My character sheets from the Aramoor campaign. My first character followed up by my backup character.

Crunch below the cut…

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As I mentioned in the previous post on this subject, our group is facing inevitable death at the hands of Voris.

We have six characters:

Prince Valtran of Aramoor
Zyhran Mournblade
Tor, adopted brother of Valtran
Riven, the Priest
My character, Agon
And Gunther.

Of these six, only Valtran, Riven, Agon, and Tor are at risk for immediate death. Gunther is with the party and it is his duty to create a distraction while the group of four leading the incursion into the enemy base tries to escape. Nevertheless, creating a distraction as one man against potentially hundreds of enemies is a dangerous task, and it can be assumed that if the group of four dies then Gunther dies as well.

What to do? I asked the other players what they thought about the situation and they seemed rather blithe about our inevitable death. And, while I agree that our characters ultimately seem doomed to die, we certainly have a better chance at surviving if we flee now rather than attempt to kill Voris when we have little health and are surrounded on all sides by his men.

In terms of metagame analysis, I’m certain that our GameMaster has things roughly planned out on where he wants to take the campaign. However, if we essentially throw ourselves onto the blades of Voris then he will have to completely abandon any previously planned plotlines and attempt to deal with the untimely death of a major figure (Prince Valtran) and his retinue. I think so long as we attempt to survive he’ll be a bit lenient with us.

Is there a character contradiction in coming as far as we did and then turning back? I think only insofar as we did not turn back earlier. It’s easy to be blithe about impending death when you’re not the one being dismembered to get there.

I suppose I’ll try one last time to convince the group, and if not then I’ll deal with it. I did want to play this character though, and it makes me somewhat disappointed to feel that I need to create another character. I suppose this time I’ll play someone a little more hard-nosed about his own survival and less loyal to his friends.

I finally dug out my character sheet to discover the name of the place where our characters in this campaign are from, rather than constantly referring to it as the pseudohistorical campaign.

Backstory:

Aramoor is a small country in this fantasy world that was recently conquered by the Nymerian Empire. Prior to being a vassal state of the Nymerian Empire it was independent, and prior to that it was a province of the neighboring country of Talistan. Aramoor is, geographically, a highly prized region not only because it has excellent horses, but it also borders on the pass that leads from the Nymerian Empire into the neighboring Empire to the east. (Sadly, I can’t remember the name of this other Empire.)

Relations between the two countries are not hostile, as each Empire benefits from trade with the other. The Empire to the east is inhabited by people known as Trin, or colloquially/pejoratively referred to as Gogs. However, there is a rebel element in the Trin Empire that seeks to overthrow their emperor.

Our adventure begins with our group, all Aramoorian nobility of one stripe or another, being deployed to guard the city that borders the trade route between the Nymerian and the Trin Empires. The city, and us as its erstwhile guardians, has been under assault from a rebel group led by Voris, the Wolf for several months.

This is where our campaign started. Our first session covered a raid by the forces of Voris the Wolf on our encampment outside the city. Our second session picked up with the after-the-battle scene, caring for the wounded and reinforcing our defenses. One of the characters, Prince Valtran, met with the representative from the Trin Empire. Through one means or another, Prince Valtran decided to lead a small group of men in an incursion to attempt to capture or kill Voris.

For this dangerous mission he selected five other men. However, the Lord Mournblade seemed to think it was a better idea to stay in camp and plot against Prince Valtran. Together with the emissary from the Trin Empire, the five Aramoorian men set out under cover of darkness into the wilderness to attempt to find the Trin Rebels’ encampment.

The first obstacle we encountered was the neighboring river, which several people nearly drowned in. Natural obstacles like rivers and cliffs always seem a bit problematic, as it seems like they are all-or-nothing. Who wants to die on a cliff on their way to doing something important? Not to mention you’re entirely at the mercy of your dice for success.

We passed through the river with a series of ten swim checks each. Our Cleric nearly drowned and we found him coughing up water downriver. After resting a bit we set out through the wilderness. The emissary went before us, using bird calls to identify his position. We nearly lost track of him but one of our characters had hunting dogs who easily figured out where he had gone, and I signalled the rest of the party (who had fallen behind) via bird calls.

