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Pick your targets

Today for some reason I was in procrastinating mood. Rather than doing what I should have been doing I ended up catching up on loads of really out of date forum topics that a really had very little interest in, which is why I hadn’t read them when they were fresh.

From my forum browsing a few bits stuck out. There was a comment by JDale about some of the people he had met at the weekend were fencers (at Pensic?  I have no idea what that is.)

I also came across Intothatdarkness talking about ballistic weapons and damage and critical locations.

So lots of things came together earlier when I had moved on to procrastinating by walking the dogs.

When I am fencing many of my fights are ‘first to 5 points’ as a competition format. My plan A is to press the attack and do three rapid ‘flurry of blows’ type attacks to my opponents wrist. The idea being that they will pull their wrist back and normally up out of the way exposing the underside of their wrist/ forearm. My next attack is to ‘beat’ their blade, I am left handed and most opponents are right handed so I snap my blade across them left to right to strike their blade. This knocks their blade off line and my blade bounces off theirs as I lunge forward to strike their chest or upper arm. My third attack is to feint to the knee before stepping in to strike the neck or head. If these are successful and I am three points up or at least in the lead in the bout I will then press the attack forcing the opponent back but not actually attack, I would rather have them pinned to the back of the fencing piste so they can only come forward. I can then stand off waiting for that attack and counter strike into their arm as they try and attack me.

The point of all that waffle is that the actual target for each attack is known to me before I take a single step forward. The idea of a random result that could be a foot or head or elbow doesn’t really come into it.

IntoThatDarkness has different critical tables for each location.

This seems like a really good way of doing things. I know that fencing is not combat. If I get hit I lose a point not a kidney. But I would counter that no skilled swordsman is going to go into an attack without a plan. Even if that plan is being revised every five seconds.

If the attack declaration phase started with pick your target area we can have very easy armour by the piece rules as you know where you are hitting and then location specific criticals, as Into has done it. Then the last piece of the jigsaw is just attack roll mods to make aiming for the head harder than hitting the body.

What we don’t need is some newfangled method of determining the hit location before rolling the critical or rolling the critical before the attack roll or reading the dice backwards or upside down which are the sorts of solutions we have seen so far. You just say I am going to aim for the head, if you hit you hit and if you miss you miss, end of.

That all sounds a bit too simple. Have I missed something?

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RPGaDay2018 Day 14: Describe a failure that became amazing

I have told the story of our greatest role playing failure several times but it is such a wonderful story I will tell it once again.

So the GM (not me, I am innocent of this one!) is trying to bring the party together. It is a spacemaster game and my character is an insurgent against an evil empire. As I wander around the town other members of my team of dropping out of radio contact as if they are being picked off. Then I notice I am being tailed so I end up leading them to a cafe, lots of witnesses around should they try and make a move against me. Much to my surprise my tail sits down opposite me at my table. We are eyeing each other, full of distrust. I take my auto blaster out of its holster and it is aimed at this person under the table. Unknown to me the person opposite has done pretty much the same thing.

The tension builds….

A third person enters the cafe, walks up to our table and says “Hello” and the PCs all shoot each other and all roll fatal criticals. End of game.

Amazing but not in a good way, but it is a good story.

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RPGaDay2018 Day 13: Describe how your play has evolved

So I am running behind schedule again. I have two days to catch up and I have a post that I want to share that has nothing to do with RPGaDay.

So how has my play evolved?

It is convoluted answer time….

When we started we were terrible role players. We were more roll players than role players. Our games were lots of kick in the door, kill the orcs and then repeat.

As we grew up a bit our games became much more sophisticated, character became much more important and I think I was probably 17yrs old when I actually created a character with a personality radically different from my own. Our games were more to do with political intrigue, world spanning politics or world saving high adventure than kicking in doors to kill orcs and steal their two copper pieces.

These days with my face to face game we have sort of regressed to hack and slash. The reason being that our games are so infrequent that we cannot keep all the subtle facts of a political intrigue game in our minds in the months between sessions.

In my play by post games I play much more sophisticated characters. As one has the time to really craft your responses you can be always in character. More than just speaking with your character’s voice you can pepper your responses with mannerisms and body language. As a GM you can layer on setting details to keep the world ever present in the players mind. You can use a palette of materials and textures when describing scenes much more often that you would when describing things to a group around your table. So my PBP gaming is much more sophisticated than my gaming table ever was.

The third kind of gaming I do is solo. Solo gaming is a way of playing that takes  a lot of practice. It is really hard to start but once you get the hang of it it is great fun. My solo play has also opened up a whole raft of games systems. If like me you have shelves of games you have bought but never played then solo play is a great way of getting them off the shelf and run an adventure. I have played games I never thought I would get to play. Some games I had read and thought sounded great on the page have proved really slow and uninspiring in play. The opposite is also true, games I had dismissed as ‘not for me’ have turned out to be great fun to play.

There is also a different sort of answer to this question.  How has my play evolved? It has become ever more simple. I settled on Rolemaster in the late 80s first with the red MERP book and then 1st edition RM. Since then we added every single companion, profession and skill but then came my maturing as a GM and I started removing that which I didn’t feel added anything so I would keep the new spell lists but one channeling/essence hybrid is pretty much like another so I would skip the professions. I found the constant subdivision of the skills into ever more specific just slowed down character creation and made the characters less proficient. Originally a character may have had Medicine or Surgery as a skill but once all the skills were in the game they probably needed Medicine -> Surgery -> Ear, Nose & Throat -> Nasal -> Left Nostril and of course if the critical has blocked the right nostril the character was down to using half skill as the left and right nostrils are only similar but not the same.

This quest of simplicity is what lead to my abandonment of levels, professions and development points and the querying of realms of magic. I have pretty much abandoned Arms Law for having too many tables and so on.

So it is not just how I play that has evolved but what I am playing.