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Topics - agony

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Apocalypse World / My Savvyhead wants to heal the environment, help?
« on: June 02, 2011, 09:48:32 AM »
We play up the "In Apocalypse World it rains thick black like toner." angle and the Savvyhead came up with the idea to heal the atmosphere.  I was like, uh, ok. 

My answer was that, rather than building something, he could enter the Psychic Maelstrom and heal the environment with the help of this strange woman several of the group have been having visions of (She's a threat/front attempting to seduce key members of the population and devour the city).  The Savvyhead has augury and has been messing with the maelstrom so this seems to fit kind of.

I'm not sure that's a good answer though and I have no idea how he's going to work with this evil psychic queen who wants to mindfuck everyone.  I could either use an alternative idea or help fleshing this idea out a bit.

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Apocalypse World / Site 55: First Session
« on: May 19, 2011, 01:56:59 PM »
1st sessions rock.  We have:

-Pandora (Touchstone): She's a confident, strong woman standing out amongst the crowd as a beacon of hope, and also because she has a weird potted tree sticking out of her backpack

-Allan Mann (Savvyhead): He's weird as hell, disconnected from society, and just discovered the psychic maelstrom which he is now intent on figuring out

-Rouge (Battlebabe): He's a smooth, deadly assassin who arrived in the holding a month ago with an odd briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.  Now he's Uncle's (the NPC hardholder) strong-arm and bodyguard

-Wire (Chopper): Wire is Uncle's muscle, leading a gang of 30 well-disciplined road warriors.  He controls the goings-on in Site 55 like an old west Sheriff while trying to maintain a semblance of peace in his own unit

The holding is a long abandoned missile silo located somewhere in the Southwest.  There are three missile tubes burried in the ground along with a small network of tunnels and bunkers.  Uncle and his elite live underground in the silo while the rest of the holding makes do in the abandoned buildings and prefab shelters above.

The missile silo is of course non-operational but it is clear to his followers that he is attempting to bring it back into commission with the help of Allan (Savvyhead PC).  Allan works for Uncle out of the Radar Station/Control tower at the edge of the nearby air-strip.  At the other end of the airstrip is an old rusted out hangar that Wire's gang inhabits, guarding the armory which is one of Site 55's largest assets. 

So the social dynamic was that all of the group was working for Uncle except for the Touchstone Pandora, who is subsisting off the people's generosity.  She is a threat to Uncle but he can't risk getting rid of her as it could cause a wholesale uprising due to her popularity.

Scenes:
-We started with Uncle addressing the populace concerning the water shortage.  He's standing atop a platform and encircled by a wall of choppers with Wire directing crowd control.  Uncle attempts to explain to the people that they are doing their best to distribute the water they have but with the recent loss of a supply caravan from nearby Dead End they're going to have to bear down and hold out a little longer. 

Shit hits the fan as the people don't believe Uncle's bullshit - rumors are the silo contains a deep well in order to sustain the inhabitants and Uncle's hoarding it for his elite.  Bottles are thrown and Wire's men have to take down a couple of harrassers before Uncle removes himself from the podium.  Rouge tries to convince Uncle to tell the civvies that cooperation with Dead End must be maintained and this violence cannot persist but Uncle is pissed and refused to be made a fool of.  Rouge blows his manipulate roll and I have Uncle shove the megaphone into the Battlebabe's hands, directing him to speak to the crowd himself.  He does, of course, and diffuses the situation with a shotgun blast tot he air and a dose of fear. 

-Some small talk with Pandora chatting with Rouge about the water supply and she wants Rouge to admit Uncle is holding out.  Rouge looks up to Pandora as the Touchstone told him that if he continues on his current path there's no place for him in the hopeful future. 

-Allan churning away in his workshop in his radar tower, messing with his crazy signals and transmitters.  He discovers one of his receivers is picking up a strange noise (Augury) and he opens his brain to the Psychic Maelstrom.  The noise is beautiful chaos and the paint on his walls begin to peel and melt away as his heart races.  He catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman who cradles his face before the whole thing ends.  Somehow Allan managed to record the whole goddamn audio experience onto a cassette tape (isolating a piece of the maelstrom).  Very cool. 

-Rouge spotted a couple of newcomers in the crowd when his speech was being delivered and one in particular caught his eye, the dude was wearing a heavy duty arctic fur-ligned coat with the hood pulled up.  He had small goggles on his eyes and was wearing a surgeon mask (clearly a Brainer).  Rouge followed up on this lead by heading to The Shed (tent/bar area in the middle of the holding) and getting some solid intel by speaking with Dog-Face, a one-legged destitute civillian who subsists off others charity. 

-Wire heads to Allan's to speak with the techie about patching up his bike.  Wire caught word of Roark (a former gang member who broke away with Wire's lover Goldie in tow) attending the Circus this month in the Salt Flats.  The Circus is like this monthly gambling den, racing camp that is flocked to by inhabitants of all the nearby holdings for miles around.  Wire hasn't seen Roark since they split and he's planning on racing.

Allan agrees to work on the chopper's bike as he hatches this crazy idea.  He's going to audio he captured from the maelstrom and etch it into a belt in the bike's engine like a vinyl record.  Wonder what will happen when Wire takes to the Salt Flats in his maelstrom infused chopper?  Wire doesn't know this, of course.

-Allan, Wire, and two of Wire's crew (Lars and Rufie) head out to the Junkyard to scrounge up a proper belt.  I stole the Junkyard from a poster on here (not sure who?), it's basically this huge area outside of town with tons of crap, although it's infested by a group of mutants called Outlanders and you have to roll a custom move to navigate the area without trouble. 

When Lars shows up on his bike Rouge (Battlebabe PC) is riding on the back.  They're lovers and Lars thought they would need all the help they could get for the trip.  This pisses Wire off as he sees Rouge as a threat to his leadership, Lars being his lieutenant and all.

They hit the junkyard, get lost, and are attacked by a band of Outlanders.  Allan takes a crossbow bolt in his thigh and Rouge is cut up from a blunderbuss but they get what they came for and make it back intact. 

-Pandora shows up at the Shed (the only bar) and speaks with Dremmer, Uncle's right hand man.  We establish Dremmer's been making moves on Pandora for a while with no luck.  Nevertheless, she convinces him to go to Uncle and attempt to loosen up the water supply.  In exchange, she promises to back him for Holder if Uncle ever falls. 

-The people returning from the junkyard hit up the only doctor in town, a woman by the name of Joe's Girl (she was a former slave who somehow was set free and now practices medicine - roughly) who runs what people call the Hack Shop, a free-standing medical tent placed right between the 3 missile tubes above the silo. 

-Allan successfully etches the audio recording into the new belt for Wire's bike and puts the thing back together.  I made him roll a custom Weird move and he hit a partial success.  I gave him the option, either you don't put the bike back together correctly and Wire takes a -1 on his roll at the Circus, or Wire realizes what you did to his bike (although he doesn't understand it).  He chose the latter - awesome.

Oops I skipped over a small scene where Pandora convinced Allan to build a water purifier - Allan still needs to meet with Jackabacka in the bazaar to get the parts.

-Final scene was Lars running up to Wire who was drinking with some of his crew.  Lars tell Wire that Hammer (another chopper in the gang) was loaded and heading towards Rouge.  He's armed and was mumbling about offing the son of a bitch.  (Note - we established in the first crowd speaking scene that Hammer was afraid of Rouge after the battlebabe made his speech and sees Rouge as a threat to himself and the holding, so Hammer got liquored up and acting on fear went to attack Rouge in his quarters).  They find Hammer in the silo with a grenade in one hand and a 9mm in the other banging on Roug's door.  That's where we cut.

Sorry for the lack of brevity, I'm hoping to use this to document our game in case we take a long break so I didn't want to leave anything out.

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Dungeon World / Probabilities and Balance
« on: May 18, 2011, 03:26:18 PM »
So balance isn't a big deal, I agree.  The only concern, and why I created this thread, is when balance tips into the player's scale so favorably that PC death is so very unlikely to occur that combat gets boring.  Part of the reason why I created this thread is that I feel like if I aggressively tried to kill our group's Fighter, I would have a tough time doing it unless I resulted to dickery.  This feels a bit wrong to me, but check the points made below.

So, yeah, probabilities.  Every Fighter is going to have +3 Strength by level 3, for sure.  Thus, he will score a partial success on a Hack and Slash move 91% of the time at level 3.  He will get a complete success 59% of the time (rounded up).  That means nearly 60% of the time the Fighter will receive no damage if fighting a single foe and he doesn't need to Defy Danger (roll Dex to avoid damage). 

The problem that is coming up in our group is that I have thrown level 6-7 monsters at a group of level 3 and 4 characters (at different points in the game) and at least twice I thought they were suicidal for attacking.  Nope - no one's had to roll on Death's Door yet except for one other encounter which doesn't have to do with this thread.

The issue is that the Fighter Attacks the NPC up close while the other characters stay back and support.  The bard will heal the Fighter 12 points of health (this is like all the Bard does, sing over and over again), The Thief sneaks around or runs away, and the Wizard will throw a fireball or two not caring if he hurts the Fighter.

