As seems to often be the case for the end of the semester, I don't have enough time for a full write-up on the Saturday sessions. Last week we had three new players, so I did another intro scenario for the Battles system in D@W with some alterations to the Chaotic force. I let the new players design their own divisions using a point-buy system based on BR values. This time we had four divisions of Lawful troops against three divisions of beastmen (orcs, hobgoblins, ogres, and a troll platoon). Surprisingly, no one elected to play the elves, or to add any extra heroes to a division.
Durnovaric Expeditionary Force Company A(Father Padeen BacCorleot, 5th Level Cleric)
2x Heavy Cavalry
2x Longbowmen
2x Slingers
Company B (Lord Damuth, 5th Level Dwarven Vaultguard)
4x Dwarven Heavy Infantry
Company C (Magister Finbar Crowne, 5th Level Mage)
Heavy Infantry A
3x Longbow
Company D (Sir Asmund Crayg, 5th Level Fighter)
1x Heavy InfantryA
2x Longbowmen
2x Light Infantry F
1x Medium Cavalry
Beastmen Horde, Legions of the Undying Company A (Warchief Khazay)
1x Trolls (with 27 unit hit points and 7 attacks!!!)
2x Light Ogre Infantry
2x Heavy Orc Infantry
Company B (Chief Awitar -- Kyle: "Hey, didn't we already kill this guy?" No, that was Zraqua!)
1x Heavy Ogre Infantry
4x Light Orc Infantry
Company C (Engineer Ursk)
4x Hobgoblin Bowmen (desperately needed some infantry support!)
By sheer luck, the dwarves and cleric set up on the same side as the hobgoblins, and the mage's division got the trolls. This allowed the mage to keep the trolls locked down with web spells, and the cleric to tie up the hobgoblin commander with hold person, as the dwarves slowly chewed through the ogres and orcs. Web is another good example of a spell that works much better on a large battlefield, where it's essentially perfect crowd control against a single tough opponent.
Once the orcs in the center crumpled, the game quickly moved to morale checks, and Chaotic troop armies never survive more than one of these. None of the commanders were slain, but all of the units routed off the map. Arguably, the trolls were trapped and couldn't escape, but I want Khazay as a recurring villain, so I'm going to assume that he was stronger than his trolls and could break out of the web. (A more detailed system like Pathfinder would allow individual characters a combat maneuver check to escape from web.)
I'm feeling more ready to start on a full campaign with production mechanics included, although I might need to try simplifying the mechanics to accommodate the fact that not everyone has a rule book. For the moment, I'm working on creating more Excel spreadsheet tools to avoid having to look through a zillion photocopied tables for monthly recruitment limits.
Last night MEK OP hosted the board game room for the Yellowjacket Activity Council's fall-semester gamer event, Pwn Fest. Despite the obvious popularity of console video games (something like eight different rooms of Call of Duty, DoTA, LoL, etc), we still attracted enough players to run five multiplayer tabletop games simultaneously. I had a group playing War of the Ring that went until midnight!
The climactic defense at the Roaring Banksleft gnollish power permanently broken in the Savage Reaches, and left little opposition along the river valley. With poor treasure to claim from the nomadic gnolls, attention turned to the forsaken swamplands to the west. Saurian forces marching against Fort Diffident had been neatly rebuffed two weeks earlier, but the pale dragon commanding them had retired from the battlefield with a haste beyond the possibility of a pursuit. Locating the dragon's lair seemed a lucrative alternative to mopping up fleeing slaver caravans, and so the leadership of the Briarwood Irregulars turned westward at the mountain spur, following the footpaths into the murk and fester of Pallid's Abode.
The saurian tribes were primitive and dispersed into tiny hovels throughout the swamp, offering little opposition and indeed, little evidence of any recent habitation. The trail itself branched into a sinking complex of broken temple structures being flooded by water and overgrown with razor-thorned vines. Double-lidded eyeslits peered out from the water, then extinguished themselves to leave only ripples as the cavalry companies rode past.
