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Old 10-07-2019, 07:17 PM   #11
Dalin
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

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Originally Posted by Almenac View Post
- Tone down or remove the evil runes from the passage the characters can't avoid
Another option for the runes is to give them an effect other than injury. Perhaps they cause the effect of a curse spell or reduce your fatigue or slow you down or make you sleepy or itchy or sneezy. Whatever you think is spooky for your players and will have the game-balance effect you're looking for.

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What do you think? Is this a workable idea? What else would you suggest?
All of this sounds great. When will the game be? I hope you'll post an after action report!
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Old 10-08-2019, 12:09 AM   #12
Almenac
 
Join Date: Dec 2018
Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

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All of this sounds great. When will the game be? I hope you'll post an after action report!
Excellent!

The game will be next week, probably Thursday.
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Old 10-26-2019, 03:39 AM   #13
corwyn
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Saskatoon, SK
Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

So what happened?
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Old 10-26-2019, 04:06 AM   #14
Almenac
 
Join Date: Dec 2018
Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

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So what happened?
Not much yet. 1,5 sessions have gone to character creation and last week they entered Merle's basement and battled 2 giant spiders on the stairs. It was tight at times with no room to maneuver, but at the end they won without a scratch.
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Old 01-03-2020, 08:24 AM   #15
Almenac
 
Join Date: Dec 2018
Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

So, here's a kind of an after-action report.

The mini campaign lasted 4 sessions and it went quite well. I fleshed out ISAR a bit and inserted in my own world so it wasn't so blatantly about getting loot and gold. We got one more player after second session and his Half-Ogre Barbarian helped out as a heavy hitter.

I replaced the peshkali with several cultists, their champion, skeletons and zombies. I also cut out many of the side rooms to avoid needless combat. So basically the ritual chamber lead only to the cavern where Merle's Husk was.

My biggest gripe was the power level of the starting characters. None of us were new to RPGs or dungeoneering, but no one was familiar with GURPS. Even so, none of our previous experience helped with how GURPS handled things.

The absurdly high skills meant that both the players and the GM must have a considerable degree of system mastery to make use of the competent characters and challenge them. The Swashbuckler relies on understanding certain mechanics very well and it required a lot of Discording and flipping through the books before we understood how knocking a foe out from skull/eye/vital hit was and with what penalties that happened. The magic system isn't very intuitive and our cleric struggled on what he should be casting or should he just bash foes with his mace or sword.

Also DF monsters have really high HT scores which meant the fights usually dragged on forever and many monsters didn't lose consciousness before -5x HP. And there was no easy way to parse what the 15+ traits of a monster (Diffuse, etc.) actually meant and does this suffer extra damage from headshots or not?

I think the idea of a worked example GURPS fantasy dungeoneering game is good. But the starting point should be how it is in other similar games: go clear a watchtower of goblins and their shaman or something. While this isn't so epic starting point, it presents the players with simple options at first from which they can expand. 250 poiint characters won't be a problem for someone who started with 75 or 125 point character and built from there. At the very least offer different starting tiers like beginning adventurers (100p or less), middle of the road (150p), ready heroes (250p+).
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Old 01-04-2020, 08:39 AM   #16
Gnomasz
 
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Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

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Also DF monsters have really high HT scores which meant the fights usually dragged on forever and many monsters didn't lose consciousness before -5x HP.
Yeah, I feel you. I've learned that it's really important to very liberally use "And Stay Down!" on Exploits page 86.

About the power level… I also think that it's better for experienced GURPS players who just want to feel cool and easily soak up range penalties and shoot bows every round. Not so much for starting players.
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Old 01-04-2020, 01:29 PM   #17
Dalin
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Default Re: Modifying I Smell A Rat for two PC's (Swashbuckler and Cleric)

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The absurdly high skills meant that both the players and the GM must have a considerable degree of system mastery to make use of the competent characters and challenge them. The Swashbuckler relies on understanding certain mechanics very well and it required a lot of Discording and flipping through the books before we understood how knocking a foe out from skull/eye/vital hit was and with what penalties that happened.

With new players, I usually don't even mention hit locations and things like that. One feature that helps players enjoy their high skills without any fuss is Deceptive Attack (Exploits, p. 38). Who doesn't love penalizing the opponent's defenses? My new Swashbucklers haven't had much trouble. Scouts have been harder. The interaction of damage types, armor divisors (for bodkin arrows), and hit locations is very complicated. For new players in the future, I think I won't mention bodkins and cutting points for the first year of play.


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Also DF monsters have really high HT scores which meant the fights usually dragged on forever and many monsters didn't lose consciousness before -5x HP.

As Gnomasz pointed out, those "And Stay Down!" rules are meant for this sort of thing. 90% of my monsters drop at zero. It took me a while to figure this out.


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And there was no easy way to parse what the 15+ traits of a monster (Diffuse, etc.) actually meant and does this suffer extra damage from headshots or not?

Yeah, that kills me too. If I don't have time to figure it out during prep, I just wing it during the game. (I hate flipping pages during a game.) Then I look it up afterwards to find out how it was meant to work. Even after running (and teaching) DFRPG for two years now, I still can't keep track of all the monster traits.
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