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SPOILERS for _Shattered City_ ahead; read at your own risk.
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Post by Erol K. BayburtHow much of the problem do you think is due to your "one player, six
characters" format? If you had five other players to share the
accounting burden would it have seemed as heavy?
Clearly it would have been lighter, though there are also costs to
having multiple players--you spend a lot more time discussing
tactics and trying to coordinate, and also getting players' attention
when it strays. Jon is also running this campaign for his
regular Saturday evening group, and though they have four players,
it actually goes more slowly. (But two of them are teenagers and
not very experienced players. It could certainly be made quicker.)
I think I could have played one of the four non-casters fairly
successfully, but I would have been bored and frustrated with
any of them except the "speedster" as they were mostly ineffectual.
It's a long wait for your turn to come, and then you often can't do
anything. This fight was unusual in that regard--usually the
balance among the PCs has been fairly good, with the rogue and
paladin a bit behind the others but making up for it with
personality. But here, I don't think the melee fighter ever did
anything to the erinys except shoot arrows at her and miss--he is
not good with a bow and there was no way, with his low initiative
and movement, for him to close with a teleporting, flying foe.
In any case, it's the situation we've got; we have to pick games
that work for it. I *like* the multiple PCs: we had a lot of
fun with the diversity of viewpoints playing off against each
other. But you're right, it makes the cumbersome combat even worse.
I don't think I'm likely to enjoy a seven hour combat with one
character, but it would be less exhausting than six. Missing
most of the good character moments, though--and there were several.
It wasn't a total botch by any means, I just ended up feeling that
the bad outweighed the good. (This is true of almost all of our
failed campaigns.)
Post by Erol K. BayburtAs for seven hours to grind out the fight scene - just how big was
that fight scene? How many characters on each side?
On the PC side, six PCs plus one party NPC and her animal companion
(both run by the GM with some player input). This particular
PC party does not summon much; a summoning-heavy party like my last one
would have slowed things down another notch.
On the NPC side, one kuo-toa high priest, seven underpriests,
about fourteen kuo-toa fighters of some kind, a monk, and an erinys.
The erinys was the major contributor to the fight taking seven hours.
There also would have been a young adult black dragon, but the
PCs used diplomacy and bribery in advance to make sure there wasn't.
Post by Erol K. BayburtHow much of the seven
hour fight scene was due to the fight having lots of characters
involved, skirmish-wargame style, and how much was due to the
characters having lots of options & bookkeeping attached, HERO style?
We had streamlined the bookkeeping pretty carefully, but initiative-chart
movement carried over 70 rounds of combat is intrinsically slow.
We spent a lot of time working on this when we played Shadowrun,
and I think we've polished it as far as it will go. The GM was
using a carefully pre-prepared initiative chart and computer
assistance. (I couldn't have done it, myself. Way too hard. I am
in awe of his organizational skills.)
The long fight had a lot of awkward semi-breaks in "combat time"
because calling initiative every round was too cumbersome, but
the characters were repeatedly bushwhacked by the erinys and
every time we had to know *exactly* where every character was at
the point of contact. If the grunt fighter had been 10' closer
on one occasion it might have been a 40-round fight.
Much of the slowness came from subtle manipulation of the
initiative chart. Magic Circle Versus Evil is a 10' circle
around the caster, and for a long time we thought we needed
to keep all the PCs in that circle--while negotiating highly
congested terrain like stairs and narrow balconies. So there
were a lot of "delay" and "ready" actions. There was also a
lot of PC movement, sometimes under Haste so that the distances
were very large. And the erinys' hit and run tactics forced
heavy use of "ready".
A combat with "delay" and "ready" takes about twice as long as
one without.
The enemy were frequently in locations where it was slow and
difficult to get at them (eg 30' down and 60' out, behind a
moat) and also had combat-slowing traits (high AC, anti-missile
defenses, spell resistance, high hit points, immunities to
various attack forms). Kuo-toa also trap weapons on their
shields, which slowed matters further. And the high priest
and his last defenders stayed in their chambers and put on
armor rather than emerging at once, breaking the fight into
two parts (with a long hit-and-run between them, so it never
stopped being combat, but no progress was being made).
PC spellcasting was not the worst part of it, except at the
very end when we had Evard's Black Tentacles (a bookkeeping
nightmare) and a summoned creature and a Silence spell. Hm,
actually Silence slowed things down quite a bit as we had to
constantly count out squares and remind ourselves of the
effects--no PC communication, no casting. There were two
Silences cast, one at the beginning and one at the end.
The GM made the PCs bookkeep missiles, which we do not
usually do; this slowed things down further.
I can see a few streamlining decisions. Making Cure Moderate
Wounds potions do a defined amount of healing rather than
2d8+3 would have been surprisingly helpful, because then the
player can say "I use five of these" rather than rolling
10d8 two at a time and adding them up. If only Protection
from Evil could have lasted a bit longer, we wouldn't have
tried Magic Circle and movement could have gone faster.
Bookkeeping missiles was simply a pain--we should have had a
bag of holding full of the damned things. But I doubt this
would add up to more than a 10% improvement.
Fundamentally, the initiative system is slow, and hit and
run combat is slow, and hard-to-hurt enemies are slow; and
we had all three.
The previous too-hard fight was about 40 NPCs, mostly second
level rogues and fighters, versus 6 PCs, and took maybe four
or five gruelling hours. The range of tactical options which
make small combats interesting (tumble, ready and delay,
flanking, Grease, morale effects, etc, etc, etc) make large
combats exhausting.
In a previous campaign (Ars Magica, as it happens) we invented
a mass combat system to get rid of this, but it wasn't a big
success; it was hard to relate the results to "what would really
have happened."
In a game with no intention of being simulationist, simply
avoiding setting up large fights would help some; but after a
point, challenging combat with small numbers is very hard to
arrange.
What we have read on the SCAP discussion forums is that this
encounter is total party kill for about 50% of the groups which
encounter it, and many abandon the game; sometimes the GM wants
to continue but the players just won't. However, groups that
do a bit better often find it a really memorable and intense
experience. I was, I guess, unusual in winning the fight and
still thinking it was a bad experience overall.
Having had to enlist the GM to pick the PCs' magic items didn't
help; it undercut any sense that I, as a player, could have done
this and won. (And indeed I couldn't, as we saw when we assessed
the stuff I would have picked. Without the eight scrolls of
Stoneskin it would have been TPK for sure.)
Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com