giving away this game:

Return to Moria

Given that it's free, and I already have an Epic Games account, I went for it. Just passing along the news in case anyone is interested.

Friday Roundup 12/13/2024

End of another busy week.

- Computer RPG as a training device, perhaps? This 1979 CRPG has you play a doctor and prescribe treatment for patients. Pretty neat. Part of me feels like this is what were doing for nuclear reactors playing SCRAM! It didn't come up in my line of work, though. Probably for the better.

- Beowulf, as a DF Wrestler template GURPS character.

- Illustrations from Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord. I'd forgotten about Mordorcharge.

OSR Christmas at Tenkar's Tavern

Tenkar has a list up of what will be in the OSR Christmas. Have something you want to give away? Contact him at the email in the post.

Updated With More Gifts! OSR Christmas 2024!

More rulings & notes from session 201

Yesterday was session 201.

More notes!

Mocking their best option. At one point, Thor moved up into the guards vs. cultists fray, and a cultist stepped up from 2 hexes away to adjacent to Thor. Thor's player said, "Are you seriously stepping close to the human Quisinart?" and I said, "Yes." I mean, what an idiot. This fool was stepping from 2 hexes away from Thor, who has a 2-hex sword, into 1-hex range, where the cultist's club can hit. Thor's player instantly retracted it, but it was a funny moment - the cultist literally did the most combat-effective move he could do in the situation - stepped into a gap in a line, closed in on a fighter with a longer reach weapon than him, and attacked.

The fact that he was totally doomed was a whole different manner, but hey, with cultists resisting intruders, "Surrender because I'm probably overmatched" was about as much of an option for him as "Go home empty handed" was for Thor.

So if throw with both hands . . . Yes, I allow Dual-Weapon Attack with thrown weapons. It's about as silly as can be (just picture it), but I allow it. You must target the same or adjacent hexes unless you have Enhanced Tracking, which allows seperately aimed ranged attacks. There was a suggestion that cone rules could be applied to determine an appropriate spread of potential targets, but that'll be complex and I don't think any better from a play perspective. It'll be even harder to rationalize, and harder to actually implement. Same with "one automatically scatters." That's easier but I'm not sure it's really more believable that one always misses by 1 at a minimum.

More VTT notes. It would be nice if the character in a hex that is "up" on the turn order would be automatically selected. It would be nice if I could put names on tokens Always on Top. It would be nice if I could apprend a random 3-digit number in () after each name of duplicated characters so I can tell them apart. It would be nice if I could drag-and-drop damage onto the characters on the turn tracker. Also, it would be nice if status was a drop-down menu unconnected to a token - drag and drop status effects would vastly speed up dealing with mooks.

Hirelings cost how much? The PCs spent around $4K on 8 guards, 2 laborers, and 4 125-point hirelings. That's 14 people, some with substantial pay asks. Also, they promised higher pay in order to help find them (see, "Where did you find these guys?" in DF15) - and that adds up. It would have be a lot less if they'd offered normal rates.

Do we get a bonus to find known guys? No. If you took a -3 to get an elf with broadsword and Fireball it's -3 to find that same guy again. It's not -0 because it's a known person. It's just pure luck and GM laziness that makes it the same character next time, not because it's easier to find the guy the next time. Maybe realistically it would be, but it's a game and I don't want to reward gaming the system by jacking up the bonuses to find a specific type of character and then not needing those bonuses net time for that same character. No thanks.

Ho, Ho, Ho? Next game is likely 12/22, and/or 12/29. We'll see.

GURPS DF Session 201, Brotherhood Complex 8 - Raid, Part I

Actual Date: 12/8/2024
Game Date: 12/12/2024
Weather: Cold, clear, dry.

Characters
Chop, human cleric (301 points)
     Brother Quinn, human initiate (125 points)
Hannari Ironhand, dwarf martial artist (316 points)
     Amlaric, human squire (125 points)
Thor Halfskepna, human knight (306 points)
     Leon the Eye, human archer (125 points)
     Aaron, Brandon, Cedric, Dortmund, Ernie, Ferd, Grunlark, and Hansel, human guards (62 points)
     Bullworth and Oxford, human laborers (62 points)
     Honest Charles LeGrand, human squire (125 points)
Vladimir Luchnick, dwarf martial artist (298 points)

The PCs hired up a bunch of able-bodied men, purchased sacks and backpacks and rations, and headed off to the Brotherhood Complex. They reached it in due course, and headed in.

Long story short, they tried to head "left" towards "the gnolls." Naturally this entailed going straight and right, and going right back to where they fought the guards last time. There, thanks to confused guidance by Vlad, they headed to the "barracks," only to find a hallway to a storeroom. As they took a look at it, their mass of guards yelled, "We're under attack!" as shouts of "Get them!" and "Attack!" rang out.

The PCs turned to find their rear guards fighting a mass of robed, club-and-shield bearing cultists.

