See part 3 here.
Oh noes! Failure!
After recovering the key part from the Merchant “Prince” the players consulted the Map.
Math: All right, the next closest thing is the Vats, let’s go!
Eric: No, let’s do the Vats last, we’ll be able to bust them after and then go do Rocco, Franky and Mike’s goals while the whole place burns down.
Yan: Whoa, When did you become a Brilliant Planner?
This game session went from surprise to discovery for me. Players were obviously ‘in the zone’ to a point I hadn’t seen in a long time. Of course, they had near full control of their PC’s destinies and could make significant choices that drove the game. All doubts I had about the Mouse Guard method evaporated at that point.
Once the players arrived near the entrance of the Re-Education camps, I described how it was enclosed behind stonewalls with only one apparent access point, heavily guarded by Foulspawns. The players discussed for a few minutes and agreed to the following plan: The PCs would investigate the surrounding neighborhood to try to find the best possible way of entering the compound undetected.
Chatty: All right then, I’ll call this a Streetwise check DC 30, representing you gathering the intel and trying to infiltrate the compound the best way you can.
The party failed the roll by a few points (finally!). Looking at the time (it was about 9h30 PM) and gauging the energy level (still high), I decided on the following.
“Okay, based on the best tip you could get, you decide to infiltrate the sewers. Unfortunately, you entered at the wrong time and were caught by a patrol of the Overmind’s Amphibious thrall: a pair of Chuuls! Now here’s a battlemap of the sewers. You start here (pointing), the monsters are here and here (putting minis on map). Your objective is NOT to fight the monsters, but to exit the map here (point opposite exit), although killing the monsters is fine too.
The PCs made their way toward the exit but were unable to dodge the patrol and eventually killed them off. During the combat, one player pointed at an enclosed space near the edge of the map, asking what it was and jesting that I was probably hiding monsters in there.
Say Yes? Sure!..
Since the PCs were nearing the last stretch of the fight, I fished out a bag filled with my little ‘zombies’ (from the Zombies board game, awful game, great minis) and I dropped 6 of them on the map.
Chatty: You see corpses rise out of the Sewage or ‘unstick’ themselves from the walls
Franky: Oh, like in Pirates of the Carabean scene on the boat!
Chatty: Exactly! Also, like Davey Jones, you notice that the heads on the corpses are kinda squidy, like a Mind-Flayers’ They all shuffle toward you.
Group: WTF?
The party engaged them too. Then Nanoc the barbarian killed one with one hit (Yay, minions!)
Chatty: As the zombie-like creature falls down, the squid-like head detaches itself, showing a long, phlegmy proboscis being retracted from the corpse’s mouth.
Yan: Ewww
Chatty: But that’s not all… the squid-thing launches toward your face (clatter clatter) and hits you, giving you the full Alien Spa treatment.
Yan: Wah?
Chatty (Noticing a joke that my assistant DM John had written in the stats): But after probing your brain for a few short seconds, it snorts in frustration, falls off your face and starts running away. It seems your wisdom and Intelligence scores are too low to properly feed it.
Yan: Hey, I’m actually insulted by that!
Har har har!
The fight was eventually won by the PCs (thanks to a great maneuver from the Invoker, who fried all Squids whenever they attacked). Fangs, whose brain was tastier than Nanoc’s, even got some private face sucking time with the squid-things (modeled after Half-Life’s Headcrabs), failing a save and getting close to complete domination.
The party then made their way deeper in the sewer, ready to enter the Re-education camps.
Roll credits to an awesome session.
Lessons Learned
- This session was the culmination of my efforts to develop into a better improv DM. Having Encounters and battlemap ready helped a lot. I’ll do this again for sure.
- When a crazy idea seem like it may work, go for it and try it… just prepare the floor first.
- It’s not a lesson anymore, but more of a mantra: Always find a way to Say Yes.
- Giving players control of the goals of an adventure, within the frame of the DM’s Main Quest allows players to more easily achieve setting immersion.
Post Script: Two-hit minions? Tell me more!
(Bonus feature!)
A few weeks ago, while playing a Barbarian in Yan’s game (which I never got to write about, sorry man, great game!) he introduced us to a new type of monster he called ‘two-hits minions’.
Basically, it’s a monster that gets bloodied on the first hit and dies on the second (or dies when hit by a critical hit) regardless of the amount of damage done. This allowed Yan to mobilize monsters that were credible threats (they still rolled for damage) but that didn’t need any special book keeping except tracking their bloodied status.
It worked real well.
So well in fact that I ended up adapting his concept and serving it back to him. So here’s the creation that my assistant DM Johenius and I came up with. It worked brilliantly!
