Felltower Generic NPC: Guard

This is the standard "guard" NPC that PCs hire or sometimes fight. This is built off of the 62-point Guard template in Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen.

Generic Guard

Available for hire, or to fight the PCs as they delve!

ST 12 HP 12 Speed 5.75
DX 11 Will 10 Move 4
IQ 10 Per 10
HT 12 FP 12
Dodge 7 Parry 9+DB 2 Block 11

Broadsword (13): 1d+3 cutting, 1d+1 impaling, Reach 1.
Large Knife (11): 1d cut, or 1d-1 impaling, Reach C, 1.

Traits: Bully; Code of Honor (Soldier's); High Pain Threshold; Overconfidence (12); Sense of Duty (Companions).

Skills: Armoury (Melee Weapons)-9; Brawling-11; Broadsword-13; Carousing-12; Climbing-10; Knife-11; Shield-12; Stealth-10; Wrestling-10.

Equipment: Heavy Leather Armor Suit (with face protection); Cheap Broadsword; Large Knife; Medium Shield; Personal Basics; Pouch; Wineskin (1 quart capacity).

Notes: For a bandit type, repace Code of Honor (Soldier's) and Sese of Duty (Companions) with Greed. Loadout puts the guard at Light encumbrance with an empty pouch and wineskin, medium with just about any load at all.



Note they lack - deliberately - empty carrying sacks, backpacks, etc. This is a design choice by the GM to make it harder to turn "hired fighters" into "loot carriers." That's a laborer's job. Armor is from DFRPG, not GURPS Basic Set.

Acrobatic Dodge & Criticals?

In our last game, one of the PCs attempted an Acrobatic Dodge (Exploints, p. 48, and Campaigns, p. B375). He rolled an 18 on his Acrobatics roll.

What happens?

The player agued, nothing except a -2. An 18 is a failure, and a failure is a -2 to Dodge. It says that explicitly in both referenced rules.

I allowed that, but I'm still not convinced.

The argument in favor of the player's position is that the rule doesn't specify anything about a critical success or critical failure, so therefore they don't have any special effect.

But does the lack of a specific result for a critical failure overrule this basic, underlying rule for making skill rolls? Success Rolls (Exploits, p. 5-7, Campaigns p. B343-348) calls out what constitutes a critical success or critical failure. Does the lack of a specific result for critcial success or failure mean there are no critical successes or critical failures?

For my game, I am willing but not terribly happy to have Acrobatics rolls for Acrobatic Dodge insert the concept of "only skill rolls with specified critical results have criticals" into the game. I would restrict it only to rolls in this case. Largely, though, I'm not sure I like the implications . . . but for DF Felltower, I'll go with it and say it's only for this case and the related case of Aerobatics.

How to use hirelings to boost a Felltower Party: GM's View

This is a GM's view of a useful way to use hirelings in DF Felltower. I'm focusing especially 62-point hirelings, since they're pretty much available in large amounts in a way that 125 point ones are not. Expected additional reading: What are Hirelings Good For?


Repeat after me: Hirelings are Not PCs

One of the biggest issues I see is expecting too much of hirelings. I've heard of walls of polearm-armed NPCs keeping the enemy back, archers or crossbowmen keeping the enemy pinned down (I think that's much more a modern rapid-fire firearms idea, anyway) or "sniping," backstabbing foes, etc.

The thing is, 62-point hirelings are boderline fodder or actually fodder vs. 250 point delvers, depending on how efficiently built for combat they are. Against 300 point delvers, they're fodder. Why is that important? Because they're at best better than 1:1 equal with fodder, but more likely 1:1 equal with fodder. They aren't 1:1 equal against worthy opponents. If orcs are fodder, ogres are worthy. If large spiders are fodder, giant spiders are worthy. If goblins are fodder, trolls are worthy. Is your 62-point hireling equal to an ogre or a giant spider or a troll? No.

So don't expect them to accomplish anything more in combat than an equal number of fodder opponents.

So what are they good for?

Largely, freeing up PCs to do PC things.

Hirelings can be best used in Felltower, in my opinion, to do the following:

- Covering the flanks. In a place like Felltower, this is largely acting as a rear-guard tripwire, and watching crossing hallways to keep the PCs from being surprised - or at least reduce the odds of that. This also slows down any attackers until the PCs can turn around on them and engage. It's unlikely they'd win a fight, but they can provide valuable assistance just by starting the fight before the threat reaches the PCs.

