Question for the masses about how I should have run a combat, along with a rule question.
The players were heading out from a stardock to intercept a set of three ships, one of which was docked airlock to airlock with a mercenary that had been transporting cargo the players were on a mission to retrieve (the Hutt cargo from last week).
My players went tactical; two have their own fighters that they flew off to try and divert the non-docked ships, two others manned the main ship and maneuvered in place alongside the docked ship, and the last jumped in his repair mech (sealed) and went out the airlock to attach to the docked ship and try to interface to shut down their systems externally.
Nothing really went right, their rolls for every Face Adversity were horrible. Both shuttles ended up disabled (missile hits that I ruled as Critical damages that damaged/shutdown systems), the repair mech wound up attached to the docked ship but rolled poorly and the ship powered up, dropped the airlock and took off with him attached to it. He kept trying to interface with it, so I’d have him Face Adversity to hang on (which he’d pass) then Face Adversity to interface (which he’d fail), so I had systems go haywire then eventually brought in reinforcements.
Overall, I’d say we spent 45 minutes to an hour resolving the combat, and I eventually brought it down to three rolls to figure out what would happen to the remaining forces (pilots escape podded, docked ship had all systems disabled, shuttles will need to be picked up but the cargo was retrieved).
Anyways, we spent way too long on the combat…as things went downhill, I could have just killed off characters but I wound up giving them the opportunity to roll Patch Ups which they succeeded on to get back into the fight. Any suggestions on running this fight where everyone wants to do something different, their outcomes have direct impacts on what others are doing, and things go downhill but not horribly so? How many rolls would you have made this entire combat given the setup, or what flow would you have given it? Much like Dungeon World, I felt like I was trapping myself with 7-9 Face Adversity rolls, and I eventually ran out of hard choices/threats.
Rule Question: Shields up doesn’t indicate adding armor to the roll…if the ship/vehicle has armor, is it supposed to be added or should vehicles like shuttles be treated like PCs with Brace for Impact rolls?
Remember that a Miss is not necessarily a failure: a Miss just means you make a move. You can very much so give players what they want, and just make things miserable. I think a fight would go faster if the PCs are making progress while the GM just cranks up the heat. I wasn’t at your table, so I don’t know how much you let them succeed on misses and how much you used your misses to explain why they failed. That’s my first thing I’d look out for.
Beyond that, for a big fight where everyone’s actions are interconnected, I would recommend going around the table and finding out what everyone is doing before resolving anything. Just get everyone to declare what they’re up to, so you can figure out how best to resolve things — whose actions influence whose, who is near one another, who is being jeopardized by other’s actions, etc.
Alfred Rudzki has the main concept expressed well. I would add that lots of coordinated actions taken by players might also be interpreted as getting involved in another’s primary action.
Also, if a combat goes horridly bad, time to start planning the next session as a prison camp escape…
Another tip would be once an adversity is faced successfully once, just move on without testing it again every so often. That threat has been put to bed so future mentions of should either involve a new wrinkle, or be described only as something the character is still dealing with in their successful way. Once you have established that you are holding on, then the GM can move on to other actions and just remind you how you are still holding on for dear life. Now, that might make new actions harder to justify in the fiction…
Yeah the other two got it. The thing that stood out to me was “roll Face Adversity to interface”. Why? What’s the inherent danger in plugging a jack into the outside of a space ship? What can go wrong?
As a general rule of thumb: if you can’t think of interesting things to happen on failure, let an action succeed. “You fail interfacing…” then what?
All good comments, thank you!
Alfred Rudzki We did do what you suggested; I would go around to each person and ask what they were doing now. Distracting the fighters + maneuvering the ship in close + jetting out of the airlock. I ran into problems when they rolled horribly and I tried to maneuver the fiction into a place where they failed.
I think that might be where I’m suffering a major impasse; I typically treat 6- as a failure, when I should probably treat it as a success with a horrible outcome or make a hard move. That frees up 7-9 as a success with a choice/consequence that the player has more control over. Does that sound right?
Judd Goswick I thought about using more Get Involved moves, but they were fairly adamant about performing their isolated functions. Given that two of them were distracting two of the enemies, I didn’t feel like a Face Adversity + Get Involved was significantly different than two Face Adversities, but it could have kept us at a single situation to deal with rather than two disparate situations, which would have been easier.