The emissary led us, after about two hours of travel, to the location of the Trin rebels’ encampment. There we were ambushed by two enemy guardsmen, but quickly dispatched them. We then studied the layout of the place. It was a huge encampment with space enough for at least a thousand men, likely more. In the middle of the encampment was a pavillion which we surmised would be the tent of Voris.

Prince Valtran decided to lead us into the enemy encampment to ambush Voris and kill him. Valtran’s brother, Tor, prepared several poisoned daggers for use on Voris. Although we were successful in making our way to Voris’ tent, we were identified by several rebel Trin who we had to dispatch silently, and we all took some damage… Our session ended with us outside of Voris’ tent, all badly wounded, debating whether to attempt the suicidal task of attacking Voris and if there was even another option…

At the beginning of this week I was thinking about the Spycraft game we had played the week before and the upcoming Pseudohistorical Fantasy D&D game. As I mentioned in this previous post, there were a lot of issues I had with the pseudohistorical campaign that were making me wary of it.

As I was thinking about it, I realized just how well the previous week’s Spycraft campaign had went. Things started off fairly slowly: We had ended a previous mission to investigate a certain facility and retrieved information from a private computer that the man we were tracking was now in Japan. We then flew to Japan to track him, received some intel on his position, and took awhile planning out our course of action.

Once we had decided what we were doing, we set off in a Humvee to the undisclosed location where our target was hiding out. As it turns out, the place was infested with guards, but the cool part of this situation was that, while we were all in the car, some other guards came up to us and chased us around. This was my first introduction to the Chase mechanics in Spycraft, and it seems like a cool little system — Not too cumbersome, but a lot more interesting than a simple opposed skill check or other tactic. There seems to be an actual strategy that gets opened up via the mechanics that would normally be relegated to the realm of pure luck (via dice rolls). That’s pretty pleasing to me. Not to mention, we have a “Wheelman” class character and it was a real chance for him to shine.

After the chase we went about tracking down the target, who fled the scene as soon as our presence was detected. One of our members saw the direction his vehicle was heading in, and we tailed him to an airport where he boarded a private jet and took off. We were all pretty stumped at what to do at this point, as we really had no way of figuring out where his plane was going. I proposed a plan.

My character is a Telepath, using the class from the Shadowforce Archer book. Although I don’t really have very many abilities I can use at low levels, one of the things I can do is to receive telepathic impressions left on objects from past owners. The airport was guarded by several armed guards patroling the facility, but if I could make it to the vehicle our target was using I could try and get a psychic impression from the car perhaps revealing to me a snippet of conversation our target may have had on the phone relaying his destination to an associate. We devised a quick plan and executed it: Our driver crashed the gates, running over two of the guards. One of our soldiers began sniping at guards as a distracting, taking out two. A second soldier was in the car using a SAW to mow down the guards from within the vehicle. Meanwhile, in the chaos, my character rolled out of our Hummer as it came to a screeching halt near the target vehicle. Taking cover behind the vehicle, I managed to spend a few moments receiving a psychic impression and successfully identified the destination of our target.

I was extremely pleased with how well this plan went down. Almost everyone felt like they had contributed to the scene in a crucial way, and we didn’t have any serious problems that could have arisen (such as an untimely death). All in all it has me quite excited for playing the Spycraft campaign again. Best of all, this encounter was one that was entirely unplanned on the part of the GM. Although we could have, as he suggested after we completed our plan, called in with our parent organization to track the plane leaving from that airport, what we did was more entertaining in every respect, and made use of all of our character’s abilities.

Last week our group had a long extended discussion on the future of our gaming enterprises. For the last couple of months we’ve been doing one “game” — That is to say, we’ve been rolling up characters for three or four hours, then playing for an hour if at all — per week. This was obviously a situation that needed to stop. So we all sat down and had a discussion about what games we were going to run and when, and what we would do in case someone couldn’t attend. We all agreed to our schedule, and then we began discussing the games themselves.

So far we’ve got a Spycraft game, a game in a Warhammer-inspired world, and we had a new proposal — A gritty, low/no-magic campaign, played with all Human characters in an alternate-world version of the Roman era. This idea really appeals to me, as I’m a bit burnt out on the typical D&D paradigm of spellcasters being omnipresent and overpowering, magic items under every rock, and a proliferation of non-human races which are fundamentally the same as humans except for granting a +2 to whatever attribute you need. For our stats we rolled 3d6 for six attributes and created six sets, choosing the best of the six sets. This resulted in fairly mediocre abilities, but I was pleased with that: I prefer a game that’s more grounded in reality than the usual game with superhuman characters running around from level one and only getting worse with time.

So this week rolls around and I show up at our usual gaming location with another member of the group. Two hours later, we leave in disgust when no one else showed up. The next day I get a call and say that there’s a game — We’re going to play the pseudohistorical Rome game. I show up only to discover that one of our players is rolling up a Cleric. “What?!” I think. I thought this was going to be a low/no magic game. Now we’ve got a Cleric in the group. I suppose it’s understandable, but hardly what I was hoping for.

We sat down and the DM explained some of the history. Things sound interesting enough, and then we get to playing. I enjoyed the game overall but there are some serious issues that I need to bring up with the DM, as he seems to be playing loose with the rules and this is causing a bit of confusion:

First of all, he seems to be treating flanking as any attack on a character’s “flank.” However, D&D 3.5 doesn’t have facing, so this is pretty much impossible to determine unless characters are in an explicit formation. There were a few times during the session when characters received penalties for “being flanked” by one opponent.

Second, so far we haven’t been using an explicit representation of characters’ positions on a battlefield (via miniatures) but we have been using the tactical rules (AoOs, flanking, etc.). I feel unsatisfied with this, as it means the players aren’t able to make informed tactical decisions. There was one particular incident where I mentioned that my character was going to take a five foot step back, and then turn and run away. Even though this should not provoke an attack of opportunity he ruled that it did.

Third, the characters we were fighting had, according to the DM, “20 dex.” Since this is impossible for a human using a 3d6 x 6 method, and since the characters we were fighting were mooks, I am a bit worried about us being pitted against foes who are receiving a bit more leeway than we are.

Fourth, the DM seems to be using a rather random “critical fumble” assessment, and he also expressed a desire to use a “critical hit” chart from 2nd Edition. I’ve always hated critical fumble rules, even though it seems like everyone and their brother thinks this is a good idea. I just find it absurd that the more experienced a character gets the more likely it is for him to critically fumble (due to iterative attacks). It’s a stupid idea and it needs to be put down. One the note of the 2nd Edition critical hit chart, according to his description it contains plenty of nasty effects such as “Lose a limb” or “permanently disfigured.” Since critical hits are a much bigger problem for Player Characters than they are for NPCs I’m very, very wary of this attempt to change the rules. Crushing the skull of some mook and having his intelligence permanently reduced to 3 might be fun on the giving end, but seems to me to be a serious problem if applied to PCs.

Fifth and most problematic to me is the fact that there’s a serious deviation in how he’s awarding experience. I don’t recall what each character received but I do recall that one player, who I felt contibuted about as much as I did overall to the game, received 3300 XP. On the other hand, I received only 2650 XP. It’s rather irritating to me foremost because the difference in our performance was entirely psychological — My dice rolls toward the latter end of the game were all very poor, but earlier on in the game I was having much better luck than the other player. The most recent success seemed to take precedence. Either way, I think it’s very dangerous to award experience based on how well you rolled.

A nearly 700 experience gap is a serious difference and, not only do I feel it wasn’t warranted, but I see serious problems ahead if this continues. Particularly when the Cleric in the group gains access to spells such as Flamestrike, he is going to end up receiving much more experience than the rest of the characters in the group. Not only is the Cleric already the most powerful character in the group due to his access to a slew of versatile spells, but he will become even more and more powerful as the experience-awarding system gives him significantly more experience than the rest of us and hastens his trip up the exponential spellcaster power curve.