Blog Steel!

Category: Players Keep Out!

  • Players Keep Out #3: The Moathouse Dungeon

    First off, just a heads up, there’s not going to be a campaign diary next week (editor’s note- by “next week” I really mean “this week” since this was posted late. Whoops). I was very busy the last couple of weeks and wasn’t able to prep as much as I wanted and so the session has been pushed back, either one or two weeks depending on the players’ availability. If I think of something there might still be a blog post next week, but it’s probable that there won’t be. Anyway, on with the show.

    You know the Ankheg the party found and avoided last session? Well, the behind the screen reason for that is that I just… forgot to print out the Ankheg stat block. I was super excited to run it, the players were super excited to fight it, and then I was looking through my stuff for the stat block and it just wasn’t there. The players were very gracious in having their characters decide to look through the rest of the area first. 

    One thing that I think has been missing from past games I’ve run that happened in this session is inter-party debate. I don’t quite understand why this was missing before or why it’s happening now, but twice now the players have spent quite a bit of time arguing over what to do about a particular situation. I love it! Maybe it’s happening because they have things in front of them that aren’t problems now, but represent potential problems in the future? And so there isn’t as much pressure to come to an immediate decision, and no one feels the need to act immediately before everyone has had their say? I’ll get back to you when (if) I figure it out.

    An interesting thing about Allora being the only party member who can read Caerwyn’s journal is that it’s made Allora’s point of view about what’s in the journal the default point of view. I don’t know if it’s the player or the character doing this, but Allora is basically taking Caerwyn’s words at face value, and the thing is- she shouldn’t. Caerwyn has basically been driven mad by grief at this point, and he is not a reliable narrator or journaler.
    Another thing about the journal that the players have assumed is that the journal – which is written in the present tense – is entirely about past events, which is not true. Most of it describes past events, but the third entry describes both past events and future plans. The human hovel isn’t something Caerwyn has already destroyed, it’s Hommlet, and Caerwyn was planning on destroying it. Depending on what the heroes decide to do once they capture him, he still might.

    Going into the next session, there’s a good chance the players will finish out this adventure, but that depends on them. If they just grab Caerwyn’s unconscious body, kill the last ogre, and head back to Hommlet it could be done real quick, but that leaves 7 vine-zombie-humans and 1 vine-zombie-ankheg in the dungeon, plus a tied up Wode Elf in the moathouse. If the characters remember – I may or may not remind them – they might go handle some or all of those loose ends. They might also remember, and still just head back to Hommlet with Caerwyn. Depending on what combination of Caerwyn and his underlings survive, things could go very poorly indeed for Hommlet once the heroes depart. I suppose we’ll see how it goes.

  • Players Keep Out! Session #2

    If you’re playing in my game, don’t read this. If you do, I’ll send you to Finland.

    Last week’s session was the first session that really utilized the adventure module I’m using, The Village of Hommlet. If you don’t already know, The Village of Hommlet is a famous adventure written by Gary Gygax for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. We’re not playing Draw Steel!, not AD&D, so there’s a fair bit I’ve had to change about the adventure.

    First, there are a whole bunch of encounters in TVoH that really wouldn’t challenge the party. In D&D that would be fine because D&D is built around attrition AND offers the party experience points in small amount for even small encounters (in AD&D terms I believe you got XP based on the amount of gold you find, not from killing monsters, but the point still stands).

    In Draw Steel! however, things work a bit differently:
    •Your character’s coolest abilities use your class’s Heroic Resource, which you gain throughout an encounter. There’s no attrition for your character’s abilities, only their health.
    •When you beat an encounter your character gets 1 or 2 victories. When you start an encounter, you receive your Heroic Resource equal to the number of Victories you have, and when you take a rest, your Victories become XP. BUT, since each Victory is quite significant, you don’t get any victories for trivial encounter.

    Because of those two points, I think trivial encounters would feel pretty bad for the players. The fight wouldn’t be terribly exciting because everyone knows the party is going to win, the party isn’t getting anything from the fight, and they’re just losing stamina. It’s a lose-lose-lose scenario.

