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

I think we're still good, some poor tactics notwithstanding. Unless something comes in to surprise us - or those mounted orc knights turn out to be MUCH tougher than previous enemies - we're going to be okay.

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

I think I overestimated how dangerous the mage is, I was expecting a followup shot pretty much immediately. Also I can't fire 4d burning touch arrows fast or for free, at best I can do them for 2FP every other second or for 1FP every three seconds. I'd rather save the FP for a few big area attacks when I think we need them or for defensive casting.

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

Burning Touch costs 1 FP per die of damage (before the cost is halved due to the house rules) and +2 for the Spell Arrow. You can reduce spell energy costs by 4 FP (yay house rules!). The spell has a one second casting time.

Even launching 2d Burning Touches every other second into the mass of orc knights a half-dozen yards away would be pretty effective.

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

I wonder this quest anytime had the chance of being something different of a raging open field war -almost a Mass Combat scenery with a DF party counting as as an army!

OTOH, I haven't read all the sessions: any character died during some delve? It would be a bit surprising to find no player character death and suddenly a Total Party Kill in session 44.

Anyway, good luck to delvers!

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

The delvers attacked the main gate of a fortified valley during daylight and let some sentries escape to rouse the guard. They never made a concentrated effort to break contact but instead have chosen to hunker down and smash Team Evil.

A stealthy night assault on a poorly defended section of the wall and with concentrated effort to eliminate fleeing sentries was probably within their capabilities. That would have let the assault the central keep without first going through the majority of the army. Alternately, they could have disengaged back over the wall at some point and used their numerous tricks to break contact.

The epic Mass Combat situation they are in now was not inevitable. It's the result of the decisions they made and the reasonable responses of the enemy. I've been enjoying the heck out of it, but it's not the only way it could have gone down.

FWIW, this last wave of orcs is probably the last for a while, as the high command is about ready to hunker behind the inner walls if they lose 2/3rds of their elite forces to no good effect.


No active PC has died in the game, though Hammer and Mrugnak have been taken out of action while in play. (Hammer had a crippled arm; Mrugnak had a crippled leg at the end of Tomb of the Bloody Baron and was permanently blinded in both eyes at the end of Fens of Despair. He got Regeneration spells in both cases). The GM doesn't give former PCs-turned-NPCs the same love and attention as a real player, and Singeon was spectacularly killed in the Tomb. And of course, almost ever PC has been knocked unconscious at one point or another. Having everyone down at the same time would be unprecedented, but not impossible.

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

I think we chose a daylight assault on the assumption that our enemies could all see in the dark, so why hamper OURSELVES by attacking when it was darker than it needed to be?

That said, we could have done a better job of taking care of fleeing scouts and avoiding contact with the enemy. This, however, is more epic and more fun.

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

Session 45 or so
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/...uded_Valley/11

This session was just a big, confusing mess. Lots of cavalry riding around and getting caught in explosions; lots of delvers taking damage. Of course, most of the damage rolls were pathetic, with the GM rolling 6 or less on 3 dice on at least 3 crucial junctures. So even though Ayake and Berkun both got hit by lances, neither of them took significant damage.

tbriggs' trick of using a spell-arrow to cast a regular spell at a distance from the target of the spell arrow is almost certainly illegal. I'm going to let him get away with it for the rest of the campaign, but the description of spell-archer in DF3 doesn't imply one can do that. Fortunately, he's not playing a mage in the next campaign.

The mob rules were confusing from the PC perspective, but worked okay from the GM perspective. The smaller bands on foot worked better than the large bands of knights, and the cavalry were very tricky. The PCs sensibly targete the horses, and I hadn't really thought about what would happen to an abstract bunch of lancers if half their horses get killed or crippled. The compromise I came up with seemed to work okay, but it's something I'll need to think about more in the future.

Fortunately, I'm done with big sets of foes for a while. The next session will be the attack on/infiltration of the castle, and I'll challenge the delvers in different ways.

