|
Just discovered this last week and bought the physical core book. I guess I'm a little late to the party; I think I read that support for the game will be ending? Regardless, I want to DM this for my 5E group because I'm not really having fun with it lately. They'll likely never accept anything other than 5E as their main game, but I got them to at least agree to let me run other games for them on the side. The plan is to only use the core book for now. I'll run Dark Deeds and if they don't hate it I'd like to move on to The Witching Wood (because I loved The Witch). I've read that Dark Deeds is pretty forgiving, so is it reasonable run it at level 0? I'm not opposed to bumping them up. Any tips on increasing the odds that they'll enjoy the system, or effectively presenting this as an equal/better alternative to 5E? I'm sure it has been discussed to death at this point, but I haven't made it through the entire thread yet. Also, is my best bet for having the most up-to-date material to purchase it all on DTRPG? Fresh Shesh Besh fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Sep 2, 2019 |
#
¿
Sep 2, 2019 01:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:44 |
|
|
All of this has effectively scared me into using zones for our first game. I'll write up an after action report when we're done, but that'll likely be after we get blasted by Dorian.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2019 00:11
|
|
|
Ran Dark Deeds in Lost Hope last night for my friends and it was a lot of fun. Of the 3 that'd be playing, one bailed to go to a bachelor party (that he apparently knew about for months, dick) so I ended up adjusting for 2 players. It went about as well as it could have for them. The PC's were changelings that had replaced a pair of twins in the town. One of the PC's rolled for 20ft of uncuttable rope on the interesting things table, which ended up being important. Summary and Spoilers for Dark Deeds: They caught Edgar when he tried to run and immediately tied him up, brought him to the temple, and made him dig up the graves where they found Solomon and the empty coffins. They brought Edgar to the constable, and since he was tied up he couldn't try to escape. They noticed the lovely lock and wanted to use the rope to secure the cell door rather than fix it on the spot, so I allowed it. They got deputized, followed the tracks while missing the dead woodcutter, and found the empty camp. After the camp they found Muck as the woodcutter and recruited her to help with the beastmen. As a rule I hate DMPCs but I didn't want to punish the party because someone bailed. I adjusted the number of fomor from 8 to 6 just in case. PC's got half to leave and then Metal Gear'd the rest. They saved Adelmar, convinced Muck to keep working as a priest until a replacement for Solomon arrived, got paid by the Mayor, and the town didn't find out about Muck or the Necromancy. Oh and on a hunch they went and shook down Edgar to get the finger bone from him. Other than changing the number of enemies, I allowed one player to cast the Power 2 necromancy spell from the grimoire for free and I didn't impose 2 banes on the other player that wanted to dual wield. In fact most of the time I had them roll with 1 or 2 boons. They were excited to try new things so I didn't want to piss in their cereal in their literal first experience with the game. Overall everyone had a really good time and they were already asking for another session. So, mission accomplished I guess! Next I might run the Witching Wood as a level 1 adventure.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2019 17:54
|
|
|
You might be running it now that I'm typing this, but as long as your party is clever and lures some beastmen away it should be fine as written. I lowered the number of beastmen from 8 to 6 and allowed Muck to assist with the woodcutters axe. One PC used a sling to make sounds on the opposite side of the camp to lure half of them away. Then they managed to lure one of the remaining 3 to the edge of the camp and use their prepared attacks to instagib him. Then they instagibbed another with the bone splinters spell, and finished off the last one via normal combat. So there wasn't really a brawl like I was expecting. When the other 3 fomor returned they saw the corpses and fled, which pretty much falls in line to how that scene is written in the adventure. I might have made it too easy for them, but I'm happy with the way things turned out. Fresh Shesh Besh fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Sep 7, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2019 19:25
|
|
|
I only just recently got into tabletop with 5E and now Demon Lord, so this might just be because I'm not quite attuned to tabletop yet, but to me the way Punkapocalypse is written makes it seem way more complicated than SotDL. Like I can tell that it runs pretty much the same, but the verbage just turns me off. Plus there's double the number of stats to keep track of and the very literal naming of each stat seems more awkward than intuitive. But yeah I'm a TT scrub so my brain probably doesn't know how to make sense of a lot of stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2019 12:15
|
|
|
Need opinions on a couple of things: First is grabbing. My group loves to fuckin' grab enemies. In 5E a grab is automatically maintained until you let go or they escape, while in SotDL it appears that the grab is automatically released at the end of the next turn unless you actively use your action. So, you can get an attack off on your target next turn before you automatically let go. Would you give them a boon to attack their grabbed target, and give a grabbed target a bane to attack their grabber? Seems fair but I know my group will be sad that they can't indefinitely grapple a creature (assuming it fails to escape every time). Second is cursed items. I like powerful items with drawbacks rather than it being a straight up "gotcha" curse, but some of the items in the premade adventures don't seem very well balanced. One of my players took a Goreblade in Blood Will Run, but he succeeded on the Will challenge against the curse. So now he just straight up has a +1 boon +1d6 weapon. It'll still corrupt him when he kills, but there's nothing about making additional challenge rolls. Looking at some of the other adventures, that seems to be the trend. You get a one-time challenge roll against the curse. If the player succeeds, they basically never need another weapon because the bonuses are very good. If they fail the roll though, the penalties are so severe (weekly insanity, permanent health loss each rest) that cursed characters are pretty much as good as dead. Some of the curses are high level which makes them almost impossible to remove, and many of the penalties persist even after the curse is lifted which leaves the character so crippled that you should probably just put him down. These curse challenges usually have one or more banes too, which is kinda fine because the items are powerful, but also kinda not fine because you die if you fail. Just as another example, here's an excerpt from the weapon in Knife in Your hand: "Second, any wielder who becomes cursed by the blade must make a Strength challenge roll each time the moon rises full, even if the wielder is no longer cursed. The wielder makes the roll with a number of banes equal to his or her Corruption. On a failure, the wielder takes a permanent and cumulative –1d6 penalty to Health. If the penalty reduces the wielder’s Health to 0, the wielder’s body withers and dies." This one doesn't even allow a roll. It makes sense within the context of the adventure, the character basically sacrifices themself in order to do the greater good. But they have literally no way of knowing that until they get cursed, which is required to use the weapon. So it turns into this big "gently caress you" to the player who is now guaranteed to die during the downtime between adventures. Would I be better off creating my own lower-intensity items, or is this sort of thing intended to be supremely high risk/high reward? Does anyone have ideas for making similar items? Fresh Shesh Besh fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Sep 21, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2019 17:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:44 |
|
|
I'm a sucker for obscene grimdarkness so I'm curious how easy it will be to refit SOTDL material to Mad Wizard. Apparently the MW mechanics are the ones Rob is most proud of, so it'd be a shame to leave behind all the stuff I like in SOTDL.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 00:52
|
|