Just played our third DW session of Steading of the Hill Giant Chief – and our first PC fatality! Xiola Zenwaith, elven wizard, fell during a lethal battle against two hill giants and four dire wolves as the party attempted to retreat from the Steading to rest up before staging a direct attempt to attack the chief. We also had our first level up – Felix Pook (aka Pook i’the Hood), the thief, took a +1 Dex and the Cheap Shot Advanced Move. Interesting GM snippet was basically escalating a notional “adventure front” I was pretty much making up as we went along – how was the Steading reacting to the PCs’ intrusion. I’ll be writing that up more formally for future sessions. 🙂
Just played our third DW session of Steading of the Hill Giant Chief – and our first PC fatality!
Just played our third DW session of Steading of the Hill Giant Chief – and our first PC fatality!
What happened during Xiola’s Last Breath?!
Cool, my players are leveling way too fast! Too many 6<
Leveling up seems fast (first or second session) at the start, but slows riiiiiiight down as you go on.
Action and behaviour spur improvement. Â If your players act on their XP, resolve a bond and do all the dungeon stuff, they’re getting 5 xp / session plus any failed rolls. Â Players that want to improve risk failure – failure leads to complication – complication leads to fun!
Yeah on the first session i had 2 level ups at the end, 2nd session and I got two  players at 3 points to lvl up again, but it is slowing down, they are getting the hang of it and avoiding risks when they don’t want complications. On the other hand one player went ahead and took risks because he thought it would be cool to see what comes. 🙂
I second the question though, what happened in the last breath roll?
Remember, you don’t level up until you make camp, so even if you get enough XP during the End of Session move, you can’t level yet.
That was one of the anxiety factors for one of the players actually, hehehe.
Seriously, you can’t leave us hanging on Xiola’s Last Breath. PC death is one of the most fun parts of DW. It actually inspired me to include Death as a major character in my most recent DW campaign. He was being assaulted by Morena, goddess of death, who wanted to replace him.
I’m afraid Xiola’s Last Breath wasn’t in itself a massive in-game event. 🙂 She was pummelled by a hill giant’s club in the middle of melee, with no one around to help defend, and reduced to 0 (it would have been -4 if you could go negative). The subsequent Last Breath roll… failed. We could have drawn things out, but to be honest the dramatic moment was there and then; there was a lot of shouting and drama, attempts to heal, etc, but the melee was still highly dangerous and the hill giant more than capable of killing other PCs. After the melee the party carried her body with them to their secret cave to regroup, where we ended the session.
The bad thing was the speed of the event; with no “bleeding out” or “dying” rules, reducing to 0 HP is “roll or die” – sure, you can die in a long, lingering way, but there isn’t any chance to save a dying person with magic or healing, etc. On the plus side, that did feel very old school, and helped hammer home the RAW. It made us aware that you have to be very careful in a dangerous combat – certainly more so than in standard D&D or many other trad RPGs.
I’ll maybe do a blog post on the session. 🙂
Something to remember about Last Breath – you die, but not always right away.
Consider Tony Stark. He’s done three movies on a failed Last Breath roll.
grin