I'm pretty sure our level 4 group could kill the level 10 Dragon in the monster section as the Fighter has like 40 hit points and does somewhere around 15 damage when buffed up (which he always is). 

I know statistically this is in a vacuum but it just feels wrong that the Fighter will only take damage 40% of the time all the while the Bard is healing him for nearly half to one-third the damage caused. 

I feel like I should be driving harder with my monsters and being more aggressive in combat but I find it difficult being a fan of the characters and appropriately challenging them at times. 

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Dungeon World / Quantity of Rolls
« on: May 18, 2011, 03:01:50 PM »
Are other groups making moves and rolling dice about twice as often in Dungeon World as they do in Apocalypse World? 

I mean, it seems like every other scene in our DW games constitute a Battle in AW terms, while in AW you don't even necessarily have a battle every session.  Is this the case for everyone else?

I think the by-product of this, for me, is that I'm having a harder time determining how hard of a move to make in response to a failed roll as there's just so much more rolling going on.  The dynamic of play just feels so different to me than AW.  Maybe we're playing DW wrong, I dunno. 

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Apocalypse World / Battle Moves Question
« on: May 17, 2011, 08:36:08 PM »
So, Going Aggro clearly states to not use this move in battle.  If a battle breaks out and my intent is to kill Roark, how do I do this?  Try to Seize (Roark's Life) by Force.  If I roll and choose to get what I wanted to seize does that mean he just automatically dies?

My confusion stems from the sentence under Going Aggro where it says not to use it in a straight up Battle and then in the optional Battle Moves section it says you can have a battle with the existing basic moves, including Going Aggro. 

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Apocalypse World / Gangs by Proxy
« on: May 16, 2011, 05:19:08 PM »
So, how do you handle a Hardholder sending his Gang to rough up another group.

The book gives an example of a Gang being ordered to seize a bunker in a miserable charge and the player rolls his own stat while acting through the gang.

Well, what if my hardholder has a 0-Hard but my Gang is tough as nails.  If I send them after some hooligans and have them Go Aggro shouldn't their Hard be higher?

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Dungeon World / Dual Wield with New Damage
« on: May 10, 2011, 10:09:38 AM »
How do you handle Dual Wield with the new class based damage rules?  One die less than the class normally receives?

We have a Fighter with the Dual Wield ability is why I am asking.  So he should be doing 1D10 + 1D8?

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Dungeon World / Gamma Actual Play Feedback
« on: May 04, 2011, 09:31:48 AM »
We played last night with the new rules.  For Hack and Slash - we said no Damage on a 10+ but we also didn't use the +1 armor/damage options.  We also gave the Wizard 5+Strength encumberance which worked ok.

Thoughts:

-This was pointed out by Ben in my other thread, but there's no easy way for low strength characters to gain XP.  Our group typically highlights the low-stats to keep XP in check (otherwise we get like 20xp a session) and there are no moves for strength besides Hack and Slash.  The Wizard is too soft to hack and slash (until he gets mage armor) so he often finishes with less XP than the Fighter who can Spout Lore and Discern Realities nearly always (Fighter's Int/Wis is routinely marked).  We could think of no easy fix for this.

-Groups seem a little weak to me.  A zombie warband - the largest sized group of zombies possible by the rules - only deals 12 damage.  That seems a bit underwhelming.  I don't think the group rules are terrible - they just feel a little underwhelming.  I think the issue is that HP scales much more than Group damage (From level 4-5 a group of monsters will do 1 more point of damage but a Fighter will gain around 10HP).

-Bard is way too good at healing.  He multiclassed and took the Paladin's +4 when healing an ally and he heals 16 damage when singing at level 4.  Some of us also think the Bard is way too good at casting spells.  At most he will be 1 level behind the Wizard if he takes Spellcasting at level 2.  We thought a fair compromise would be that you can't take the spellcasting move until level 3. 

-Even though it's a bit clunky, we almost think that certain abilities should not be able to be taken with Multiclassing.  Maybe have abilities marked with an X if they can be or something.  The two bard abilities above are an example - also the Ranger's dual wield is a bit overpowered in the hands of a Fighter.

-The new equipment rocks.  You asked me why in my other thread Sage - I like the new items, I like the simplification of weapon categories, I like the new armor stats, I'm glad to finally see ammo available, I also like the suggested prices. 

-We love that carousing is free, that seems to bring the economy back in line.

