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| Game over. |
I could have just started stacking extra hit points on the goblins to "make them a challenge", but I feel like scaling encounters to level defeats the whole purpose of leveling characters being a free choice. I gave the option of harder or easier targets, and the group consensus was to play it safe. If you want to outclass the encounter, you should have the right to outclass the encounter (and complain about the low-level treasure). Hopefully the personnel assigned to future missions will adjust up or down to fit the challenges, or vice versa.
I've been looking for options to speed up the rate of play. First, I think I'm going to switch from the book rules to the "cyclical initiative" method used last summer by Walley rather than rolling round by round. That will allow everyone to make a single initiative roll and stick to it for the entire battle. The only slight complication is that some initiative bonuses (like Battle Casting) are situational, so they might go away during subsequent rounds.
Second, I think anything in tight tunnels could be fought abstractly based on fixed marching formation, rather than by setting up miniatures. Anyone in front gets to attack without restrictions; anyone in the second rank can use a spear, polearm, missile, or magic; anyone in the third row can only use magic. Deeper rows are buffers, healers, and reserves. (All ranks reverse if ambushed from behind.) This is the way that lots of groups in the classic 80s era played D&D. I like the strategy of having to plan marching order and then rearrange it between fights to adjust for wounds.
January 10, Caudex Annales 70 AUP
On reports of spies and other area threats, the gathered heroes at Balewood Keep elected to form two search parties and split off to explore regions to the east along the road, and to the south beyond the river. Team A (shaman, explorer, thief, spellsword, paladin, nightblade, bladedancer) took along the exuberant Sir Wilrick (a 2nd level fighter) back to the goblin caves, and Team B headed down into the riverside marshes.
Team A discovered multiple entrances into the caves, and elected to take the high entrance rather than the brush-obscured one. The entry point was a natural chamber where the party encountered and brutally attacked a bearskin rug, baffling the cave's occupying ogre who defended his bedclothes with great valor but little success. Multiple Choking Grasp spells from the spellsword levitated him unhappily in the center of the room, while the rest of team gave him the pinata treatment. Searching the room turned up a collection of treasures and a passage into the goblins' maze of passages. After dispatching the guards in the room above (from behind) and crashing a large party in the common room, the team kicked open the door to the chieftain's quarters and left nothing standing. The chieftain himself fell to a serious mauling from a lion-form druid.
A thorough search of the room turned up the goblins' treasures (a chalice and tapestry) and the following note written in the goblin language, which was sent back to the realms of Isigwold (the forest-river region of most player domains) for analysis.
Meanwhile, Team B scoped out the woods south of the keep, where torches had been observed by night. Working back upriver after crossing at a boggy ford, the party's invisible scout discovered a camp of several poorly equipped soldiers with tents and bedrolls. After deploying a bard bellowing bar songs to serve as a distraction for patrols, the camp was broken into two parts and crushed in order. Even a heavy spear formation couldn't dent magical armor, and technology proved more than a match for raw numbers. This yielded another missive, again seeming to indicate that the camp had little or nothing to do with a direct threat against the keep.
Casualties
Sir Wilrick: Mortally wounded, survived after treatment but lost a severed hand
Treasure and Experience: Group A
Coins: 725.9 gp (1126 cp, 590 sp, 115 ep, 548 gp, 2 pp)
Artworks: Silver chalice (90 gp), Gold-threaded tapestry (900 gp)
Magical Items: 6 arrows, 1 potion, magic scroll (cure light wounds, hold person)
Gold per share: 1715.9/4 = 429 gp
Note: Three heroes each took a magical item in lieu of a share, and Sir Wilrick voluntarily declined compensation.
Kills: 1 ogre (140 xp), 1 goblin chief (65 xp), 21 goblins (105 xp)
Total experience from nonmagical treasure: 1715.9 xp
Total experience from kills: 310 xp
Total experience: 2026 xp
Total experience per member: 2026/8 = 253 xp (127 xp for henchmen)
Treasure and Experience: Group B
Coins: 35 gp (321 cp, 270 sp)
Total nonmagical treasure value: 35 gp
Kills: 1 graverobber captain (20 xp), 1 sergeant (10 xp), 8 spearman (80 xp), 2 longbowmen (20 xp)
Total experience from nonmagical treasure: 35 xp
Total experience from kills: 130 xp
Total experience: 165 xp
Total experience per member: 165/6 = 28 xp (14 for henchmen)
Wow, this is really taking off! I take it there is a slow and growing interest in ACKS at LETU? It also sounds like MEK attendance is improving.
ReplyDeleteWe officially have five players (Kim, Kyle, Peter, Zac, and my wife) who have set up realms, but each week we've also had at least one observer come along just to watch. Jarrett Locke has stayed a couple weeks, Vox and Ruthie visited for a week, and then for this one we had a friend of Jarrett.
ReplyDeleteThe down side is that we've stolen all the oxygen from everything else. I really want to have at least three games going simultaneously each week, maybe one board game, one miniature table (either mine, or with 40k players), and one table for hex-crawling with campaign heroes if I'm not in either of the other two already.
I think Zac will go back to running a table for Warhammer next week.
I bought a copy of ACKS and plan to start a game. I am curious, how did you generate these encounters? How much of them was tailored to the party?
ReplyDeleteI also like the idea of non-leveled encounters. It is nice to have challenges, and sometimes to run away. But it is also fun once in a while to just steamroll some baddies!
I am totally ripping off every bit of old content I can find. ACKS is fairly compatible with any pre-3.0 material, and creates characters roughly intermediate between "Basic" and "Advanced" characters from 80s era D&D. It can probably do a good job of playing modules from either system.
ReplyDeleteThe goblin encounters were from the south caverns in B2 Keep on the Borderlands, for example. The only changes I needed to make were rotating the AC values to the ascending scale (AAC = 9 - AC), which I could easily do on the fly. The graverobbers are from , another Basic-level module. I've been tying the module factions to my own hostile NPC realms, as if the chaotic realms are sponsoring intelligent monsters to populate the dungeons.
Its interesting to see how certain encounters change in difficulty with new rules. Ranged and polearm weapons get an interrupt attack that's independent of initiative. And Alexander Macris (the designer of ACKS) gives spears a bunch of unique advantages, like double damage on any charge (foot or horse). Virtually every fighter is going to want to carry both a spear and a sword at once, like the ancient Greeks. "Charge" is the ACKS substitute for "crit" in other rules systems. A single lucky goblin with a spear can take down a 5th level rogue!
I've been seeding the different encounters with "map hooks" that show the locations of monster lairs on the world map that are allied with high-level NPC realms, along with just enough information to determine the "challenge level" of the lair. That ties the dungeon crawl encounters with the hex crawl encounters on the world map I'm building, and lets players have some freedom to pick harder or easier encounters.
I recommend grabbing a copy of the ACKS toolkit (http://www.autarch.co/forums/general-discussion/my-acks-toolkit) by Aryxymaraki, an old friend I've known for the last decade or so. It's good for quickly populating a world map with random lair encounters.
I'm adjusting some random encounter tables to the party, since randoms are mostly just there to wear the party down and not kill them. But I figure there's a certain virtue in having any fixed encounter that can be scouted be of unpredictable difficulty. I have at least one encounter in the area where the sensible response is "run away and come back with a small army, and then resolve it using the miniature Battles rules".