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

I think the solution you came up with worked just fine, and I'd use it in the future as well. It was quick and simple. An alternative is to use the rider's Riding skill as a defense roll for the mount. The fact that they consistently started failing those in the last couple of rounds was what eventually had that end in our favor.

The most confusing part about the mob rules was really not having a good way to tell how effective a given attack was in the early going. Once we pointed that out and you corrected it, all was well.

I'll also point out that this is probably the biggest chance I've had or seen to playtest the Imbuement rules, and they still seem very clunky. I'm dealing well with them, but I can easily see a lot of players just not being interested in using them because of the huge amount of extra rolling involved. It might be something worth looking at modifying heavily.

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

Session 46 or so
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/...uded_Valley/12

At this point, my players and I have pretty much agreed that the normal goblins are not meaningful opponents in any amount. Richard's fragmentation arrows, fired from 100+ yards away, kill too many too fast. Even if the goblins close to melee somehow, they don't do enough damage on their infrequent hits to be a real threat.

As a consequence, I had the goblin army abandon the castle except for a few sentries, clearing the stage for the main event. And the players almost decided that wherever the army was going was the interesting part! Fortunately, they quickly dissuaded themselves and we moved onto the fun part: delver heroes versus demonically empowered orc heroes.

Three rounds in, and I don't think the fight is going well for the orcs. The assassin wounded Richard, but he'll recover, and Berkun has pretty much neutralized the assassin. That's a wash. Mrugnak is probably going to go down sooner or later - 5:1 against are hard odds - but Ayake has pretty much disabled the ogre hero, who will go down from Fatigue loss well before Mrugnak fails a consciousness check. Connell isn't accomplishing much, but neither are the goblin and orc wizard. If Team Monster can overwhelm Mrugnak without losing too many members, they may be able to concentrate on Ayake. I suspect not, though.


One weird issue we came up with was Connell's new healing strategy: Use "Plant Form Other" and "Heal Plant" to provide unlimited, if slow, low-cost healing. I think this is a tad abusive, while the players feel since it can't be done in combat, it's perfectly okay.


I missed Harald's comment on Imbuements from last week. He is right that Imbuements take too many die rolls. I can't see an easy way to solve it, though.

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

Heavy Imbuement dierolling:

For a character with multiple attacks (most monks and weapon masters, and the types that seem most attracted to Imbuements) using the One Man Army box from Supers helps... somewhat. Instead of rolling Penetrating Blow 5 times against 5 orcs, and rolling Project Blow 5 times against 5 orcs, and Flaming Strike 5 times, etc etc etc, and capping it off with 5 Karate rolls, you can take it down to ONE ROF 5 roll for each schtick...

But you still end up with 5-6 rolls for the one combat action. I'd let the player assign the successes as he wills, personally, just because it's faster than arguing about it, and avoids the immensely frustrating and confusing situation of "Well, on Orc #1 I made my Penetrating Blow, but failed my Power Blow, so I do X damage, and on Orc #2 I succeeded at both, so I do Y damage <math math math roll roll roll, five minutes later> ... uh... so how much damage have I done?"

It's a system that works best when you have Mooks or identical Worthies, though - otherwise if you have different hit penalties vs some targets or different rolls for Imbuements vs some but not others, it starts getting really ugly and you either have to ignore the differences, or roll everything separately again.

Outside of running in a game environment like MapTools where you could theoretically automate the whole damn thing and have the computer worry about the dice rolls and resolution (presuming your programmer doesn't go MAD) there really is too much damn dice rolling.

The only alternative to just having advantages again is moving to a longer duration on the effects - One roll for an entire turns worth of effect (possibly at a penalty) instead of one attack. One roll for 10 seconds worth of effect instead of one attack. Something like that. At which point you're really VERY close to magic spells.

Mmmph. On the topic of Ayake exploding things, I still owe you the fragmentation scripts for OpenRPG. Ugh. I hate Python...