In a short, sharp fight, one of the guards was knocked out (and two had their cheap swords break) and most were wounded . . . and all 12 of the cultist guards were down - dead, crippled, or just out. Hannari and Thor took out a couple, Vlad a bunch more, and their guards and Honest Charles a few as well. Chop used Command to keep the enemy off balance until they were all downed.

The PCs left their NPCs to loot the guards and searched the rooms they came from. They wanted prisoners to question, but didn't bother to bind up with wounded . . . and left them in the care of NPCs that include one with Bloodlust (6) . . .

The PCs found some coinage, a box of spices, and a food and drink. They dumped out the food, spilled a barrel of vinegared water on the mess, and dunked three corpses in the water, wine, and vinegared water. Once everything was ruined, they headed around the complex.

They found a dead end (checked with See Secrets), and a few more doors that all led back to the room with the black hand on the floor. From there, they checked a few more corridors, and found a door. Thor forced it open . . . and suffered a massive wave of cold that chilled him to the bone. In front of him was a sizeable room full of brown mold. They fled as the mold expanded, accidentally running into a dead end and then back out. Only Thor was harmed, and they backed off.

Needing a short break, they retreated to the entrance to fully regroup. We ended there.

Notes:

- the whole fight was under 9 full seconds. Fights in GURPS are ridiculously fast. For a small, cloe melee, it makes sense, but in actual play, 1 second turns means a guy search a room takes 3 seconds to turn, run down a hallway to a fight, find foes, and kill about one per second for 5 seconds. It took longer to write this sentence than for 30 combatants to fight until 12 of them were down or dead. It just feels too short. Part of me sympathizes with people who just say turns are 3-5 seconds but don't allow any additional actions. The whole brawl taking 30-60 seconds would feel brief but not crack versisimilitude like this does. The whole fight took about, oh, 3 hours to play out. Long for a mook fight, but with 30 combatants, it was slow to resolve. That makes it feel doubly weird when it turns out to be only a few seconds long.

- MVP was Chop, who used Command very effectively to break up the cultist's attempts to keep fighting.

- the whole "stop and regroup" thing is a way to allow us to let the PCs continue their delve - they spent a lot on NPCs - like $4000 - and want their money's worth, but also to allow our missing players to join next time. Since it wasn't in a fight or even in a crisis situation, it seemed reasonable to allow them to regroup for 15-20 minutes, heal and recover fatigue, and then head further into the complex.

Fun and productive session, even if it looks short on the summary.

Final game prep

I had only a little to do today for game, and not a lot of energy to do more. So I:

- ensured the VTT is up to date

- updated the rumors for Felltower

- ensured my manuals, maps, and so on are ready to go.

Nice bit about a persistant dungeon game is that I don't have to do too much.

Friday Roundup 12/6/2024

It was a good week for reading:

- Echoes from the Geekcave has a post about why he uses the 1 gp = 1/10 lb standard. I don't love it, but I understand his arguments for keeping it.

- Tom Van Winkle wrote "The Historical Argument about Racial Diversity in D&D." I present it mostly as a post of interest - I stay out of the whole discussion of gaming as a whole as much as possible. I like our game, and how we do it, and the silliness and whatnot that comes with it. I won't pretend it's a model of any particular ideology or worldview, but it does produce a lot of fun. When I do take a look around at gaming as a whole, it always seems to be like it was in the past - a lot of people fighting about who's way of playing is right and why it's right. I'd rather take a pass on all of that these days . . . but I always like to see TVW's take on subjects.

- I finished Jon Peterson's book, that I started back in August.

I'll stand by my description in that link - it's a more readable story of the development of D&D and roleplaying games. I just liked the detail more in the 1st edition; this read more like his later work, Game Wizards. I enjoyed it well enough, but I don't think I'll return to it again in the way that I did and do with the 1st edition.

- Felltower is Sunday . . . small group - 3-4 players? - and we'll see. It's likely they'll skip the Brotherhood Complex without the firepower of Duncan and Persistance Montgomery. NPCs just can't provide enough to make up for a couple of 300-point PCs.

- Iron Llama on how to play GURPS!

More VTT questions for Felltower

I've had a little more time, so I've been spending it on learning my VTT of choice more in order to enhance Felltower. I found a good source of tokens, so I'm largely good there. And for terrain, too, but that opens up a whole new set of issues.

I do have some things I need to learn:

- How to put down a tile as a texture on the ground, rather than as a moveable object.

- How to use images as terrain features without making them moveable tokens. Maybe that's the same as what I just noted.

- How to attach light sources to objects without having to make them actors/tokens.

- What the heck Region does.

- How to make light sources visibly working even when you can see without them. Right now, guys with Dark Vision can't tell you there is a torch lighting an area, which is odd.

That's about it for now. I'm working on these.

Felltower Update

Next game of Felltower is 12/8, so today I:

- finished some VTT work

- tried out some mapping software for battlemaps

- updated a few monsters

- did a final update pass on the Brotherhood Complex as of 12/7/24, so it'll be ready to go next Sunday.

Should be fun!