    So, I took out most of the encounters I thought would be trivial once made with Draw Steel!’s monsters. Some frogs at the Moathouse entrance were taken out entirely, a giant spider in a tower was found already killed by the villain of the adventure (who I also completely changed), some brigands were replaced with Wode Elves, and a big snake, a lizard, and a giant tick were all removed.

    Also, the evil vines I showed off in the last Players Keep Out! post didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. They did a little bit, but with how Draw Steel! potencies (the equivalent of a D&D saving throw but without the randomness) work, I’d have to roll very well to really affect most of the party members (Paarthanoxx got affected because his Might is as low as it could possibly be). Next time I make something like this, I’ll probably have them only rely on the roll and not on any of the party’s stats unless the effect is nastier or harder to end.

  • Players Keep Out! Session #1

    If you’re playing in my game, don’t read this. If you do, I’ll throw you into the sun.

    We’re only playing once every two weeks because people are busy, so I figure I might as well post a retrospective on the previous session that goes into some of the behind-the-screen sort of stuff. So that’s what this is going to be! Have fun.

    So first, let’s talk about a couple dumb mistakes I made. This is my first time running a sandbox style game, and I wanted the players to start out with a bunch of hooks to different adventures to prevent a situation where they have their first hook and that becomes the first thing they do because… what else are they going to do? So every character started with a hook to a different adventure, but I screwed up communicating that to everyone, so there were a few players who started out thinking that each hook was to the same adventure and that was going to be how everyone came together as a party. That would have been a good idea, but I had a different idea that would get us straight into player-led sandboxy goodness. Only… I messed that up too. When I was writing the hooks, I had this idea in my mind that each character would have some idea that the associated adventure would be too much for their character alone, so they would naturally be interested in getting together with other likeminded heroes. But I ALSO failed to make that clear in the hooks and didn’t tell the players directly. What a fool I am.

    But in spite of all that, it still went pretty good! Honestly, the awkwardness that all caused did a pretty good job of simulating the awkwardness of 5 very nonhuman people showing up in a very human town that was at best quite chilly towards them. There was some really good roleplay going on and I was hugely impressed with how quickly my players had an idea of who their character was and actually put it into the world.

    Now, onto some specifics. Michael Thornberry might die next session, or maybe the one after that. He’s just a guy and he’s wholly unprepared to find anything other than muck in the swamp. He’s probably going to want to leave very early into Friday’s session, but there’s a chance that he gets killed if he tries to leave on his own. If the party keeps him alive throughout the adventure, there’s a very good chance he wants to curl up in his tavern a cry. I don’t think he’s going to stick around with the party long term.

    We had our first fight of the campaign after the session! It didn’t actually happen, but I ran out of prepped material while we still had time so we went back to the War Dogs that the party passed as a little white room scenario. Two characters very nearly died! It was basically a standard encounter according to the monster rules as they currently are, but my players are new to this game and I think they’re just used to DnD combat where you basically have to just wait until after an encounter is done to meaningfully heal. In Draw Steel!, you can use a maneuver (basically a bonus action in DnD terms) to heal 1/3 of your stamina, and you can do that quite a few times before needing to take a rest. I think even the elementalist in the party has 8 of those he can use, so it’s a pretty large amount of health. The tactician really saved the party in that combat because when the PCs damage the enemy he has marked, they can use one of their heals without using a maneuver, so once things started looking dicey for them they had an easy way to stay alive.

    Lastly (and this has more to do with next session than the previous one), I made my first Draw Steel! homebrew! It’s a very simple environmental hazard (and honestly very similar to one that’s already in the monster packet they sent out) but it’s mine! It’s a hidden evil vine that’s going to try to drown the PCs in the swamp! How fun!

    I’m pretty happy with how visually similar this is to the monster stat blocks that MCDM has released for Draw Steel! while only using google sheets. I’m not sure about whether EV 3 is accurate (one Level 1 hero is roughly EV 6) but we’re going to find out! My hope is that the vines will take up enough of the heroes’ action economy that the ogre becomes a big enough threat for them. Otherwise it’ll get stomped pretty badly, I think.