GURPS Jade Regent: Crikey! Yetis!
Played in +Nathan Joy‘s Jade Regent game using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. We picked up in the middle of the battle that was raging last time. All in all, this will be a short report. Cadmus did a lot of defending. He attacked ineffectually a few times against pretty awesomely skilled defenders. He did break ranks to Heroic Charge a super-duper Skill-30 guy from behind, beheading him. But then I got nailed like three times, and down to HP 0. Fell down, crippled left hand and right leg. Didn’t KO. Fast-Draw a major healing potion (house-ruled to 2d+6) and I was back up to 15 of 18 HP (boosted thanks to Righteous Fury).
Still, my next move should be pretty cool if I get to pull it off.
The other guys are pretty much more awesome than me, even though I’m technically a 470-point character by now. The spellslingers are seriously earning their keep, and Mystic Knight continues to be an amazing template, with envy-inducing imbuement skills (the explosive arrow is a real crowd pleaser).
We are absolutely inundated with bad guys. Nate’s exulting about finally making us use some of our consumables.
We did the game over Skype and MapTool, and Skype refuses to play nicely with my admittedly sparse setup with regard to webcam, headphones, and monitor-as-speakers output. At least sometimes. Other times, it works fine. No idea.
Never used maptools but I looks nice.
470pts….geeeesh that's crazy. Shouldn't you be leading armies and conquering kingdoms at that point? 🙂
How long are your sessions btw?
And in such an open room, how do you prevent them from completely overwhelming you? Keep retreating and backing up all the time? I mean, seems they all could just sprint up behind you and completely lock you down there. I run big fights like this in D&DN sometimes but that's easier. In GURPS, that sheer number seems crazy and so easy to just completely destroy you with overwhelming grapples/pin down 🙂
Sessions are four hours.
They so far manage to prevent being overwhelmed by the aforementioned exploding imbued arrows taking out mooks rather quickly, and the mage managing to bury a bunch of others alive. So crowd control GURPS-style, basically.
The yetis aren't that fast and started on one side of the room, though they are currently starting to surround the players and the players have had their "destiny point" probability altering currency severely depleted.
Mostly I haven't been using grapples because I forgot to give these enemies much grappling skills.
The sheer numbers are partly to allow everyone a chance to shine. The Mystic Knight can do some pretty impressive AoE damage, and while the mooks aren't a threat individually, enough of them surrounding PCs and crit fishing would be very dangerous, but they're being held off by both the Wizard and Mystic Knight. Meanwhile the scout is doing a credible job of counter-battery fire on the mook archers, and now that they're eliminated will probably start making life miserable for the more heavily armored main baddies, and the Warrior Saint and Knight have been locking down those baddies to let everyone else mop up the more numerous but weaker opposition. It's been chaotic, but also I feel like everyone got a chance to shine, despite Doug getting whacked repeatedly with an axe.
The end of this fight will be interesting. A lot of the mooks are dead, but the players have taken some injuries (a big deal in GURPS) and don't have a lot of Destiny Points left, which are kind of "save me from probability" currency, and I still have a few more tricks up my sleeve on the bad guy side.
We'll see if I finally manage to kill some PCs without resorting to cheating ninjas.
Hehe, thanks for the reply on this Nathan,
Do you have some kind of average time per player turn, just to give an idea and do you limit this time, as in, say: ok, you got 10 seconds per turn, past 20 seconds, I'll count down, etc or do you leave them as much time as they want basically, including party discussion, etc?
That's really the kind of stuff (and tactical situations) that makes me want to get into GURPS more. Good luck to the PCs 🙂
There's no time limit on player actions, but mostly people coordinate group actions ahead of their turn in OOC chat in text Skype. We were having trouble with turns taking forever, so we just recently added Skype voice to coordinate player actions. This was the first session using it, and despite some hitches in the beginning I felt like it massively sped up play.
Right, figured that could be an issue.
I'm a big fan of 100% chat TTRPG as I feel it brings out a better IC experience and structure and less disturbances due to technical issues, background noises, "thinking as you talk" and the like.
For D&D Next, I usually have a 10 seconds rule per turn in combat, only short sentences when it's your turn as well as as little OOC as possible, and try to enforce it, but D&D Next is fairly simple so that's easy and goes extremely well.
For a GURPS campaign I'm preparing, combat is the biggest thing I fear, mostly because I want to keep this same fast paced and IC structure but know that GURPS is much more complicated, especially because of modifiers and actions available.
Anyway, cheers.
I find pure text based tends to remove some of the "group of friends bullshitting around a table" feel. We remove a lot of the background noise by having everyone using Push To Talk on their mics.
I almost never have a problem with players not knowing what they want to do on their turns. It's usually entirely "is that guy on fire? What's the darkness penalty? I want to do x, game mechanically is that this roll, this roll, and then this roll?"
We mostly try to take care of that ahead of time in OOC chat before their turn, but sometimes another PCs turn changes some variables and some questions arise.
I find if I don't take forever choosing the exact optimal strategy for the bad guys, players also don't take forever worrying about what the perfect action is for every single turn. This tends to help speed things up, IME.