GM’d my first game last night, and I had a ton of fun! The group I played with are all new to this sort of thing (me included), but everyone really got into it. I was constantly challenged and surprised by what my players threw at me to work with. Thanks Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra for enabling this wonderful experience!
I did have one question that came up though. One of the players was skewered by an enemy from behind rather deeply and he decided to attack said enemy by twisting (while impaled) and grabbing his sword (which he had earlier embedded into the enemy but then had to leave) and essentially ripping it downward to cut the enemy open.
I figured this action was rather painful since we was impaled at the time so I had him roll Defy Danger +CON to “endure” the pain of twisting around before making his attack. Does this make sense or is there a better way to handle this scenario?
Thanks!
My only comment is before he decided to make this move, ask the other players what they would do. Create the choice to aid, or defend or act, versus some other act they may want. This can create new bonds “Fighter saved me once, I owe him my life” or new dynamics “Character 1 had to abandon his sword to save character 2, which left him defenseless”
Personally, I think endure covers it, that’s a lot of pain to fight through.
I just try and get my players to act in each other’s favor. Aid and Defend are great tools that can make a combat situation turn in their favor. Because you should root for the heroes, but you should give them a fight worthy of them. If Heracles isn’t fighting the hydra, but five bandits, who cares?
Personally, I would “present an opportunity at a cost”: in this case, let him do it, but tell him if he does he’s going to aggravate the wound and take more damage.
The problem with having him roll here, is that if he rolls and fails, the result is UNCOOL. As a GM, you want to try and encourage coolness (and badassery) whenever you can!
The result is only as uncool as the GM wants it to be, which is, perhaps not coincidentally, the same as failure on Hack and Slash, or any other player move, right? How did the player get into this situation in the first place? Presumably some recent failure.
The character is bad-ass for attempting to twist on a skewering blade, whether they succeed or not, and bad-assery is its own reward!
Scott McGougan Which is why I try and get the other players in. Usually when the bad happens, it starts snowballing. And the character that jumps in with aid or defend usually makes it awesome. And eases the “Bad” so to speak.
Scott McGougan But to clarify, the bad-assery is usually Awesome.
Paul Weber “I’ve got this fiend firmly in hand, friends, but if you’d be kind enough to hold my intestines until I’m done? Thanks, you’re a peach!”
LOL
Scott McGougan More like “Hey, Ranger, your fighter friend has been skewered, and you know that look, he’s about to do something crazy. You can get to the fighter and maybe help him out before he makes it worse, but if you do, the wizard you were defending will be exposed. What will you do? Oh and what was that bond with the fighter?”
I’ll elaborate a bit more. A perilous journey went awry when the trailblazer stopped and setup camp on a game trail which was frequented by a small pack of wild boars. At the time of said twisting, the Paladin (the one that was impaled) had failed to defend his Mage companion and was attempting to lay hands on him to heal him. The Mage had been attacked an knocked prone by the boar the Paladin unsuccessfully tried to interfere with. Finally, the fighter in the group was attacking the boar that had just attacked the Mage, flinging it clear of him.
The Paladin getting impaled was mostly a result of him failing his defend roll completely. I gave him a rather small consequence at the time so that I could let their moves potentially snowball, creating a more interesting hard move as a response. Before he was impaled I let all of the characters decide what to do. The fighter chose to attack/fling the boar attacking the Mage while the Paladin was going to Lay Hands on the Mage. The failed roll in conjunction with ignoring the boar he had previously attacked caused him to get impaled.
Sounds absolutely cool! I bet they remember this fight for a while!