Dungeoneer
First Post
I don't know if this is the right forum for this, but GW is 4e, so I figured this was as good a place as any to post my experiences running a GW mini campaign.
Things got kind of crazy in November and it became apparent that several folks in our regular Sunday afternoon Dark Sun game were going to be out of commission for a couple sessions. Looking for material for a one-shot I stopped by my FLGS and picked up their last Gamma World 4E boxed set. The boxed set is definitely an attractive package with a lot of cool stuff in it. Plenty has been written about that elsewhere. But it got me pretty excited about running a GW one-shot. Little did I know that this "one shot" was going to expand into a three-session mini-campaign!
In the interest of saving time I planned to run a GW module, but there was a snag. The word on the street was that the adventure at the end of the book was bunk and there just wasn't much else out there. Plus, using something else meant I wouldn't be able to take full advantage of the cool maps and monster tokens in the box.
Eventually I went back to the module at the back of the book and gave it a closer look. Yes, it was awfully light on plot but I liked it's hook: a series of exploding robots. I also noticed that there was an encounter featuring a creature that ate clothing and that the BBEG was a samurai rabbit with a grenade launcher. The more I looked at it, the more the adventure had promise. Yes it was short and bare-bones, but it contained the seeds of some entertaining scenarios.
The thing that concerned me more about my scan of the 'Iron King' adventure was that the encounters looked tough. The fights seemed to start as decent challenges and then scale upward in difficulty rapidly. Since we were down to three players. I decided to recruit one more. On the day of the game I was able to rope in my buddy Mike. Mike played tabletop games back in the day, but his last experience was with D&D 2E. He would be an interesting test of how accessible the new GW was.
In preparation I harnessed some of the freely available resources on the internet to print out extra copies of the Origins and Powers. The GW box would definitely be served by having something like this instead of expecting an entire table of players and DMs to use the same book. It took us somewhere north of 45 minutes to roll up our characters. They are easier to make than in D&D, but it was our first time and we had to figure out the ins-and-outs of weapons and armor and stat calculation. But when the dust settled we had a party with a Felinoid Yeti, a Pyrokinetic Empath, a Hypercog Gravity Controller and a Hypercog Yeti.
The first session proved to me that GW players can both dish it out and take it. On only the second encounter, the players faced the fearsome (yet tasteful!) Yexil. Thanks to clever use of stealth checks and Gamma Tech my players were able to scout out that battlemap beforehand, come up with a plan and go in swinging. That poor Yexil never had a chance. Pity, since I was actually going to have him be willing to negotiate with the players in exchange for... articles of clothing. Ah, well.
By the time we wrapped up two encounters we were out of time. I don't know why I assumed that the adventure at the back of the manual was a one shot, but for some reason I did (I was going to drop at least a couple encounters). To be fair, the adventure gives you virtually no information about how long it is, how hard it is, how many players it's optimized for or how many levels it will take you through.
This last omission turned out to be pretty important.
All players, including n00b Mike, were really enthused by GW so we planned a second 'wrap up' session for later in the week. I had done a little prep work for the first session as far as plot and characters went, but by the second session I was ad-libbing things pretty much from scratch. The players didn't seem to notice, so apparently the stuff I was coming up with wasn't any sillier than the norm for GW. It involved an ancient shopping mall where a robot proprietor had setup shop and was selling ancient junk. The players bartered with him for a bit, then robbed him of his one piece of actual Gamma Tech.
By this point I had realized something important about Gamma Tech. The GW manual has you handing it out basically every encounter, which seemed like overkill at first. But soon I realized that GT essentially equals Daily Powers. There are lots of GT cards with attacks that do 3[W] damage and the like. Since most GT cards are basically a one-shot deal and ALL Alpha Mutation cards are, and since players regain full health between encounters, this means that smart players are basically going nova on every encounter. This is why GW characters are tougher. So the players pwned the next encounter involving blood-sucking birds and radioactive terrain.
That said, the very next encounter demonstrated how swing-y combat could be. Since by this point I was drastically shortening the adventure just so we could get through it, I had moved up an encounter at the end that involved a room guarded by deadly lasers and robots with powerful rocket launcher attacks. This encounter would prove fatal for one of my players. DUN DUN DUN!
