What is a Ninja Tool (DF 12 question)

Sir Pudding (not actually knighted or pudding, sadly) asked about what the Ninja Tools advantage (DF12) covers.

Sir Pudding put together a good list, and I commented on which ones I think belong on it. I'm stealing it for here:

Arrow; $2 0.1 lbs. B276
Blowgun Dart; $0.1 .05 lbs ea. B276
Blowpipe Mount; $10 1 lb DF12 p. 15
Bow Drill; $8 1lb DF8 p. 25
Caltrops; $5 0.5 lbs DF1 p. 27
Door Needle; $4, neg. DF8 p. 25
Fukimi-bari; $5 .1 lbs DF12 14
Nageteppo, Flash; $40 .2 lbs DF1 p. 27
Nageteppo, Smoke; $40 .2 lbs DF1 p. 27
Shuriken, Star; $3 .1 lbs DF12 p. 14
Shuriken, Spike; $3 .1 lbs DF12 p. 14
Torch, Waterproof; $12 1b DF12 p. 15

Personally I'd have no issues having it include concoctions such as Bane poisons or Monster Drool. Why not? They aren't hideously lethal, they're certainly appropriate to the ninja's idiom, and they're within the realm of what seems like a gizmo. Here is that list, also courtesy of Sir Pudding:

Acid; $10 1lb DF1 p. 28
Anti-Toxin; $20 0.5 lbs DF 1 p. 28
Bane; $50 .5 lbs DF8 p. 37
Black Dust; $50 1 lbs DF8 p. 36
Foul Pepper; $50 1 lbs DF8 p. 36
Luminous Dust; $20 0.5 lbs DF8 p. 37
Monster Drool; $20 .5 lbs DF1 p. 29


Otherwise, I'd go with GM rulings on individual items. After all, if the GM and player both think a given item really fits the term "Ninja Tool" and otherwise is covered by the gizmo rules, it should be covered. And certainly a GM is within his or her rights to veto anything from the list above! But it's a good starting point at the very list.

(Oh and don't forget, Ninja Tools lets you trick out your weapons permanently. It's a powerful tradeoff for not having that one little piece of gear you really need . . .

Random Notes 9/8

Day off today, with nothing particular to do.

So, besides non-gaming things (shopping, cooking, Japanese study, exercise, etc.) I got some gaming stuff done, too.

- I painted some more figures today. 90% finished some demon-things I've had for a while, put final touches on a knight, spot-sealed some golems and monsters (including some D&D pre-paints I re-painted), and started on some other minis. Took care of two monsters, too - Bones figures.

I also knocked off a Chainmail skeletal something-or-other I had white primed and blackwashed, all in a single shot. He was another "I'll paint this while the guy I want to paint is drying" one, and he turned out to be very easy. And I did some touch work on a giant I've been painting for a while (well-duh spoiler alert for my gamers - there are giants in my fantasy world.)

- Statted up one monster, fixed stats on two others, and started preliminary notes on a stats for a figure I have and painted.

- Did some thinking about my megadungeon and outside connections to it, and put rumors to the appropriate effect on my rumors list.

- noodled around on the SJG Forums for a bit, reading Doug Cole's comments on people's questions about his new book. Welcome to "you did it all wrong!" and "Hey, what about this obvious thing you forgot and no one mentioned until just now?" Doug!

- Watched Doug's interview with Sean Punch. Why haven't I done such a thing? Because Sean and I have been friends for like almost 20 years now. Do you really think we stay on topic for an hour? I sure don't!

Key takeaway from that interview: the goal of GURPS isn't realism, it's believability. Works for me.

Okay, so maybe today was pretty productive after all . . .

Hail Nurgle - Painted Chaos Demon

This post is mostly for my players. Way back in my last campaign, they ended up in the demon world facing off with bunch of demon lords, a lich, and a pile of "lesser" demons. One of them was an as-yet-unpainted, black-primed Great Chaos Demon of Nurgle from Warhammer 40K I'd bought off of eBay.

He's sat in my "to paint" pile for years since then. About six or eight months back I roughly painted him with some green, but that's as far as I got. Last Friday I stopped painting a mini I'd been working on, spied this guy sitting there, and pulled him out intended to do a little brushwork on him while the other guy dried.

Instead I painted him straight through to completion.

Here he is, done (except for re-highlighting the eyes). He's gloss coated with two layers of Army Painter Quickshade, both Soft Tone. I also Dark Tone shaded his spine and the mouth-thing and sword handle. I was going to matte seal him, but honestly, it looks awesome glossy, and he should be slimy and nasty. So I'm going to perhaps gloss coat him in the future to protect the coat but otherwise he's done.

