Yesterday, I ran a playtest for Bulldogs! that went quite well, from my perspective. The group seemed to have fun (I certainly did), and I got an idea about what works and what needs work within the system.

One thing that struck me, though, was how effective my preparations were. In general, I think I prepared fairly well; I knew the system, and I had in idea of where things were going. There were areas where I think I over-prepared, and others where I feel I didn’t prepare enough.

The chief area where I was over-prepared was simply in the length of the adventure. We played for a good three and a half hours, and got through about half of the adventure. In a more traditional, longer-term play setting that might be fine, but in a one-shot playtest, it’s really better if you can get through the entire adventure in one sitting. I decided partway through that I was going to cut some of the fights out of the adventure because it simply didn’t need it, but we still weren’t able to finish (I had to get home and feed the dogs, after all). I think the reason that I prepared so much was simply because I’ve never run a FATE system game before, and I had no idea how long it would take to resolve a single conflict. Practice, I think, will solve this problem.

Bulldogs!, like any FATE game, is fairly easy to improvise with; it gives you a lot of tools with which to adjudicate player actions on the fly, and doesn’t require nearly as much preparation as, say, D&D does. In fact, the adventure that I prepped (the one that was too long) was only two pages long. I also had a set of cards with character stats and notes on them, though that stuff could have easily been included in the adventure document, and would likely only have increased its length by half a page or so.

It was pretty easy to run the adventure from this document, but I could definitely see areas where I could have prepared more. For example, simply putting stress boxes for the enemies on the document would have saved me a lot of time that I spent hand-drawing them before encounters. I also think that some of the fights that I planned were a little too hard for the party. This is partly due to inexperience, I think, and partly also due to the fact that it’s difficult to gauge how difficult an opponent should be for a particular set of PCs.

Despite these hitches, I do think that everyone had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed running the game (and I had a good, creative set of players), and I’d definitely run it again.

I’m not calling this a review, per se, even though I’m including it in the reviews category. I’m also including it in the session reports category, because it’s going to be a bit of both. I’m going to talk about some of my initial impressions of the game after playing it five times, and I’m going to describe (briefly) what happened in each session.

Let me start by saying this: my win-to-loss ratio in Castle Ravenloft is not what you’d call “good”. In fact, at one win and four losses, I’d say it’s pretty bad. That does not, however, mean that I think the game is bad. Quite the opposite actually; I enjoyed each game quite a bit, particularly because I never really felt that losing (or winning) was a foregone conclusion until, once or twice, right near the end. Another thing that I’d like to mention is that this game plays very well solo. Three of my five plays have been solo (using the included solo adventures), and they’ve all been a lot of fun.

Game One: Escape from the Tomb
I played the introductory solo scenario as my first game, using the dragonborn fighter and his recommended-for-beginners loadout of powers. I rolled badly initially and wound up swamped by a bunch of monsters that I hadn’t taken care of, but my dragon breath power got me out of that sticky spot. I used a wand of teleportation to get a wraith out of my hair and ran down a hallway, but I drew too many tiles with white triangles on them (in the initial scenario, these advance the sun track by a step, bringing you closer to Count Strahd’s awakening), and the vampire lord awoke and came to get me. I continued running down my hallway while Strahd and the wraith chased me, and eventually found that it was a dead end. I doubled back, but got stuck in a room with a crushing walls trap, and the two baddies quickly caught up to me. Between those three sources of damage, I went down pretty quickly. Game over.

I feel I made some tactical errors in this game, the most notable being that I had eleven or twelve experience points at the end, and hadn’t spent a single one. I could easily have canceled that crushing walls trap, which would have made things considerably easier, but forgot that I could. Lesson learned: spend your XP, don’t hoard them.

Game Two: Escape from the Tomb, Redux
This time I went in with the ranger. I was a little worried because of her relative squishiness compared to the fighter, but she more than makes up for it with offensive power. Careful attack is easily one of the best at-wills in the game. It may not seem like much, but the ability to automatically deal one damage to an adjacent monster at will is pretty big. Sadly, she didn’t fare much better. Strahd didn’t awaken this time, but pure attrition brought the ranger down. I do feel that, if I had had twin strike as an at-will instead of hunter’s shot, things might have gone better; there was one situation where it would likely have saved my life.