In theory, bypassing a pit full of lasers shouldn't be a problem in GW. You are likely to have players who can fly, walk on the ceiling, teleport, etc. A couple good science checks and the lasers are disabled and the melee fighters can make mincemeat of their ranged attackers. In practice, at that precise moment our party had no special abilities for bypassing the lasers beyond some decent Athletics checks on the part of the Yetis. After a number of near-death experiences the Yetis were eventually able to close ranks with the ranged attackers, but it turns out Yetis suck at science checks. On a failed science check the lasers attack a random person in the room. A one was rolled, a laser attack was made, and Mike the n00b was cut down in his prime.
I'd killed the new guy! D'oh!
Well technically it wasn't me, it was the other Yeti who had inadvisably attempted to disarm the lasers with a negative INT modifier. I turned to Mike and said, "As you slide to the floor, with your last breath you speak your parting words..."
"DOUCHEBAGS," Mike intoned ominously. The table cracked up. Once again the session had gone longer then expected and we had to adjourn.
Session 3 was, really and truly, the final session. At the end of the second session I had done a quick math check and realized that since GW PCs hit level 2 at only 600 XP, the players were in fact due to level up. This is probably why the laser encounter was so deadly. Again, in fairness to me, the adventure in the book makes no mention of this.
N00b Mike rolled a new character, this time (to our excitement) an android rat swarm (we decided that he was a small army of tiny toy soldiers). At least we now had someone capable of making science checks. But we were down a player yet again. Again I was worried that the encounters were going to prove unexpectedly difficult. I needn't have worried.
The party by this time knew exactly what they were doing. They deployed Gamma Tech and Alpha Mutations early and often in a fight, and were good at locking enemies down and neutralizing their nasty effects. They made short work of the preliminary encounter of the session (an encounter I had skipped previously and now tacked on with some tweaked enemies), and then it was on to the final showdown. I had renamed the Iron King and the Iron Shogun (I mean, he's got a katana for goodness' sake). Along with his grenade launcher, the Iron Whatever controls a robot arm which can drop players into a vat of nano fluid with some really nasty effects.
I was so concerned about the difficulty of the final fight that I actually held a couple of the monsters in reserve. Once again, I needn't have worried. This was because on the last Gamma Tech draw, one of my players had picked up a Leaky Fusion Rifle.
The LFR does something like eight dice worth of damage in one attack. The tradeoff is that the player rolls another three dice and takes that level of radiation damage, but it's a risk my players were more than willing to take. Sure enough, in the first round they bloodied the Iron Shogun with this weapon only, freeing up the other players to deal with the other enemies. I also had missed the fact that using the robot arm was only a minor action, so the BBEG wasn't as deadly as he should have been.
Once again, the party was able to deploy their random powers to devastating effect, rapidly neutralizing threats and using focused fire to methodically take down monsters. BOOM!, BBEG dead, fight over, players victorious. There was a very short wrap-up and then we called it a night.
I've highlighted many of the lessons learned about Gamma World above. In a nutshell, I would say that I've discovered that the Risk vs. Reward ratio differs significantly in GW compared to vanilla D&D. Due to the simplified heal system and the temporary nature of things like Alpha Mutation and Gamma Tech cards, players are encouraged to Go Big Or Go Home by unloading all the firepower at their disposal on every encounter. However, some biffed rolls or a party that just happens to show up to an encounter with the wrong combination of powers could turn the tables very quickly. Thus, the swinginess of GW combat.
Everyone agreed that roleplaying the wacky characters they rolled was a ton of fun. Players felt less constrained by the need to be realistic, and could give their imaginations free reign. I felt the same as the DM - this was the most I've ever ad-libbed in a game. It wasn't always pure gold, but the fact that I was making it up as I went along meant that I didn't mind when the players inevitably turned my plans on their head.
Mike the n00b had a bit of learning curve getting familiar with the 4e combat rules. He seemed to enjoy them, though, and with the help of the more experienced players was able to be effective in combat. I did notice that turns took longer in combat (thus the slow pace of our sessions) because players were constantly having to learn the new powers that the cards provided.
I want to take a moment to specifically single out encounter design in the back of the manual module as a standout feature. Although it features basically a string of eight combat encounters, none of them are grind-y or dungeon crawl-y. I noticed that very few fights involved one-on-one melee. Instead enemies were often in hard to reach places or able to make use of interesting terrain. Monster stats were balanced perfectly, so that they did enough damage to scare the players but went down quickly when they started getting hit. Encounters featured a manageable number of monsters that didn't bewilder the poor DM. And the poster maps that come with the box just look good.
So kudos on the encounter design, Wizards.
Overall our GW mini-session was a really fun experience and I hope that that freedom to roleplay and ad-lib that came with it will carry over when we pick up our Dark Sun campaign again in the new year.
