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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8955689" data-attributes="member: 70468">“<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/describe-your-last-rpg-session-in-5-words.679952/post-8955688" target="_blank">revisions seemed to work well</a>”With the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/commentary-thread-in-that-“describe-your-game-in-five-words”-thread.682741/post-8952844" target="_blank">rebuild</a> out of the way, we were able to go straight into the session this week. The plan was as articulated previously: poison the Boss Trog corpse with the potion of poison and lure/trick the dream dragon into eating the corpse.We experimented with a variant take on clocks that used a d6 to advance progress instead of fixed ticks. I would judge it a failure. It made Complete Success feel bad when rolled a 1 on the d6. It made determining the level of the progress trackers be too unreliable. The average on a d6 is 3.5, but players can roll hot or cold. Even if you did really well, you could still end up worse than average. I ended up fiddling with the tracker levels when we used them, then reverted back to regular ticks at the end.The first part of the session involved Dingo and Tama working together on the corpse. This was a short-term crafting challenge. The current idea for crafting is items have a durability clock, a progress clock, and a quality clock. If you complete the progress clock before the durability clock runs out, the item is completed. If you also complete the quality clock then complete the progress clock, the item is High Quality. In this case, a HQ corpse would result in the dragon making its Defense Check against the poison at −2.The crafting challenge ended up going long because Dingo would get a Complete Success and then roll a 1 on his progress roll. I think that happened twice, and he got a 2 on another roll. Under the previous rules, he would have gotten six ticks for his trouble. He also would have gotten more ticks for using another corpse to help them out. Instead he increased the die to a d8 then rolled a 1. Bleh.Anyway, they were able to work together on the crafting. It took them a few rounds of crappy rolls to realize that group rolls were the way to go. There’s some growing pains with the new system, but I think we’ll get the hang of it. When they finished, they’d successfully created the poisoned corpse. There was discussion about tactics to take for crafting, which I liked.While Tama and Dingo worked on the corpse, Deirdre started working on how they were going to entice the dragon into eating it. She went into the next room where she encountered a few more trogs. They were packing up and getting ready to follow after Bloody Mary now that she was in charge. Deirdre talked to them about how they fed the dragon by throwing things down the hole. She got a Complete Success on our roll, which put 4/12 progress on the tracker (would have been 2 out of 6 ticks on a clock if we were using those). They told her the call they used to lure the dragon over. Since she understood draconic, she recognized it as something fairly boring (like, “hey, we left you some food”), but the fact it apparently worked was important.While Deirdre was talking to the trogs, she also saw that they had a naked vuple hung up over the hole. It was Kriss, a vuple bard they met with an adventuring party on their way back to town. They were looking for a rogue prismist friend of theirs. The other party had encountered the trogs and do as well with their parlay. They’d been chased off, and Kriss was captured. Dingo asked the trogs about him, who said they didn’t really care about him now that they were leaving. She saw a large plank (it was 4m, so quite long) that she could put over the hole to help him down safely, so she rolled for that. The player got a mixed success on that particular roll, so the consequence was that this whole maneuvering the plank was noisy. When she entered the room, I’d established that there was croaking to the east. It got louder. The noise were attracting giant frogs.Deirdre looked for some other ways to try to set up the lure, but without a corpse, she was short on ideas. She decided to wait for Dingo and Tama to finish. Once they did, they decided to use Dingo’s enough rope to lower the corpse down and call out. They did, and the roll was a Complete Success. This time Deirdre rolled well enough to finish off the tracker (a 6, but I’d reduced the threshold because the trackers obviously were not working). She waited at the hole while the others hid. She heard the dragon sleepily come over, eat the corpse, and then suffer an unpleasant death as the poison took effect. (It got to resist, but it did not roll well enough.) After it was done, she climbed down to check it out and cut off the head to make sure.The lower cave was pretty funky. There was an orange and purple glow, a hot steamy lake, and lots of crystals. The party eventually followed her down (after some discussion of what to do next), but there was a detour first. Before the trogs had left, Deirdre asked them what was in the other caves. They told her about their larder (and the talking frog there) and some other places. Deirdre was intrigued by the frog. The rest of the group agreed to check it out before heading down.The frog was Prince Frog I, the heir of the Magical Frog Kingdom, or so he claimed. It was a pretty silly encounter as the party kept getting confused by the frog’s use of the royal-we. He promised them untold riches if they would let him down off the hook, which they did. The frog then said to tell the dragon that he sent them, and they could have their pick of the dragon’s treasure. The party laughed. The dragon was dead, so they were taking all the treasure.And all the treasure it was. There was ~1.5M silver in the dragon’s hoard. I use a silver-based economy where I rebased on cp, so the 15,000 gp in the book became 1.5M. It makes the numbers a little silly, but that’s intentional. It’s meant to be evocative of goofy JRPG money. It’s also not all coins. It’s a mix of currencies. In terms of load, there was ~63 slots worth of treasure they need to extricate from the dungeon. That should be fun. After some talk about how to guard it, they realized no one else was going to sneak it away easily behind their backs, so they left it for now.After that, they checked out another room where Dingo tried sifting through a room full of bones only to roll terrible on his Investigate + Strength roll and get Failure: “Me: The sentient dream equips energy drain. Players: <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😳" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f633.png" title="Flushed face    :flushed:" data-shortname=":flushed:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />” They murdered it before it could even act. They then headed north through another passage where Deirdre walked right into the trap. I mentioned that there was a bead in the center of the room, so she walked right in, and it exploded. Everyone had to resist blindness. Tama opted to turn it into a called Defense Check (meaning she succeeded and got to resist the stress gain). Deirdre rolled well. Dingo failed. Tama used some of her MP to cast Cleanse on Dingo to remove the blindness.After that, they finally met the prismist, Marjorie, who was not certain about them. They failed their Connections roll (establishing that their retainer Eleanore was a rival of the prismist’s), but Tama opted to deescalate and resist the consequence where Marjorie went hostile. They were able to regroup by fetching Kriss, who knew her. They learned about how Marjorie had trapped her husband along with a dozen shades in a large crystal (and this was apparently not an unusual occurrence). She could break the crystal to free him, but it would also unleash a dozen shades all at once.Tama offered to do a ritual while Deirdre worked to chip away the shades into smaller crystals. I did this as a 4-tick clock (having given up on progress trackers) with the consequences being that shades would escape. Tama rolled well on her first Rituals check, but Deirdre Failed her Sabotage to break the crystal. Two shades were coming out unless she resisted them. Deirdre reflexively blocked the first one but let the second one out. She rolled a Failure on her resist roll, so she still blocked them, but she gained the maximum stress. This also happened to Tama a bit later. The party ended up fighting through five or so shades. One of them did manage to get a hit in on Dingo, but it was only a Mixed Success, so it did “only” 1 damage and caused him to gain 1 stress. Yep. Shades also do drain too. Otherwise, the encounter managed to wear them down even though they mostly walloped the shades (including a nice Backstab by Dingo with the Sword of Saints, which deals +1d10 to undead, giving him 2d6+1d10+2 which resulted in 19 damage in one hit).Overall, it was a pretty good session. There’s some stuff I need to work out for next time, but I think it went pretty well. We also had a partially reworked cleric spell list, which seemed to get more play than before (yay).</blockquote>

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