I hate to spoil the surprise with minis with my players, but most of them fought this guy already.

Pictures beyond the cut.

Megadungeon Play Reflections - The Immediate and the Cumulative

Ken Harrison has been posting about megadungeons recently, and asked about the experience of others playing in/GMing megadungeons.

As a GM, and reflecting what I see of my player's approach, is that megadungeon play is a mix of the immediate, and the cumulative.

The immediate in play is what you're doing right now, and what affects you right now.

- your supply of resources

- your immediate goals

- your take this expedition (loot, knowledge, experience, whatever - your gains)

- the obstacles and combats you must face

all of this is right now. But the cool part of a megadungeon is, right now can feed into later.

The cumulative in play is what you've managed to build up in expedition after expedition.

- your maps

- accumulated knowledge of the dungeon

- cleaned out safe areas

- attrition of monsters

- demolished doors

- newly discovered entrances and exits

- set traps

What I like about this is that every trip is both immediate and cumulative. Expeditions have their own problems right now, and their goals right now, but it matters what you accomplish. Even a bad trip, with casualties or a lack of treasure or minimal exploration, accomplishes something for the next trip. It might add a new room to your map, reveal a new infestation of monsters, pick off a few critters from a larger group.

Conversely, even a successful expedition can give you some bad long term results. Perhaps you weaken one group enough that they get displaced by foes more dangerous to you. Or you pick off a few of their guards but they get on to your M.O. and capabilities.

A fight with a monster you can't beat can result in a retreat and a return with more information or firepower. A mission can be planned around things found in one trip that can't be exploited right away, but deal with later.

You get this mix of the tactical and strategic, too. It really matters how you take down doors, guard your six, move in the dungeon, and so on. But it also matters what you plan to do and how you arrange your overall trip, how you make this trip feed into the next trip ("We clear these guys, and next time no one hassles us on the way to and from level 3"), and so on. Killing a chokepoint monster might make a new area accessible. It might make an area safe to explore because the threat of death on the way out is now gone.

So your choices, tactically and strategically, matter both immediately and cumulatively.

This means you can make a tactical choice to back off from a fight, and pay for it later as the threat still exists. Or you could be making a strategic dent in the opposition by whittling away their resources by attrition. Or both - you can be cutting them down, reducing their numbers, but giving away knowledge of your capabilities and relative threat level.

All of this is because it's a reactive environment, not a static one, and it's not a one-trip dungeon but a location you return to many times. This works for the GM and the players, who can mix bold immediate goals with cautious long-term ones. Or the reverse - plan a series of cautious immediate goals, which lead cumulatively to a long-term benefit from the dungeon.

That's what I really like about running a megadungeon. I never did it back in the day - I came of age in the Module Era, and we ran (and even made our own) modules. But yeah, every session matters both now and later, and that's a real plus to megadungeon play.

GURPS Technical Grappling is out

Just a quick post - long-awaited congratulations to Doug Cole on the publication of his book - GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling.

I saw it in playtest, but it's nice to finally see it on the market. Doug basically did for grappling what GURPS Martial Arts did for combat in general. It dials up the resolution and potential without sacrificing realism or playability. It's good stuff, and I hope to give it a more complete review on a much less busy day!

Resource and Planning Tips for Dungeon Delving

This is just riffing off Doug Cole's post yesterday, and some of the best practices I've seen from GMing my Megadungeon campaign.

Most of this is old news to experienced delvers, and long-time gamers. But if repeating it one more time saves you a frustrating session trucking around without a weapon, or saves an expedition, it's worth writing it down. Remember, it's generally more fun to be prepared.

Resources

Carry spare weapons. And not just weapons. Have a spare everything of items you can't live without. That does mean two of your main weapon, not just a backup knife. This goes double if you've got a specialized weapon or you're a Weapon Master or both. GURPS really has pretty generously favorable breakage rules for weapons, yet when it happens it's from your critical failure in combat and you're left weaponless in the worst possible circumstances. Have a spare. If it's too heavy for you, hire a henchman or have a stronger buddy carry it for you. Ideally you want it on your, ready for action.

No One Died From Too Much Healing Magic. Every hear the one about the delver who died because he had so many healing potions that, uhm, somehow something bad happened? Me neither. Carry a lot of them. Make sure everyone can heal themselves, in a pinch. Yes, I know you've got a cleric and potions are expensive and blah blah blah. What if the cleric gets one-shotted with a lucky and nasty critical hit? What if the damage comes so hard and fast the cleric can't keep up? Bring some and bring extras.

