The Beast Lunching has continued, although I have not had a chance to post about it for awhile. After the conclusion of Voss' first hunt, we switched back to Katari (my hunter). We've done about 4 sessions on the current challenge, with 30-45 minutes of "in the mode" play each session, depending on socializing, meeting schedules, etc. I'm going to describe this in two posts, the first giving mostly story, and the second talking about my experiences with the game mechanics this time out.
I gave Johnzo, as challenger, the following guidelines: I wanted to address and resolve the issue of the angry spirit of Katari's mom, now contained within his bard's staff. Deciding to up the ante, I set a budget of 40/8, with the showdown rule in effect since this would be a non-Beast Hunt challenge.
Johnzo chose to start things off just prior to Katari's tattooing ceremony, in the wake of his first hunt versus the Pifnir. Ahkiban (Katari's father) had accompanied him back to the Spirit Stone, and was making a fuss about not being allowed to participate in the ceremony. Katari took the side of the Beast Hunter elders, and told his father in no uncertain terms that he had no place here. Ahkiban settled for watching from a distance, after Katari agreed to let him hold the bard's staff containing his wife's spirit during the ceremony.
After the ceremony, Ahkiban pointed out a chip in the staff, and Katari, noticing it was fresh, accused him of carelessness. Ahkiban admitted to whirling the staff in the hope of hearing his wife's voice in the sound it made (we decided that it functioned somewhat like a bullroarer) and losing his grip on it. Katari interpreted this as a signal from the spirit, and decided that rather than journeying north as originally planned, they would travel in the direction in which the staff flew.
This took them, after a few days travel, into the heart of Rosvaya. In that accursed and magic blasted land, the very light seemed wan and pale, and secret eyes watched their every step. I called a challenge to set a trap for whatever was stalking us, in the courtyard of a ruined building we passed near. Johnzo gave immediately, and introduced the character of Rozhneva, the ghost of a beautiful Rosvayan maiden, who had been attracted by the powerful spirit Katari carried in his staff. She was seeking a path back to the world of the living, and hoped that anyone who carried such a spirit must have great power.
Akhiban became assertive in this situation, adopting a more refined northern aspect than he had typically been showing. Rozhneva spoke of a great pit in the center of Rosvaya where the magical holocaust had burned away the barriers between worlds. Ahkiban suggested going there, and told a tale of a beast with one eye that guards the way to the land of the dead. Rozhneva seemed to fear it. Katari consulted the staff once again by whirling it and letting it fly free. It landed at Rozhneva's feet.
Confused by this oracle, Katari decided they would camp the night in the courtyard, and then proceed in the morning where Rozhneva wished to lead them. But in the night, he awoke to hear his father speaking in words of strange power to the ghost, ordering her to lead them to the pit at the center of Rosvaya.
The next day's journey was interrupted by an attack by winged, twisted gargoyle men, who fell upon the party and snatched at their possessions as they tried to climb a steep slope out of a canyon. Katari fended them off, and captured their leader, but the rest fled, carrying what they had grabbed, including the bard's staff.
Katari compelled the captured gargoyle to take him to their aerie. There, he left Ahkiban in charge of the prisoner and he climbed up in the dark of a moonless night to try to seek entrance into the caves, and find and escape with the staff. This lead to the most exciting extended challenge so far, with stealth, taking of another hostage, sowing confusion by imitating the cries of the gargoyles, and finally surfing down a rocky chute on a piece of slate just ahead of an avalanche. We also had an amusing Star Wars homage: Katari slipped by some gargoyles in the tunnels by hiding in an alcove, upon which Johnzo said "ah, the Ben Kenobi move". He then promptly narrated me into the gargoyle refuse pit (aka the garbage compactor :). The end result was that the staff was recovered, but when Kitari returned to where he had left his father and the prisoner, he found only Rozhneva, who told him that other gargoyles had descended and taken Ahkiban away with them.
More shockingly, she revealed that she had followed them, and seen Ahkiban conversing opening and freely with the gargoyle shaman. Apparently he was skilled in the necromantic arts and bargained with his wife's captive spirit as a powerful resource against the shaman's aid in returning Rozhneva to life.
