Disappointment

Oooooooh ... I've been sick.  So sick.  Not covid, just a cold, and in any case I'm shot full for that anyway.  Meant to write some posts this week and I've crashed and audiobooked my week instead.  Felt up to working today on the wiki some.  Time to write here.

Monday I wrote about my party's fight with a drow elf and some gargoyles.  As the title says, our subject today is disappointments, exactly the sort that come of throwing dice in the open and the continuous possibility of loss, which I steadfastly build into my rules.

I said that last week I felt like my old DM self.  That included being on my feet for much of the game, moving around the table, hovering over player shoulders, watching people's die rolls, which I know is an unusual behaviour for a DM.  Some might call it, um, oppressive.  Am I going to look at your character sheets?  No, probably not, but if you're going to make a roll that might drastically alter the consequences of this combat, then yes, I'm going to come over and watch that die roll.

There are two stories in this post, and the first hinges on Ivan, the 10th level thief.  Ivan is my son-in-law's character, and the henchfolk of the 12th level druid Pikel, whom I occasionally mention on this blog.  When Pikel was a young low-level druid, he was a spongy thing that the party constantly had to rescue to keep alive.  His spells weren't that much, his starting hit point rolls weak, his strength and constitution stats near non-existent ... yet the player is a smart fellow and Pikel managed to limp along until finally getting his first henchfolk at 5th level, Ivan.

Now, one might expect tottering-in-a-light breeze Pikel to want a fighter to stand in front of him, but upon reaching 5th Pikel was just starting to come into his own.  The third level druid spells make a big difference, at least in my game.  Ivan, however, was a strange choice.  The player certainly has the dark turn of mind that's needed to play a traditional thief (no weeny-ass rogues, please), but in truth my son in law relies pretty hard on game metrics.  Give him a metric and he'll bend it twenty ways until it looks like a balloon animal ... but for most of my game world's existence the thieving abilities have always been mostly shit.  AD&D's rules are mendacious to say the least and I think very, very little of what 2nd and 3rd editions tried.  My own efforts up to 2014 were repeatedly frustrating, largely for reasons discussed in this post.

As such, to BE a thief in my game, one has had to be metric fluid.  Steadily, since 2014, I've been creating a set of sage abilities for the thief, most of which remain unbuilt at this time — yet the structure is proving rational and as each new part is added, Ivan's player has been finding the thief an easier character to play.  With the last session, he patiently worked his way through the sage ability I call stealth (discussed on the blog here) and acting upon them, using the huge floorspace available, was able to work his way around for a chance at backstabbing the 7th level drow.

Now, a few points about that.  First of all, I don't really consider the attack as literally "backstabbing."  That's just a convenient term to use.  In actual fact, if you want to run your weapon through an enemy in order to kill them, there are multiple points on a body that are completely effective, both back and front.  The real key to the attack is surprise.  If you're a thief and you surprise your opponent, then yes, you get a pretty good chance to pick the target point of your weapon and get a lot of damage in.  The drow had 56 hit points, so he needed just 14 to stun.  Some here are familiar with my stun lock rules.  I cleaned mine up on Tuesday, just as my cold was taking hold.

The reader should take note that the stealth rules have nothing to do with surprise.  They have to do with getting close to the enemy, so that if the enemy is surprised, you're right there.  Ivan dropped his pack, his wings, every weapon but his short sword to lighten himself sufficiently to get a better bonus.  Though that wouldn't have served him well if he hadn't succeeded in surprising the drow.

But, identifying the roll, and identifying that his chance to surprise was 2 in 6, I rolled the die in front of the whole table and yes, a 2 came up.  Big cheers all around.

Ivan hasn't backstabbed anyone in a long time.  Like I said, doesn't really think like a thief.  Honestly, the player thinks more like a really dangerously smart spellcaster.  Keeps the party alive a lot of the time.  In this case, Ivan was quite surprised to learn that as a 10th level thief (and here I still use the old AD&D rule) that his damage was quadruple, not the double he expected.  He owns a Players Handbook but with so many rule changes in my game, most of my players don't read it.