We didn’t test adversities multiple times unless the situation changed, though that brings me to a different question. Enemies are supposed to take damage as the fiction dictates rather than tracking hull vs engineering, etc. I do that, but I feel like my enemies are playing by a different set of rules from my players and it’s awkward. Each enemy fighter should have had, at a minimum, Hull, Engines, Missiles, Energy Cannon and Shield threats. I don’t feel like those can be bypassed by a single roll; can they? If my players were trying to keep them distracted, I felt like they needed to Face Adversity from at least the Missiles/Cannons and, when they shot back, the Engines/Shields before ripping apart the Hull (which they never got to, they always failed something before that, which leads back to Alfred Rudzki’s solution of Miss = Success with horrible outcome, maybe?). What would be a simpler way to resolve that dogfight, in your opinion?
Aaron Griffin he was clinging to the hull of a docked (and undocking, eventually) enemy while two other enemies swooped around shooting at the other PCs. In space, potentially with debris (the ship he was clinging to eventually had its shields taken offline when one of my players tried to shoot it, knowing the player was still clinging to it). Suffice to say, I thought there were threats that would prevent his interface, so I had him Face Adversity. Now, looking at the other comments in the thread, maybe he should have successfully interfaced with a horrible result…given that he was interfacing with the intention of disabling their engines, perhaps the crew could have come out for hand-to-hand combat on the hull, or maybe the reinforcements were sufficient bad outcomes.
Had you been running it, would you have just let him interface and disable the ship remotely (mind you, this is an alien ship that he doesnt’ have the schematics for, so there’s a bit of an Independence Day virus feel to the whole scenario) or would you have seen something in the situation that required a roll? I’m very interested in alternate outcomes and adjudications here because I’m not at all convinced what I did was the best way of running the game.
Again, thanks for the comments guys!
I would have simply used a single Face Adversity roll to stay attached to the ship, unless other hard moves presented themselves.
And yeah, I’d absolutely let him interface and disable the ship, because that sounds awesome. Be A Fan of the Characters.
Aaron Griffin so noted, and probably what I should have done for the reason you stated. I think I took the Darth Vader scenario a few weeks ago too much to heart and I’ve been overcomplicating my threats. I’ll look to change that in future sessions.
The thing that always pops into my mind is this: losing HP and botching rolls jsnt what makes conflict tense. The tension and excitement comes from choices. You don’t have to hit them consistently hard, you just have to make them choose between things they want. “If you shut the engines down wrong, the ship may start spinning uncontrollably, with you attached! You still want to do it?”
Aaron Griffin that’s an excellent way to frame it. Giving them some of the potential outcomes before they roll alleviates my need to come up with things after they roll. It’s predetermined, we’re just rolling to see which way things will go.
That’s exactly what “Conflict Resolution” is in RPGs! It is declaring the stakes up front and saying “is it worth this risk?”.
Stake negotiation is super neat, where you say “if you do it that way, you risk X” and they modify their plan until they have a risk they’re okay with.
Zach Swain Yeah, a 6- doesn’t always have to be a super complicated success, but it’s rarely a bad choice. Especially when a PC is doing something they ought to be good at (someone’s concept is a Hacker, and they’re not up against a better hacker; someone’s concept is Gunslinger, and they’re not horribly overwhelmed or outnumbered; etc) you’re probably in the clear on a Miss to go “Okay, so that thing you’re doing, of course that happens, right? You wrap that up, and then WHAM, [horrible thing X really ruins your day].”
On the fighters front, you’re right that enemy fighters are built up of several Threats. Just to be clear, remember that players don’t have to disable every threat. In general, the only Threats you have to defeat to shut down a ship are its shields and its hull (and most enemies who don’t want to die will change tactics when their shields get taken out). Cannons and Missiles are threats, yes, and I think you were probably in the right to make the PCs face adversity to distract the fighters without getting blasted to kingdom come.
As you observed, yes, firing back does require two hits (generally) to take them out… but again, remember, unless we’re talking about dedicated, high-morale, orderly warriors, they probably won’t press the attack endlessly when they’re an inch from death, right? Generally, people don’t charge into dangerous situations with no protection. So, in the future, you can adjust the pressure the players are under by letting your antagonists mix up tactics when they’re feeling the heat (again, I don’t know how well your players succeeded at hitting these guys at all).
