Unsure about a play procedure? Need examples of how something might work in play? This is a thread for us to help each other out.
Issue One of the Goblinville Gazette · By
I was curious about the Fighting Pits town location. What's the benefit there? You pay 1 scratch to fight, and then what? Or is it just a thematic thing? If that's the case, why have an option to pay 6, that's a lot of scratch for broke goblins...
Haven't been able to run a full on play session yet, but we created a couple goblins and tested out the mechanics, loving it so far!
Glad you're loving it. I hope you can get a full session in soon.
We kept the Fighting Pits description pretty open. We play it as an action roll: winning nets a 2 scratch purse and town-wide renown but risks an injury.
The 6 Scratch cost is to hire heavies, who follow the "Hired Help" rules on page 17.
Suppose the goblins are in a room and there's a trap that just triggered which fairly rapidly flips the room upside down. We're talking about a trap that wasn't foreshadowed here, so best practice is to tell the players that the room is flipping and look to them to see what they do next.
Let's say one of the players says something like "we run and jump on the wall as it rotates and get up as fast as we can and run and jump on the next wall which is I guess the ceiling as it's about to become the floor!"
Is this how you'd adjudicate?
Definitely a roll. Next in marching order rolls, or cedes their position, or gives their die to someone who's already gone.
Action: everyone does the running stuff
Danger: stuff falls out of packs/hands and goes flying and gets broken
Harm: yes; everyone gets exhausted
If Action is failed, then everyone gets injured (is this way too harsh?). If Action is progress, then... one wall? Seems lame, they'll just try again, but maybe that's intended. Danger would be less and maybe no harm and maybe action failure after the second is just exhaustion.
In particular, if the roll looks good, what would you do on failure or progress? Condition, or "now you're tumbling to the (new) ground, what do you do?", or something else... actually I don't care too much what you _would_ do, more what might someone do that's _not_ good practice. Like maybe give-a-condition isn't really kosher.
Follow-up about progress, I think there are two ways to handle this:
Is there a reasonable way you could describe one goblin setting up another? If so, then that's what progress is. They improve position but someone else needs to address the problem (good idea or roll).
Instead, I tend to take all-or-nothing rolls like this as good context to shift positioning down to Bad (unless they are really well-prepared for it). In a bad position, actions are binary (1-4 is failure, 5-6 is success) so you don't have to worry about what 'progress' would look like.
This is a vicious trap, so obviously I like it a lot. Here's what I would
Action: Everyone makes it to the new "floor"
Danger: The gear in everyone's hands is dropped and it damaged.
Make it clear that if they don't succeed the action, they will fall and end up injured. I would definitely not add harm to this roll, since the only way they are getting hurt is if they don't succeed.
Finally got to run this yesterday, and had a couple of questions.
1. To give "advantage" of sorts, it's always just putting the goblins in better position or reducing the intensity of the danger, right? Never a free die?
2. When using equipment for an extra die, is that always a twist? Equipment is not mentioned in the "Action Rolls" section, except for "put their gear at risk" in a twist. But in Camp, we see under Making Supplies "While adventuring, supplies can be used up to add 1d6 to a relevant roll." Sounds like that's in addition to a twist.
(all in all, it went well, and because of some reaaaally bad rolling the 3 goblins came frighteningly close to being tpk'd by 2 owls, so I was wondering if it was really just that bad rolling or if I missed some bonus dice they should have. yeah, they used title and traits.)
1. Generally, yes. If the goblins are more likely to succeed at something because of an identified advantage, then you improve their positioning. If the goblins have insulated themselves from risk, then adjust the danger they face accordingly. There are two exceptions. Supplies (typically made in camp) grant an extra die to a single roll. You could rule that something the goblins are using to perform a task grants them supplies (noting that an extra die in addition to traits and titles is a rather significant advantage). The more likely case, when goblins have some a dominant advantage that putting them in a 'good position' isn't sufficient, is that they don't have to roll at all. The only have to roll for risky actions, if they have eliminated the risk of failure, there's no roll.