Guards are your template of choice for this situation.

- Carrying the loot and the bodies. Way too often, the PCs depend on PCs to carry loot, carry out unconcious buddies, and carry out the slain. Worse, it's often getting a badly wounded PC concious despite being at negative HP and just hoping they can limp to safety. Having some NPCs - especially those designed to do so - carry stuff is helpful. Laborers are rarely considered because people assume that arms-carrying mercenaries are happy to stop being warriors and start being laborers. They might tolerate it, even willingly do it thanks to high Loyalty, but a guy with ST 12 and armor and weapons and a shield has less carrying capacity than a lightly-clad lightly-armed laborer with ST 13 and Lifting ST 2.

- Junk Work. Guarding the camp probably takes an actual Guard, while minding the rations and the left-behind loot is a good job for Servants. But when a job needs doing, and the sessions devolves into "I don't want to discuss how we do (X or Y or Z) for 10 minutes" the answer probably is a cheap NPC doing it, instead. Leaving NPCs behind policing up the battlefield, guarded by a few guards, is risky and has drawbacks, but if you need the PCs immediately in another battle, at least it's getting done somehow. Having an NPC to routinely guard camp spares the 10 minutes spent discussing how you'll conceal your stuff left outside the dungeon. And so on.

The rest of the potential uses? Makeweight combatants, augmenting the front lines, etc.? Generally a bit of a waste in a high-lethality situation like Felltower itself. They're useful when you need to cover lots of angles of attack and slow down the enemy, but they aren't going to win you a fight. They can reduce the cost of such a fight, and let the PCs focus on what they need to focus on.

In other words, let the PCs do their jobs, but have NPCs be your eyes, ears, and hands for the flanks, rear, and loot. Bringing your own fodder to the main battle is good, but better is preventing the enemy from flanking you because your NPCs block the corridor for a time. Having some crossbowmen shoot at the enemy (and all the time that takes in actual play for the GM resolving it!) is nice, but nicer is having your Scout shoot at the enemy while your fodder prevents the enemy from charging straight in. Having your knights and barbarians fight instead of carrying your unconcious buddies and the loot sure beats anything else.

Pro Tips:

Have the Leader PC do the Hiring. Loyalty is set based on the reaction roll of the hiring PC; this PC should also be the leader. "We tell them to listen to any of us" sounds great, but in a fight, who do they turn to? Everyone? Anyone? "Listen to any of us" quickly becomes "Do whatever seems useful to someone at the moment." Better they have a set leader, who then delegates authority in non-combat situations.

Have a good mix. Don't just hire 10 laborers or 10 guards or 10 torch bearers. Get a mix depending on what you actually need.

Tell the GM ahead of time. If the GM is sitting down to play, the GM won't have so much time to generate NPCs and load in tokens and give them names and so on. VTT is slower on the setup than physical play.


Just my opinion. I could be wrong, but it's what I see from my side of the screen.

Friday Roundup 10/25/2024

Links for Friday.

- There is an article discussing a book that lets you build classes for B/X D&D.

Having fun with BX Options: Class Builder

There was a dragon magazine article that did exactly this, also with B/X, in Dragon #109, by Paul Montgomery Crabaugh. I wonder how much this matches up with that previous work?

- Undead Handmines. Cute.

- A bit of a look at AD&D's STR scores and bonuses.

DFRPG Monsters 2 sale

Warehouse 23 is doing a sale . . . on mostly Halloween-themed things.

One of them is DFRPG Monsters 2. 23% off.

Oddly, though, GURPS Zombies is not on sale. Huh. Too bad, it's a keeper! I'd use the horde rules for zombies for my DF game, but my players refuse to defeat foes, they want to destroy each and every single one of them. So no point in figuring out what a crowd of critters is like and what is enough to defeat it if I then I have to deal with each one individually anyway. But it's a great supplement. It's just oddly not on sale in an October game sale.

VTT Gripes

Foundry & Forge were a problem in our last game session.

We had some of the usual - slowdowns, occasional drops and hangups, etc. The usual network issues. That's typical.

- There has been a change since a few sessions back with dragging and dropping damage onto a token. The bounding boxes seem to be too large - if I drop damage onto a character, the nearby tokens also get put up as options. That's useless but not a problem when it's on, say, Hannari Ironhand, Chop, and Percy. It is when it is on Gnoll, Gnoll, or Gnoll.