Presenting the 2-stage minion:
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| HP 1; a missed attack never damages a minion. | ||||||
| AC 25; Fortitude 26, Reflex 22, Will 22 | ||||||
| Resist Psychic 10 | ||||||
| Speed 8, Climb 4 | ||||||
| M Slam (Standard; at-will) | ||||||
| +16 vs. AC; 7 damage. | ||||||
| R Launch Debris (Standard; recharge 56) | ||||||
| Ranged 10/20; +16 vs. AC; 5 damage | ||||||
| Time for a new Host | ||||||
| When the HeadSquid Zombie is reduced to 0 hp, replace it with a HeadSquid. It acts immediately. | ||||||
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| Skills Endurance +15 | ||||||
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and
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| HP 1; a missed attack never damages a minion. | ||||||
| AC 25; Fortitude 20, Reflex 26, Will 22 | ||||||
| Resist Psychic 10 | ||||||
| Speed 4 | ||||||
| M Shin Slam (Standard; at-will) | ||||||
| +13 vs. AC; 5 damage | ||||||
| m A Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong (Standard; at-will) | ||||||
| The HeadSquid shifts up to 5 squares and makes an attack: +15 vs Reflex; 7 damage, target is dazed and blind (Save ends both)
First Failed save: Target is immobilized and blind (Save ends both) Second failed save: Target is dominated (until headsquid is killed), at the end of the Encounter if target is still dominated, it turns into a HeadSquid Zombie Special: Any damage done to the target is also dealt to the HeadSquid. |
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I like where you took my idea of the two-hit minion and transformed it into a two stage minion… 😉
There is so many interesting things to do with this.
Personally I love big fights and minions fill an essential role they fill out the ranks… The problem is they fail to pose a significant threat. Especially with a wizard in the group.
Enter the two-hit minions, which do wonders to give the feel of an epic fight without the extra book keeping. When I created them, all I did was take a monster which was about two levels lower than the players’ level and made it into a two hit minion as described above.
Great Series
I was hoping your handling of a failure in this post would be something besides a combat(not that you made the wrong choice in rolling out the head crab zombies), just because I have a hard time envisioning myself coming up with interesting complications. I wonder have you had any fridge genius moments since the session of other complications?
I just finished running the second to last session in the mega WOTC module: Demon Queen’s Enclave. I wish I had your player goals framework to guide things a little better from the beginning, as it was a nonlinear dungeon with all fights and no decent hooks for the PCs much of the way.
I can’t wait to put it into practice as soon as I think of a plan for the next adventure. I am already scheming ways to hint to my alternating DM to design goal based adventures!
I love the 2 stage minion idea, I’ll most definitely put that into practice “Soon ™” in my campaign. Some of the stuff you come up with makes me feel so incredibly unoriginal and makes me say “Why didn’t I think of that!”.
OMG! LMAO at “A Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong” hahahahahahaha
This series of posts feels like a really good big joke. Build up… build up some more… build up even more… then… bam! the punchline! AWESOME!
I’ll do some searching of my own here in a moment, but is there a 3.x to 4e conversion guide online? If so, I need to find it and reverse engineer these bad boys with it. I definitely want to add them into a 3.5e campaign soon. lol
Great job, Chatty and gang! Truly entertaining!
This is really great, the whole ‘failure creates a complication’ thing keeps things moving fluidly, it’s great.
On the ‘2-hit minion’ thing, I’ve been thinking of creating something similar for my next campaign (I’m out of DM rotation at the moment, I went first and we all learnt a lot but I want something VERY special for my next turn!).
I wanted to come up with a city siege scenario where the players take on and command whole armies, but rather than filling a map with minis, I figured I could abstract it a little and instead use ‘multi-minions’. A Squad of maybe 8 or 10, or even more all combined so that when a PC hits, they roll maybe a d4 rather than damage and that determines how many creatures are killed, then give the squads a suite of powers that diminish or change depending on how many are left, couple it with some simple rules on how they behave based on how many are left.
So you start with a squad of 10 attempting to use a battering ram to take down the fortress gates, a player wades in and manages to cut down 3, leaving the battering ram unwieldy and ineffective, another loss leaves it too heavy to lift so they resort to fighting hand-to-hand. Down to 2 men and they start to retreat or join up with another squad to battle further and so on.
Obviously it only works in specific situations, but I think it would be a nice set-piece in a larger adventure.
Woot Friday morning comments, I love those!
@Yan: I knew that you had pushed the minion design space in a very interesting direction when I saw that all the players came up with new strategies to deal with your 2-hits wonder kobolds.
