Hi all. I’ve been away. Great to be back!
I wonder if there are those FotF players out there who would be willing to share and discuss how you actually use GROUP followers during a fight. I tend to lean heavily on the storytelling side, so I’ve often been found winging it, but I’d like to see a by-the-rules play-by-play take on this. In one game, I’ve been finding it challenging lately to handle “Ferenhaem’s Guard” a group of archers who also carry swords. I understand that they are a follower unlike any other except they possess the GROUP tag, but with 6HP, does this mean a single giant rat bite can kill them ALL AT ONCE? And how should their damage work? I’ve been using the rule, roll player damage, roll follower damage, take the higher number. “Do their Thing”, however, seems to suggest that the followed can make independent damage rolls. Maybe I should consult The Perilous Wild more closely, but I thought I’d ask first…
Thanks!
The intent is that each follower in the group has (e.g.) 6 HP and does 1d6 damage.
How you use those numbers depends entirely on how you frame the action. Remember: the group isn’t a faceless horde, it’s composed of individuals. There’s nothing stopping you from saying “Rolf, you sneak forward and slit the wolf’s throat!” And you roll to Command Followers to see whether Rolf does it. If he does, roll Do Their Thing to see how it goes for Rolf. You use the Loyalty and Quality of the group, but the outcomes largely effect only Rolf. If Rolf does damage, he does 1d6. If he takes 6 damage, he does but the rest of the group is alive.
(Possible exception: on a 7-9 to Command Followers, if you choose “do it but -1 Loyalty” then the whole group’s Loyalty is reduced. And on a miss, maybe the whole group rebels and is like “no way are you sending Rolf in there!”)
When you get more zoomed out (“okay boys, hold this doorway against the orcs while we finish the ritual!”), you make one Command/Do Your Thing roll for the engagement. In that case, I wouldn’t really roll individual damage. I’d roll the damage dice from the two sides and use them to help inform the fictional outcomes.
If the group is helping a PC gang up on, say, an ogre… I’ll have the PC roll hack & slash with a +1 if the group succeeds at their Do Their Thing. And damage would be “roll all the dice, take the highest.” I’ve also started adding +1 damage per warrior or archer helping.
That help?
Just a thought, and totally not RAW: I’d probably run a 6HP group as 6 members with 1HP each, unless otherwise specified (3x2HP, for example). This means that death would be based more on fictional circumstance. A single giant rat doing 6 damage would kill one. A rat swarm doing 6 would kill them all.
So +Jeremy Strindberg and Aaron GriffinI think that your approaches, like mine, are slightly at odds with the idea that “a group is a follower like any other, but with the Group tag.” (PW, p. 19).
Maezar “A group is a follower, like any other, but with the group tag” is intended to mean: give the group a single Loyalty and Quality, the same tags, the same damage and HP. In general, order them around and make moves for them as a group.
But that doesn’t mean they’re some amorphous blob of followers, incapable of individual action and sharing a common pool of vitality. They’re a group of individuals. Each one is going to have its own HP and its own ability to deal damage.
(Just like monsters… goblins have the horde tag but that doesn’t mean the whole mass of them has only 3 HP and they only deal 1d6 damage when they gang up on you… each one has 3 HP and they do 1d6+1/per goblin damage.)
In retrospect, we probably should have made the intent clearer in the group tag description. But we were short on space, and it didn’t occur to me to do so.
Side editorial: Part of the problem is that DW doesn’t have a clean concept of “group” combat. The way HP and damage work is very much zoomed in on individual combatants. There’s no good, common language for that, and you see it come up in questions about “how do you deal with a PC attacking multiple foes?”
I find myself missing Apocalypse World’s more limited harm scale, with 1 = some injuries, a few serious; 2 = widespread injuries, many serious, a few fatalities; etc. I’ve thought about it, but I’ve never been able to come up anything clean that works with the HP/damage scale in DW. So I just use damage vs. HP in groups as inspiration rather than a determinant.