Now, I did see you say “I felt like they needed to Face Adversity from at least the Missiles/Cannons and, when they shot back, the Engines/Shields before ripping apart the Hull” and I disagree here. I wouldn’t have used FA for attacking the enemy shields: that’s just Open Fire, straight up, I feel. You’re shooting at them, they’re shooting back, blam blam, if they roll well then the Shields threat is taken out. That’s not really a FA situation (unless, of course, the fiction suggested that it was — Point Defense turrets aren’t meant for big vessels, so maybe you do need to FA for that before attacking; Lasers aren’t meant for small vessels, so maybe you need to FA for that before attacking; etc) if it’s a relatively even-handed fight, so you can handle it with the Open Fire roll.
(As an aside on the topic of using Open Fire to eliminate Shield and Hull threats, I think I would use Face Adversity to eliminate Missile and and other weapon threats? I’m still rolling this over in my head, but my thinking is that there is a definite — and risky — difference between taking any opportunity to blast the enemy, and trying to carefully line up an attack on their weapon systems instead.)
These folks have already answered quite awesomely, so just thought I’d chime in regarding the interfacing with the ship. Face Adversity with Physique to hold on is great (though I would waive that if the character had the Weightless or Heavy Lifting skill (both apply in this case, in my opinion)). After that I would simply make it an Access roll.
Access is made for situations like this, where a system is locked out to a character. The skill is a measure of how well and how stealthily you can enter a system. On a 7-9 “they’re aware of your intrusion”, which will create a number of new opportunities for you as the GM. They could send a couple of mercs in space suits to “de-barnacle” their hull, or the character could see the a panel pop out from the hull and be staring down the barrel of a point-defense gun (“You’ve got system access, briefly. Do you disable the guns pointing at you? Or do you shut down their engines and try to dodge the retributive fire. You can only do one”)
Also: Shields.
– Vehicle shields add armor value. (“Shielded” upgrade). These shields are small, close to the hull and not very powerful, but useful because they don’t add weight and could feasibly be calibrated to protect against some environmental issues as well (used with Expertise as part of a Face Adversity against radiation storm or whatever). When a Vehicle takes a hit, the pilot rolls Brace For Impact. (Vehicles include shuttles, bombers, starfighters, etc)
– Starships are massive and more or less made of armor, they just reduce or flat out ignore most damage. Starship shields are much more significant, and thus are a separate roll before the attack even gets close to the hull.
Sean Gomes excellent, thanks for the clarification on shields.
I think I was thinking Access, but treating the rolls like Face Adversity. I’ll admit, I need a cheat sheet of all the moves sitting in front of me to remind me what’s available and what the consequences are…does anyone have a 1-pager of that sitting around somewhere?
Yes, actually! There is a GM cheat sheet floating around! Honestly, I forget where I grabbed it from because some of the resources are a little scattered (uncharted-worlds.com has links to preview content but no player or GM resources, but the dropbox has entire chapters up for view but all of its at-the-table resources are JPGs and not PDFs, etc).
Regardless, I grabbed the important stuff and saved it to my GoogleDrive. Links incoming:
Ship Sheet https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-6E4gdYqvyMc1FhS2NIbnVlSEU/view?usp=sharing
Campaign Sheet/GM Cheat Sheet https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-6E4gdYqvyMN2FvV3hyOEhQNk0/view?usp=sharing
Fillable character sheets https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-6E4gdYqvyMakFjSnhTeW1LS28/view?usp=sharing
Campaign sheet/GM Cheat Sheet is the file you want; the GM’s sheet has all of the moves spelled out.
Why yes! There’s a Campaign Sheet at http://www.uncharted-worlds.com/downloads 😀
Edit: Apparently we forgot to have a link to the Downloads section from the main page. I’ll try to get that fixed asap.
Whoa, Sean Gomes! I had no idea that page even existed!
Sean Gomes any chance you could put all the character creation bits into a PDF (like the playbooks normally used in PbtA games) so that I can pass it on to my players?
bingo! thanks much!
Yeah, people have covered it. It struck me as strange that people get in their fighters but take individual action like buckaroos. It would be smarter to fly in formation and concentrate on knocking the enemies back objective by objective (with lots of Get Involved moves?). You should have mentioned it to them.
Splitting actions is a valid tactic! The system is designed to have resolution happen quickly enough that even a split-party can still pull off some awesome coordinated take-downs.
Formation-tactics are the safest by far, because each additional character acts as a back-up to Get Involved should things go south. Multi-pronged tactics are the most efficient, able to simultaneously accomplish multiple time-sensitive tasks at once, BUT it’s also the most risky tactic, since you don’t have a safety net.
Of course, in this particular instance the dice were not with them.