The Heasquid appeared to me as being an alternative that achieved a similar goal, plus I wanted to create a really dangerous minion, using the save twice or get really screwed mechanic of 4e.
Great work there Yan.
Nothing specific, except to say that I simply LOVE everything about this session. You’ve engaged your players. You seem to have invested more into this session and your game as a whole than you did in previous recaps.
That darned save twice mechanic though. It’s a real pain in the rear, but the headsquids don’t even take it to a horrible extreme.
Given the notion that failures are successes with complications, do you feel there’s ever going to be an appropriate time to make a failure a real failure?
.-= Brian´s last blog ..The 4e Druid Handbook – Part 1: Ability Scores and Class Features =-.
@itliaf: Yeah, the danger of this method is to default all failures into combat, like my friend PM wrote in his guest post last week. I was well aware of what I was doing. My players are butt kickers and I judged that a small combat would end the evening well.
Other failures in that sense would have been PCs getting caught in a flooding trap in the sewers. Getting spotted by the guards of the compound leading to a generalized alarm (with the assumption that fighting everyone is not a good idea).
Heck I could have the party sneak up the compound’s wall during the 1 minute ‘hole’ during shift change and have a NPC walk up to the wall and shout “Hey, Nanoc, what the hell are you doing on this wall? Don’t you know it’s like a political prison in there?”
I think that the combat turned out fine 🙂
@Fazz: Thanks. Don’t beat yourself up, I’m among the blessed few that have minds like a nuclear reactor of idead. The up of it is that I come up with crazy wild stuff… the downside is that I often have trouble doing anything with the ideas except a confusing mess. Except in times like these where the planets align or something and it all works out.
@Tiorn: I’m happy to have helped brighten your day. You can probably reverse engineer the monster pretty easily. Give it about 5-7 HD but with a very low constitution to lower HP. Make it grab automatically (forget about using grapple mechanics) as soon as it hits. Make PC save for Ref to prevent face-landing. on a fail… blind and dazed (i.e. only one action per round). Then make the PC save vs Fort or become paralyze. Finally, on the third round, make a save vs Will or become Dominated. The condition can only be removed with Healing or something (Protection from Evil perhaps… I’m getting rusty with 3,5)
As for the Zombies… just pick any zombies and make it throw things.
Hope that helps.
@Mike: I would suggest that you get rid of Minion armies and play the game at higher level of abstraction. Heck, if PCs control units, use the Player driven goal system. They describe the strategy, you ask for an appropriate skill (or ability) check.
Failures can lead to routs, Mutiny, victory with high casulties, or a catapult rock crushing a key general… etc.
Otherwise, your idea is very fine to create a D&D mini-wargame. That’s fun too.
@Brian: There are times where the spark is there and everything just ‘works’. I’ve learned to cherish those times and accept that all games won’t be like that. Yet I feel I’m unto something. Yes I ended up investing myself a lot in that game and the players really got into it, but I feel the method had a lot to do fir it.
I’m beginning to get what all those ‘I improv all the time’ GMs are saying. Although I don’t believe that the method would be appropriate for, say, an exploration based game like my old Font of Sorrows adventure.
As for your failure question. I think that the only interesting failure in a RPG is one that puts the player in face of a big challenge they did not expect. I took this from Prime time Adventure, but were I to play a game where PCs must stop an Nuke from exploding in their city, there really is no point in having the bomb go off and kill all PCs. That kind of failure is self defeating.
However, failing to capture the terrorist who planted the bomb? That’s the kind of complication I would use.
So yes… Failures that push the story in a new direction or that opens up a new Story: Yes!
Bottleneck Yes-No options? Pass!
yeah, I guess my army minions add an extra level of complexity, I’m a sucker for the wildly complicated set-piece one off 🙂
One message that seems to be coming through from your improv developments is that you actually need to do MORE prep to make sure you’ve got a list of encounters and NPCs and stuff, you just don’t do as much prep on the scripting side.
@Mike: I can identify for about the wildly complicated stuff.
I would define my last game as the first session of a Sandbox type of game where the DM has prepared micro modules (Encounters and Locales) but hasn’t assigned them to a map. As the player explore, the DM fishes from his ‘bank’ of encounters.
So yes, there’s upstream prep for sure. But I don’t have much more prep to do from this point onwards…
That being said, anyone trying to run this type of game, planning to create encounter straight from the Monster books will likely kill the game because of the delays.
Yep I can keep myself from a seeing a dozen of other variant on the idea…
You could combine both approach:
Two-hit minion that upon death transform into an other minion.
A boss that has an aura in which if one of is minion dies in it, he is raised as a two-hit zombie minion.
