Game of Thrones / Song Ice & Fire RPG

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Huh... interesting. Perhaps I haven't seen that level of specialization take over, or maybe my players haven't been as good at it, or maybe I just run a slightly different game than your narrator. I am kind of curious to see how I handle that sort of super-specialization, because in my games, it's tended to be more hindrance than benefit.

Most of our characters have a 4 or 5 in their highest "stat". Our knight has at least a 4 in weapons (plus some specializations) and must have gotten at least decent scores in Athletics and Endurance. My bluffmeister has a 5 in Deception (and a 1 point specialty in Bluff and 2 in Disguise), and our most recent PC (joined a session or two late) has Archery 5 plus a specialty point or two.

So in my character's case, when I want to roll a Bluff, I roll six dice and drop the lowest. It ... adds up.

Our group generally consists of older characters. My own character is middle-aged, although he's so good at disguise he often appears much younger. Or older.

My bluffmeister got forced into combat once (the one where our knight almost died). He fought a bandit with 4 weapon dice. Fortunately, he was disguised as a mercenary*, so the bandits didn't focus on him like they would have if they'd known he was a noble I had a left-hand dagger, which almost but not quite gave me good enough defenses, and I'd left my armor at home, but due to sheer luck I got out out of it unscratched. I even got to taunt and lightly wound my bandit foe, while the rest of the party dealt with the archers rather than lend me a hand. *Sigh*

We learned we only needed to worry if the deck was heavily stacked in the enemies' favor. (They ambushed us, had slightly better numbers, were kind of far away, uphill so they were hard to get at, were hiding behind cover, and yet our knight still killed more than half of them by himself -- at great cost, but still -- and even my non-combat character found it safe to get into melee with bandits so he didn't need to worry about being shot at by other bandits.)

Even generic NPC bandits have a 4, for instance, those archers that basically killed our knight had 4 in Marksmanship and the melee bandits had 4 in weapons, but generally had less stat backup (I rather doubt those melee bandits had the 4 in Athletics required for high damage).

*How'd he do that without armor? Neither the GM nor I noticed that until afterward

And yes, I'd like to know how you handle this in your game. I could pass tips to my GM.

 

[Rashak Mani]

Why would specialization be a surprise ? Our world is like that... Westeros too. A good warrior with excessive time spent in becoming a scholar will lose out too a specialist.

Curious to hear more about people's campaigns at the Macro level... our group all started as members of a minor house. Guess most do something similar.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I don't know about super-specialization. Yes, it's certainly possible - and the temptation is there - but it's also really easy to take down a character whose not prepared for either combat or intrigue. If you're Gregor Clegane, it wouldn't take much for even Bronn to outsmart you, and all though Littlefinger can talk circles around Timett son of Timett, all the Burned Men would drag him to a nasty, bloodied end.

But what would your Gregor Clegane do in a court intrigue scene? Littlefinger in a fight against the Burned Men? Can the players do anything except sit and wait until the scene is over?

With our sadly short sessions and my players' "inefficiency" I fear that a player may sit and listen for a whole session without any meaningful contribution from his character.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

But what would your Gregor Clegane do in a court intrigue scene? Littlefinger in a fight against the Burned Men? Can the players do anything except sit and wait until the scene is over?

True.

There needs to be "skill challenge"-like guidelines, I think.

Curious to hear more about people's campaigns at the Macro level... our group all started as members of a minor house. Guess most do something similar.

Same here -- we're a minor house. At the start, our wealth, defense and power were high, everything else (eg land, population, etc) were terribly low. Our law level is atrocious. First, we fought bandits, utterly crushing them in two encounters and getting a pyrrhic victory in a third. We also bought some bandits and made their leader into a "sworn night". Then someone kidnapped the heir to our banner house... turned out to be a mercenary hired by a nobleman (he'd paid bandits to do so), who would then "rescue" the heir and get influence over us with our own banner house. We managed to beat him at his game, even buying those bandits too (now let by "Ser Roguish the Shifty") and the merc left. But not after propositioning our "princess". Our knight swears to kill him.

Unfortunately, our banner house had an even worse law level than ours. We had to spend time fighting those bandits, which my character did mainly through social combat. He actually hired a "special" unit to make Bluff 4 dice checks for him, and they give us so many plot points.

Then we were "volunteered" to host a tourney for King Robert. That would cost us 30 Wealth we basically didn't have. We took the risk and will do so, so our only good resource now is power (and defenses). But we stand to gain a lot of renown if we pull this off properly.

 

[Jeffrey]

But what would your Gregor Clegane do in a court intrigue scene?

Throttle the entire court to death?

Littlefinger in a fight against the Burned Men?

Run like a frightened schoolgirl?

 

[Cor Azer]

Most of our characters have a 4 or 5 in their highest "stat". Our knight has at least a 4 in weapons (plus some specializations) and must have gotten at least decent scores in Athletics and Endurance. My bluffmeister has a 5 in Deception (and a 1 point specialty in Bluff and 2 in Disguise), and our most recent PC (joined a session or two late) has Archery 5 plus a specialty point or two.

