Building Sandcastles

I was inspired by this post on Monsters and Manuals to bash out some more justifications for my switch to a sandbox campaign for our irregular (new babies do that to you) game nights.

I have been mulling over a range of systems for a co-GM’d fantasy sandbox campaign we have planned. As I have written, I get the distinct feeling that the players in our group are hankering after a bit more of the ‘kill the monsters and take their stuff’ playstyle of D&D and a bit less of the ‘scrabble in the mud, survive, though mentally and physically injured, and go unrewarded’ playstyle of WFRP. This doesn’t mean that the system will be a class and level D&D-alike system. After playing around with A/D&Ds and their retroclones, BRP-derived games, and even small timers such as Dragon Warriors and Advanced Fighting Fantasy, it looks like we’ll be using WFRP (1e or 2e? we’re not sure). However, by letting the players choose their starting career, the range of skills and trappings should create an *adventuring* party capable of a bit of fighting and a little magic. Replacement characters, by contrast, will be rolled randomly the old school WFRP way – but as they will (barring a TPK) be coming into an experienced and better equipped party, these characters will have a better than normal chance of survival. And as WFRP isn’t a level-based system, replacement characters that start at ground level can be far more useful; they needn’t be mere torchbearers. More, the career system of WFRP is the perfect match for sandbox play; your character wants to be a sea captain, a merchant, an explorer, a knight, an outlaw chief? Well, do it, and the system will support that[*1]. All said, the aim is that the game will be much more in the image of the front cover of WFRP1e – grim and perilous dungeon delving – than that of a ‘classic’ WFRP game – in fact, we intend to borrow as much from that other great 1980s Brit-fantasy world, Titan, as we do from the Old World. More Blacksand, less Bogenhafen.

More of this, please.

Now, The Enemy Within starts with a great switch – what begins with a promise of D&D dungeon-delving for hordes of treasure quickly turns into a Call of Cthullhu scenario. But while that is a really nice idea, the players in our group struggled to rationalise just why budding treasure-seeking adventurers would be bothered about the mysterious goings on of a town that they had never before visited. Sure, they were pushed along by the events that force them to leave town rapidly, to travel a certain way up the river, and so on. D, my co-GM for the upcoming sandbox, used his character to rally the party with (frankly delusional) renewed hope of great rewards, even as the riches promised were snatched away from them. But it was all a little ‘forced’; NPCs turn up when needed by the plot, neither the chasing Watch nor the angry mob will catch the PCs unless they do something very stupid – it was all a little ‘forced’, on both my part, as the GM, and on the part of the players.

I should have let the party bog off into the woods, roll up some random encounters, fight goblins, discover an ancient barrow, and then, as they slowly bleed out, die of disease, or gibber insanely, they would have watched the town of Bogenhafen fall into a abyssal portal of Chaos fire.

I should have let… no, I didn’t stop them, but as we all knew we had to play our roles I didn’t have to. We played our roles in the story, not our roles in the game. So I made sure that Guild Master Johann Exposition pops up when needed, as written, and they make sure that, despite being a bunch of lightly armed, poorly experienced ne-er do wells, they maintain the motivation to investigate a possible daemonic cult even as the apparent odds against them mount. We wouldn’t want to ruin a great campaign by not following the trail set by the GM, would we?

Yes, we would. The best parts of the handful of sessions that played out Mistaken Identity and Shadows over Bogenhafen didn’t involve dealing with the cultists – for those bits, the PCs were pushed and pulled along until they got to the right spot for the plot. The best parts of those sessions were the player-driven bits: when the sneering Elf played by S decided to become an Agitator for Human-Elf understanding and had pamphlets printed (at the printers of the fake lawyers’ stationary that had lured them to Bogenhafen); when the illiterate farmhand played by C threw these in the face of anyone who obstructed the party, accusing them of racism; when the thug played by A knocked out the festival boxing champion, and was in turn knocked out by the C’s illiterate farmhand with a spectacularly lucky punch in the same tent the following evening.

I want the players to be excited to play because they get to decide what to do. Not because they are waiting to see what the GM has planned for them. I want the players simply to drive some incidental colour but the adventure itself.