-I'm not especially convinced that the Fighter is balanced with the new monster stats but our session was a bit wacky.  We will need to playtest this more.  My hang-up, which may be a non-issue admittedly, is that the Fighter has too much HP and the disparity between him and other classes causes problems when creating monsters.  The issue is that the fighter will only get hit roughly half the time he attacks (Say he rolls a 7 on average and has a +3 strength).  So if a monster is balanced to be killed in 3 attacks (I remember you stating this as a rough design goal eslewhere), the Fighter will nearly always kill it before he dies.   If you up the monster damage too much, nearly every other class will explode if they try and get in the fight (Thief, Ranger, whoever else).  I think this disparity will grow with level as we're currently level 4 and seeing this creep in a little bit.  Like I said though - we need more playtesting.

-This kind of leads into my last issue.  I'm having some personal problems with making moves as a GM.  Last night we had a Dracolich fighting the group.  The Fighter is meleeing the beast and doing this thing.  The Fighter rolls a 10 and htis without taking damage.  If I want the Dragon to fly and grab him and take him away can I have the Fighter roll defy danger?  HE already negated a hit with his Hack and Slash roll?  We ended up allowing it (mostly because the player was cool with it), but I felt bad allowing it to threaten him twice.  It could ahve killed him.  If the answer is no, the Hack and SLash included the Dracolich's attack, then I felt like the fight was realy kind of boring as half the time it was doing nothing but taking damage from the Fighter.  Not sure how to handle this situation and be fair to the players.

Thanks.

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Dungeon World / Thoughts on the Gamma
« on: May 02, 2011, 09:07:31 PM »
So, yeah, we're playing tomorrow and this is just from reading the Gamma but I thought I'd put this stuff down while it's fresh in my head.

-Encumberance is harsh.  Don't all Wizard's stat dump into Strength?  With an 8 strength he can carry his spell book and maybe a bow or staff - well he wouldn't take a bow because he can't carry the arrows.  That means he can't carry any food, adventuring gear, armor, etc.  Even if he had a 10 strength he won't be wearing leather armor or using a bow.  I'm not sure about the other classes, but our houseruled encumberance was almost universally higher (we gave everyone 6 basically plus strength mod, I think - maybe we did 5 for lighter classes).  I don't think I'll be able to convince my group to use all of these values.

-Love the rewriting of the basic moves.  Several cool little things.  I really like the re-worked Hack and Slash for balance purposes - not sure how the Fighter will feel about always taking damage but it makes more sense than him always being invincible because he can somewhat easily roll 10+

-Thief player is upset because he lost his magic device ability - this isn't something major I'll probably just let him take it but I thought it may be worth noting.

-Spell Defense is cool as shit

-Revised item list is awesome.

-Groups seem very squishy.  When they take more damage than their level they break apart?  Wouldn't a 1st level Fighter that deals 1D10 damage be able to break apart a level 5 group very easily.  As a GM that makes me nto want to use groups really.

-In our game on Sunday night, the players ran across 20 or so zombies.  The Halfling fighter dove into the group and failed his hack and slash taking a crapton of damage.  We had a discussion over whether he should know whether it was one group or a couple smaller groups ahead of time.  Using the new rules, would they always count as a single large group?  My only complaint with this is that it is very easy to ignore a group if a character with high dex finds himself in danger as he is unlikely to fail his Defy Danger roll to get hit.

-Love the expanded monster list.  Why is all damage static though?  I'm not necessarily opposed to this but I think it can make for a more dull combat at times.

-Monsters also seem soft in general (well, some of them).  Our group's Fighter will still do 1D10 + 1D8 (dual wield), +2 damage to start with, +1 damage from his Fighter ability from levelling.  If you combine this with the damage bonus from the Bard (this happens routinely in our game), he will still deal over 12 damage plus whatever the bard ability was reduced to - on average.  He is capable of dealing up into the high twenties.  That means he can one shot every monster below level 8 and some of the level 8 monsters.  He can have these stats by level 3.  This may be ok,it just seems odd that a level 7 or 8 monster won't be that hard to kill from a level 3 group.  Although, with that being said the monsters deal a lot more damage at higher levles so this probably evens out - it will just be a quick and deadly combat. 

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Dungeon World / Treasure
« on: March 24, 2011, 08:37:53 AM »
How is everyone handling treasure?  What's a good amount of GPs for the group to acquire after defeating a dungeon (I would imagine this would change by level)?

It seems as though after the first dungeon the group will likely be rich (as everything is very low cost) and everyone will be decked out in heavy armor.  The only item which actually eats a lot of coin is the Reverie which is recommended to be 100gp per level.

Also, how often does your group acquire a magic item?  Like every dungeon?  Every other dungeon?  Are most of the items permanent effects or are they one-time use items (like a scroll of some spell)?

Thanks.

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