Game Three: Adventure – Impossible
This is a great adventure. It gives you the opportunity to play all (or most) of the characters, and gives you some experience with the villains, too. I started off with the cleric, and very quickly ran into the werewolf. What I discovered in short order is that the werewolf is extremely hard to kill if you don’t have a silver dagger or an at-will that does more than one point of damage. He regenerates one hit point every round, making it very difficult to make any headway against him. I mostly avoided him and explored, and soon ran into the zombie dragon. While the zombie dragon lacks the werewolf’s regeneration, it does have thirteen hit points, which is a challenge in and of itself.

The wizard followed the cleric, and he managed to deal some decent damage to the zombie dragon and take out a number of monsters before he went down. He didn’t last that long, though. Next came the rogue, and she was the one who finally bested the werewolf. A well-timed sneak attack, combined with a snipe shot and a riposte strike, took that beastie down. She also made some decent headway against the zombie dragon, and even leveled up, but failed to kill it. She went down, making way for the ranger.

Because of the ranger’s strong offensive capabilities, I was able to finally slay the zombie dragon, but not before an encounter card drew a tile from the bottom of the stack and teleported the dragon to that tile. Interestingly enough, that tile happened to be another villain-spawning tile, bringing the young vampire onto the board. The ranger killed the zombie dragon while the vampire slipped past her toward the entrance, and when she pursued, he killed her quickly.

Last was the fighter, and I was pretty sure I had it in the bag. Famous last words. Although the fighter is durable and can deal pretty good damage, the vampire heals himself every time he hits, and he was hitting a lot. He finally whittled me down and dropped my last hero.

Game Four: The Icon of Ravenloft
I finally convinced my wife to give the game a try, and she enjoyed it. She played the cleric while I played the rogue, and the two of them make a good team. Between my backstabbing and her lance of faith, we could one-shot pretty much any monster that got in our way, and we did so. We were getting a little worried when we got down to our last two or three hit points each, but we still had both of our healing surges when we found the chapel. We killed the two monsters on the tile (a wraith and a gargoyle), and made off with the Icon for my first win!

Game Five: Klak’s Infernal Artifact
Immediately after playing that game, I convinced her to play again. It wasn’t hard. This time she played the wizard to my fighter, and we went after that sneaky kobold sorcerer. We drew some nasty monsters early (wraiths, blazing skeletons, and gargoyles), and I had the misfortune to pull a spear gauntlet trap that did some significant damage to my poor fighter. We ran in the other direction, leaving it to do its thing. We started down a corridor and ran into a blazing skeleton, but by that time we each had two hit points and we had used both of our healing surges. Actually, I had used both of them; I had taken the tank role a little too seriously. The skeleton took the wizard out, and it was curtains for our mission.

Again, there was a tactical error that we made there. I had the bodyguard utility power, which would have allowed me to turn that hit into a miss. The next treasure card I drew (I killed the skeleton in the hopes that I’d get a healing potion for her) would have allowed us to heal one hit point every time we hit a monster, but that was too little too late. By the time we had figured out our error, though, the game was cleaned up.

Conclusions
I’m enjoying this game so far. I’m going to play some more over the weekend, probably both solo and group play, and I’m itching to try some of the more elaborate scenarios. I like that each of the characters feels different and has powers of varying complexity to use, and the monsters really wind up feeling pretty different from each other. I like that traps are deadly and nasty, and the encounter card system is a nice touch that makes it so that you never know what’s around the corner. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I may have rose-colored glasses on when I look at this game; I’ve been pretty excited about it for a good long time now. On the other hand, I’ve built it up in my head for quite a while, and so far it hasn’t disappointed me. Time will tell, but so far, so good.

So, I went to my first WWDDGD yesterday, and it was a blast. For those unfamiliar, WotC does one of these things every time there’s a really big release. Most of the time it coincides with a Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, or Dungeon Master’s Guide; this time Dark Sun was the theme of the day.

We played a short adventure in which our characters had to find a magical cistern that generated its own water–a valuable commodity on a desert world. I played Kuori, the goliath barbarian, and it was a blast. A few things stood out to me, being on the player’s side of the table during this adventure.

