Additions to Felltower - DF23 and DFRPG DTG

Here are some additions to Felltower from recent books.

Dungeon Fantasy 23: Twists

Strongholds

Felltower delvers are eligible to buy Strongholds. These can be explained in many ways - inheritance, purchase, taking over control of an abandoned area, etc. In all cases the appropriate costs must be paid - $10,000 per person. While some of the benefits of a stronghold are already folding in "town" benefits, PCs with a stronghold will get:

- cost of living mitigation

- access to skill-appropriate equipment per DF23 p. 6. Note these just remove the penalty for lack of equipment - you don't get a bonus.

Other additions? We may use Status and Rank, if enough players desire it. The other stuff isn't really appropriate.

Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game: Delvers to Grow

I've discussed these a bit before.

Herbaceous Mastery - available for druids.

Scroll Scribbling - available for anyone with the appropriate prereqs.

Vanishing Act - thieves only, may not be usable in all circumstances (especially in tactical combat)

We've discussed Master at Arms but I don't want to use it as written and discussions haven't gone anywhere. So it's still a maybe.

I decided Soul Warding would result in endless questions - does it apply now? How about now? And now? And this time? And hey, did you remember to include your Soul Warding DR? Etc. Not worth it to me.

For now, at least, those are the additions to Felltower.

Short posting break

Sorry guys, busy day today, tomorrow, and into Saturday as well. I'll miss a few days of posting but should be back with a Felltower-related post as usual on Sunday.

My take on take-backs

This post over at Monsters & Manuals prompted this response:

No Take-Backs?

It itself is a response to this post:

Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items

In any case, this quote is from Monsters & Manuals:

"Is it ever legitimate for a DM to say to the players: "This power you now have is ruining the game by making everything too easy and I should never have made it possible to have it. Let's say that tomorrow you wake up and it mysteriously no longer works"?"

Yes.

In my games? Of course it is. It's a game. We're playing it to have good times with one another as our paper men do imaginary things to other paper things. Sometimes when we do this, we make decisions over rules and results and powers that have repercussions we don't expect.

Sometimes those are awesome.

Oftentimes, they suck the fun out of something. Or they, retroactively, destroy the canon of the game by making something we've already decided is this way or that not actually valid given this new thing.

In the case of awesome, we keep them. In the case of the others, we talk them out and figure out a better approach that doesn't make the game less fun. Generally we'll let results stand - almost always in my DF game. But we'll go back and revise powers. We'll revise rules when they don't seem to do what we want - like our XP rules or spell learning.

Remember when we changed missile spells to have larger explosion radii and a whole bunch of NPCs got blown up? But then we realized it wasn't really so great. We changed the rules to a different set. We didn't take away the ability but we nerfed it a bit. It needed doing.

Importantly, we do these by consensus whenever possible. Sometimes it's clear to me that it'll screw up the game from my side of the screen, and I'll just go and change it. But if at all possible, I'll do a 'take-back' with the whole group on board. We all want a challenging but fun game. If something we've put in the game makes that less so . . . yeah, we'll change it.

Attempting to finish Darkest Dungeons

After a good, solid year off, I decided to reinstall Darkest Dungeons and finish it.

Where I left off, I needed some specific guys at level 6 to attempt the Dark Dungeon itself. But, they needed time off to recover from stress. Plus, one guy I specifically needed have been killed and I couldn't seem to find a replacement. The other missions mostly required me to assemble a sub-optimal team and basically kill time. I have no stomach for that.

A year later, though, I did.

I started back up, killed time with a mission or two, and then attempted the first dungeon mission proper.

That didn't go well.

Two tries later, I'd lost 7 characters and made no progress. I was able to get a few missions in and level up some other guys.

I won't lie . . . those two TPKs (a near one followed by a full one) almost caused me to quit again. But I decided to set it aside that day and come back to it.

I tried again. I won this time, but of course, the final enemy critter - a boss's underling - with 1 HP left, killed one of my guys dead outright. Sigh. I got revenge but what the heck.

I've been doing a few other missions, trying to assemble a good crew for the next dungeon mission.

I'll finish the whole thing out over the next week and be done with it. It's a fun game except when it feels like the game is just piling on - like when you've got 3 full HP low-stress guys and the bad guys just pile on the same wounded, high-stress PC over and over and over again no matter what you to do self-mark or what have you. Maybe it just seems that way? Worth what I paid for it but still I'd like to check off the game as complete.

Holy Water - a list of what it doesn't do

In GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, Holy Water is all of $15 a vial, $7.50 for clerics. It's expensive for water, even by 2021 standards, but it is cheap as dirt compared to potions and other concoctions. Even a 1d6 healing potion costs $120, and mild poisons - easily resisted and doing minor damage - range from $20 per dose.

Yet, despite that, my players are convinced - half-seriously, half-kidding - that it should do more. Much, much more.

Powers my players have ascribed to, or suggested for, or claimed are logical for, holy water:

- it acts as Paut for clerics and holy warriors

- it acts as a healing potion for clerics and holy warriors

- it's poisonous to evil creatures

- it damages evil creatures on contact, instantly

- it removes curses

- it exorcises evil from anything it is poured on

- it repels evil creatures

- it turns unholy water into holy water

- it neutralizes poison

- it refreshes good creatures, restoring FP and acting as Essential Water

- it turns your mother into a basketball . . . not wait, that's SPACOM.

For my players - anything I have missed?

See also: GURPS 101: Item/Spell Effects or Creature Weakness

Sakatha Spoilers

Since Sakatha has been defeated, and his lair is gone, we did a little spoiler-filled recap at the end of the game session. I rarely do this except post-campaign, but I think it was appropriate to do it now since nothing from it will impact play.