You get my drift… That’s design space. 😉
I think it’s one of the things that I like so much about Wizards’ decision to go with exception based design. Having eaten Magic the Gathering and dived deep enough in the comprehensive rules to know large parts of it by heart, I can ‘feel’ the 4e DM toolkit rules more than any editions before. It’s like I can see the numbers of 4e’s Matrix 🙂
So when we push the limits of a given concept, I too feel the possibilities.
Heck… I even imagine some sort of Puzzle made up of various minions!
Imagine minion that cycles through one of 5 different forms when brought to 0 HP (without ever dying)… then imagine an encounter that requires minions in specific forms being pushed in some squares to unlock a puzzle and drop a Huge Treasure parcel…
Hmm, if I weren’t already me, I’d totally steal that idea!
Oh wait…
lol! Yep totally… 😉
@Mike Watts
You should really take a look at One Bad Egg’s Hardboiled Armies PDF. It sounds like it is exactly what you are looking for.
I’ve seen a few other methods of maximizing Minions.
The Minion That Wouldn’t Die: When the minion is hit, roll a saving throw. If the minion makes the throw, it doesn’t die.
Schrodigar’s Minion: On a hit, roll a d4. On a 4, the minion is actually a normal monster.
This is one of my favorite series of posts on chattydm.
I have been wanting to get a similar technique into my campaign, but did not know how. You have given me tools. Parts I can pick up with my hands to build an adventure.
Keeping some encounters on the ready is something I need. Know what would be really cool? A PDF of one-page-encounters. Just a thought.
@Kevin Richey: Oh God… wouldn’t a contest for 1-page random pre-generated encounters fit that bill?? Especially if it was compiled into a nice PDF collection? Too soon after the 1-page dungeon contest though. lol
@Kevin: I humbly thank you. I’m really happy that you liked those posts. I too like to have building blocks I can pick and drop in a campaign.
Your idea (and Tiorn’s gentle nerd baiting) is interesting… except it would be hard to pinpoint the scope of the thing, covering 30 levels.
But yeah, I’d totally could use bundles of Encouter PDFs, each packing 3-5 encounters for a tight level range.
Let’s see if the idea falls on fertile ground… 🙂
Book of Challenge 4e anyone?
Chatty: The nerd in me can clearly see the convenience of having such pre-made information on hand. I agree with you though… it might be too much for a contest. You couldn’t really do edition-neutral material, so that would leave older editions out. I’m not into 4e at all, but something for 3.x or Pathfinder would be more appealing for me… so I would probably shy away from it if it was 4e-centered. But like you did with the 1-page dungeon contest with old and new school categories, the same could be done with a 1-page encounter contest with 4e and Pathfinder/3.x categories. If it looked like it could be a big contest, then additional categories could be created like: urban, wilderness, and underground encounters. And also, like you said, categories based on level groupings. It would be nearly impossible to get a good collection of encounters for each and every level. But organizing categories based on 5 or 6 level groups might work out. If 6 level groups could be done, then that would yield 5 groups to cover 30 levels with. That doesn’t sound too bad at all, honestly.
Another idea too, that I just came up with, is a 1-page Quest contest. Basically, it would be another 1-page 5-room dungeon concept contest, but with the understanding that the Quest could easily be plugged into the 5×5 method and link fairly seamlessly into an overall campaign. But of course, someone could easily do that with most of the original 1-page dungeons anyhow, I guess. So maybe my nerd brain is overloading. 🙂
More overload… 🙂 … how about a Create A Monster contest? I absolutely love the Headsquid Zombies and will definitely use them. It would be interesting to see what other ideas people can come with and organize those into a PDF as well. People have been doing it for years anyhow, but most of that work is scattered from one site to another and to yet another… you get the idea.
Speaking of the Headsquid Zombies… I think I figured out how I’m going to reverse engineer the conversion to 3.5 for them. It should be really simple. 3.x zombies are templates anyhow, so just a few changes would have to be made to the original template. The biggest change would be to rule out certain creatures types, since any creature with a skeletal structure can be a zombie (I’m sure you wouldn’t want to see a Headsquid Zombie CAT, especially since you alluded to INT/WIS not being sufficient in your game recap). So, the Animal type should be easily ruled out. Humanoids are obviously the best choice, but how about monstrous humanoids, fey, magical beasts, giants, or even *gasp* dragons?! I think the creature size would play a factor too… a Headsquid giving a face-full of alien wing-wong to a Storm Giant just doesn’t seem like it would work out at all, unless there were larger Headsquids (but that’s another path to follow). The hardest work should be on converting the Headsquids themselves into a new 3.x compatible format. That shouldn’t be too bad, honestly.