Things got kind of crazy in November and it became apparent that several folks in our regular Sunday afternoon Dark Sun game were going to be out of commission for a couple sessions. Looking for material for a one-shot I stopped by my FLGS and picked up their last Gamma World 4E boxed set. The boxed set is definitely an attractive package with a lot of cool stuff in it. Plenty has been written about that elsewhere. But it got me pretty excited about running a GW one-shot. Little did I know that this "one shot" was going to expand into a three-session mini-campaign!
In the interest of saving time I planned to run a GW module, but there was a snag. The word on the street was that the adventure at the end of the book was bunk and there just wasn't much else out there. Plus, using something else meant I wouldn't be able to take full advantage of the cool maps and monster tokens in the box.
Eventually I went back to the module at the back of the book and gave it a closer look. Yes, it was awfully light on plot but I liked it's hook: a series of exploding robots. I also noticed that there was an encounter featuring a creature that ate clothing and that the BBEG was a samurai rabbit with a grenade launcher. The more I looked at it, the more the adventure had promise. Yes it was short and bare-bones, but it contained the seeds of some entertaining scenarios.
The thing that concerned me more about my scan of the 'Iron King' adventure was that the encounters looked tough. The fights seemed to start as decent challenges and then scale upward in difficulty rapidly. Since we were down to three players. I decided to recruit one more. On the day of the game I was able to rope in my buddy Mike. Mike played tabletop games back in the day, but his last experience was with D&D 2E. He would be an interesting test of how accessible the new GW was.
In preparation I harnessed some of the freely available resources on the internet to print out extra copies of the Origins and Powers. The GW box would definitely be served by having something like this instead of expecting an entire table of players and DMs to use the same book. It took us somewhere north of 45 minutes to roll up our characters. They are easier to make than in D&D, but it was our first time and we had to figure out the ins-and-outs of weapons and armor and stat calculation. But when the dust settled we had a party with a Felinoid Yeti, a Pyrokinetic Empath, a Hypercog Gravity Controller and a Hypercog Yeti.
The first session proved to me that GW players can both dish it out and take it. On only the second encounter, the players faced the fearsome (yet tasteful!) Yexil. Thanks to clever use of stealth checks and Gamma Tech my players were able to scout out that battlemap beforehand, come up with a plan and go in swinging. That poor Yexil never had a chance. Pity, since I was actually going to have him be willing to negotiate with the players in exchange for... articles of clothing. Ah, well.
By the time we wrapped up two encounters we were out of time. I don't know why I assumed that the adventure at the back of the manual was a one shot, but for some reason I did (I was going to drop at least a couple encounters). To be fair, the adventure gives you virtually no information about how long it is, how hard it is, how many players it's optimized for or how many levels it will take you through.
This last omission turned out to be pretty important.
All players, including n00b Mike, were really enthused by GW so we planned a second 'wrap up' session for later in the week. I had done a little prep work for the first session as far as plot and characters went, but by the second session I was ad-libbing things pretty much from scratch. The players didn't seem to notice, so apparently the stuff I was coming up with wasn't any sillier than the norm for GW. It involved an ancient shopping mall where a robot proprietor had setup shop and was selling ancient junk. The players bartered with him for a bit, then robbed him of his one piece of actual Gamma Tech.
By this point I had realized something important about Gamma Tech. The GW manual has you handing it out basically every encounter, which seemed like overkill at first. But soon I realized that GT essentially equals Daily Powers. There are lots of GT cards with attacks that do 3[W] damage and the like. Since most GT cards are basically a one-shot deal and ALL Alpha Mutation cards are, and since players regain full health between encounters, this means that smart players are basically going nova on every encounter. This is why GW characters are tougher. So the players pwned the next encounter involving blood-sucking birds and radioactive terrain.
That said, the very next encounter demonstrated how swing-y combat could be. Since by this point I was drastically shortening the adventure just so we could get through it, I had moved up an encounter at the end that involved a room guarded by deadly lasers and robots with powerful rocket launcher attacks. This encounter would prove fatal for one of my players. DUN DUN DUN!
In theory, bypassing a pit full of lasers shouldn't be a problem in GW. You are likely to have players who can fly, walk on the ceiling, teleport, etc. A couple good science checks and the lasers are disabled and the melee fighters can make mincemeat of their ranged attackers. In practice, at that precise moment our party had no special abilities for bypassing the lasers beyond some decent Athletics checks on the part of the Yetis. After a number of near-death experiences the Yetis were eventually able to close ranks with the ranged attackers, but it turns out Yetis suck at science checks. On a failed science check the lasers attack a random person in the room. A one was rolled, a laser attack was made, and Mike the n00b was cut down in his prime.