Horrified, Katari turned his back on the gargoyle nest and his father, and asked Rozhneva to take him to the place where she first came in to being as a ghost, assuming there might be some way there to put to rest the unquiet spirits. Shortly after setting out, more gargoyles intercepted them, led by the shaman, who attempt to bargain with Katari, his father's life for the staff. Katari said that he knew that Ahkiban and the shaman were in cahoots, and warned the shaman not to hinder him in his quest. And that is where the situation stands.
Johnzo is now down to 12 adversity points, and with the showdown rule in effect, the next contest will be the final one.
This time out, secondary goals have played a huge part in the course of the game. 8 points turns out to be a pretty stiff cap for contests, since the Challenger is in a position to buy very targeted opposition. A big offensive trait plus some damage boxes puts the challenger in a position to roll up the advantage points very fast. And rather than spending those on directly womping the hunter, Johnzo has been choosing to spend those on setting up and buying secondary goals, much to the benefit of the narrative.
Secondary goals have included the original theft of the staff, Ahkiban's capture (later revealed to be duplicity) and the breaking of the staff. This last was most interesting, because it provided a direct application of the rule that the person who prices the goal must wait at least one turn before being able to buy them goal themselves. Johnzo proposed the goal at a point where I was slightly ahead of him in advantage, but he was in a position where he was likely to be accruing advantage faster than me. So I was put in the tricky position of putting the price of the goal just out of his current reach, at a level he *might* not be able to make on his next offensive maneuver, but one that *I* would be able to reach on *my* next offensive maneuver. As it was, my gamble paid off, and I was able to ensure the fate of the staff by buying off the goal myself, much to Johnzo's surprise.
The goal was part of the staff recovery contest, which also had another point of interest in that it started as a mental challenge (because it was proposed as stealth and trickery), but the narration once we went to the dice ranged all over the place, with sneaking in the darkness, confusing the gargoyles by imitating their cries, wrestling with a gargoyle in flight, and surfing down the side of a mountain on a loose chunk of slate. By the mechanical rules of the game, this all played out using mental resources, even thought the description ultimately got very physical. Not a problem per se, just an interesting observation. It was a squeaker of a contest, coming down to the last few dice rolls. Johnzo's last strike, 2d6-1, by rights should have done a medium and taken me out due to accumulated damage, but came up a 5 (a light) and I squeaked out a win.
The key dynamic as I see it for extended contests plays out somewhat like a Matrix game, with the challenger as the judge. The requirement for the challenger to make a point offer on offensive maneuvers, combined with the guidelines for setting the values of offers on page 71-72, mean that it is almost never worth it for the hunter to roll dice for maneuvers. The challenger's offer is always better (sometimes significantl so) than the average result on the dice. Thus it's really a game of impressing the challenger with clever reactions to posed threats, and creatively leveraging what is going on the SIS. The dice *do* play a roll in the challenger's maneuvers, providing uncertainty to the rate at which the challenger is going to build up advantage points versus the rate at which the hunter builds them up, which is more predictable. The true resource then becomes actions -- looking at the cost benefit analysis of turning on traits to increase the hunters rate of accumulation or slow the challengers, and buying small strikes for the steady and efficient victory versus gambling on large strikes for a quick finish versus wasting a lot of points.
The main problem I've had with the contest mechanic is that it does sometimes overstay its welcome. I've gotten into a few situations where the ultimate mechanical outcome is obvious, but strategically the losing side can benefit from dragging it out. This leads to some repetitive narration. One can decry this tactic, but if this really is a gamist system, then one cannot criticize player decisions for following mechanical optimums rather than story decisions. I've been enjoying the story we've been telling, I just wish the extended conflict mechanics had a bit higher density on points of decision.
One more thing: something that we didn't have to deal with in play, but that came to mind, is how to handle things when something occurs to permanently change the circumstances surrounding a trait or resource. Had the bard's staff been broken, that is an actual resource on Katari's sheet. My impulse would have simply been to retain the mechanical resource, but rewrite it's description. Not a big deal, but also not a situation addressed by the rules as written. I an also see this applying to Voss, he's got traits that revolve around his relationship with his daughters, that would presumably be resolved at some point. Again, nothing a simple descriptor rewrite couldn't handle. Another alternative would be rebating the reward value of the trait or resource, allowing the hunter to invest them somewhere else. However I lean toward the descriptor rewrite, since I think the mechanical progression of the game is influenced by the players choice to put points into domains, and also to spread them into multiple traits resources versus building up singular ones.
