Weapons of the Gods, two variations on a theme

[inkylj]

This weekend I did two plays of the same module, the Auspicious Beginnings starter module for Weapons of the Gods. It went reasonably well, I think, and it's interesting to compare the two playthroughs, but it'd take a lot of play before I feel like I have this system anywhere like mastered.

Comments

[inkylj]

Another thing that sort of got dropped from the session was any of the interpersonal relationships; I guess this is kind of how it goes when it's just a one-shot session, but the combats and system-learning really chewed up all the time, leaving basically nothing for all the Clash Of Passions that is a big part of wuxia.

[storme]

It was an interesting session to play through. Thanks for running it, and as usual, I enjoy your GM-ing style a lot. My thoughts

[maga_dogg]

About the general failure to move around:

People didn't move around much, I think, because we didn't have a very strong conception of our relative positions, or about the physical layout of the hall (apart from the watery floor and the skylights). I, fairly arbitrarily, imagined that the no-goodniks appeared on the right-hand side of the hall:

[huskyscotsman]

My mental image was roughly the same, only flipped left-to-right.

I think I had Liang and the arguing enemy further back, and Patience further towards the middle, since (in our session) Patience spent some time defending Liang.

I'm not sure how much this really matters. It would be fun to play around with miniatures, but that seems a bit too concrete for a wacky game like this, and managing all the little henchmen as individual miniatures would be a pain.

[maga_dogg]

Yeah, I wasn't meaning to say that this'd work better with miniatures - the acrobatic hopping-about should be too three-dimensional and fluid for that, anyway. I was just sort of thinking that a bit more concrete information about, and reference to, the setting might have helped. It's pretty characteristic of the sort of genre that WotG is aiming for to have pretty well-defined sets that the fighters can make dramatic use of. Like, in our big fight scene the set gimmick was the water floor, so maybe we should have been made to keep moving about, or else sink and get penalties.

Obviously this is yet another ball for the GM to juggle, but it'd be something to focus on once the players were reasonably confident in the core mechanics, I guess.

[maga_dogg]

Other things: it does look as if the narration went better in the second session, when you started out prodding everybody quite a lot about narrating their rolls. In this game people's personalities are obviously going to be defined a lot by their

I'd probably have liked a few more physical descriptions of NPCs, I think; the guards just seemed faceless, and I could have got a better idea of them (and hence narrated fighting them better) if they'd been, I dunno, all dressed in black and wielding broadswords. Similarly with our Wulin opponents; the genre makes them opponents as much by merit of their personality as their fightiness, so a few more visual hooks would have helped somewhat, I think. I dunno if it'd have slowed things down or not, though.

The core mechanics were brought in and explained well, and the River seemed pretty straightforward - I got a bit confused about the distinction between the bonuses joss and chi gave, because there are, as you said, a lot of bonuses to keep track of and they're all slightly different. I'm

oops

[maga_dogg]

What I meant to say in the first paragraph: it does look as if the narration went better in the second session, when you started out prodding everybody quite a lot about narrating their rolls. In this game people's personalities are obviously going to be defined a lot by their fighting style, and if the GM's doing that for you then you lose a lot of the basic character-roleplaying.

[huskyscotsman]

Re the minions, inky notes that he really should have given them more attack rolls, which might have made them more dangerous.

Also, I haven't checked how well Feng managed his chi on Sunday, but in the Saturday session I'd have been running low if the fight lasted more than 3-4 rounds. Sooner if I wanted to use secondary attacks. Those minions would definitely cause some trouble when my attacks started petering out and I couldn't maintain my chi-powered armour... Overall, I really like the chi mechanic, but we didn't have any fights that lasted long enough to make us play conservatively.

The grouping of minions into 5s was a little annoying, because you either overkill but don't get to take down more than 5, or underkill and leave some irritating stragglers. It did make for good comedy, though -- inky's description of a 4-minion takedown as a "spare" was spot-on, and the reactions of the lucky leftover guy were usually funny.

[maga_dogg]

Right - I played Patience's combat quite conservatively, waiting (as per the strategy guide) to fill my river before unleashing the high-grade whoopass; and by the time I'd done that, the battle was pretty much won. I'd definitely be interested in seeing some longer, more evenly-fought battles.

I dunno about the grouping. There's really a limit to how many people have the physical space to pile on you at once without getting in each other's way, and this seems as good a way to represent that as any. It'd be nice if you could use overkill if there are other enemies nearby, though - hurling minions into slightly-more-distant minions, or knocking them into nearby Wulin to give them penalties. Still, this is all gloss, and I think inky was basically right to play things without too much embellishment. I just want more, dammit.

[lpsmith]

[As a note, the second link is now working