GM WhtKnt's The Waxing Dark: Savage Worlds Weird War I

Game Master WhtKnt

Sweet. =)

Yeah, Aleksei, you'll probably soak at least one wound, and Jac has a d8 in healing, so he might just wipe the rest out once you get to him. =)

I think you're thinking of the Gritty Damage setting rule. I still haven't actually gotten the Weird War I book, but I don't think Weird Wars uses it?

Guys, I just wanted to take a moment and say that THIS WAS AWESOME!!!

This? This thing right here? You guys ROCK ASS! =-D

If this were any other group of guys, we're dead now. If ANY one of us focked up, at least one of us is lying in a pool of their own quickly congealing blood from being shot three times with a wave of enemy marching past them.

ALL of us EXECUTED our assignments FLAWLESSLY!

High fives all around!

No, seriously, PbP can go t1ts up at any moment, but we rocked the house. I've seen many scenarios not even this challenging go poorly because someone Leroy Jenkins'ed, or someone went somewhere else instead of staying where they needed to, but none of us did that. The flanks held the flanks, and Jacques covered us both.

ZenFox and Aloha: I know you guys are awesome, and this just proved it!

Shadow Bloodmoon: I didn't know you before this, but you have done some yoeman work here! Keep it up! =D

Even if things go south from here on in, don't let this moment of glory pass you by. We did good here.

Just be careful not to get caught up in a firefight at the door. There are probably a bunch of Germans about to come in the front door, so getting it closed is the important thing.

Teamwork makes the dream work. :)

Thanks! Now to clean up the mess before the rest get to us..

WhtKht? Dudeman? Everything okay? We're just waiting on a quick update from you, I think.

Yeah, just been v. busy. I'll egt something up tomorrow. Would do it now, but I'm running my weekly F2F game tonight. :)

Hey WhtKnt, how are you doing experience? Have we gotten XP?

I kinda feel like we should've had at least one advance at this point. But if you've got a Master Plan(tm) that's fine. =)

Well, I was going to hold out until the castle was finished and give 3, but if you guys like, you can take 1 now and I'll give you the other 2 when you complete this mission.

Yes, for two reasons:

1) I'll always go with the payment now. That's the best way to guarantee that you have it!

2) I'm actually sort of opposed to giving Players large bumps in power/levels at one time. It gives the campaign a sense of "Deus Ex Machina". There can be a risk of disconnect, if in one post a character is still at 0 XP, and in the next post the Character is much, much more advanced, as if they improved greatly from one breath to the next.
With a more gradual improvement, it gives the Player a chance to "feel" every jump.
That is to say: You get the same endorphin rush from 1 advancement as you do from 3, so why not maximize the buzz? =)

(Indeed, one could contemplate giving one now, when we've breached the front hall, another one when we find/rescue the prisoners, and another one when we've escaped safely.

I'm just spitballing here. IMHO. YMMV. =3

(But true story: Once I made a game where the DM had everyone make a lvl 1 character. We all had dinner and met our employer, then, a thing happened, and he told us all to level up to level 4. We gave a collective "You couldn't have told us that at the start?" It was so weird that there weren't ten more posts when the game died. Jus' saying. =-)

Sounds logical to me. Okay, everybody take an XP! And since it's the holiday season and I'm feeling generous, you guys can open your gifts early. Everyone gets a free extra benny.

Yes!! =-D

That makes total sense. Feels more... organic that way. Now to update the character sheet...

I've spent my one advance for +1 Vigor...
...because I'm out front, on my own, fully working both my Overconfidence and Death Wish. =P

WhtKnt - did you give us 1 *XP*, or 1 *Advance*? Because in SW it takes 5 XP to get one Advance...

And while I agreed with Daniel's comments on getting 3 "level-ups" (Advances) at once, getting 3 XP at once is no big deal.

I was wondering the same. I only added 1 XP.

Ah! Oh, yeah, I may have gotten it wrong, then. I had assumed he'd meant 3 Advances, as that seemed more in line, and since we haven't gotten any XP yet. But, yeah, 3 XP...you can hand that out whenever.

Take one advance. It's easier to track that way. :)

I don't know why more people aren't posting, but if someone doesn't post something in the next 12 hours, tomorrow morning I'm doing something extremely stupid. =)

I think they are busy roflmao'ing Aleksei's clumsiness.

-Posted with Wayfinder

Well, none can say that you weren't warned! =)

So apologies for my absence. Most of my post time has been while I'm on break at work, but I can't reach Roll20 from my work computer, so...

Once I get off shift tonight I'll figure out how to get to who needs fixing. :)

Just so everyone is aware; convention season is upon us again! I serve as the Game Operations Director (that is, the Director of the Game Room) at CoastCon, a local convention in 1.5 months, and this takes up a lot of my already pressed time. So if I am slow to update or respond, please bear with me and bot me as needed.

Is that everyone? I remember we were sent in here to save prisoners, but I don't recall how many. Are we done here?

(Personally I was looking forward to clearing an entire castle just because, but it's not like we'd get an achievement for it, so we may as well just get out. ^_^) (If there was a rumor of a some kind of infinity-1 sword in here, I'd say yippe-ki-ay, but there's not, so meh.)