Stock Up On Speed-Enhancing Gear. By which I mean delver's webbing, potion belts, lanyards for your weapons, crossbow slings, and so on. Learn Fast-Draw so you can draw it out even faster. It's worth the money to get a weapon into action or back into action a little faster, or to have your gizmos or potions ready to hand.

Planning

Quit Before You're Out of Mana, Not After. The time to start pulling back is while you've still got enough magical/supernatural power to cover your retreat, punish pursuers, or seal doors behind you. Or deal with surprise encounters. This goes for fights even when you're planning to win it and then rest - if you've got to drain yourself empty and then hope there isn't a second wave, it's probably too expensive of a fight to win.

Corollary: Always Have A Power Reserve. Never spend to zero unless it's the only thing that will save your life right now. Keep some extra power, an extra paut, a extra source of any kind of power you can think of. You want that still in your pocket when you walk out of the dungeon and back to town. Murphy's Law predicts you'll need it the one time you don't have it.

Walk Before They Make You Run. At some point, you can still end a combat on your terms. After that point, you've got to stick it out until the bitter end, either way. If you've got no real gain for sticking it out, consider leaving. Start withdrawing when you've still got enough power to make it stick. If you wait too long, you've only got two choices: stand and hope to win or rout. You may need to willfully ignore this when there is something to be gained by staying, or a massive lost to be avoided by fighting it out. But try to get a feel for when it's starting to look like you're climbing on the tiger's back and at least know that's what's happening.

(This tip is titled after one of my favorite Keith Richards songs.)

Don't Have a Single Trick for Victory. Or Retreat. If your whole plan is "we attack and cast spells X and Y and the archer shoots their leaders" and the enemy is immune to missiles, then what? What if your plan is "instigate, retreat to a doorway and hold it against counterattacks" and you hit a circumstances were you must attack, or have a time limit to deal with and can't wait for the enemy to come to you?

Conversely, what if your plan is Sir So-and-So covers your retreat, and Sir So-and-So is out with injury? Or that Hugh McStrongmuscle carries the wounded out, but Hugh is the casualty?

This isn't to say you don't want set plans. Have set tactics, have patterns, be predictable to each other - but don't just bring your hammer and hope the dungeon is full of nails. Don't be Nichelle Nichols - "Murder isn't working and it's all we're good at." Be ready for when the usual doesn't work, and have a backup idea.

Have a Plan For Isolated Allies. If your berserker goes berserk and runs out ahead, will you back him to the hilt or back off and hope to recover his body later? If someone gets cut off, do you know how you'll deal with it? Make some contingency plans. This needs to get done, especially in a GURPS game with Sense of Duty (Adventuring Companions). It doesn't say "except when it's inconvenient because they made a bad tactical decision." Or in a D&D game when you're running a Paladin - Galahad wouldn't leave a man behind in the clutches of evil critters just because the fight was going badly.

And this should almost go without saying, but:

Endeavor to Make Every Fight Unfair In Your Favor. Whatever you can think of doing, prepare to do, or attempt to do to make a fight lopsided in your favor, do it. Ambush, flanking, attacking en masse versus a weak point (aka defeating in detail) - whatever. Do it. Use poison. Use trickery. Attack only when it's in your favor. Use whatever you can to ensure victory by the widest possible margin at the least cost for that win.

More on resources:
The Hierarchy of Expendables
Megadungeon Exploring: Three Dos and Don'ts
My Megadungeon Resources

Gauging an Epic Fight in GURPS DF

So my last session was 15 hours long and features a 12+ hour fight. The entire fight was tense from start to finish.

One of the commentators on that session's writeup, Lars L, asked about how I balance such encounters.

The short version is that I don't balance fights. That this one was such a balanced nailbiter was more luck than anything else. My experience told me this fight would be tough, or at least could be tough, within a certain range. But it could have been a short fight with a few lucky rolls by the PCs, or bad ones by the lizardmen. It could have been a TPK or a walkover, but it was tough enough that the latter seemed unlikely but not so overwhelming the TPK seemed likely, either.

The long version is that, like everyone else, I do balance fights - I gauge the relative challenge of the encounter with how much of an impact I'd like it to have. That does come from experience, not from luck.

So let's talk about that lizardman / PHB cover homage fight. Over 80 bad guys, ranging from fodder's fodder to summon creatures and badass leaders backed by magical support.