So in my character's case, when I want to roll a Bluff, I roll six dice and drop the lowest. It ... adds up.

Our group generally consists of older characters. My own character is middle-aged, although he's so good at disguise he often appears much younger. Or older.

My bluffmeister got forced into combat once (the one where our knight almost died). He fought a bandit with 4 weapon dice. Fortunately, he was disguised as a mercenary*, so the bandits didn't focus on him like they would have if they'd known he was a noble I had a left-hand dagger, which almost but not quite gave me good enough defenses, and I'd left my armor at home, but due to sheer luck I got out out of it unscratched. I even got to taunt and lightly wound my bandit foe, while the rest of the party dealt with the archers rather than lend me a hand. *Sigh*

We learned we only needed to worry if the deck was heavily stacked in the enemies' favor. (They ambushed us, had slightly better numbers, were kind of far away, uphill so they were hard to get at, were hiding behind cover, and yet our knight still killed more than half of them by himself -- at great cost, but still -- and even my non-combat character found it safe to get into melee with bandits so he didn't need to worry about being shot at by other bandits.)

Even generic NPC bandits have a 4, for instance, those archers that basically killed our knight had 4 in Marksmanship and the melee bandits had 4 in weapons, but generally had less stat backup (I rather doubt those melee bandits had the 4 in Athletics required for high damage).

*How'd he do that without armor? Neither the GM nor I noticed that until afterward

And yes, I'd like to know how you handle this in your game. I could pass tips to my GM.

Ahh... our terminologies are crossing I think. I'm not considering a 4 or 5 in a primarily useful ability as super-specialized. I was thinking you were pushing into the 6 or 7 range, and so would barely have enough points to keep 2s in other abilities, let alone some 3s or another 4 in your supporting abilities.

As to how I've handled it so far myself... mostly, it's simply been by encouraging people to test their character's limits (we're all fans of the books, so some have wanted to do the fish-out-of-water thing like guileless Ned in King's Landing), and occasionally by throwing a curve ball at player's/character's expectations. The combat-focused knight had to defend his aggressive actions in court; the sly steward had to survive the inevitable bar brawl to escape his shady dealing unharmed. It's certainly not done all the time, but just enough to say, "hey, if you don't throw a token point this way, you're going to get tripped up just enough that your main deal might not always save you".

True, there's a party involved, and sometimes people can step in for others (the knight defending his lady's honour, or the lord testifying for his captain-of-the-guard in trial).

I do tend to hand out a fair amount of destiny points - although this is chicken-and-egg with my players stretching their limits - they try things at which their characters are somewhat disadvantaged, and often are rewarded with destiny points for bringing their disadvantages into play, which they are then only sometimes able to overcome by using their destiny points. I say this because maybe my party is as "specialized" as yours is, and I'm not noticing it due to the use of destiny points.

 

[Cor Azer]

But what would your Gregor Clegane do in a court intrigue scene? Littlefinger in a fight against the Burned Men? Can the players do anything except sit and wait until the scene is over?

With our sadly short sessions and my players' "inefficiency" I fear that a player may sit and listen for a whole session without any meaningful contribution from his character.

To be fair, I'm sure Littlefinger would do no worse with the clansmen than Tyrion did.

As to The Mountain, that is partly my point. Certainly, the lords may call such a man before them to try him for some of his "aggressive" actions where his social graces would fail him, and while such a formidable beast of a character makes a great antagonist (or more likely, the instrument of an antagonist), he is rather ill-suited for a PC for precisely your observation. He's too focused on one area, and if the game strays from that one area, then he sits bored.

I guess that the other reason I encourage my players to have well-rounded characters; I like different scenes, and I like them all participating. Having a character be too focused on one area, means there may be other areas that basically (inadvertently or not) slide them off not just into the background, but out of the picture entirely. Less than fun that is, in my opinion.

 

[Rashak Mani]

Is it possible to play GoT without a Ar Magica approach where all members are part of a house or houses very close together ?

Otherwise the GM would have to have separate scenes for most players or players mini-teams.

 

[Cor Azer]

Is it possible to play GoT without a Ar Magica approach where all members are part of a house or houses very close together ?

Otherwise the GM would have to have separate scenes for most players or players mini-teams.

Not entirely sure if this is what you're asking, but there's some discussion in the Narrator's chapter about running a "Game of Thrones" campaign, where each player controls their own house (not necessarily geographically local to each other). Each house then gets a stable of PC-level characters to interact with the world (and each other). So, not all scenes are together, but many can be.

 

[Rashak Mani]

Not entirely sure if this is what you're asking, but there's some discussion in the Narrator's chapter about running a "Game of Thrones" campaign, where each player controls their own house (not necessarily geographically local to each other). Each house then gets a stable of PC-level characters to interact with the world (and each other). So, not all scenes are together, but many can be.

That would be a handful... with multiple PC characters with very conflicting interests... we tried out with only 1 house... can't see how you would manage a game not involving 1 or many houses like you mentioned.