In order to do damage to specific tokens with area-effect spells, I had to resort to dragging them one by one out of the fight, applying damage, and then putting them back - and then making sure their facing was correct.

This took a long time. It literally took 10 minutes (12:51 to 1:01 pm) to inflict damage from one explosive spell thrown into a packed field of about 8 foes. With better damage dropping, it could have taken 2 minutes, if not more like 1 (if I typed fast enough.)

- GCS/mook generator issues abound. DR doesn't always import well. Some stats are missing sometimes. I usually ffind out when I need them that, say, DR is 0 on the vitals of a golem. That slows me down because I have to generate a mook, then import it, then check it line by line. It would be vastly easier if I could just do the line by line in the first place because the mook generator imports poorly at best.

- I can't seem to figure out why the icon facing always chooses something inappropriate. You can drag your icon one by one by one along the map, and the facing it chooses will vary according to a pattern we can't discern. It would be much better if you moved hex by hex and had facing change as you faced into it by default, or not move at all by default, and then display the actual move when you click to end the movement.

- We can't have tokens cover more than one hex without just being bigger overall. I've had to essentially make falling prone a one-hex thing, and big monsters into one-hex foes. It's annoying at best - I've had to essentially change the rules so I don't have to deal with it.

Those things really slow us down in play.

Here are a few things I'd really like:

- Ability to put GM-view-only status effects down. I should be able to mark who has a Missile Shield or is poisoned or whatever without my players knowing automatically.

This is especially true with Reeling, which sometimes comes on for monsters that cannot suffer from Reeling. That's annoying. I need to figure out how to turn that off for certain NPCs without turning it off for everyone.

- droppable smoke or other vision-blocking effects.

- Actual item tokens I can put down.

- An actual, official, licenses, SJG-backed VTT package for GURPS. A person can dream, I guess.

Rules & Rulings from DF Session 199

Here are some rules and rulings from last session.

"15: You strain your shoulder!"

Ah, the most hated of all critical miss results.

My players comment? "There should be a clerical way to speed up the healing of the 30 minute cripple from the Critical Miss Table." I agree; it's Instant Restoration. I'm sure they meant cheaper, faster, and easier. But no, it's a cripple, but instead of 1d weeks it's 30 minutes; you can speed it up to instant with magic or you can wait. Just like a 1d week break isn't cheaper to heal if you roll a 1 instead of a 6, it's not cheaper if you only have 30 minutes to wait or 1 week. I don't think anyone will like that ruling but it's consistent.

Is Lightning's Stun too powerful?

Lightning stuns with a -1 per 2 injury. It's been suggested that it should be weaker. I think it's fair on the initial stun, but I do think my players are right - it probably should be an unmodified HT roll to recover from stun. I think that's what DFRPG Spells intends, too - so we can do that.

Does the DX penalty for fire affect you if your DR is too high to get hurt?

I said yes. DFRPG Exploits, p. 68, says that the DX penalty doesn't affect you if the injury can't hurt you. My players read this as "If the damage can penetrate your DR" and I read it as "If the fire could harm you." It says injury, not damage . . . my logic is that yes, your DR protects, but fire that could hurt you is distracting. If you can't be hurt by the flame - immunity or native DR vs. fire, say - it doesn't distract you if you have clothes on fire.

What if you have enough natural DR to not get hurt, asked someone running dwarf who'll probably try to get DR 5 for this purpose . . . still no. I just don't see it, given the DR that PCs can purchase. Last thing I need is someone with a barbarian's DR ignoring being on fire because he's got cinematic DR.

Just be grateful I didn't have the 3+ fire damage detonate alchemists fire like the rules says it does. But I know, you have it ready to Fast-Draw but otherwise completely covered from any possible damage or breakage.

Rapid Strike and Step

Just for the record, we don't allow you to Rapid Strike and split the attacks on either side of your Step. You can Step and then Attack with a Rapid Strike, or Attack with a Rapid Strike and then Step, but not split it up. Or Step, Attack, Step with two steps. You get me. No splitting the attack.

With Extra Attack you can. It's part of why it costs 25 points.

And, for what it's worth, I still hate the +4 for targeting a hex and Retreat.