Hi Guys,
Ran my first game last night and it went really well. The only two minor issues were the fighter with 3 Armour shrugged off nearly every dmg roll. Also when the big combat happened the narrative went out the window at times. So there was a lot of people just hitting each other and trying to do dmg. Also the bard died and failed his last breath roll, though the cleric wants to plea to his good to resurrection (which I am tempted buy), just thinking of a very hard choice.
The players loved bonds and the way they help colour the world.
Also thanks for the quick and helpful responses to a couple of posts I put up yesterday. Great to find such a helpful and constructive community.
Cheers,
S
Doesn’t sound too bad for first game. That will happen with the fighter & with the other discussions in the group, it’s where the fighter is at home good so be sure to vary up where the group is so every player class gets to play some where their class is at home & give some variety (so you take a break from the wilderness/dungeon to stuff going on in town).
Up to you on the bard, depending on the story they might be happy to bring the poor bard back in return for a favor or service (ie. He/she gets revived but must help the temple out & convert to that faith) or someone else revives him/her for some other plan. Or come up with new character, up to the player & GM. Just my Call of Cthulhu RPG nature of trying to smoothly avoid or fix early player death, though good narrative can fix all. The next quest could be bringing back the lost bard & give that player a NPC hireling (or supporting one shot character to return as NPC later) to run until the bard returns.
Also hard to do narrative with combat that’s always tricky to manage but if you have a bunch of npcs & monsters which can eat up time running that, try mostly narrative with either simplify the fight to just a high die roll or NPC/monster morale affected by player characters & let one side flee if they want to revisit later.
Good luck on the next game as sounds like a good start for the group overall.
Don’t let your players go “I roll Hack and Slash, I deal X damage.” They should be describing what they do and you should be the one deciding whether a roll is needed and what type of move it is based on what they’ve described. This will keep fiction-first going during combat.
For the Fighter, that’s normal, that is what the Fighter is good at. Remember that monsters are characters, not just bags of HP – they should be adapting their tactics to the player characters (assuming they’re smart enough – not the case for oozes obviously, but definitely the case for kobolds/goblins/etc.), which means they should be mobbing the Fighter (in which case they get to deal damage automatically, using the mob rules to increase their damage, unless the players can find a way of stopping them from doing that) or trying to disarm him/take his armour off/etc. (use DM moves other than “deal damage”).
Also, you should totally let the Cleric pray to his god to resurrect the Bard (at an appropriate cost), because that’s interesting.
Definitely do other things besides deal damage. If you want your monsters to be threatening, make them smarter. The average goblin isn’t a threat to a Fighter with 3 armor if he just tries to swing away, he’ll never do damage that way.
The fact ghat the bard died shows that there is still order in the universe…