This fight was set out a while back, and while the lizardmen learned and adjusted from the repeated skirmishes they had with the PCs, it stayed about the same. They armed up as well as they could. They set plans to call in reinforcements and send a flanking force (one champion and all the guards, etc. he could sweep up on the way, plus a summoned creature). They tried to fight in combined units (lizardmen, acid slorn, and newtmen together) not separately. They pushed when they had to but generally tried to keep their advantage on the defensive. That it didn't work has a lot to do with generally smart play by the PCs and their general man-to-man superiority.

I certainly ran the NPCs with vigor, and bad intentions. They wanted the PCs dead and used the best tactics they could do kill them. I always play my NPCs this way - they fight as if they want to live and they fight with intent to kill (or capture, or escape, or whatever - as appropriate.) I don't pull punches or sacrifice NPCs to make the PCs feel better. My players know this, which makes every fight a bit tense.

After the fight Dryst's player and I talked about it as we cleaned up (me my minis, maps, and PC; him, wiping the battlemat for me.) Had Christoph the Scout also been there, or if Borriz was there, or Honus - basically, if there was just one more PC-level delver - the fight would have been much shorter. Or if Dryst had just a few more paut potions or a bigger power item. Or if Galen had a spare bow once his broke, instead of needing to waste turns scrounging up a tiny shortbow to plink with. We both figure the fight would have been much shorter and lopsided in favor of the PCs.

But had the PCs been a smaller group - say, had Dryst and Honus smashed the door guards with ease a few sessions back and managed to force the door and get into the temple - it would have probably been a TPK.

Had I just stuffed some lizardmen in the room, it would have been a walkover. Instead, I modified the environment to make it more interesting (bad footing, chances to fall, wet air, special supernatural modifiers, no morale checks except under certain circumstances). I also made sure the opposition was appropriately tough. I also made sure I had some idea of how they'd fight and what they wanted to accomplish. These are all things I might not do for a trivial monster encounter, at least not to the same degree.

So really, I say I don't balance fights, but that's not quite true. It's better to say I don't decide which fights I want to be epic, I just set the stage for that potentiality.

I don't balance the fights so it all falls to clever PC tactics and good die rolls, but I make the fights appropriately challenging enough that this could happen.

And I don't decide what the outcome or costs of a fight will be, I just place it and scale it so it's worthy of the time it takes to play out.

So yes, you can call that balancing the challenge. This is actually pretty old-school - if I say "Level 1 of the dungeon" and you say "rats, kobolds, and goblins" then you know what I'm talking about. You just don't put encounters down willy-nilly, there is some kind of external balancing factor. This is especially true for a "Saturday night special" - a special placed encounter, meant to be a real challenge. You might just write down "3 trolls" for a room and figure it'll be tough or it won't, but for something meant to be special, you just can't do that.

To gauge this does take some experience with the game system, or one that has a great deal of balancing built in (such as every edition of D&D I'm familiar with - see level 1 and giant rats and kobolds all the way through Challenge Ratings in 3.x). In GURPS it can be trickier, since points provide equality of choice, not balance of results.

My advice is to play as much as you can, but also to draw off the experience of others:

- the excellent advice on fodder/worthy/boss level monsters in DF2.

- The various Melee Academy posts, so you know what's what with the combat options in front of you.

- My two posts on making tough DF fights - the original and the more recent minor expansion (also read the comments on that one).

- Doug's post about skill levels in GURPS. Don't be shy about giving monsters in DF skill 18+, as they may need it to even concern high-defense PCs and fend off feints, Deceptive Attacks, and so on.

Also, I can't find an appropriate post to link to, but Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch has written often about making some "fights" not about combat. Time limits, stop-the-ceremony situations, unkillable monsters who can only be dealt with via some unusual means (break the soulstone, kill the demon - meanwhile he's kicking your ass), puzzle monsters (ahem, Acerak), obstacle monsters, etc. can help make for interesting and memorable encounters. Everything doesn't have to come down to whittling down HP.

Remember that if the encounters are always scaled to your PCs, and balanced against your PCs, and you'll win by the skin of your teeth if you play well, you know everything is potentially winnable. Nothing is a walkover (or looks like one) because you know there aren't any. But equally nothing is a TPK waiting to happen because it's never too hard for you. That's fun for the one fight, yes, but it's not as fun as an epic that just happens organically, in my opinion.

So the short version, after all, is this. Learn how to make the fights potentially interesting, but don't try to balance them. Make them something that could be fun, let loose, and see what happens. But yes, definitely figure out how to make them appropriately challenging.