The mouth of the great cave discovered outside the complex was worn smooth by passage, and a team of officers and heroes was already alert to dangers below.The passage sloped down into a chamber of muddy waters, where three saurian elders had elected to make a final stand. Two of the lizardkin were dispatched with fire and sword, and the third fled deeper into the tunnels. Swift pursuit brought the explorers into a throne room full of caged prisoners, waiting to be served as meals to the cave's draconic master. Pushing onward with growing apprehension, the warparty discovered a deep underground pool of acrid waters, churning and bubbling. And then the waters parted and the head and sinuous neck of a young dragon erupted into a furious gout of acid. Even those leaping aside in the nick of time were horribly choked and staggered by the rolling fume-clouds that blossomed around the splashing torrent.
Burning Hands: Need a light?
Both knights of the Irregulars, Thorgood and Wilson, fell in battle to the claws and fangs that followed up this noxious barrage, but not until after the dragon had been dazzled by a burst of light that left him stumbling and swinging wildly. As the surviving saurian burst from another nearby pool to employ shamanic arts to heal his master, scholar and magister Arthur Firebrand moved to catch them both in a fan of crackling flames. With the shaman scorched beyond life and driven into the caustic waters of the dragon pool, all focus returned to containing the dragon's fury. Thorley took a final stand beside the gruff Father Otis, notching arrows as the dragon closed in on them.
Surprise! Dagger KO!
In the end, the wyrm met an ignoble death. Firebrand, his magical arts exhausted, flew at the dragon's right flank with an unsheathed dagger and plunged it into the beast's scarred breast through a rift left by the enchanted sword of Sir Charles. The dragon stumbled in blind agony, and then at last lay quietly on the floor in a pool of fuming gore.
Amazingly, neither warrior was permanently injured after falling in battle to the strokes of the dragon-claws, knocked senseless by the impact but otherwise protected from laceration by sturdy mail, artful parrying, and Sir Humphrey's Ring of Protection.
With magical arts, the dragon horde was quickly identified among the acid-washed bones of hundreds of unfortunate captives. Great treasures drawn from the smaller pool where the lizard-priest had been concealed included (after return to civilization and careful identification): a Ring of Spell Storing with 5 spells, ample compensation for a wizard's valor, as well as a Shield +1. There were additionally strewn about the room a pair of scrolls, one (perhaps not coincidentally) with the fourth-level arcane spell spell storing, and the other with the lesser spell hypnotic pattern. In other corners, bones concealed a second set of Leather Armor +2, a Potion of Clairvoyance, a Potion of Invulerability, and a mildly cursed (but potentially also useful) Philter of Love. The floor was littered with offerings to the dragon from his saurian devotees amounting to the weight of nine thousands of gold pieces, and several rare gems: a flawless facet-cut diamond, a ceremonial jade belt, a wrought silver diadem, and a glamoured moonstone with patterns that swam beneath its surface.
In all, the wealth amounted to over 20,000 gp of monetary treasure, but with the further value of the spells beyond simple enumeration. Thorley Acquisitions now had access to one of the few techniques known of creating items that could store magical energy in any common jewel or ornamental band -- a talent prized beyond nearly all others by the great arcane loremasters of the world!
Notes: Prior to this encounter, I would have rated the battle at roughly even odds, but now it's clear that it required a lot of good luck to go as well as it did. Not only did all three PCs make a successful saving throw against the (basically lethal) dragon breath, but the dragon failed a saving throw against glitterdust. Otherwise it would have been unlikely that the party could have survived long enough to grind it down over multiple rounds. After seeing how lethal the breath attack could be, I didn't use it again during the battle, ostensibly on the grounds that dragons that are attacking by smell (instead of by sight) prefer to claw and bite. Another two breath attacks would have finished the battle quickly and sorrowfully.