Thanks for writing this all up. There are some great observations in here. I've had a really busy long weekend, but I'll get back to this (and the Forge thread) soon.
After about ten sessions of Beast Lunchers, I'm really feeling that the secondary goals are the awesome sauce for campaign play. I appreciate the chance to introduce contentious story points via the mechanics. It feels cleaner and less railroady when these story points are subjected to review by the other player.
Plus, secondaries make the adventure terrifically easy to plan. My Challenger strategy is to list all my contentious story points for the session as secondary goals, and then wedge them into whatever conflicts emerge.
Wil's theft of the staff secondary was something I did not anticipate. I am kinda curious as to what prompted him to make the decision to sacrifice all that advantage to thwart that story-point. Was this a story point he wasn't interested in? Was this something that Katari would have wanted? What stance is in play here?
I had a bit of a mental dislocation when the staff goal was denied -- had I won that goal, we would have rolled directly into a big Showdown, which I'd been anticipating. So I had to fall back on old-school uh-oh-my-scenario's-broken instincts and ride it out. I hope my poker face served me there.
When he's been Hunting, Wil has not proposed a lot of secondaries -- I remember the original one, to determine the identity of the spirit in the staff -- but not any after that. I can understand why, though. He needs his advantage points to stay alive. With an eight-point challenge, I can totally roll over him if I'm not concentrating on secondaries. This'll be even nastier in our next challenge, which will be a twelve-pointer under the Showdown rules. So when the hunter picks a heavier threshold, they are sacrificing an measure of story control. Is that dissatisfying at all to Wil?
From a pure-SIS standpoint, I see that Katari has a few misconceptions about Ahkiban. Rozhneva has been a less-than-reliable narrator. This is cool and will hopefully make for some good tragedy down the road.
I agree that sometimes the conflict mechanism outstays its welcome, and that I should be more willing to concede conflicts. I think we should have an agreement that it's okay to ask the other player for a concession. Had I managed to purchase the staff-breaks secondary in our last game, I would have conceded the conflict in order to move onto the showdown.
So far, I've been reluctant to buy challenges with more than the basic 1-point set of damage boxes, because I didn't want to risk coolness exhaustion. Defensive traits can also make for draggy play. So my typical plan has been to buy the biggest wallop of an offensive trait I can and 1 point of boxes. Trouble is, Wil only has to generate 24 advantage points to take that out, guaranteed -- so long as he can stall his fate long enough to do so. I want something a little less deterministic, so next time I'll be buying a bigger stack o' boxes.
The whiffiness of the strike table has been haunting me. Three times in the last session I had hoarded advantage for a big decisive strike, and three times my dice have been dirty betrayers. The slow and steady approach that Wil has been using has been more effective. In fact, he's not lost a diced conflict yet, though I have been blowing lots of APs on expensive secondaries. In the Showdown, hopefully I will have enough APs to buy up some story and also bust some heads.
I am wondering if using 2d20 for maneuver rolls rather than 2d10 might make the dice more tempting. I'm in agreement with Wil; under the stated guidelines, it is very rarely a good idea to roll the dice as the Hunter. But with an opposed 2d20 maneuver roll, there is the chance of something really crazy and wonderful happening when you roll the dice. That said, is it a good idea to de-emphasize the impress-the-other-player element of the game?
There has been the suggestion to make strike costs lower to speed up conflicts. I can't look up the RPG thread right now, but it might have been dyjoots who suggested just using 4 AP for each D6, continuously (e.g., 24 AP for 6D6). That would also lower the whiff factor. Do you guys want to give something like that a try and see how it goes? It'll lead to more damage to the Hunter, too, so take that into account. I am definitely going to add something like that to the optional rules section of the free supplement we're working on.
Another optional speeding-up thing I've been thinking about is to simply allow free strikes after every maneuver. I haven't playtested that one yet, though. It would lead to a lot more light damage, I assume :)
I also only very rarely buy more than 1 AP worth of damage boxes. I wanted to leave that option in there, but with 6 months of more play and much more feedback under my belly, I'm thinking that I would officially advise against using more than that in most cases. It should be in there for showdowns and beasts, but other than that, it's probably not a good idea.
On the maneuvers, I really really like almost never making a roll. That's really what I wanted to achieve. I'm not sure how an optional change there could simultaneously make rolls less useless and sustain the same focus on the narrative.