That said, are we just bull-ing our way out the front door? I admit I have no more ideas, but I just wanna make sure that's the consensus?

There were just two prisoners that you know of, yes. That being said, if you want incentive to take the whole castle (not trying to say that you should, mind you), consider that the Germans must have some battle plans holed up in here someplace.

Ooo! Since we found the prisoners do we get another advance?? Huh? Huh? =)

Yes, actually.

Awesome! Added Stealth and Throwing..

Some thoughts:

1) I jsut wanna say that I really like this game. Sure, we all have games that take a lot of time in RP or intra-party banter, but a lot of that is a lot of work, and not really that rewarding sometimes. Hence, I'm glad that this game is like a dungeon crawl, but in the SW world. I like having at least one place where I can just look at the map, line up the shot, and worry about moving on toward the clear no-nonsense objective, while killing proto-nazis on the way. =)

I understand that it's slow at times, and maybe this isn't the sexiest genre for the others, but -I0- really like it because I accept and appreciate it for what it's worth. ^_^

2) How's the equipment gonna go? Like, low-magic worlds generally have some kind of "quality" of equipment scale (ala Fallout) but WWI, in reality, isn't like that. So, having never played in Weird Wars before, are we gonna find better.magical gear? Or is this it? (Just wondering if I can keep my hopes up, or if I should dash them against the ground like a cigarette that's burned out its usefulness. =)

Thank you. It's nice to feel appreciated. As for magical weapons, it isn't out of the question, but by and large, what you have is what you get. If a magical weapon were to show up, it would probably be intended for a specific purpose and be really only useful to fulfill that purpose.

World War I has always held a certain fascination for me, and I feel that it's a setting that has been largely ignored by games (both RPG and computer). It's such a rich setting that this baffles me. I was glad to see that the new Wonder Woman movie will be wet in WWI.

For the record, I upped my Shooting from d6 to d8 on the first advance, and I've just now upped my Agility from d6 to d8 on this second one.

Oh that's right, advances were a thing we got. The first upgraded Jacques' shooting and stealth to d6 and the second gave him the Jack of All Trades edge. :)

Aleksei, please let me know whenever you start your Savage Rifts campaign - I created a PC for it, and joined a PbP group, but it died before we even got past the first page of posts...

You got it! As soon as I free up some time boards wise (i.e. my current other game is coming to an end..), I will start that up. I've always wanted Rifts with a new system and spent years attempting to convert it to GURPS, M&M and others, but the Savage System seems to work well. Once I get the hang of the Aim rules ;-)

We're one week out from the convention. As such, my time is getting crunched pretty badly. I'll try to check in as much as possible until Wednesday, after that, don't expect to hear from me until Monday. Please bot me as necessary. If I'm running your game, I ask for your patience. We will continue!

For Bobby, or anyone else who's interested..

Savage Rifts

Once, after my tour was over, just for fun I played the enemy for a national guard infantry squad that was practicing room-sweeping.

This, uh, this one of the things they do. Stack up, toss coconut, rush in.

=)

ALL - I've just joined a second PbP game in Roll20 (for the combat mapping), and when I clicked on the tab that I have open for this game, Roll20 automatically took me to the other game's map!

I see nothing to click on to "back up" to a point where I can choose which game to join.

Any ideas?

Nevermind, the problem fixed itself...

I'm curious about something - why was Alekski's grenade a dud? What was it about his roll that made it a dud? And why didn't he re-roll the Ace on the Wild die?

Because my original rolls were a 1 and a 1 but during the server difficulties it double posted..

I had a feeling that was what it was, which is why I didn't say anything. On the subject of grenades and other thrown weapons, am I missing something in SW where they have a missed target chart, or is a miss just considered a miss?

A miss on your Throwing roll is covered under Area Effect Attacks, under Situational Combat Rules (page 70 in the 2011 SWD). It's somewhat complicated, so I won't copy-and-paste it here.

I figured that would cover it, but two ones is usually a critical mess up, subject to GM fiat...If I need to roll deviation:

Distance: 1d6 ⇒ 2
Direction: 1d12 ⇒ 11

Yes, we'll use the revised rule, though it makes a raise pointless so I dunno why they did that.

According to one of the game developers, the "you can recover from Shaken and act on only a Success" change was made mainly to not force players to spend most of their Bennies just to take an action as opposed to doing something cool with a reroll or Soaking a more serious attack.

This also speeds up combat, as PC's and NPC's that aren't Shaken aren't just standing around doing nothing.

As well as to simplify bookkeeping for Extras. Ideally they're either up, shaken, or down; but with the old rule they might be unshaken but also not acting.

Mmmmrmph. This is one of the odd sticking points about vanilla SW--without any powers or arcane. Is the medic goes down, or if someone goes down and can't do anything about their 2 or 3 wounds, the player is gonna be bored. With arcane you can spend PP, or with some tech (I0, Savage Rifts) anyone can get some +dice to healing, but with straight skills and only natural healing in sight, it gonna be a long night for dem. =)

(Jus' sayin'. IMHO. YMMV.)

True, it is difficult, but I think that I have an out. See the gameplay thread.

Hey Whtknt, I got a question for ya.

Are we ever going to have access to Arcane background edges? Or upgrades of any kind?
Or are we pretty much straight SW throughout?

Just asking. =)