• Barbarians do sick amounts of damage. Sometimes this impressive offense comes at the expense of defense, as with a power called “Avalanche Strike”. This power does 3W damage once per encounter (yes, I said encounter), but grants enemies a +4 bonus to hit you for a round, meaning you’ll probably draw a lot of aggro (as the kids say). In the hands of this particular barbarian, who wielded a mordenkrad, it meant 6d6+11 damage, with 1s being re-rolled due to the morenkrad’s “brutal 1″ property. During a solo encounter against a creature called a tembo, I scored a crit with this power, dealing 56 points of damage in one blow. This triggered my barbarian’s rampage attack (a melee basic that did 2d6+7), which piled on another 20. I then spent an action point and blew my daily, dealing another 20 damage, for a total of 96 damage in a single round. That’s pretty sick for a 4th level character.
• While my barbarian was a serious engine of destruction, the monsters are no slouch now that the Monster Manual 3 rules are in effect. During the second combat encounter I engaged a powerful gith, once again dealing impressive damage with an at-will. For my trouble, though, he attacked me right back, knocking me from my full hit point value (49) down to 8 hit points in a single swipe, and knocking me prone to boot. I got my ass handed to me a little bit in that encounter.
• Short, minion-heavy encounters can be pretty satisfying from the player’s point of view. The first encounter had four minions and five non-minions, and it lasted just about the right amount of time. Our strikers were beating pretty hard on the non-minions, and they went down pretty quickly. It was a nice surprise when the fighter went over to the minions and killed three out of four with a burst attack.
• A striker-heavy party is great for speeding up combat. None of our combats really dragged, and I think that was in a large part due to the fact that there were three strikers in the group: my barbarian, a warlock that could deal up to 4d8+6 with an at-will, and a monk who was pretty effective at handling groups of enemies. During the first encounter, the warlock and I focused fire on enemies pretty regularly, and that wound up being a winning tactic.
• Saying “yes” isn’t always realistic, but it sure can be fun! At one point, we were trying to identify some cave mushrooms, and none of us were having any luck. As a joke, I asked if I could intimidate the mushrooms into telling me what they were, and the DM said, “sure, but you have to roll a natural 20.” I rolled and came up a 17, but then I showed him my tattoo, and he gave it to me. Not realistic at all, but very funny and it made the game more fun for everyone.

Unfortunately, for reasons outside of my control, I missed everything after the tembo. I had a lot of fun, though, and I learned something valuable: playing a barbarian is hella fun.

There is a new session report up.

Overall, the game went really well. I tried a few things that I’ve mentioned on this blog. The first encounter included a variant of wild magic rules; unfortunately, I forgot to utilize them as often as they should have been, but when I did it was interesting. During that encounter, one I got a chance to make use of two house rules that I’ve posted on the site.

First, when Chance was dominated, he made use of grit. It worked pretty well. The dominated condition still affected him somewhat, and he deliberated over the choice for a little while before deciding to do it; he was only going to be dominated for a turn, after all, and damage equal to your healing surge value is a lot in the middle of a fight. I think that, if it had been a save ends effect, the decision might have been easier, but still not a foregone conclusion.

Then, when Kraygin was dropped to negatives, he made a last-ditch effort. This one I’m still not entirely sold on. I think it might have been more dramatically interesting if he had dropped in the middle of the fight rather than being effectively staggered, running over to the rest of the party, and getting some healing. I think that, if you’re going to get that extra turn to save your bacon, the urge to heal yourself (or even for others to heal you) is pretty strong. I might balance this by making any healing you get during a last-ditch effort temporary hit points instead of real ones, but I’m not entirely sure.

Finally, I ran a combat that was partially a series of skill challenges, used for pacing. This worked really well, prodding me to change the dragons’ tactics as the fight progressed, making for a more dynamic and interesting encounter. I don’t think I’ll use this technique a lot, but certainly it has some merit when you’re doing a solo encounter that might not otherwise be all that interesting.

So, last night I got a chance to play in D&D Encounters again. I’m playing Yuka, the mul brawling fighter, and I’ve got to say, Yuka really shined in this encounter.

Why did he shine? It was a combination of a couple of different things. First, the encounter took place in a canyon of sorts, surrounded on most sides by twenty-foot-tall bluffs covered in thorny brambles. The enemies could fly from bluff to bluff, and attacked from atop them. Because only a few of the pre-generated PCs have ranged attacks, we had to get a little creative in order to take the fight to the bad guys.