@Tiorn: I don’t think that an edition less encounter book would be feasible. Here are my reasons:
Crunch reason #1 level: Each system as it’s own default setting and progression what would be consider a level 1-5 encounter might be a 5-10 and the maximum level is not the same.
Crunch reason #2 number of monster: Each system as it’s own understanding of how many monster can be in an encounter and what is consider common ground in one system might be to many in an other.
Fluff Reason #1Type of monster : Monster are mostly dependent on genre and worlds what is present in one world or epoch is not present or of the same strength in an other. Although this is relatively less true if we’re only talking of edition changes still a lot of the monster don’t have an exact equivalence.
So to leave it edition neutral you would need to leave most of the crunch out which is what you need to give in order for the end product to be of any significant help.
Be that as it may…. I ‘m sure there are enough online 4e and Pathfinder fans to allow for a system specific contest.
The thing is… I like contests to bring together people across the hobby. In that sense… the idea of a 4e/Pathfinder encounter contest is not one I’d pursue.
However, I could envision 4e/Pathfinder adventures that embrace the Player-driven goal approach AND contain a bunch of pre-made encounters as well as tips to creatimg your own rapidly (possibly with a template).
I’m just sayin’
Yan and Chatty… I agree. That’s why I said it would have to be in categories. It couldn’t possibly work if the goal was to have edition-neutral (or even system-neutral) entries. What’s good for 4e is not good for 3.x and vice versa. So basically, it would have to be two different contests… one for each edition/system. Or… just do one (as mentioned: 4e) and have a drop-off in the number of participants. There would be a drop-off if it was just 3.x/Pathfinder-focused as well. Recognizing and accepting a drop-off either way is definitely an option.
The only way to have one contest that would cover both editions is if… you did it like the 1-page dungeon was done, as far as ‘old school and new school’ style categories. Instead of ‘old school and new school’, it would be ‘3.x/pathfinder and 4e’ as two separate categories. It would essentially be two different contests, but under the same ‘banner’, so to speak.
One of the ‘Gnomes’ is big on Pathfinder right now. He might take interest in such a contest with a 3.x/Pathfinder focus. Who knows? hehe If anything comes out of it at all… its good for the hobby, period! That’s my viewpoint. 🙂
Just an observation : the ‘two-hit minion’ is similar to the way minions work in Savage Worlds – 1st hit=Shaken, 2nd hit=Gone.
I guess that parallel evolution of the same idea is a sign that it is a good one. 🙂 Savage Worlds seems to have many elements that I like in a RPG. I will put the Explorer’s Edition on my next list of games to read/try.
@Yan: That 2-hit minion idea is great! I liked the idea of minions but, as you stated, felt that they posed no real threat to area attacks… and were far too easy to identify. 2-hit minions FTW!
@ChattyDM: I think you just ran exactly the kind of game I was trying to run: a game in which the players have the power and will to affect the game world.
Good improv skills from everyone, willing players and clearly-defined player-chosen goals seems to have won the day!
.-= Eric Maziade´s last blog ..On the road to Spellgu- postmortem =-.
Thanks Eric. Another thing I like with them is, that since they go through the bloodied state they trigger all kind of effect.
i.e:An orc minion cannot use it’s racial ability. An orc 2 hit minion that is bloodied gets out of his bloodied state if he use is warrior surge.
I personally like it a lot.
Headcrabs for the win!
Another minion idea I’ve been playing for my own game with is to make a large creature with many limbs (Krakens or Hydras, say), where each of the tendrils or heads is represented by a shifty, low-move minion “tethered” to the main creature, which can use its own move actions to move the whole body. Then you can use the limbs for attacks of opportunity, flanking, special attacks, &c. The two-stage minion could play into that interestingly – say, the second stage for a Hydra head can only be damaged by fire or acid.
I’m currently running a game with a ton of players based on the 3.x d20 rule set. By necessity I also stumbled across the idea of a two hit minion and would like to add my endorsement to the idea.
I’M happy to see the 2 hit minions get so much acceptance. Yan is ecstatic at the idea that people he doesn’t know like the idea.
I’m going to use it again for sure!
Chatty + Yan = Worlds greatest DM?
Now, if only we could make the fusion permanent…I’ll get to work on that dodgy teleporter array from the Fly and we’ll have you two merged in no time!
Seriously though, awesome idea with the headcrab minions and really loving the freeform template. I’m gathering ideas for my next campaign already and hoping to do something much more free form like this. All these ideas are really helping 🙂
oh boy! that would result in some damn huge fly!!!
Glad you like the idea… 😉