Four Perilous Journeys: Four new adventures for The Fantasy Trip

[larsdangly]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

There's two factors at play here, I think. The one I want to talk about, though, is the many-on-one problem.

That is: you're going to show up with three to six characters played by three to six players in all likelihood. The GM gets to play the bad guy and ALL the other guys.

If you play even-steven, and make the Big Bad Nemesis mostly play by the same rules and point totals as the Good Guys (or at least Team Us), then BBEG invariably gets curb-stomped.

Sure, you can try and load up on henchmen, but the kind of combined arms, every move carefully planned, clever exploits are go! play that the players usually can bring is frequently lost in "the GM is running 15 guys."

So in order to make and keep the bad guy a threat in the face of four-on-one odds, they get up-gunned.

And even when the GM does up-gun them, outrageously so, the many-on-one thing still is the trump card. Christopher Rice just GM'd a GURPS supers game where he "cheated" outrageously. His bad guy was designed to probably kill half of us (and my guy is a 2,000 point super). PLUS a team of high-skill super-commandoes and then even more mookish guys with firearms.

We steam-rollered them. Wasn't even really much of a contest. We came up with a plan, executed the plan, and it worked. Many-on-one for the win.

So . . . my experience is that unless you up-gun your bad guys, there's not much of a game there. I think that TFT does better at this than many other games, but I also suspect that it's still prone to it.

Whatever the GM's motives or philosophical stance on all this might be, I think these issues boil down to two 'classes' of decisions about how bound the GM is by a game's rules.

1) Are you bound by outcomes of die rolls or consequences of things the players have done? For example, can you up or down grade your own damage roll to force an outcome in a fight, or if a player expends a Lesser Wish to achieve a certain outcome on a die roll, can you effectively over rule them and impose an outcome of your choosing?

2) Are you bound by the little mechanistic 'gears' that hold the game together. For example, can you just declare that an IQ 12 NPC wizard knows and can cast an IQ 14 spell, or that a ST 10 NPC fighter can use a broadsword without penalty. Or, can you declare that NPC's roll 4 dice to make a 2 hex jump while players roll 5?

I'm not referring to house rules in either case - a house rule is simply a part of the rules set unique to your group. The question here is whether the GM follows ANY rules - official or created for that campaign.

I think the 'highly powered NPC' issue that started this line of discussion is a somewhat more subtle and complex example of the second category. I do not perform either kind of GM fiat, but I am particularly disinclined to this second sort. I don't consider it to be a good mechanism for expressing creativity.

Re. the problem of NPC's who are too easily defeated, I'm sympathetic to the issue but think a GM can find solutions within the rules. First, if you wish an NPC to simply have more firepower than a normal person, make them be one of the types of non-normal people found in the rules. E.g., a Vampire or a Wraith or, if you adopt the rules for Supers from the Companion volume, a kind of super hero. Or, equivalently, supply them with an extraordinary object (assuming you accept the consequences of the players getting hold of it!). Second, a normal person may be abnormally difficult to defeat under special circumstances. That is, you could devise a physical or social situation for an encounter with that NPC where they have some source of protection or escape. I find it is actually more creative and interesting to approach things this way as opposed to just declaring your favorite NPC has 50 stat points (or whatever).