This is all going to go wrong, I fear. But then I remember that it has only gone wrong if we don’t have fun…

[*1] And the career (and skill) system doesn’t support linear ‘plotted’ campaign play in quite the same way. The character actually has to take up the new career in order to advance – it is not an abstract levelling up. Sure, this can be done during ‘downtime’, but even that breaks a ‘plotted’ campaign. But if the campaign can respond to one of the players desires that their character becomes a sea captain, let them do it, and offer them the Isle of Dread, the Gold Coast of Lustria, and the Island of the Lizard King to explore. Player choices with regard to advancement shape the world as it is created in play, and by playing WFRP, even when you offer the players a way for their characters to get what they want, you are sure to leave in plenty of ways for that to end very badly.

Graeme Davis on the Enemy Within

Then, and now.

You know, a little bit of me is tempted to buy the new WFRP. But then I remember what I could buy with that money - the undoubted RPG classics that I could pay well over the odds for, and...

Don't get too excited about this...

The Enemy Within returns (to WFRP3e).

Whatever it is, it won't be this (which doesn't mean that it won't be good).

h/t The Altdorf Correspondent

p.s. Has anyone (who likes WFRP1e) played WFRP3e? Is it as bad as it looks, or am I just being a grognard?

Anti-Climactic Critical Hit!

Critical hit systems are a great way to add colour to combat and leave characters with wounds and scars from a source other that the fiat of a cruel GM. They can, though, kill off villains a little too quickly.

A few weeks ago, our WFRP game reached the climax of Shadows Over Bogenhafen. For all the praise that has been heaped on this scenario, it didn’t play out as well as I’d hoped. The players sent their characters round in circles, making little headway in uncovering the diabolic scheme of Johannes Teugen, and seemed to grow more and more frustrated with each session. They wanted adventure, but ‘every time we thought we were rich, it all went wrong’. Perhaps there was a mismatch between the expectations of the players (only one of the four could be described a properly familiar with WFRP, one had played it a couple of times, one had played D&D back in the day, and one had never played an RPG before) and the tone of WFRP 1e. And perhaps I’m just not that good at running an investigative, combat-light game for characters with few resources in world quite so grim.

Nevertheless, the party saved Bogenhafen. Despite everything, but with more than a little help from the ‘let-me-tell-you-what-is-happening-NPC’, they managed to secrete themselves inside the warehouse-cum-temple. With the party split, hiding either side of the room, I prohibited talking between the different groups – someone was going to have to declare an action.

They leapt to the ambush just before the human sacrifice was made. With surprise on his side, Stanley, the Elven Agitator, managed to loose an arrow at Johannes before his mind was wiped by Gideon’s magic. ‘Exploding’ 6s later, and Johannes is bleeding to death, an arrow in the groin. With Johannes down, with filthy brutish armed men and a woman leaping from the darkness, and with Gideon revealing his true, demonic form, the fight was immediately in the party’s favour. The ordinary cultists were screaming in terror, and the hired muscle waiting outside the warehouse were unwilling to assist a demon, even if they could pass their Cool tests, so the fight was 3 on 1. For all Gideon’s powers, the accumulation of attacks will produce enough d6 rolls for damage to take him down. A failed Cool test or two was all that stopped him being hacked to the ground in a single turn.

An anti-climax. But then, it was an anti-climax to me, as GM. None of the players (much less, the characters), had any idea of just what was at stake as they disrupted the ritual. For all they knew, they simply rescued a young woman and smashed a demonic cult.

Funnily enough, our experience appears to be very similar to the ‘playtest’ of this RPGnet review. Except, at the final moment, ALL the dice all fell right for the player-characters. Which suggests to me that, for all Shadows Over Bogenhafen’s undoubted qualities, it is very often played poorly by players and GMs.

…and every time we thought we’d be rich, it all went wrong

Just when Alfred Molina thought he was rich...

I arrange sessions of our ‘The Enemy Within’ campaign by Facebook. After a long gap between sessions, due to holidays and illness, I asked my players to remind themselves what had gone before. S, playing Stanley, the Elven Seer (and now Agitator for Elven-Human understanding), summed up the group’s previous adventures so; “There was some weird shit going down underground...and every time we thought we'd be rich, it all went wrong...”. Which suggests that we are playing WFRP the right way.

