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Actual Play Report!

I'm going to cover two different games here, one on Friday and one on Saturday. They were both a lot of fun to run. The Friday game featured some good roleplay-in-combat moments, and the Saturday game featured an interesting point about the core mechanic.

Friday's game started with the usual set-up: the PCs were gathered by Darius Anders, noble scion of House Thessel, to perform at a dueling tournament to impress the other nobles. If they did well, they might even be selected as regents for the too-young-to-rule count, Dillard Thehoven.

The combat started with a Stun maneuver by the player who was playing Hank (the PC stat blocks are posted in another thread; Hank's a rogue with Dagger-and-wine style). I told him that Stun is a very powerful maneuver that normally requires a secret to be learned in roleplay, but he used the rumor that he had heard about his opponent (Boris Mendelssohn; I had distributed rumor sheets at the start of the game). That made it ok in my book, so Hank stunned Boris. Boris managed to fight back next round, but Hank used "Duck and Slip" to make Boris hit his own wife, Gretchen Mendelssohn, who was dueling on the same tournament grounds just a few feet away! That led to some interesting roleplay and laughs.

After the fight, Massenay, the current paramour of count-to-be Dillard, was abducted. The party gave chase! There was anice-sled race, bouncing caltrops, and the climax was a bouncing ice-sled race down a frozen waterfall. The party managed to catch up to the kidnappers in the last round possible - and not only that, but they also leapt onto the zeppelin before it

could get away! The swashbuckler used his daredevil move to climb up on it, so I couldn't even make him roll against an increased doom (Climbing is automatic success with daredevil move). So, even though I hadn't planned on it, we ran a fight scene on the zeppelin. Turns out it was a lot of fun, and the swashbuckler almost got to pull off a Death from Above. Still, he got in a spectacular strike, and it was cool how everyone got mood from that.

I should also note that the player playing Boris, who is a wight, used the wight's "Feed on Fear" ability well. He was constantly scanning for fears and exploiting them to his advantage. It was great when he got a fellow PC - Tristan, the swashbuckler - to admit that he had a fear of amounting to nothing. Good stuff.

Friday's game finished with the PCs returning to the castle, presenting evidence of Duke Rohn's betrayal (the evidence was all over the zeppelin that they managed to board), and then whittling down the Duke's inspirations so that they could take him out. We ran the undead assault on Thyre's walls as a quick two-round test of the mass combat rules because that's all we had time for.

All in all, a fun game!

The Saturday game was fun too, but it didn't feature quite as much roleplaying. Part of the problem was that one person there just could not understand the idea of "Roll the biggest die size that doesn't exceed your characteristic score." Even after two hours, I would say something like, "Ok, give me a quickness roll" and she would look blankly at her character sheet. We tried to explain, but she just couldn't get that if her quickness was 7, she should roll a d6. I hadn't ever seen that before. I guess the moral is that there are always going to be some people who don't get the system.

The game itself went pretty well, although as you can imagine, it was a bit of a halting pace since either me or the guy next to her had to help her pick her die for every single roll. She also couldn't grasp the idea of narrating what your character is doing in a chase scene, or narrating how an inspiration relates to a situation at hand. To her credit, these were all new ideas for her, and she did try. At a few points she even advanced the story a few times.

The PCs didn't catch the zeppelin this time, partly because they caught the kidnappers just as they were starting to crash down the waterfall, before reaching the zeppelin on the plains at the bottom. That meant we had time for the foreshadowing undead fight - and that was a lot of fun. The guy playing Hank (who thoughtfully delivered Massenay to freedom before returning to Dillard, who had already forgotten about his paramour) pulled off a couple of environment tricks, including Soup in the Face of the undead giant. Lots of fun, and effective. Unlike the PCs on Wednesday night, the PCs in this game hardly took any damage from the giant. There was also a lot of fun with twitching zombies. Twice the party managed to stop the twitching zombies just before they exploded. The lady playing Horace and the guy playing Tristan were both really cool in this fight (and throughout the game, really).

Again, we took a super-fast, one-round look at mass combat (they sent their heavy footman charging at the skeleton children's brigade), and then we had to end the slot as people needed our table. A good game, and it made me think that I should have a chart handy showing people what die to roll for the various different scores.

You are brave trying to teach a 4-year-old the Wii. :) My niece is 5 and, well, she is very smart but I don't think she is quite at a place where she would enjoy it.

You're totally right. Sometimes some concepts and some people just don't mesh. Just the way it is, I guess!

I think when a kid or someone new to RPGs comes to the table, a lot of it depends on the group. Old-school D&D can be great for this because there's a lot of room for free-form rp'ing and because the people that play ODD tend to have little problem with the idea that "the DM just rolls the dice for the sound they make." But if you had a group that did it totally by the book, yeah, it could overwhelm the kid/newbie because there are a lot of different dice there.

My first DM was actually... my mom! We were in this small town in northern Michigan, I was in 4th grade, and I had heard of this relatively new game, D&D (AD&D actually at the time). I told my mom I wanted to try it, and she being the saint she is said sure. Thought it might be a good family activity. My dad made a cleric named Billy the Hindu Bishop (I am not making this up), my mom DM'd, and I made a magic-user, I think, with some name like Eric or Alarin. We made it through about two rooms of B1 In Search of the Unknown (we had mistakenly bought a boxed set and a couple AD&D books). We realized we didn't know much about what we were supposed to be doing, and my mom said, "You know what, your cousins play this game. Let's wait until summer when you go downstate to live with them for a few weeks, and you can learn it from them." So that's how I learned, the summer after 4th grade. But I will never forget Billy the Hindu Bishop!