So happy to join this community and what seems as a system that will be taking a lot of my forthcoming time!!!!
So happy to join this community and what seems as a system that will be taking a lot of my forthcoming time!!!!
Two newbie questions that my search here did not find any answers:
a) How do people usually deal with dungeoncrawls? As Journeys or a Scene Challenge? Ignore/substitute it completely for/with other Moves?
Say for example I take a vow to find the missing daughter in a mine. One milestone is probably searching in the corridors/tunnels and maybe a small cave system discovered. How would you handle this?
We went for Undertake a Journey without clear steps in order to allow the steps to surprise us on what we may find down there.
b) I would not talk balance in such type of a game but the following scenario popped up:
Troublesome Vow & Quest; Pick up a companion as positive complication during the quest; very bad miss and matched challenge dice in the aforementioned dungeoncrawl + naughty ORacle dice roll leads to betrayal and we randomly rolled the henchman turned traitor level ending with an Epic adversary. It felt a bit unsatisfactory or underwhelming that in the end we will only get 1 XP for a troublesome Quest ignoring the fact we were totally challnged and almost died by an Epic adversary.
I am still too new to this game so I am still mulling it in my head but I would like to hear other's thoughts on both :)
PS. In case I did not mention it clearly I loved this system from the first page! Excellent work!
Two newbie questions that my search here did not find any answers:
a) How do people usually deal with dungeoncrawls? As Journeys or a Scene Challenge? Ignore/substitute it completely for/with other Moves?
Say for example I take a vow to find the missing daughter in a mine. One milestone is probably searching in the corridors/tunnels and maybe a small cave system discovered. How would you handle this?
We went for Undertake a Journey without clear steps in order to allow the steps to surprise us on what we may find down there.
b) I would not talk balance in such type of a game but the following scenario popped up:
Troublesome Vow & Quest; Pick up a companion as positive complication during the quest; very bad miss and matched challenge dice in the aforementioned dungeoncrawl + naughty ORacle dice roll leads to betrayal and we randomly rolled the henchman turned traitor level ending with an Epic adversary. It felt a bit unsatisfactory or underwhelming that in the end we will only get 1 XP for a troublesome Quest ignoring the fact we were totally challnged and almost died by an Epic adversary.
I am still too new to this game so I am still mulling it in my head but I would like to hear other's thoughts on both :)
PS. In case I did not mention it clearly I loved this system from the first page! Excellent work!
Hey, Stefanos Patelis! Welcome to the community. So glad to have you.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to hear what others have to say regarding dungeon crawls. There may be some in the community who have dealt with this in their adventures.
For your vow, can you offer a bit more detail in what happened, particularly the Epic foe? Did you roll on the challenge rank oracle to randomly come up with epic, or did it come out of the narrative? Using the foes in the book as an example, epic is really a rare encounter. I believe the only example I have is a leviathan.
I'd suggest you use the Ask the Oracle "choose two" option more often when randomly determining the rank of a foe, especially for a low-ranked quest: "Is this foe dangerous or formidable?", for example.
Anyway, tell me more :)
Thanks for having me Shawn.
ReplyDeleteThis was a game of two ran gm-less. We were undertaking a common starting vow we obviously set at troublesome since this was the first time playing.
Lots of things happened along the way (the other player adored the oracle concept so we probably rolled much more than I would have liked)
When we arrived at the destination we rolled a strong hit (end the journey) for a favourable element in the scene. To cut a long story short this element eventually become a follower (created a new asset on the spot similar to the others and he was rolled with a guard npc role)
Now jump a few hours later, deep in the mines where we are already lost and moderetly low on supplies. And we get a real bad miss and matched pairs on either a supply or journey move I don't recall. We didn't want another combat or natural disaster complication so we ask the Oracle for pay the price and get betrayal! It was obvious that our guard was faking his allegience (it fit with other threads of our overall story as well). The thing is we also rolled for his power level and got epic due to a really high d100 roll. In retrospect rolling two dice and keeping the one closer to expectation is a good suggestion. In a feat of luck and bravery we defeated him with heavy loses though and still managed to complete our quest
But overall I think my question stands. If one undertakes a troublesome quest and yet due to rolls, encounters higher difficulty tier challenges would it make sense to grand bonus xp? Or is it better to curb difficulty of said random encounters since you are afterall on an easy quest.
What do you think?
Generally, I would suggest keeping the XP to the reward defined by the vow, but obviously you have flexibility to adjust as you like. For the most part, you'll adjust the challenges to the narrative and to the rank of your quest, but it's also cool to have things go off the rails and find yourself caught up in a more complex and dangerous quest than you anticipated. In that case, it might be appropriate to increase the rank of your quest, but for the most part I just roll with it. Sometimes, things go to hell.
ReplyDeleteFor your specific example, I would have suggested ignoring the epic result, mostly because an epic foe is something of mythic power. If I rolled an epic rank on that table I might have said to myself: "Well, epic doesn't really fit here, but obviously the oracle is telling us this guy is more skilled than we anticipated. Let's make him formidable".
All that said, sounds like a cool adventure, and I love how the twist turned out.
Well said and totally in line with what I thought. Now how to convey this to the wife and her addiction to the Oracle dice rolls is my next challenge :D
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback
Happy to help! And I'm thrilled that you and your wife are playing. I think Ironsworn's sweet spot is 2-player GM-less, and I am always really happy when it helps couples game together.
ReplyDelete