Ivan rolled and hit.  He moderately lamented not rolling a natural 20, making the damage 8 times, but as he adds +3 damage to the d6 for his short sword, he felt pretty good.  By then I was lurking behind his chair, watching him roll.  Usually, he rolls very well.  Scarily well, I have to say.  But, in this case, he rolled a 1.  Four damage, times four, equals 16.  Stunned the drow, but now Ivan faced a combatant with 40 hit points left, 100 feet from the rest of the party who were fighting the three gargoyles, without much hope of support.

Yet he could have really ended the fight right there.

There'd been good luck leading up to that point.  The surprise roll, the dice he rolled for stealth, the successful to hit roll ... and 16 is not bad damage.  And in the end, Ivan walked away from the fight, albeit with a lot fewer hit points.  When the drow unleashed with the prismatic blade he had, lots of people took a lot of damage.

The player took it well.  No shouting, no lamenting, no repeated references to the 1 (except that the next time he was able to do damage, he rolled a 1 again).  Hurt though ... to get quadruple damage and not achieve total wreckage.

The other half of this story weaves around the character Hof.  Hof is a burly 6th level fighter with an 18/51 strength (I have no idea how to explain that to 5e people, except to provide a link) that gives him +2 to hit on his attack roll and +3 damage, in a game where 12 points is quite a bit of damage.  Hof also uses a +2 trident of warning (link is to the original DM's Guide) that he's been carrying around for awhile.  Hof also has an 18 constitution so that at 6th level he has 60 hit points.

In the combat he absolutely slaughtered the first gargoyle single-handed, and was moving onto the second one.  With weapon and strength together, he pile-drives every hit with 2d4+5 damage, which is an average of 10.  And the player running Hof also tends to roll well.

Hof at this point has lost a suit of +1 armour to the prismatic blade, the first attack the drow made before recharging his weapon while Ivan crept up.  The armour failed saving throw and cracked in two.  It's not stopping him from clubbing the second gargoyle to pieces however, which is good because half the party lacks the weapons to hurt one at all.

Hof also gets 5 attacks every 4 rounds.  In my game, this means he has to go 3 rounds at 1 attack per round ... and then in 4th round, he gets two attacks.  At this point, Hof hasn't missed; he had his three attacks and I cannot tell you the thrill of excitement he got as he reached for two 20-sided, declaring happily that it was his two-attack round.

He rolled a 1 and a 2.

I linked the critical hits and fumbles page already, but here it is again.  The picture shown here is also on that page.

If that was all, we wouldn't be talking about it.  But the player running Hof had to make another d20 roll and, in front of all and sundry, rolled another 1.  His fierce +2 trident was downgraded to a +1.

Oh, that hurt.  That really did hurt.  He'd acquired the trident at 4th level because he'd been the only character able to use one and so it had more than power-value ... it was a legacy of Hof's beginning to be a heavy hitter in the party.

When you join a party of higher levels and you have to start at 1st, as I require, there's a transition point to which you get nearer and nearer, where you stop acting on the fringes of a fight, and you stop needing others to carry the weight for you.  Pikel started to reach that threshold at 5th; Hof, at 4th, had it handed to him in the form of a +2 trident.  Not that he hadn't been carrying his weight thematically and practically prior to that, as the player behind Hof is an insightful, keeps-up-with-me just fine problem solver .  But the trident added some clout to the character ... and though he needs it less now, the player feels that particular loss keenly.

I have trouble explaining to some people why my players find such a deep satisfaction with combat in my game.  There's a tremendous nuance built into the rules set, so that it's never just two people standing face to face blandly exchanging blows of 30 hit points until one runs out.  I've given my all to enhancing and redesigning the combat rules so that every player has an opportunity to think out of the box (though it takes the wherewithal to do so) and nothing is ever wholly predictable.  It's predictable enough to let players gamble upon risks, but the die rolls can go so badly all of a sudden that when those thuds happen, everyone has to reassess how deep in they've gotten themselves.

To remind the reader, in this battle, Makar died.  If Ivan hadn't gotten the surprise roll, he might have died too.  This drow and three monsters did more than 200 total damage, in AD&D numbers (approximately 525 damage in 5e), to a party between 4th and 10th level.  It could have been more.

I have two more posts about this fight, that I'll get to when I can.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide.