Poor thief almost got goo’d
Tonight’s session had a lot of zany moments (including one where the poor thief got mind-controlled and set on fire), but this one happened at the end is a good example of what I’ve been doing with my homebrew system.
After the party
made camp, they went into the dungeon. I’m running
The Incandescent Grottoes, so it’s a good test of my system’s compatibility. This session, they had pushed deeper into the ooze cult’s area. At the very end is a strange place with several tanks of gel. There’s a yellow one with a corpse in it, an orange one, and a red one with a skull.
They’d figured out the red one was dangerous, but they weren’t sure about the orange one. The barbarian decided she would throw the corpse into the orange one to see if it would bring the corpse back to life. It didn’t. The tank’s frame had been damaged, which I noted as consequence since the intent was to put the body in the tank. Naturally, she rolled only a regular success. That means she gets her intent, but there’s a consequence.
I described how the tank was going to come apart and go everywhere. If she lept out of the way, she could get away safely, but the thief behind her was going to take the goo (and be disfigured). Alternately, if she took the goo, it’d block the thief. Of course, I also suggested that there are other possibilities if she had a good idea. Which she did.
She has the High Jump speciality from her ancestry, which lets her leap up several meters. She wanted to grab the thief before the gel hit and jump onto the tank with the yellow gel. Okay, that’s going to be a standard target (10). It’s Exert (DEX) this time because she needs to be quick. Her DEX is not great (I think it’s just +0), so we looked for help.
The thief said when all this was happening, he wanted to try to climb on the barbarian. That would let him roll Exert (STR) to help. If he rolled well, he would give her a (success) +1 or (complete success) +2. The barbarian’s bard retainer also started singing a helpful song. She rolled poorly on her roll, and the thief did too, but his Expertise feature lets him reroll one of this dice (skill checks are 2d6). He did that and got enough to succeed, which gave him a +1. Otherwise, help can add consequences, which no one wanted.
The barbarian’s player liked the help, but he really wanted to make sure his character would completely succeed. I have a mechanic where you can sacrifice something, so he said his barbarian would sacrifice her spear. That would give her 3d6+3 versus a target of 10. The player rolled 17, so she more than made it.
The way this played out in the fiction is as the tank came crashing down, she used her spear to help boost her and the thief up as the thief grabbed on and she jumped up onto the gel.
If she had rolled poorly, they would have overshot into the gel. It wasn’t dangerous, but you have two people trapped in a tank of stuff they can’t breath. That definitely would not have been a good situation.