[Tunnels & Trolls] Colonizing goblin lands
newsalor:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on April 02, 2009, 06:11:05 AM
Anyway, that's details. The more important thing is that you clearly didn't think that I was being impartial in my GMing. How come? You also played pretty nice at the time, I had no clue you were dissatisfied with my calls. Do speak up more, feedback is the only way for anybody to improve their GMing.
Perhaps I came of sounding too harsh. My apologies. I don't think that you were impartial.
Your calls in the table were fair in the sense that they made sense. If there was one thing that you weren't fair with, then it was not telling us that a successful luck save and a dexterity save at the same level weren't equal. I would not have made a luck save of it, if I knew it could get us ambushed.
You stated that your goal was to kill PCs. I seem to remember that you said that the game was supposed to be hard in the table. Now I'm no crybaby, so in that enviroment, I did my best. A big part of the fun was that it was oldskool and hardcore, but I would not want to play in a campaign where you are set up to fail most of the time.
Eero Tuovinen:
No problem, it's interesting to hear how others view sessions. For instance, I don't remember coming out and saying that I'm trying to kill the PCs - I might have said that, but that certainly wasn't a goal for me. Interesting challenges might lead to fatalities for characters, but that's life in T&T. Usually I express this more along the lines that there is no plot protection for PCs, but I guess I might confuse things by saying that I'm "trying to kill PCs".
Luck was the only way to find the goblins in the scenario before the group scouted Goblinia and met the old fisherman, thus learning more about the routes the goblins used, but that first ambush wasn't exactly due to luck. I was thinking more along the lines of your nightguard alerting everybody and then seguing into a nice little skirmish in the light of a campfire or some such. Doesn't go that way always, but that's freedom in roleplaying for you. I did lightly upbraid Sipi for endangering the party with useless grandstanding, if you'll remember - he should know better, having played several sessions with me during this winter's old school binge.
Anyway, that's nitpicking. A longer campaign would no doubt be different, not the least because everybody would have an opportunity to calibrate their gaming better - more entertaining challenges, more appropriate contingency procedures and so on and so forth. Tunnels & Trolls has no rules for balancing encounters like D&D does, so the game is very much dependent on all players calibrating their play to reach an equilibrium in what the players expect and what the GM throws at them.
newsalor:
I meant that you stated above, that you meant to kill PCs. During the session, youjust said it would be hard.
Callan S.:
I think Eero said he was going to follow procedure, and if procedure wants a character dead, he's happy to continue following procedure. Though I'll grant that alot of the time in most RPG's, what someone thinks is the procedure is often self invented (oh, I've been there a few times...that I know of. Dread to think of how many times I didn't know I was doing it). So if it was self invented, isn't that the direct intention to kill a PC? That's an odd place and I'd say no, even if it were self invented I'd say Eero was, in good will, following procedure as he saw it (hope you don't mind me saying so, Eero). But at the same time, that's why I focus alot on getting procedure ever so clear cut (as clear cut as a maths equation) and without ambiguity (if anyones interested in what's been called my investigation into rules and fun). Good will is nice and means things are good overall. But it is not enough, IMO. Umm, so yeah, it's worth considering when looking at who intended what.
Eero,
Quote
Your choice with the unwinnable encounter was the right one, by the by - I hadn't intended for the encounter to be winnable on those terms, just wanted to see if you'd try anyway. That was the challenge there. The point of the encounter was mostly to introduce the idea that the goblins were moving larger groups with warlords into the area
Do you think this is perhaps a mistake, given the sort of repeating pattern of gamist behaviour in people (by which I mean, it's probably a mistake to make peoples gamist behaviour bend to the games design rather than bend the game to peoples typical pattern of gamist behaviour). As I understand it, entering these unwinnable battles is losing, while staying out of them is winning, or as close to winning them as you can get. And that's cool.
But the thing is, when they lose, play doesn't stop or reset or anything. It was sort of dragging out the event of losing, to play out entering these battles which were unwinnable. Especially given these things were actually there to illustrate events (in this thread we talk about how a start up sequence just doesn't work as play, it only really works as a quick monolog to set up the actual challenge).
What's your perspective? And how would one handle the revelation that even entering into battle was losing the battle, and wrap it up quickly?
Eero Tuovinen:
I'm with you on procedures, Callan. And they're often self-implemented and self-regimented, I know exactly what you mean - these games simply don't have the huge amount of rules procedures that you'd need if you wanted to be able to point at them from a book. So instead the GM constantly regulates himself with these small subgames. An example from the convention was the way I decided to deal with the "wilderness" as three concentric zones centered on the town the PCs used as their HQ - I then used this zone structure to regulate strategic-level travel movement of characters and monsters, as well as setting difficulties for various checks. Much of this sort of procedural systematization is invisible to players even when I do a lot to make my rules procedures obvious, so it might seem that I'm just lifting stuff out of thin air. What makes it more complicated is that sometimes we are lifting the stuff out of the air, specifically when new scenario elements are introduced.
As for the unwinnable combat, there was just one of those situations in the game. It was rather obviously different from the other goblin encounters: while the normal encounters had been 4-6 goblins, this one had something like 30 goblins and 10 dire wolves, and some of those goblins were obviously some sort of chiefs based on their armaments. So it wasn't difficult by any means to make the call to not attack them, although I liked the math the players did to figure out their chances. Had they attacked, the T&T rules system would have made the battle relatively short, so that wasn't a problem. There's also the fact that while I characterize this encounter as "unwinnable", that doesn't mean anything in mechanical or procedural terms, it's just my own judgment - had the players decided to attack (surprise, terran advantages) and then proceeded to win, then obviously it wasn't as unwinnable as I thought. I'd definitely play the combat procedure out in full to find out what happens in such a combat, however desperate; I'd especially do this in T&T, which is very friendly to alternate goals, scaling back your objectives and other such wrinkles. Without playing through the combat we don't find out which characters escape, which surrender and so on.
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