The second reason was the DM. I played with a DM I had never played with, a guy named Andrew (I think; DM, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry if I’ve gotten your name wrong), and Andrew is my kind of DM. The DMGs talk about saying “yes” to your players, and Andrew really takes that advice to heart: if something has the potential to be awesome, he’ll let you try it. And in most cases, it was, indeed, awesome.

We were ambushed by some goblins (I think they were goblins; they were dressed in bone armor that disguised their features, and they may have been some Dark Sun equivalent to goblins, if goblins don’t exist in Dark Sun. I’ll just call them goblins.) and their pet drake. The goblins had flying contraptions strapped to their backs that allowed them to glide from bluff to bluff and the drake could, of course, fly. The combat started with the drake flying overhead, dropping a rope on our supplies, and landing on a nearby bluff. One of the goblins had the other end of the rope, and it was clear that they were going to try to steal our stuff.

The party quickly set out trying to attack the goblins, but I took a slightly different tactic: I picked up the rope and gave it a good, hard yank. The DM liked this idea, gave me an Athletics check (which I succeeded, what with my +9 to Athletics and all), and the goblin was pulled off the bluff and to his death (he was a minion). I then proceeded to use my move action to climb the bluff with the drake at the top, taking an opportunity attack and some damage from the brambles. The drake, however, flew away, back to one of the goblins, so I couldn’t attack it.

However, the goblin passed the drake another rope, so it was clear that they were going to make another attempt on our supplies. As such, I decided to prepare a trap for the drake. I backed up, to give myself a running start, and readied an action. My plan was to wait until the drake was over our supplies, about ten feet from the edge of the bluff, then charge forward, jump, and grab onto the drake. Andrew thought that was awesome, so he let me give it a try. And you know what? I succeeded. I grabbed the startled drake in mid-air, then twisted us as we fell so that I landed on top of the drake, minimizing my damage and maximizing its.

On its turn, the drake tried (and failed) to escape my grab. On my turn, I stood up, got a good hold on the drake, and then spun it around and slammed it into the bramble-covered wall of the nearby bluff. An ally then quickly finished it off.

Later, I spotted an archer on top of a bluff. I climbed a nearby bluff (failing my Athletics roll slightly, my first failed roll so far), and it cost me more movement than I had anticipated. No big deal. I traded my standard for a move to get into position, then spent my action point to charge, jump, and perform a flying tackle on the goblin archer. Andrew liked it and, once again, I pulled it off, knocking him prone, grabbing him, and landing on top of him. On his turn, he tried (and failed) to escape. On my turn, I picked him up, hurled him off the cliff, into the brambles on the side of an adjacent bluff, and that, combined with the falling damage he took when he hit the ground, killed him. Awesome.

At this point there were only two goblins left, both of them curse-chanters of some sort. They were both on the largest bluff, and there was a ten-foot gap between me and them. No problem. I leaped over the gap and, finally, drew my weapon and charged. And missed. Go figure, I finally make a normal weapon attack and I miss. The goblin tried to escape, though, provoking opportunity attacks while flying from both me and the party’s thri-kreen battlemind. We both hit, and because Yuka has Combat Agility, my hit knocked the goblin prone, causing him to fall out of the air and onto the ground below. The fall didn’t kill him, but our ardent did shortly afterward.

The DM, and the party, responded really well to all of my improvised actions. It helps that I only made two bad rolls the entire encounter; trying crazy things and pulling them off definitely encourages you to try crazy things in the future. And you know what? It encourages others to try crazy things, too. At one point, the ardent tried to make a lasso out of the rope and yank one of the goblins off the ledge. She didn’t quite make it, but at least she tried. At another point, the other fighter (also Yuka; we had seven at our table last night), knocked a guy off the cliff with Combat Agility, then used his shift to drop down on top of the enemy. The DM liked it, and ruled that all of Yuka number two’s falling damage would be transferred to the goblin that broke his fall.

It was a great session, and it really highlighted the fact that the system is capable of handling a wide variety of off-the-wall actions, not just what’s contained in your power cards. It also highlighted that, when the DM is inclined to say “yes” to awesome improvised actions, the game becomes more awesome for everybody.