Acid? Yeah, whatever. We're all good! (By Howard Lyon)
After the battle, the two rolls on the Mortal Wounds table were totally optimal. That is, both fighters rolled a 20 on 1d20 (for survival), followed by a 6 on 1d6 (for severity of wounds), which let them both get off with nothing except some flavor text about a near-death experience! Not so much as a scar to brag about later. The odds of doing this are essentially 1 in 20*6*20*6, or 1 in 14,400!! This is, to put it mildly, not the standard outcome of being ripped apart by a 30-foot-long acid-spouting dragon in his own lair.
Finally, I'd like to salute playtester (and walking Warhammer 40k encyclopedia) Jeremy Walley, who had to move back to Arizona last week. We all miss you already.
There's a split in RPG design between systems that represent a combat round/turn as being short (6 to 10 seconds) or long (a half-minute to a minute). This divide traces all the way back to 1st edition, where AD&D switched to the "long round". The latter interpretation requires that a "round" be interpreted as multiple extended exchanges with an aggregated outcome.
When playing ACKS last night, I was impressed by just how quickly the battle was over. Essentially from the moment cave entry until the fall of the dragon (split over two separate encounters), the fight took roughly 10 rounds, amounting to about a minute and a half. On that time scale you'd expect that an entire dungeon floor could be cleared out in 20 minutes. Granted, it would require amazing stamina to fight continuously for that long!
That carries over into the tactical battle system as well. A battle involving huge armies clashing still ends in a couple minutes. And that can involve a single hero wiping out multiple platoons, probably amounting to a kill every three seconds or better, under calculations based on the surprisingly generous cleave rules. Any class but a mage can cleave multiple targets, and even bows can get off a number of shots in that ten-second round under the same rule (which I guess means it should be called cleave/multishot!) Shortbows have a natural edge in this system, since they trade in their shorter range for a better cleave multiple, providing a definite incentive for an experienced fighter to downgrade to a lighter ranged weapon.
To provide some visual reference for the standard arguments for this compressed time scale, I did a search for rapid use of realistic weapons by modern-day specialists.
Here's a video of some Viking reinactors:
There's an absolute imperative in this style of fighting for taking shorter, weaker thrusting strokes, rather than the stereotypical wide and reckless swing. It's not particularly theatrical in appearance, relative to your average Hollywood movie, but the sharpness of sword-points makes it mandatory to create constant distance with any opponent. That requires both the sword and shield to be pushed forward at all time, moving in small, unpredictable arcs.
This is, in some sense, a justification of two tropes of fantasy wargaming at once: the short strokes happen fast (allowing substantial improvement in attack rate with experience). But they also aren't very effective at finding more distant kill zones, justifying the value of armor (as blocking instead of absorption) and the idea of whittling down health of a skilled opponent in small increments ("HP loss") to represent declining stamina or coordination-impairing bruise wounds to the sword-arm or shoulder. On the other extreme, an inexperienced or slow defender would take a single stroke to the neck and go down in a matter of seconds.
For ranged weapons, there are plenty of videos communicating the speed of a polished archer with a lightweight recurve bow. In a competition requiring careful aim, the limiting factor is always aiming, not the mechanics of notch and release. Here's a speed shooter firing on the move:
If you wait until the end, you can see that she's just burying the shots in a canvas screen with no attention to precision. Still, the idea of a company of composite shortbow archers unleashing this kind of barrage gives you a sense of how you really might get a chance to fight in the shade as you attempted to close the range on them.
All of the above videos involve normal humans, using mundane weaponry, in non-life-or-death situations. I'd wager that being an immortal elf defending your homeland with a magic bow is worth at least another factor of two in terms of attack capability. Five lethal shots in 10 seconds doesn't seem so crazy in that light.
This Saturday will lead off with an incursion into the lair of Pallid, a juvenile albino black dragon who has been functioning as the ruler of, and object of cultic adoration from, the Savage Reach's local saurian tribe. The saurians themselves were eliminated in a conventional action, but the dragon worked his way back to the main cave. Although the D@W rules officially state that commanders die with their units, I ruled he would have been operating as an independent hero from the air, and could make a swift escape if the battle turned against him.
