Tag: Hans Messersmith

Ambushes

I would like a little advice. How do you handle monsters that try to ambush the PC’s?

Let’s say there is a kind of choke point in a mega-dungeon, and the monsters have rigged up a big cargo net to drop on the characters at that spot. It is well-hidden.

Now, how do you work up to the point where the PCs are either caught by the net or not?

* How much do you look for signals that the PCs are actively searching for ambush? (i.e. someone scouting ahead, using Trap Expert, explicitly saying they are checking the ceilings, etc.)

* How much would you base on a 6 or less roll on a move? (i.e. unless someone misses, they’ll not get caught)

* How much do you telegraph the ambush to prompt the PCs to even roll a move? Just walking down a hall doesn’t trigger any moves, right?

* How much to you just treat this as a hard move?

Any thoughts are appreciated. I’m up to almost 30 sessions of GMing DW now, and feel confident in almost all areas, but traps/ambushes are still a soft spot for me.

When a PC is using Hack and Slash (or Volley for that matter) against a group of enemies, do you spread the damage the PC does around? Or do you apply the full damage to each enemy? If you spread it around, how does armor apply?

Example:

PC is facing down five bandits, each with 1 armor and 3 hp. The PC rolls 10 damage. Does the PC…

* Kill one bandit with 10 damage

* Do 10/5 = 2 damage to each bandit, with armor meaning each takes 1.

* Do four damage each to two bandits, killing them, and the extra two to another bandit, so that he takes one damage after armor.

* Do 10 damage to each of the five, killing them all?

* Do 10 damage each to some reasonable subset of them, killing some of them (GM’s discretion)

* Something else?

For reference, on page 58 it says “If the action that triggers the move could reasonably hurt multiple targets roll once and apply damage to each target (they each get their armor).”

A couple of questions that have come up in recent play, sort of a mish-mash…

* When you are Defending something, and you run out of hold, you can just re-roll Defend, right?  I mean, you are still Defending.  Example: Josef is trying to keep a bunch of chaos-infected dwarves from getting past him on a narrow bridge.  He is defending the bridge.  My instinct is that as long as he is defending the bridge, and as long as the chaos dwarves are just trying to get past him (as opposed to attacking him directly), he can just keep rolling defend and spending hold to damage them until a) they back off and change their tactics or b) they are all dead or c) he rolls a 6 or less and I as the GM do something nasty to him.  Does that sound right?

* Same example.  Lets say the chaos dwarves decide to instead attack Josef.  If that is the case, Josef just Hacks and Slashs or Defies Danger, right?  That is, he just keeps his hold from the Defend on the bridge until someone tries to do something with the bridge and otherwise fights normally.  Right?

* Is there a rule about stacking bonuses?  I thought there was, but I can’t find it.  The PC’s in our game are up to lvl 7-8, and some of them have some very clever move combinations (we are using Class Warfare) that lead to very high bonuses.  I”m ok with this, it just means they are badasses of great badass-ness, but it is making it harder to put tough opposition against them.