One reason I made Sakatha a load-bearing monster was because I didn't want the party to keep coming back to the Cold Fens over and over and over again, "just making sure" and "maybe we missed something" and "this time we'll check with a guy with See Secrets and Per 19, not just Per 18" in the hopes of findng something. So I set it up so that can't happen once the main guy is gone. I made it a relatively slow collapse so the PCs would have time to loot, but not to linger. Had I made it shorter, they wouldn't have had time to loot. They barely did, and really maximized "guard the group" over "get the loot." The next load-bearing monster (there are others) might not be so forgiving. You can't always search the room with a maximum bonus while everyone heals, recovers FP, and otherwise takes their ease until fully ready to delve.

Sakatha's Trident was an oversized balanced trident with Accuracy +2 and Puissance +2. $40,800 base value, saleable for at least $16,320. Broken by the PCs because delvers always assume you need to break stuff to win fights. It was useful to disarm him, but they had all the tools to defeat him without this step.

Speaking of killing Sakatha, my players especially depend on getting foes to reveal their weaknesses. They'll threaten or attack a foe, and hope that will prompt a foe to give a clue to their weak point. This can work sometimes, but doesn't always. It works less often than it succeeds. They also want to get feedback on success instantly. They'll fill a foe's hex with fire, and, before anything else happens, expect the foe to give away how vulnerable they are to fire so they can pile more on. I feel like I say, "It's a one-second turn" so often I should have it on an audio loop. Sakatha didn't give much away. And why should he have? My players will likely chime in here saying they didn't really expect him to, but they had to try, and had to observe just in case . . . but that's rationalizing behavior despite a lack of success in doing so. These are the same guys who want to Dodge shots when they have Missile Shield up so the enemy thinks they don't and wastes attacks. This also assumes the foe knows something to give away - picture Achilles, confident that he's unkillable, not realizing his heel is vulnerable. Would he flinch badly at an attack on his heel, or just arrogantly attack you back until that last lucky shot that puts him down?

Further, speaking of killing Sakatha, clues to the best way to kill him were upstairs - murals on both of the triangle side rooms in the triangular building, and in a cryptic note about Sakatha held by the bandit wizard. He left it behind accidentally, but the PCs literally never checked the hallway where the secret door was after just moving through it quickly once. So that was never found. They even skipped that side hallway during a session when they otherwise went everywhere else with Galen (Per 18) with See Secrets on.

Speaking of that bandit wizard, had they managed to crush the bandits a session or two earlier back in the day, and get the wizard, they could have found the loot of the bandits. They didn't, and the wizard left with the loot. And wearing Hooded Robes of Protection. Caution costs chances.

And missed treasure? They never tried to track down where the wights came from, either to finish them after a victorious fight or after exterminating them. In fact, they moved fast to avoid them specifically, even after wiping them out . . . and "avoided" them by traveling the exact same way to and from the triangular building ever time. Anyway, there was a clear "lair" for the boss wight. In it were a skeleton (I won't say of whom or what) with some mundane loot and an Necklace of the Serpent in the form of a silver necklace with a green jade symbol of two snakes facing each other over a rising sun. El Murik's player would have loved that. There was also, in one of the acid vats, a suit of corrosion-proof mail - which eventually made it into DFRPG Magic Items as an armor enchantment. Plus, their mundane gear was recovered and thrown into a side room the PCs never bothered to find.

There were other treasures, magical and mundane, and some fun challenges. Mostly, though, there were a lot of missed opportunities. Often lost due to a little too much caution when caution wasn't called for. Again, this stuff is why I made Sakatha load-bearing. I didn't want to deal with this place being a permanent campaign fixture for parties unwilling to delve deeper in Felltower. The looted-out Caves of Chaos and repeatedly sacked Lost City still get some "we should go and check this out" discussion, and I wanted this off the table.

Finally, the marshy part of the Cold Fens, the lair of Sakatha, the name, and very much of the main details of the area came directly from I2 Tomb of the Lizard King by Mark Ayres. In it, Sakatha is a vampiric version of the Lizard King from Fiend Folio. I liked the idea a lot, but I didn't need another vampire. I needed a demonic lizard man to match the depictions I'd had on the wall near the temple in Felltower. So I changed things around to make it so.

D&D fixed HP & a path untraveled

I missed this post or I'd have included it in my Friday roundup. Instead, it gets a Saturday afternoon discussion.

Arneson's Hit Points for Characters

My first thought on this was how much GURPS is like this.

Back in the day, in 1st-3rd edition (revised) GURPS, you rarely got additional HP. Your HP equaled your HT, and it was rarely to have access to the Extra HP advantage. Getting up your HT wasn't cheap, either, costing from 20 to 50 points per point of HT in play, thanks to a rule that doubled the cost of attributes bought up after character creation ended.

GURPS 4e pushed up the ease of getting more HP, tying them to ST and removing that doubled cost . . . and reducing the cost of extra HP, as well. In GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, getting more HP is pretty standard - you can have a fair amount - potentially 26 HP, more than twice that as a starting normal human and twice that normal human's maximum. Barbarians and other races can push this up - a human barbarian with the Mountain of Meat perk from Barbarians can have 50 HP.

Even so, the "standard" way of staying alive longer in GURPS is to armor up (to reduce damage), and more importantly, get better at not being hit. A HP 10 guy with Skill-21 is just as fragile as a HP 10 guy with Skill-12. You're just a lot less likely to get hit in combat because you're more likely to successfully defend. You'll still die just as hard from 10 HP past your DR to the vitals, but it's less likely to happen.

It would have been interesting if that was the approach that D&D took and keep early on, instead of this world of escalating HP. I basically live in that world as a base standard (again, not in DF, where it does get harder to kill characters) but most games do not. Interesting that escalating HP wasn't the only way D&D could have gone.