Author: colin roald

Jason S of The Dungeon Dozen has an awesome list for when you need an NPC on the spot.  I know I’m going to have to use #8, “Kick ass princess with a sword, finally away from oppressive court life, won’t listen to anyone about anything.”

http://roll1d12.blogspot.com/2012/11/wandering-dungeon-jerks-who-want-to.html

So, Ritual.  I’d love to hear examples of what Wizard characters in your games have done with it, and what costs they’ve paid.  The rules don’t specify much of anything, so I’m curious how other people have handled it.  I feel sure there was a thread on Barf Forth about this, but now I can’t find it.

On a related note, here’s a whacked out list (from “Jack”) of stuff and actions that could be required, most for fairly major rituals, I think.  Something like this the Wizard isn’t going to do every day!  “As you burn the incense of Zalamphel a demonic servitor will appear and demand that you sacrifice one of your senses for a year. When you have named the sense to be stripped away, the demon will vanish and you may complete the ritual.”

http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2013/01/carcosa-rehab-instead-of-violation.html

So, Bonds.  I’m three sessions into a DW game, and none of my players have chosen to resolve a bond yet.  None of them seemed too inspired by the choices at the start of the game.  And they rarely choose to roll Aid, so Bonds are kind of just lying there like dead fish in our game.  I think they’re not really getting how to make them fun or interesting, and I’m not sure how to explain it.

Do y’all get a lot of action out of Bonds in your games?

Related, in a comment below Marshall Miller wrote about Madness bonds that “You would want to have things that triggered your madness or find ways of acting on your madness in the game because you couldn’t get XP at the end of the session if you didn’t interact with or resolve your madness.  If the end of the session comes up and you look back and your madness hasn’t come up, you are neither hurt nor benefit from your madness.”  As I read the rules, you only get xp if you resolve a bond, but maybe it would be more interesting if they were like alignments, and you could get xp for just having them come up in play.  Do any of you play it that way?  

Allowing an xp for each bond might be too much, but maybe one xp if any of your bonds come up would work out.

Pulled out of one of my comments lower down:

I’ve been collecting ideas for “worse outcomes, hard choices” for melee:

    •    Opponent shoulders past to threaten someone vulnerable

    •    Character is pushed into dangerous terrain: off ledge, down stairs, into fire [note “forceful” tag means this happens in addition to dealing damage, but any opponent might push or trip as an attack]

    •    Armor or weapon is damaged or destroyed

    •    Are they carrying anything dangerous or valuable?  Poisonous, flammable, or breakable?   Was that a good idea?

    •    Deal damage from an ignored threat;  e.g. a fighter is being threatened by three lizardmen with spears.  If she just rolls to cream one of them, that’s a golden opportunity for one of the others to run her through.

    •    Helmet stops the blow, but bell is rung, clock is cleaned; take -1 forward

    •    Inflict a debility, particularly stunned, confused or scarred.

I’d be happy to hear more interesting outcomes, particularly for “regular” humanoid combat.

So, at tonight’s game, the fighter wanted to take his huge, brutal club and beat down two ‘horde’ creatures at one go.  This seems like a plausible move, but I drew a blank at the table at how to adjudicate it.  And I can’t find any guidance in the rules.  Hack and Slash says “an enemy”, singular.  The Fighter has no Cleave move.  The Harm and Healing section has rules for damage from multiple creatures, but not attacks against multiple creatures.

Is the idea to try to keep horde creatures challenging by limiting how fast they can be cut down, or is there some variation of a standard move I’m not seeing that should just handle it?

So, debilities.  The rules as written say:  “You can only have each debility once. If you’re already Sick and something makes you Sick you just ignore it.”

Am curious why that rule is there.  It seems like an obvious option to interpret a vampiric attack, for instance, as inflicting the weak debility, but it would be strange if a vampire can’t affect you twice.  Or, say, each day in the nonEuclidean plane of Madness, you grow increasingly confused.  In general, if you can normally have a range of modifiers for ability from -3 to +3, why shouldn’t debility be able to stack likewise?

Descriptionwise, it might be boring to just stack “take another -1 weakness”, but you don’t have to do that – you could presumably describe increasing pallor, and rubbery legs starting to buckle under you, and so on.

Does that sound like a bad idea?

The Hack and Slash move says:  “On a 7–9, you deal your damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you.”  As written, that allows the GM to offer a choice like “you do your damage.  The monster attacks back;  you can either take the damage or be shouldered aside and the monster will have a clear shot at the wizard” . . . but not “you can do your damage, but if you do, you’ll be out of position and the monster will have a clear shot at the wizard.  Do you want to?”  That is, on a 7-9, the rules say the character has definitely hit the monster for full normal damage.  Any hard bargain the GM can offer as part of the monster’s counterattack happens separately from that.

On the on hand, it seems like a bad idea to offer bargains as partial successes that could result in nothing happening.  So having something definitely happen is a good thing.  On the other hand, having characters be so likely to deal damage every time they roll makes it hard to keep monsters alive long enough to be interesting.  How do you all handle this?