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Prince Valiant actual play - our most recent sessions
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7862133" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>No worries - thanks for posting in the thread!</p><p></p><p>I'm not sure about publication status. I had heard of it for a long time as an important game, and for that reason picked it up via the Kickstarter you mentioned. I hadn't necessarily expected to end up playing it, but for the past year os so it has become our most regular game. (Other systems we've been playing in the past little while are Classic Traveller, Cthulhu Dark, a session of Dying Earth, and some Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy Hack.)</p><p></p><p>I think no knowledge of the comic is required, and from the purely marketing point of view I think the link to the comic is on balance a disadvantage: the plus is that it gives a lot of excellent interior illustrations, but the minus is that people associate the game with the comic more than needs be.</p><p></p><p>I haven't read Prince Valiant except for the odd Sunday comics supplement 40-odd years ago when I was a child; I don't know if any of my players has ever read it. The game is (in my view) suitable for any sort of ancient/mediaeval/fantasy provided that (i) you're happy to have magic be mosty on the GM-side (as per my OP) and (ii) you're happy with a fairly light game both in rules-terms and thematically. It's certainly not a viable substitute for dungeon-crawling, combined arms D&D. But I think it is much better than 2nd ed AD&D for many of the games that I've seen people trying to play using that system. At our table we think of it as "Burning Wheel lite".</p><p></p><p>The rule for archery, which we extrapolate to thrown knives, is that every success over the obstacle is -1 to Brawn. Zero Brawn = hors-de-combat. The rules expressly leave it up to the GM how to interpret this (and I gave an example in the OP which is the one where you ask whether death was a possibility) - exhausted/stunned (which is what happened to Twillany when the Bone Laird knocked her(?) away with a blow from the flat of his greatsword) or bleeding/dying (which is what I ruled for Sir Justin when he was defeated after fighting with the Bone Laird for several exchanges) or even dead. For PCs the rules strongly encourage GM leniency ("Normally death [of PCs] is not an important part of Prince Valiant"), but for NPCs I tend to follow the fiction if there's a logic to it, or ask the player (which, from recollection, is what I did when Twillany took down Sir Ainsel).</p><p></p><p>The only PC death we have had was actually in our first session, when I was still getting the hang of the play of the game and used a scenario that, numerically, was probably a bit tough for starting PCs - and so one of the PCs ended up getting run down by the Wild Hunt and so going to hell. (That player brought in Sir Morgath in our next session, who at that time was just a squire but since has been knighted and married the daughter of the Duke of York.)</p><p></p><p>With the chase and then ambush, there were rolls involved - I'm guessing, again with inadequate recollection, Sir Morgath's Brawn + Agility vs something appropriate for the NPCs. The ambush will have been the result of some sort of failure by Sir Morgath's player. The precise framing of the ambush is subject to GM decision, though I will have drawn on information in the scenario about the number of thugs. The game leans heavily here (and the rules are pretty clear about this) on GM judgement - (i) in framing situations that are not utterly hosing for the PCs and therefore players, and (ii) in not being too punitive when failure strikes. The game was written in the late 80s (the Kickstarter is a re-release), so before designers like Luke Crane and Ron Edwards had formally articulated the "fail forward" idea, but because Greg Stafford was a genuis the game clearly anticipates it.</p><p></p><p>The second.</p><p></p><p>One thing I like about the rules is that they are very clear where the GM has discretion - framing, setting difficulties, adjudicating consequences, awarding Fame (= XP) and Stortyteller Certificates - and equally clear about what the rules do (eg rolls are what they are, and there is not even any discussion of fudging, secret rolls etc).</p><p></p><p>This fits well with the way my group has been playing for at least the past 10 years (when my group in its current formation started a long 4e D&D campaign). And the systems we play are well-adpated to it.</p><p></p><p>The mass combat rules are the most complex sub-system in the game. As I try to bring out in the OP, there are opposed command rolls (on Battle + Presence) to determine the overall result of the battle, and then each PC also makes individual rolls per exchange, against a difficult set by the GMs roll of a number of dice determined by number, quality, position etc of the opposing troops - one of these is Battle + Brawn + arms and armour (to survive unscathed) and the other is Battle + Brawn + arms and armour (to stand firm and not break or panic). It took us a few goes to get the hang of them, and it requires some GM judgement and deftness in narration to make everything hang together. For what I think is my most elegant display of this follow the link in my OP to my previous post about our campaign, where I describe the rolls and narration for a tournament melee and try to bring out how I and the players made it all fit together in what was quite a satisfying experience.</p><p></p><p>With the two mass combats I describe in the OP of this thread - the pirate and the huns - I bumped into new constraints and considerations (the ship stuff I mentioned, and the splitting of forces vs the Huns) and this required a bit more ingenuity in adapting and extrapolating the mechancis. I was not that happy with the pirates, but quite liked how the Huns worked out.