I'd killed the new guy! D'oh!
Well technically it wasn't me, it was the other Yeti who had inadvisably attempted to disarm the lasers with a negative INT modifier. I turned to Mike and said, "As you slide to the floor, with your last breath you speak your parting words..."
"DOUCHEBAGS," Mike intoned ominously. The table cracked up. Once again the session had gone longer then expected and we had to adjourn.
Session 3 was, really and truly, the final session. At the end of the second session I had done a quick math check and realized that since GW PCs hit level 2 at only 600 XP, the players were in fact due to level up. This is probably why the laser encounter was so deadly. Again, in fairness to me, the adventure in the book makes no mention of this.
N00b Mike rolled a new character, this time (to our excitement) an android rat swarm (we decided that he was a small army of tiny toy soldiers). At least we now had someone capable of making science checks. But we were down a player yet again. Again I was worried that the encounters were going to prove unexpectedly difficult. I needn't have worried.
The party by this time knew exactly what they were doing. They deployed Gamma Tech and Alpha Mutations early and often in a fight, and were good at locking enemies down and neutralizing their nasty effects. They made short work of the preliminary encounter of the session (an encounter I had skipped previously and now tacked on with some tweaked enemies), and then it was on to the final showdown. I had renamed the Iron King and the Iron Shogun (I mean, he's got a katana for goodness' sake). Along with his grenade launcher, the Iron Whatever controls a robot arm which can drop players into a vat of nano fluid with some really nasty effects.
I was so concerned about the difficulty of the final fight that I actually held a couple of the monsters in reserve. Once again, I needn't have worried. This was because on the last Gamma Tech draw, one of my players had picked up a Leaky Fusion Rifle.
The LFR does something like eight dice worth of damage in one attack. The tradeoff is that the player rolls another three dice and takes that level of radiation damage, but it's a risk my players were more than willing to take. Sure enough, in the first round they bloodied the Iron Shogun with this weapon only, freeing up the other players to deal with the other enemies. I also had missed the fact that using the robot arm was only a minor action, so the BBEG wasn't as deadly as he should have been.
Once again, the party was able to deploy their random powers to devastating effect, rapidly neutralizing threats and using focused fire to methodically take down monsters. BOOM!, BBEG dead, fight over, players victorious. There was a very short wrap-up and then we called it a night.
I've highlighted many of the lessons learned about Gamma World above. In a nutshell, I would say that I've discovered that the Risk vs. Reward ratio differs significantly in GW compared to vanilla D&D. Due to the simplified heal system and the temporary nature of things like Alpha Mutation and Gamma Tech cards, players are encouraged to Go Big Or Go Home by unloading all the firepower at their disposal on every encounter. However, some biffed rolls or a party that just happens to show up to an encounter with the wrong combination of powers could turn the tables very quickly. Thus, the swinginess of GW combat.
Everyone agreed that roleplaying the wacky characters they rolled was a ton of fun. Players felt less constrained by the need to be realistic, and could give their imaginations free reign. I felt the same as the DM - this was the most I've ever ad-libbed in a game. It wasn't always pure gold, but the fact that I was making it up as I went along meant that I didn't mind when the players inevitably turned my plans on their head.
Mike the n00b had a bit of learning curve getting familiar with the 4e combat rules. He seemed to enjoy them, though, and with the help of the more experienced players was able to be effective in combat. I did notice that turns took longer in combat (thus the slow pace of our sessions) because players were constantly having to learn the new powers that the cards provided.
I want to take a moment to specifically single out encounter design in the back of the manual module as a standout feature. Although it features basically a string of eight combat encounters, none of them are grind-y or dungeon crawl-y. I noticed that very few fights involved one-on-one melee. Instead enemies were often in hard to reach places or able to make use of interesting terrain. Monster stats were balanced perfectly, so that they did enough damage to scare the players but went down quickly when they started getting hit. Encounters featured a manageable number of monsters that didn't bewilder the poor DM. And the poster maps that come with the box just look good.
So kudos on the encounter design, Wizards.
Overall our GW mini-session was a really fun experience and I hope that that freedom to roleplay and ad-lib that came with it will carry over when we pick up our Dark Sun campaign again in the new year.
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