Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

surely either disadvantage allows for sneaking past a sentry. You're not in combat and you're not fighting a foe (that you want to see dead).

I'd say the bloodlusty character would be inclined to see killing the sentry as the obvious tactical option, but in a situation where it is a tactical decision and not a heat of the moment thing, I don't see it coming in to play.

Now if that character also is impulsive....

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

If you're going that route, I would think you'd need to reprice all the advantages (mainly social ones) that are not as advantageous in a DF game as in a usual one as well.

Or else allow the character with fashion sense to mentally stun goblins at first glance with his dashing appearance.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

You'll notice many of the advantages and skills that don't see a whole lot of use in the genre explicitly gain utility in the DF PDFs, and some advantages and disadvantages are disallowed entirely if they don't have enough utility.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Then why do you state that you can switch targets freely earlier if you have to roll to do so once you've whacked someone?

Just making sure Bloodlust isn't a "automatic hit location penalty" disad.

Sure, but if you have a choice between turning your back on the stunned guy or the unstunned guy, why would you have to roll to not turn your back on the guy that is the immediate threat just because you whacked the stunned guy last round with that reasoning?

That's fair, I just think that the Bloodthirsty person should have some understandable internal logic that drives their behavior. Having a tier of Threat(conscious)>Minor Threat(unconscious)>Not a Threat(Dead) makes sense, but not being able to switch from the stunned guy to the guy who is maneuvering to tickle your kidneys with his shortsword without a roll doesn't jive with that belief system.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

I didn't pull it out of thin air...:)

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

It's a judgment call thing, again. The thought is that you if you're facing multiple equal opponents and wound one of them and then decide to switch to another, that's fine. They're all still equally a threat and all equally difficult to take down. But if you stun one of them, you'll want to finish him off while his defenses are weak.

I wouldn't require you to turn your back on an unstunned foe to finish off a stunned foe. But if you can keep two foes in front of you and still hit the stunned guy, you're going to want to finish him off.

My intent is to discourage the tactic of "I disable a bunch of guys and then finish them off later." I don't think that's what Bloodlust is. Bloodlust is "I immediately kill the guy in front of me if I can." Not to the point of tactical insanity, but to a potentially unhealthy degree.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

I stand corrected. :)

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

I was taking it to mean you wanted to kill your foes when possible, so no strikes to subdue and the rest of the party has to work hard to keep you from finishing all the downed foes at the end of the combat. Note, this has already come up when we wanted to interrogate the goblins and later let them go as a reward for talking, granted with some overlap with my intolerance for gobbos. Bloodlust is the same cost as Berserk but the dumb behavior is offset by making you much harder to stop. Bloodlust doesn't get any positive benefits so the action penalties should be a lot less too. I'm not real thrilled with the restrictions on switching targets but I can see where it comes from. My evaluation of the downed harpy was it was no longer an immediate threat since it had fallen down, couldn't fly and had no ranged weapons. I was pretty sure it was also in the 'finish off at my leisure' and 'can't get away' categories too. It seemed prudent to head towards Marik so we could cover each other better and be ready in case the grounded one tried to go for him.

Targeting is kind of a tricky one, I shouldn't be able to try and go for crippling blows to capture someone but I think ones to knock down their combat effectiveness so I can get in a killing blow should be, or to keep them from getting away. In this case the wings were just too juicy of a target to pass up as they had both less armor and crippled their mobility. Sort of why my wings get targeted whenever I'm flying! It really depends on the opponent; standard goblins get torso shots (or head/vitals/neck if I wanna be fancy) since it's usually the best way to make them dead and I'd rather take a -2 for a DA instead of a limb shot. Spiders with long easy to reach legs get those taken off, fliers with wings can expect those to be targeted so forth and so on.

What it boils down to for me is you should be going for the kill but you should also be able to do it in a tactically smart manner.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Sessions 15 and 16
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_1-15
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_1-16

The delvers head into a ruined town that they believe is White Pines, looking for a lost dwarven key that is worth a lot of money to the dwarf elders of Polisberg. The town is overrun with eerie, humanoid figures made of mud. Everyone decides to try to avoid them since they don't know what they are. Unfortunately, the delvers fail to avoid them and get attacked from multiple directions by dozens and dozens of shambling things.