At the end of the night, another player told me that one of his goals as a DM is to become better at handling improvised actions like that. I let him in on a dirty little secret: sometimes, you just let things happen and don’t worry about the rules. If one of my players wants to do something really, really cool, I’ll say, “give it a try, here’s the skill you need to roll.” The secret? Sometimes I don’t care what the result is. With these kinds of actions, sometimes I don’t bother setting a DC beforehand. I wait, I see what the PC rolled, and if it seems high enough, I go with it. Sometimes “high enough” doesn’t need to be all that high, if the action is cool enough. Because really, there’s nothing that takes the wind out of your sails more than trying something really cool and botching the roll. That kind of failure discourages future improvisation, and I’d rather there be more improvisation at the table than less. So, sometimes I hand-wave it.

There’s a new session report up.

This session was, in my opinion, a whole lot of fun. The encounters really clicked, and forced the players to really work together and use all of their resources.

The first encounter was actually meant to be two encounters but, as it turned out, the players split the party and were forced to play through two encounters simultaneously. The trap was great, and the beholder gauth complimented it extremely well. The puzzle in the other room was also good, though I had to allow the players to make some Insight checks to realize that they already had a clue for solving it (the cryptic piece of leather). The fact that the piece of leather and the only person in the party who spoke Goblin was trapped in a different room made things more interesting. I did allow the players to make Insight checks on their turns to get to look at the translation of the runes and the leather clue for five seconds apiece, which helped.

In the end, I decided to end the encounter once the puzzle was solved rather than playing it out to its conclusion. If I had played it out, the puzzle would not have deactivated the trap or gotten rid of any of the monsters, the encounter would have lasted for an hour or two more (it had already been about an hour and a half), and I don’t think it would have been as satisfying for the players. I saw an opportunity to allow them to feel like they’d really accomplished something, so I went with the Rule of Cool and let it happen.

The fight with the Tyrant was really hard for them, and was pretty brutal, which is just as a solo encounter should be, in my opinion. A beholder is something to be feared, and I think my players were pretty worried toward the end. Kryagin had gotten reduced below 0 twice, Chance had been downed once, and Sredni had been downed once (by Kragyin, actually, under the command of the Tyrant and with a damage bonus that Sredni, himself, had granted to Kraygin. Seriously. You can’t make this shit up.), and the party was pretty low on healing. I think they were glad that they had been storing up healing potions for so long. At 7th level, healing potions become sort of a last resort because you don’t get as much bang for your healing surge as most other healing powers will give you. However, when you’ve blown your second wind, your warlord and paladin and multiclass bard are all out of healing abilities, and you’re close to 0, you can’t afford to be that picky and you start drinking those potions and getting the hit points that you can out of them.

I ended this encounter early, too, because the players had already done 300 points of damage to the Tyrant and I saw the writing on the wall. However, I’m a little dissatisfied with the way I ended it. My reasoning was that the beholder would retreat because staying would mean certain death even if the PCs were killed (it was taking ongoing 20 damage at this point, that it couldn’t save against, because of the dimensional seal), and because self preservation is important to intelligent creatures like beholders. Also, I like recurring villains. However, I think the Tyrant’s retreat at a time when the players were not certain in their victory seemed a little artificial, a little bit like a deus ex machina. In retrospect, I wish I had simply had the beholder die the next time it took damage. It would have been a less obvious early end to the encounter and probably would have been more satisfying to the players.

I do, however, think that the players are going to have to get used to villains that don’t fight to the death, and who flee to fight another day.

For those who are interested, I will be posting the stats for the Tyrant and some guidelines for the encounter within the next couple of days.

A new session report is up. It was a great session, during which I debuted a few new mechanics that I’ve talked about on this blog in the past.

I tried out the Renown Point system, and my players really seemed to like it. It didn’t overcomplicate things, and it’s always nice to be rewarded. I do think I need to adjust some of the reward values and tweak a few of the Renown achievements.

The second mechanic that I tried out was a system for allied characters, which was a big hit. The party now has group of nine NPCs (one of them a dire wolf) following them around and crewing their new airship, which I think they really like. They’ve gotten somewhat attached to a few of the NPCs, and I think they like having an entourage.