...he realised he wouldn't be in the sequels, and would end up in a downbeat 'dramady' with Dawn French

We ended the last session with the party being escorted from the office of Johannes Teugen, after some frankly incoherent ranting about demons, murder and the Ordo Septinarius from Olaf, the Herdsman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dead-by-the-roadside-target-of-an-assassin Kastor Lieberung. Quite frankly, I can’t tell whether Olaf’s oddness is the result of good roleplaying by C, or if C is just odd. Whatever, it is certainly entertaining, as is Olaf’s role as a sidekick to Stanley, throwing pamphlets on Elven-Human understanding – which the illiterate Olaf can’t read – in the faces of people who treat the Elf with the culturally appropriate level of suspicion and hostility.

And we’ve also had some PvP violence, at least within the confines of the wrestling ring. After Axel, a Protagonist, fighting under the name ‘Madhead’, defeated Schaffenfest carnival wrestler ‘Crusher’ Braugen two nights running, Olaf volunteered to step into the ring. Adopting the fighting name ‘Meatloaf’ (who am I to veto such silliness – this is a world in which a background NPC is called Von Saponathiem!), and with an unexpectedly good series of rolls, Olaf knocked Axel out, nearly ruining the promoter, who had offered long odds on the farmboy. Unfortunately for them, they’re now relatively famous faces in Bogenhafen (and beyond), which has got them out of a scrape or two, but might well prove a handicap if they need to pass unnoticed anytime soon, anywhere nearby.

A note of playing a game with session-based experience systems: I am a little worried that the characters are gaining experience at too fast a rate. As adults, we don’t play for hours upon end – a typical session being a 3 hour game from 8pm (after baby R is definitely in bed) while 11pm (so we can all shuffle off to bed at a sensible hour) so the per-session suggested EP rewards are probably accumulating at a quicker pace in terms of game time than the designers expected. A long time ago in a far away place (no, really, the 1980s and the Dominican Republic) we would play D&D for twice that length of time (easily) – there was only homework and Nintendo to get in the way. To compound that, as adults, we seem to get through less ‘action’ or ‘plot’ than we did as gung-ho kids – far more time is devoted to fleshing out the little encounters, the incidences of adventuring, than I remember ever doing as a teen (for example, when I ran my mother and A through the Oldenhaller Contract last year they spent a fair portion of the time working as labourers and exploring the city than biting on any adventure leads I presented to them. And they enjoyed doing that). I think that it might be sensible to go for EP rewards at the low end of the recommended scale for future sessions. Gotta keep that grim vibe going.

The Fellowship of the Grim

The party assembles.

Well, we've played two sessions of The Enemy Within, with another lined up for tonight. The party are just about to enter the tunnels of Bogenhafen. Don't worry too much about spoilers, none of my players read my blog. If any of you do, exercise care. That, or understand the difference between player knowledge and character knowledge.

From left to right we have: Stanley (an adopted human name) (played by S), a flamboyant, camp Elf, who makes his living reading fortunes in leaves but has a sneeringly patronising attitude to the uncultured Humans, Olaf the Herdsman (played by C), a strapping 20 year old looking for adventure; Susi Narbe (played by D), a small (5'1"), hard woman in her late twenties with a scar on her face; , and Axel (played by A), a big brute of a young man with a serious taste for violence.

Only Stanley is literate (I don't think my players realised how important skills such as that are in WFRP), and Axel is, by some margin, the most competent in combat. Axel has already killed two men in unarmed combat - including Adolfus the bounty hunter, who was punched to stun, but a succession of exploding 6s left him facing a massive critical. Which was lucky for me, as the party were determined to take Adolfus alive. Quite what they would have done with a tight-lipped bounty hunter I'm not so sure. Their NPC friend Josef wouldn't be keen on having a prisoner on his boat, much less for him to be tortured there, and the party needed to get out of Weissbruck after a dramatic fight involving much fumbling of burning oil.

Once upon a time... I'd have been bothered about the difference in scale, with most of that group Ral Partha / early Citadel 25mm scale, with Axel represented by a heroic-scale 28mm Mordheim figure. And I messed up painting his eyes. Now, well, I think I have a much healthier attitude. Again, if anyone can put catalogue / manufacturer / year to these figures, I'd be grateful. I'll be exploring Site of Legends myself - I'm not asking anyone to do my research, just to let me know if they recognise these figures at a glance.