Going into the lair is a man-to-man (i.e., traditional RPG) scale encounter, so I've been paging through the core rules to figure out the sequence of battle. One aspect of the game that could probably be clarified is which actions are allowed in different stages of combat. Here's the result of reading through several paragraphs of text and determining how different combat actions would be classified in a "modern" post-3.0 vocabulary.
In general, every character may make one move action followed by one attack action, in order of initiative rolls using 1d6+DEX modifier. (Note: not 1d20!) Initiative order may be delayed until after any other combatants with lower initiative scores.
A free action may occur in addition to a move action, before or after it. A full-round action replaces both. A declared full-round action also replaces both, and must be declard before any initiative rolls. A spontaneous full-round action can occur at any time in reaction to an opponent, regardless of initiative.
Move any distance up to combat movement, if not engaged in melee
Make an overrun special manuever, to move past an opponent without engaging (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis)
Set a polearm or spear to receive a charge, against a charging opponent (delays the attack action until a charge occurs)
Stand up after being knocked down by a special maneuver or ability
Attack Actions
Make a missile attack
Make a melee attack
Perform a special maneuver or other special ability (usually involves additional modifiers to save from any size differentials)
Brawl with a punch (1d3) or kick (1d4), to inflict non-lethal damage (-2 to hit with kicks)
Disarm an opponent (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis)
Force back an opponents (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis), may result in a collision causing knock down and damage
Incapacitate an opponent using the flat of the blade to inflict non-lethal damage (-4 to hit)
Knock down an opponent, granting +2 to attacks against, and inflicting -4 on his attacks (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis)
Sunder an opponent's weapon or shield, using a forceful blow from a weapon or shield (various hit modifiers and save modifiers, based on types and enchantments)
Wrestle an opponent to create a hold that guarantees automatic future hits to brawl, force back, disarm, or knock down, and allows +4 and backstabs with any future allied attacks (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis every round)
Light a torch
Throw flaming oil or holy water, or some similar liquid
Ignite military-grade oil (on the floor or on a target), using a torch
Use an item (wand, staff, rod, ring, etc)
Attempt to turn undead
Either Move or Attack Actions
Sheathe a weapon and draw another
Ready or loose a shield
Pick up an item from personal inventory or the ground
Free Actions
Draw a weapon into empty hands
Drop a weapon, shield or item, and immediately draw another weapon
Activate a rage effect
Make a melee cleave attack against a new opponent within reach, after slaying another (up to class level for fighter-type classes, or half-level for cleric/rogue-type classes, classified by attack throw advancement rate)
Make a missile cleave attack against a new opponent within range, after slaying another (same class limits as above, plus capped at 2 for crossbow/arbalest, 3 for longbow, and 4 for any other ranged weapon)
Full Round Actions
Charge into combat and attack
Run away from a battle (when out of melee), at triple normal movement
Declared Full Round Actions
Cast a spell from memory or a scroll
Make a fighting withdrawal
Retreat from melee
Spontaneous Full Round Actions
Make a reaction attack with any missile weapon, spear or polearm, against a closing opponent within range/reach
Usually I try to put up an in-character recap of the previous session, but this week the detailed roster for the player army was taken home by Walley to prep for next week. So instead I'll just provide a summary.
We fought four battles, three of them relatively balanced. The humans won three battles, and the beastmen won one.
In the first battle, the player army split, and a couple companies of cavalry rode off to intercept a company of lizardmen that were getting rather close to a supply link. Both sides had roughly 30 BR, including a small dragon commanding the saurian troops. This resulted in a strong victory for the humans, at the cost of a heavy cavalry platoon.
In the second battle, which was concurrent with the one above, the remaining infantry force attacked a mobile gnoll company investigating from the south. This featured a little under 25 BR for each side, and was again nominally balanced. This time the humans fared much worse, and were sent quickly into a rout. Without any "tough" units to take losses, the humans had to lose a larger number of units, and were on the losing end of the +2/-2 morale modifier for number of units lost.