So, on Wednesday I went to my FLGS and played some D&D Encounters. It started out really well; it was an interesting fight in an alchemical laboratory with some myconids, and we had a pretty well-balanced party (though, I think that two controllers is one too many).

About an hour into it, though, when we had only succeeded in killing off the minions, it started to dawn on us that maybe things weren’t going so well. Then, people started to drop. The cleric, to her credit, managed to resuscitate us pretty regularly; I went into negatives at least three times over the course of the encounter. But when our only defender–a dwarven paladin–got completely obliterated, taken from being up and fighting to flat-out dead in one blow, we knew we were in trouble. There was no bringing him back, and the rest of us were pretty squishy.

I think we made some tactical blunders during the encounter. We spent too much time fighting the myconid guards, who were soaking up a lot of our strikers’ damage. They were, being myconids, shunting that damage off onto the myconid rot priests in the back ranks, who were just regenerating it since they weren’t being attacked. What we should have done was focus our strikers on them first; they would have gone done pretty quickly if we had, which would have made the guards easier to take out.

There was also the matter of a green slime. The slime wasn’t tough, but it kept on engulfing people, meaning it was taking half damage most of the time. We didn’t spend enough time attacking it when it wasn’t engulfing someone, choosing to react to its attacks rather than take a more proactive approach, which probably would have killed it quickly.

We also hung out in the hallway rather than going into the room and trying things out. I understand that there were some explody tables in the room that we could have made use of, and though the thought occurred to me (I used a very similar technique in my own campaign), we never really capitalized on it.

At any rate, Ash, my longtooth shifter seeker, has been brutally killed by fungus-people. I’ve decided that I’m going to make a different sort of character this time around and, rather than just making a character that I think is interesting, I’m going to try to make a character that benefits the party in a specific way.

I have two characters in mind right now. The first is Rafe, a genasi warlord. He’s the kind of character who stays at range (like my seeker), but I built him to maximize party damage output. He’s a resourceful warlord, meaning that when an ally succeeds with an action point attack, they get +4 damage. Add to this the fact that every single attack power I gave him (yes, every single one) grants at least a +4 to damage to someone (if not everyone), and I think our damage woes will be in the past. He’ll encourage people to focus fire on one target, and take that target out quickly.

The second character is Bulwark, a warforged fighter. I built him for extreme durability with pretty good damage output, going with the battlerager build for the temporary hit points it gave me. He’s got a pretty good AC at 18, but he can get as many as 6 temporary hit points from a successful attack with one of his powers, and a successful attack with any of his powers will net him 3 temporary hit points. Warforged resolve doesn’t hurt, either.

So, I’ll tell you how it goes. Hopefully one of these characters will prove to be a little more valuable, and a little harder to kill.

The latest session report is up. It’s the last one for that adventure, and I’m taking a break from being the DM so that my friend Dean can step into the role. I’m going to play a witch in his game (druid multiclassed into infernal pact warlock), and I’m super-excited.

The latest session report is up, a few months late.

It was a good session, and ended with a dragon fight. It was my first dragon fight, and I learned a few things. First, dragons are complex to run, and it’s easy to forget some of their abilities. Second, dragons should be mobile; I made the mistake of having the dragon stay relatively stationary, and I think the encounter suffered as a result. Third, go easy on extremely debilitating conditions. The dragon was using a lot of darkness-themed powers, causing players to be blinded a lot. There were also some minions that I had created that immobilized the PCs with one attack, and with the other slid them and dazed them. The tactic I kept using was to slide a PC into the water, after which he would be dazed and have to spend his entire turn getting out of the water. This was effective at locking down certain PCs and keeping them from attacking the dragon. I don’t think it was that fun for those PCs.

In general, I think that conditions like blinded, stunned, dazed, and immobilized should be used sparingly; maybe one or two monsters in the group should be doing those things, and not every turn. The problem is, because those effects are fairly powerful, attacks that utilize them tend not to do that much damage. Because of this, you wind up with an encounter that is long and potentially frustrating to the players, but doesn’t make them feel like they’re ever in that much danger. I think it’s probably a better idea to use those kinds of abilities as window-dressing to harry one or two powerful PCs, and to focus more on monsters that have the potential to hit really hard. I’d rather have a quick encounter that makes the players afraid for their characters’ lives than a long one that doesn’t.