2. Yes, supplies grant an extra die in addition to a twist. I'm glad we covered this in more detail for issue 2.
3. TPKs can totally happen. The odds are generally in the goblins favor, but the dice system is such that every fight is a fight you could lose. They have to keep an eye on when to disengage and which risks are worth taking. Sounds like a fun session!
Went to town! Some questions.
1. Seems like leaving adventure to travel back to town without camping first is a terrible idea if you have conditions and enough rations, in that there are no other times to recover before you're forced to Work. By design? Should there be a warning in the noob-text "hey now's the last chance to remove exhausted/panicked before you might be forced to gain another condition!"
2. Do injured/sick's +1d, drop-highest effects apply to the rolls to recover from injured/sick?
3. Can goblins decline to advance while in mid-dungeon at the end of a session because they wish to avoid becoming a veteran and going from 3 available titles this session to just 1 next session with no short-term gain?
@srinvp you're always bringing the good stuff.
1. If you've got rations, camping before going back to town is a good call. It's not obvious that's the case, so a warning in the text would be nice. It would also be a great GM move to say "As soon as you get back to town, you're getting put to work. If you camp first, you can recover before your shift (and without having to pay for it."
2. They do not. Injured / Sick do not impact recovery. It would be such a cruel spiral if they did.
3. I never considered it. I'd say they can't decline. They need to hit that hump of development at some point, and the veteran benefits will be nice down the road.
Ah yes, almost came up but didn't.
1 wolf: X "hp".
2 wolves: X+1 "hp".
1 wolf and 1 gnoll trainer: X+Y(+2?) "hp".
How do you handle mixed-type fights? Do each of them get all of their moves? Do they both get armor for being in a group? Do you construct a hybrid on-the-fly? In particular I expect this to come up a bunch with 1 leader plus their minions, which is how it almost came up for me.
I would use the whole stat block for whichever monster is leading the conflict (if there's no clear leader then use the toughest or most interesting). Add one move for the secondary monster and another move if the goblins are outnumbered.
The numbers are the same as the armor rule, but you're incorporating moves from everyone, which adds a lot of flavor.
Guidance on resolving town things that don't fit in town procedure or adventure? For example: it's established that the boss smith (currently missing) is the only one with certain tribal knowledge but our PC smith would love to get the forges running. Seems like an obvious candidate for an action roll. But it doesn't really fit anywhere and adding it doesn't have the "time passes" downside other rolls do. For this particular one we can probably substitute it for the job roll but a few potential things came up.
I would run this as:
Finding an opportunity
If they're not sure what to do, they may find an opportunity at a town location that offers such leads. Doing so costs 1 scratch, representing something in trade to someone for the tip. (Issue 1, page 17)
If they aren't satisfied with the answer they get from the boss smith, maybe there's an action roll to press him for more information. Or maybe there's an adventure in getting him something he wants in exchange.
You're right about the 'time passes' trade off. I think the appropriate tradeoff is a 1 scratch cost to bring the boss smith to the table.
Combat: do the rounds advance as they do out of combat ? Three players means three action to the round. So if the group fights an armour 2, 3 move opponent, there are 5 „hitpoints“, each with roughly 50% chance (bit less) to get reduced. That means there are 10 turns or 3 rounds approximately to the fight. So about dinner time (round after that one) after the fight.
Yes, rounds pass during combat. There's no distinct combat phase. The goblins might taken actions that directly attack, or they might find other ways to deal with a threat.
In terms of probability. remember that the player can assign dice wherever they want. If they roll 4 dice (action, danger, harm, and twist) then there's an 80% chance that they get at least one 5 or 6. In a good position, success (a 5 or 6) does 2 Harm. So a monster with 2 moves and 3 armor (which is moderately tough) could go down in as few as 3 turns.
And that's assuming this creature keeps fighting to the end. Often creatures lose a move or two and then don't have any that make sense in the context. That means their morale breaks and they retreat.
The goblins might not have things go their way, and they may not be willing to face the harm and twists that putting their best die into the attacking action will require. The players should definitely be prepared to make compromises and tough choices in combat. Fighting isn't easy in Goblinville, but the constantly changing stakes from dangers and twists means that you're rarely in the same situation for more than a few rounds.