December 26th, Boxing Day

The Holy Grail in Corn Wood

I have always been on the lookout for a roleplaying game that would allow me to tell a compelling fantasy story and also gave the players the opportunity to tell a story of their own. Dungeons and Dragons can provide a compelling story if the GM is good, and the players are on the same page with him. I have only been in a few games where that was achieved, and mainly due to our passive acceptance to whatever the GM put in front of us--This is because in D&D railroading is the name of the game.

The other ‘holy grail’ that I have been looking for is a combat system that doesn’t slow down the game to the point where a 1 minute (in game) fight scene takes us 5 hours to resolve, but at the same time provides an exciting experience with both ups and downs leading eventually to a climactic conclusion.

Savage Worlds came pretty close to helping find this grail, and it is a very good system for ‘pulpy’ games, especially ones in a more modern setting. And savage worlds is brilliant in how it lets the players manage all of the friendly NPCs, treating them as pets of a sort and doing all of their dice rolling,  freeing up the GM to just focus on the villains. However it still uses a combat system that does slow down game play a bit; a tactical system that is still largely the players vs. the GM, although it is much faster than Dungeons and Dragons. Furthermore, the bennie mechanic, which allows a player to re-roll failed dice, or absorb damage seems to make the characters a bit too powerful. The grail is still out there somewhere.

Fate Core gets us a little closer, and it looks like a wonderful storytelling system, however it has one obstacle that really makes that grail elusive; its aspect system. Getting one’s head around making, invoking, and compelling aspects is not an easy task, and really requires a lot of work on the part of the players and GMs alike. I do really like the system, and think with the correct group, and a bit more experience with using aspects and learning the ‘fate point economy,’ it could be very fun to play. But it is not the grail, more likely it’s one of the 3 or 4 Holy Nails.

Perhaps the grail  might be what is described here:

http://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/

I have played two rather brief sessions of Dungeon World with my students this past week, one of them on Christmas day, and have found it to be very interesting. The most interesting bit perhaps was that combat played pretty much the same as non combat in terms of speed and roleplaying style. There was of course more action when fighting, but it all went pretty smoothly, and this without the use of a map or fixed initiative order.

Play progressed as follows:

When the party first entered the village of Corn Wood the halfling rogue was accosted by a little girl, seemingly fascinated by the short man’s attire. The thief hit the girl when she pulled at his cloak, and this caused some of the villagers to come over and see what was going on--it looked like there was going to be a fight and the party was going to be run out of town. The wizard intervened and made a promise that he would keep the halfling in his place. The villagers reluctantly let them proceed to the inn, however with the caveat  that a  chaperone named Alfred accompany them. At the inn they met Tracy the innkeeper’s daughter who was strangely happy to see them, and tried to portray the image of a happy little village. This went against the party’s experience with the suspicious villagers out on the street. The wizard bought Alfred an ale, which the thief poisoned  with Goldenroot, this resulted in Alfred befriending the wizard. He happily informed the party that things were not going well in the village, and that some strange things were happening out at a ranch nearby, and that torches had been seen in the old abandoned Red Wizard’s Keep on the other side of the Green Woods. He also mentioned the recent  disappearance of the village elder’s daughter.

That night the group followed Tracy, now dressed in rust-red cultists robes out to the ranch where they discovered a group of cultists performing some ritual around a bonfire. The characters overcame the group of cultists  pretty quickly, however 3 imps were summoned, one of them running off to the village and the other two attacking the party. This is where we ended session 1, which we did in about 3 hours including some character creation.

Session two, the Christmas session,  started  with the summoning of the imps, and they proved to be very difficult to handle. We started this rather informally over dinner and grabbed the character sheets and dice when the players started telling me what they wanted to do next in detail.

The paladin was poisoned in the previous fight with the cultists and became paralyzed. The Wizard lost his magic missile spell in a catastrophic failed casting, his only real combat ability and the druid was mostly babysitting the young hysterical girl that was kidnapped, and about to be sacrificed, but he finally calmed her down and left her to change into a large owl that picked up one of the imps and dropped it onto the house, where it crashed through the roof. The second imp teleported the wizard into the basement where he was placed into a cage--which turned out to be only an illusion crafted by Tracy. The thief and druid left the paladin out by the bonfire, the girl by the fence, and searched throughout the house for the wizard.  They encountered the imp on the second floor, and dispatched him pretty quickly (he was hurt from the fall). Tracy left with the second imp out a secret tunnel when the wizard discovered his cage wasn’t real. The encounter ended when the thief and the druid fought and defeated a grotesque dire boar (which almost killed the thief), the result of bizarre experimentations in black magic, in the basement. Tracy escaped to the Green Woods with one of the imps. Meanwhile the third imp was creating mischief somewhere near the village, and the to-be-sacrificed-village-elder’s-daughter was nowhere to be found.

With the paladin still eating dirt (poisoned and petrified), hungover from drinking too much the night before, and the halfling near death, session two ended. This consisted of about an hour and a half of gameplay.

In terms of mechanics, dungeon worlds is pretty simple. The game consists of ‘moves’ that are triggered when the players describe their character doing certain things--’stabbing the imp with my dagger’ becomes the hack and slash move for example. Most moves consists of the following formulae: 10 or more on a 2d6+modifier = success, 7-9 = success at a cost, and 6 or less is a failure, which means the GM gets to do something interesting, and players grab a point of xp. The paladin getting poisoned, the wizard getting teleported, Alfred having to follow the party around town, the imps getting summoned, the party members losing various items and weapons throughout the fight in addition to hp damage were all results of this mechanic. The players loved the two sessions and didn’t want to stop. They left the last session with the comment that it was more like reading a book then playing a game. I think I have found my grail. Time will tell.