Perilous Wilds: Followers Shall Be Splintered?
Everyone knows about Trollsmyth’s house rule for shields in B/X: “Any time you take damage, you can opt instead to say your shield absorbed the force of the blow. The shield is shattered and must be discarded, but you don’t take any damage from that hit.”
Somewhere I saw someone mention using the same house rule for OSR Hirelings.
So I’m curious about exposing the implications of making it a Follower move, using Perilous Wilds:
When you take damage, you can pick a Follower in reach of the attack to absorb the force of the blow instead. The Follower is killed or crippled, but at least you didn’t mess up your hair.
Maybe roll +Loyalty before they take the blow, and determine the outcome based on that?
What do you think?
Maybe don’t roll, the benefit could be 1-for-1, and you are trading willing followers which is a cost unto itself.
A move like that is pretty dark, though maybe funny, and could certainly work for some styles of play.
The Call for Assistance move already says that if a follower helps you Defend, you can spend 1 hold to redirect an attack to them.
Which isn’t quite the same, I know, but it’s similar.
I’ve also had at least one scummy PC use a follower as a human shield, justifying a Defy Danger with “quick thinking” when a huge puff adder attacked. He got a 10+ and poor old Bilshi the Porter got pumped full of venom.
Thanks, Mark Cleveland Massengale. That’s the way I was thinking.
I asked because Jeremy Strandberg recently commented on a similar choice I inserted into my untested Skirmish move, suggesting that maybe that choice ought to be a GM move instead.
I get that, but I’m curious what people say about the art of giving hard choices to the players vs. making them as a GM.
Jeremy Strandberg, I wasn’t thinking about the mood of the move, and I acknowledge that it would probably go dark or elicit humor, without much in between.
The reason I was thinking about it is I don’t want the Followers to become leading characters on par with the heroes. OF COURSE I’m happy to have the players invest in them and think of them like people—but I’m afraid that too much investment might become a long epitaph for someone probably destined for an early, unmarked grave.
John at Deep Six Delver yeah, just to be clear… I’m not saying I don’t like the “meat shield” move you suggest above. I think it’s great for a certain type of fiction and game play.
But it’s a very provocative sort of move, right? It says that the lives of followers are essentially meaningless and disposable, and utterly in the hands of the players.
The original DW hireling moves say much the same thing (see Arcane Assistance, Experimental Trap Disarming, Warrior, the implied effect of Intervene… all of which basically make the hireling a meat shield), though, interestingly, they basically make the hireling the one who will be harmed if there is harm to suffer.
Your version is even colder, cuz it puts that grim choice front and center in the player’s hands.
That might not mean the game devolves into blackly humorous butchery. Maybe (hopefully) the paladin always refuses to use the move, until maybe there’s this one critical scene where the paladin must succeed for the greater good, and he biffs a roll, and the player (not the paladin) is like “my noble squire sacrifices himself, taking the attack so I can keep going” and it’s very touching.
But most of the time? I bet it’d get pretty dark.
From where I sit, I wouldn’t like a move that allows the player to sacrifice a follower without giving the follower some “say” in the matter. I could, however, see a Good follower with an instinct like “to protect ___” using “Do their thing” to absorb a blow in someone’s stead. In fact, in my current Friday night Freebooters group, we have one follower, a Group of Paladins (“The Order of the Heart”) who have often stood between certain weaker players and a danger. One of their moves is in fact “Shield Wall”.
I think that the fact DW foresees that you start playing as a follower in case of a character’s death or final level means that this move would go against the original intent of the designers: do things according to the fiction, trigger a move if fiction demands it, not the other way around. Meat shield can be anything and anyone on the field of battle: if the player surprises an enemy who’s back was turned to him, and uses them as a meat shield, that doesn’t have to be a move at all.
I would have a hard time taking advantage of that…my first hireling has actually developed into a 1st level character of his own and I’m now playing him instead of my 10th level fighter. I get attached to henchmen and hirelings, lol.
Scott Morgan I don’t have much experience playing or GM-ing, but I already saw this start to happen in all of my groups, and we’re barely to level 2. It’s kinda like animal companions for Rangers: you don’t threaten them until the character is well and truly gone, rolling for Last Breath, and maybe even then only if he fails and they don’t want to be separated from them in the afterlife.
Emir Pasanovic, that sounds very different than the way we play. Sometimes being a fan of the characters means giving them epic threats, and a glorious death. So they don’t die of boredom! Short of that, it also means cranking up the danger (ie. “Think dangerous”) and letting them choose their own priorities. It means throwing stuff at them that you have no idea how they could possibly survive, and trusting them to come up with something.
But if you crank up the danger and don’t follow through if they fail, or if they prioritize something else over the safety of their animal companion (for example), it’s not being much of a fan: That would be patronizing, belittling their choices, and showing them that what they prioritize doesn’t matter.
Playing to find out means it’s not a forgone conclusion that your character will live through the next session, much less your animal companion. 😉
No, playing to find out doesn’t mean everyone survives, but it does mean that the animal companion or the follower will outlive the heroic character even if only for a second, unless the narrative makes that choice superfluous or unnecessary. What you’re suggesting is, let’s be flippant, make a move to kill an NPC we maybe spent years with, but hey, at least the PCs hair is still beautiful. I’m saying from the text of the DW book, that is not the narrative the game was made to support, but of course you can do whatever the hell you want in your own games. I’m not going to assign animal companions HP and make the player roll separately to defy danger for them every time a fireball explodes nearby.
Emir Pasanovic, I’m sincerely confused by a lot of what you just wrote. I’m not sure what to ask to clarify.
I’m using the Follower rules from Perilous Wilds, which does assign HP to Followers (and to the Ranger’s animal companion).
But what Jeremy wrote above agrees with my reading of the core Dungeon World text: A huge proportion of the hireling moves (p36–37) do make them into meat shields. Do you agree?
I didn’t say kill NPCs flippantly. But I don’t see anything in the text that says or implies that the any NPCs should outlive the heroes. Can you point me to that?
And for the sake of clarity, I’ve had a Ranger in every DW campaign and most of the one-shots I’ve run, and I have never made a GM move to kill the Ranger’s animal companion.
We did have a Ranger’s AC die once, because another player made a series of moves that snowballed into an avoidable catastrophe. The Ranger herself rolled Last Breath (and took the bargain, so she lived), but the animal companion didn’t make it.
After thinking about the comments by Jeremy Strandberg, I realized—like the Skirmish move I posted—I don’t need this move. Call For Assistance already puts this choice in the player’s hands, without so many implicit exclamation marks.
And I also see that the default Hireling system in Dungeon World makes their role as “red shirts” even more focal than Followers. If we wanted to make that more focal, we could easily switch to using Hirelings instead.
I also realize I never got my head around the core Hireling rules well enough to give them a fair shake. Because the players rarely Recruited help, and other NPCs frequently act like ad-hoc hirelings or followers without any possible chance of foresight, I think I’ve used by-the-book Hireling moves in maybe 2 or 3 sessions in all my Dungeon World games ever.
As soon as I saw the hireling rules in the earliest drafts of Pirate World, I was using those instead and in addition to the original system. Followers too. The reason I preferred those rules is that they define NPCs in parity with the heroes and monsters.
Now I see the reason I “wanted” a move to let Followers be expended like ablative armor was sort of to undo that parity—so high “Quality” Followers don’t begin to overshadow the player characters.
But that’s a different problem.