Fortunately for the delvers, each individual shambler is easy to outrun and easy to kill. Unfortunately for the delvers, there's so many that some of them intercept the delvers and start to overwhelm them. Wolfgang and Ghazeb carve up a bunch, but Thasos is providing cover for Minnizig and gets knocked over and surrounded by six of them. They start grabbing at him.

At this point, Beltarne uses his True Faith (with Turning) under the hope the monsters are demons or undead - which they are. A lucky roll gives him a turn radius that entirely encompasses the spread out delving band. The two demons of Thasos try to pick him up and carry him away, but he resists well enough that they have to drop him.

Being practical, the delvers surround a stoically chanting Beltarne (who is in turn surrounded by nearly a hundred demons forty or more feet out) and start searching the town. I ruled that holding up True Faith for extended periods is tiring, and Beltarne had to make Will rolls at -2 for every hour he attempted it or have it burn out for a while. The delvers searched the town for a few hours and then retreated to the north to rest and camp. I got to make some use of Treasure Tables, though I had written the encounter before it came out and couldn't use it as much as I'd like.


In the next session, the delvers are taking an afternoon off, planning to return to the town the next morning and finish looting it. Marik goes and does some hunting, attracting the attention of horde of giant wasps that proceed to strafe the camp. Everyone hides but Thasos, who gets divebombed by 6 wasps and stabbed. The wasps have a horribly virulent poison, and the mighty minotaur goes down. Everyone else breaks hiding to rescue him. Beltarne is briefly grabbed by some wasps, but is too heavy to be lifted before his fellow delvers cut them off him. A second flight of wasps comes in from the flank, skewering Ghazeb and Thasos again, driving both of them well into death check territory. They're driven off, but not before the two skirmishers are nearly killed.

Marik, who is about 50 yards away from the rest of the group, isn't so lucky as Beltarne and gets picked up by a pair of wasps (out of 5 that originally attacked him). Over several rounds of desperate shooting, he manages to kill both wasps and survive an eight yard fall (yay Acrobatics!). He then starts collecting wasp bodies, or as he calls them, "Dinner".


These were an interesting pair of sessions, demonstrating the dangers of minions. The mud zombies were easy to kill individually, but I was rolling 1d-3 and squaring the result to see how many reinforcements they got each round, coming from a random direction. The delvers were going to get overwhelmed eventually unless they cheated by using Turning or the like. There probably needs to be some kind of rule for using Turning against large number of foes, but I can't really think how to approach it and the strain method worked well for limiting PC actions.

The wasps were much nastier than the zombies - fast flying speed and a very deadly attack. The delvers big problem against them was that the delvers were spread out and couldn't reinforce each other very well. Against the second wave, the delvers were closer together and had less problems, but were still hampered by some unlucky rolls. And of course, the entire crew was nearly stranded when Marik was almost abducted.

Everyone was very happy with the session except perhaps Minnizig's player, who was hampered by being in a twisted magic region and not having a ranged weapon. I expect Minnizig will see some redesign when the delvers get back to Polisberg.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

"use" = 'spending CP to modify a die roll resulper two t.

CP cost for a success:1 + 1 uses of it in a game session.Round down.

1 CP (1+0) for uses 1 and 2, 2 CP (1+1) for uses three and four and 3 (1+2) for 5 & 6 and so on.

CP cost for a critical hit: 2+ 1 per use of it in a game session.

3 CP (2+1) for a first use spensing, 4,5,6... for subsequent uses.

CP cost to tur a crit fail into a regular failure: 3 + 2 per use. Reasoning: Crit failures are supposed to scare players, and [i]act as equalizers against otherwise virtually invincible warriors. A cost progression of 5, 7, 9, 11... will encourage players to take their crits like a man, and make them reluctant to spend points on other modifications to keep the CF insurance premium down.

Edit: Why yes, that does make the minimum cost of turning a crit failure into a critical success ELEVEN CP (3+2) + (1+0) + (2+3).