In the third battle, the cavalry returned to regroup with the survivors, and pursued the gnolls and their prisoners. I allowed a spy to roll as an act of "sabotage" to see if he could release some of the prisoners to fight in the battle (the non-wounded ones from routed units, presumably), but this failed. In any event, the gnollish survivors were totally outclassed by the cavalry, and were destroyed.
In the fourth battle, two more companies of gnolls joined up to meet the humans at a bridge. A human mage went all Horatius Cocles on them, and fireballed the bridge as they were attacking. I ruled this was good for a -4 terrain penalty, forcing them to hit only on a 20. The gnolls then proceeded to roll 87 consecutive non-20 results! Outcome: Human victory with no casualties, and a river that you probably don't want to be drinking out of, any time soon.
After cutting back on the number of recon rolls (using range modifiers) and eliminating the distance modifier, the recon system seemed to work more smoothly. I'm contemplating adding a "rumors of distant battles" trigger for long-range recon, i.e., battles count as a recon-triggering event with a longer range. That will give distant domains some chance to be aware of the outcome of a major battle, which seems like the sort of thing that would more easily attract the attention of scouts from dozens of miles away. I like the idea that a dramatic victory by an invading army puts all the other domains in the area "on notice" that something new is happening.
Spoils/experience calculations are still a bit slow. I think it might be possible to speed them up with a standard worksheet form. It would also be nice to have a worksheet to keep track of wounded soldiers, and when they recover from wounds, as well as experience point totals for units working on Veteran status. All of this is something I could do myself... if I had more time!
I feel like I'm gaining a better understanding of the strategy of assigning losses. There's a natural need to find balance between trying to kill only your weak units (which pushes you quickly to being forced to make morale rolls) and killing only strong units (which are valuable and can't easily be replaced, providing more staying power in one battle at the expense of hurting you in the next one).
The character creation rules in ACKS seem to be organized around using the four classic classes (fighter/cleric/mage/thief), in their original incarnations. Most of the sub-type classes are implemented in rather novel ways, with the Gnomish Illusionist (for example) looking very little like the original 80s-era version of the illusionist class. But the Basic Four are almost exactly copied from their primitive form. To be precise, they resemble the Greyhawk/Holmes/Moldvay implementation of each, aside from some clean-ups like using d20 for thief skills instead of d100.
One of the places this is most obvious is in the cleric spell progression. The original 1974 release of Men and Magic includes this table:
You can see that the cleric is differentiated from the mage in two general ways: Slower initial spell progression (the text description suggests that the clerics need to "earn" their spells by service), but rapid progression after level 4.
But even stranger is the irregular at level 5 (or actually "4+1", in these pre-Grehawk booklets designed to mate perfectly onto the Chainmail rules). At the following level, suddenly the cleric gets two spell levels at once! The line that reads "2 2 -" should probably have read "2 1 1" for the sake of a smooth "one spell level per player level" progression. The removal of this discontinuity in both 1e and the Rules Cyclopedia suggests that it was a mistake.
This glitch is reproduced faithfully in the ACKS core rules. This has the effect of artificially weakening level 5 clerics, who are missing the 3rd level spell that they "should" already have in place of that additional 2nd level spell. I'm debating whether to put it back in, or leave it in the currently quirky form as a nod to tradition. There's something charming about it being a permanent monument to the amateur proofreading of TSR during the early garage-publishing era.
There's a fascinating parallel here in Biblical scholarship, where early scribal transcription errors that result from skipped lines (called "haplographic" errors) show up in many older texts that are used as the basis for modern translations. This creates a situation in which a modern translator is forced to make a choice between fidelity to the flawed text, or inserting a reconstructed version of the missing line that might not perfectly replicate the original material.
No more pink Vaseline!
In some ways, the RPG-writing community (or at least, the retro-RPG community) shows many of the same passionately conservative exegetical tendencies as a Hebrew or Christian religious community. Errors are first a source of confusion, then grow to become viewed affectionately, in the same way that some Star Wars fans would rather watch the original theatrical version of Star Wars with Vader's uncolored lightsaber and the smear of Vaseline that hides the wheels on Luke's speeder.
