Gaming Advice

[Jfan999]

Welcome to the Gaming Advice thread. Here you can post any questions about gaming or game mastering, and the "experts" of ARC will try our best to answer them. Also if you have any general advice you want to post feel free to do that as well.

[Cataphrak]

Question: is making conventional combat nearly suicidal a good way to get your players to avoid combat (assuming your players are amenable to a very talky game)?

[Jfan999]

Question: is making conventional combat nearly suicidal a good way to get your players to avoid combat (assuming your players are amenable to a very talky game)?

Yes, that's more or less how Call of Cthulhu works.

[kultz]

Define nearly suicidal.

[Cataphrak]

Roll D100 going over the top.
If you roll a 1-40, you are caught by heavy artillery piece. Instagib.
If you roll a 41-60, you are hit by a medium artillery piece. 1D20(x10) damage. DC 25 for half. Reflex at -4 penalty. (mud)
If you roll a 61-100, you make it to the barbed wire.

At the barbed wire:
DC 30 complex STR/DEX check to get past. Roll one D100 each round.
If you roll a 1-40, you are caught by light artillery. 1D10(x10) damage. DC 20 for half. Reflex at -10 penalty (wire)
If you roll a 41-80, you are hit by HMG fire. 2D10 Damage.
if you roll 81-100, you survive a single round.

If you make the check, you enter the first enemy forward trench.

Roll Initiative, enemy has surprise round.

[xlich6]

As a player, how important is it to have a good back story to give to DMs? Is it a supplement, or should we really make it part of the process.

[captaincommunism]

from a dm's perspective, a good backstory helps give us new npc's to work with, assuming you insert new characters. This also helps characterize your character, which in turn may give us ideas for making scenarios in which you might shine in roleplaying terms. Just my $0.02

[xlich6]

So, in terms of making a character, how high would you rank it in terms of importance?

[Jfan999]

If you roll a 41-60, you are hit by a medium artillery piece. 1D20(x10) damage. DC 25 for half. Reflex at -4 penalty. (mud)

If you roll a 1-40, you are caught by light artillery. 1D10(x10) damage. DC 20 for half. Reflex at -10 penalty (wire)

Why are you putting a penalty to reflex? You might as well make the DCs 29 and 30 since those penalties are always going to be there. Also for the amount of damage you might as well kill the characters if they fail their save unless everyone is playing 15th level tough heroes.

Also remember this is going to have to be a game that players will want to play and have fun in. If you kill their characters every other session, you'll end up with no players or a pile of dead bards.

So, in terms of making a character, how high would you rank it in terms of importance?

It really depends on the game, for D&D I'd put it third under character concept and character optimization, but for M&M I'd tie it for first with your character concept.

[kultz]

Paul: If it's something terrible and the chances of survival is minimal, then just streamline the rolls and leave it to imagination.
Multi-staged dice rolling would help if and only if there's branching choices. For the given scenario, simply put all possible outcomes onto a single table, and roll once.

As for the damage, whelp, if it's absolutely necessary, then go ahead, but don't use the x10, use more dice instead. The extremely tiny chance of being only slightly mauled keeps the players guessing until the last moment. (Think casino tactics.)

[TurtleClaw]

If you kill their characters every other session, you'll end up with no players or a pile of dead bards.

Unless all player agreed on a high casualty game, then it can be quite fun.

As for the damage, whelp, if it's absolutely necessary, then go ahead, but don't use the x10, use more dice instead. The extremely tiny chance of being only slightly mauled keeps the players guessing until the last moment. (Think casino tactics.)

Rolling 1d20(x10) gives you a greater chance of taking minimal damage then rolling 10d20.

What do people think about giving an option to use 3d6 instead of d20? It gives you better average performance, which makes sense for trained fighters who are less likely to fumble every 20th swing. Might not work for crit builds though.

[captaincommunism]

vincent, i'd say you should ask your DM first about setting notes. I also advise making it from their point of view, so we see how they narrate stuff. it'll give them a human feeling. I would say at least a general concept of character is more important as john did, but I would also say that it's very close. also, for starting out, optimization isn't really a big deal. leave that for when you're more versed with the system. that said, I would recommend wizard over sorceror, if you decide to start gaming (and want to play some kind of mage).

edit: It is not always required. sometimes even just a very general backstory is good. for example, in craig's firefly game, i'm playing a friend of the captain of the ship, who saved his life once during the war. got promoted to colonel (the captain was, at that time, a general) for a whole two days, then the war ended. something about the motivation for your character is generally best.

[Cataphrak]

This is BLACKADDER GOES FORTH QUEST, not "Superman 1914" Quest. I want to make actually going over the top something which no (level 1) PC can realistically survive. There were three themes I wanted to go for.

1: Your life in the trenches sucks to a comedic degree, find every little way to make it better.
2: "fighting" is different from "war". You have a chance to survive a fight.
3: If your unit is ordered over the top, you best be elsewhere when the whistle is blown.

But yeah, an abstraction of 1-100, being how far you get before your PC is murdered (with 95+ being actually surviving somehow) might be better.

[kultz]

Indeed.
Focus on exploring trench life with interesting rules. Not complicated rules, just interesting. Be mindful not to punish the player at every breathing moment. Suffering is assumed by atmosphere, no need for a 30-entry table to roll how bad the breakfast was.
In other words, give the flavor, not the tedium.

Same can be said for most sorts of environments (sailing, post-apocalypse, etc).

[Cataphrak]

So be all about talking your way out of Forlorn Hope duty and stealing the duty sergeant's scotch so you can trade it for a newspaper so you can trade that for food that isn't made of rat?

Also, blanket morale penalties "you're bored as fuck because you didn't do anything interesting today, -2 to everything" good idea or bad?

[Gaming]

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