</p><p></p><p>One thing I have felt is a bit ironic is that this game is, mechanically, much further from a wargame than eg Traveller, or most versions of D&D, but perhaps precisely because of that is the only game I can remember playing or GMing where PC control of a growing warband is not just an off-screen thing but a central aspect of play. The only time I remember it coming up in D&D was when, at low epic, one of the PCs briefly had command of a contingent of drow warriors which gave him a minor action AoE attack - in the ficiton, he gave a command to direct the hand-crossbow shots from the drow contingent. And in our Traveller game the PCs have a crew of about a dozen or so NPCs, but they don't normally work as a warband.</p><p></p><p>There is no mechanical correlation at all between checks and resolution (on the one hand) and the passage of time in the fiction (on the other). Even with healing, the rules expressly make this a matter of GM fiat.</p><p></p><p>For me, this is similar to some of the other games I've mentioned in this reply - eg Burning Wheel, the Dying Earth, even 4e D&D once we're in non-combat resolution - where the GM has responsibility for managing pacing, including the opening and closing of scenes. With the particular event you are repsonding to - ie Algol returning with the reliquary - what is happening at the table is that one of the players is saying something like "Is Algol back yet?" and I respond "Well, it's possible but it will depend on how fast he has ridden - make a check for him against such-and-such a difficulty." </p><p></p><p>Another pacing decision that I think I mentioned or at least alluded ot in the OP was about when Twliiany (and Rhan, but as a NPC she's less important) could return to the main site of the ction after finding andd exploring the wooden dais. This was decided based on a combination of in-fiction considerations (a fight is generally quicker than riding, exploring etc) and also table considerations - Twillany's player has done some stuff and so now it's Sir Justin's player's turn. The decision was also influenced by the fact that, once Sir Justin was downed, Sir Gerran delibrately held off to see if Twillany would return with help of some sort.</p><p></p><p>Another consideration in all this is that, similar to Apocalypse Wold and Dungeon World, there is no initiative system. It's GM decisions about pacing and faming that dictate this sort of flow of events.</p><p></p><p>And another comment that links the mass combat aspect to the pacing aspect - you can see from the OP that I am using GM authority over framing to set up some situation involving the whole band, and other situations as involving the PCs (and perhaps some close NPCs) only. That's deliberate on my part.</p><p></p><p>Our combat resolution - opposed checks until one pool is reduced to zero, so a definite death-spiral aspect - is pretty similar in terms of tble techniques to other RPGs we play. The focus is normally on the mechanics, not the narration, unless something significnat in the fiction is changing ("you're downed and bleeding"; "he gets past you to the NPC behind you"; etc). The imaginative element is supplied to a significant extent by the minds of the players.</p><p></p><p>When it comes to social conflict, the narration becomes much more important because it establishes (i) what exactly the PC is doing, and (ii) what the range of likely "meanings"/options is for the NPC response once the dice are rolled and compared. Because of (i), the player narration helps build up the imaginative element. And because of (ii), the narration on both sides establishes the trajectory of the encounter, in a positive feedback loop (ie the GM narration of the NPC response/consequence provides an important part of the context for the next player action declaration). It's this combination, which produced a dynamically evolving shared imagination, which makes the game fun. I guess in that sense it's a "story game" rather than a wargame, although <em>story game</em> is a term I'm a bit wary of because of the connotations it can bring to a RPG discussion.</p><p></p><p>That doesn't surprise me. Even though Prince Valiant is very different from Rolemaster, which I played and GMed for a long time (decades), it feels closer to RM than it does to (eg) most D&D. And I think that's because of what you mention - the divesity of PCs and diversity of situations, which makes it very different from "combined arms dungeon crawling" which is perhaps the core D&D experience.</p><p></p><p>About 3 hours, sometimes 4. Normally we start some time around 1-ish, there's some lunch and catching up and boardgaming as we wait for the stragglers (especially if I'm the straggler, given I'm normally the GM!), and then the RPGing starts between 2 and 3 and finishes between 5.30 and 6.30 depending on who has what sort of curfew constraint.</p><p></p><p>I'm not sure for the first of the two sessions in the OP, but the second was I think 3 hours almost exactly. I'm quite happy with the amount of "story" we get through in these sessions. I don't feel they're dragging. The players sometimes want to linger on the logistical/equippage aspects more than I think is interesting or really supported by the system, so I tend to push us past that as best I can without just running roughshod over their bean-counting.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7862133, member: 42582"] No worries - thanks for posting in the thread! I'm not sure about publication status. I had heard of it for a long time as an important game, and for that reason picked it up via the Kickstarter you mentioned. I hadn't necessarily expected to end up playing it, but for the past year os so it has become our most regular game. (Other systems we've been playing in the past little while are Classic Traveller, Cthulhu Dark, a session of Dying Earth, and some Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy Hack.) I think no knowledge of the comic is required, and from the purely marketing point of view I think the link to the comic is on balance a disadvantage: the plus is that it gives a lot of excellent interior illustrations, but the minus is that people associate the game with the comic more than needs be. I haven't read Prince Valiant except for the odd Sunday comics supplement 40-odd years ago when I was a child; I don't know if any of my players has ever read it. The game is (in my view) suitable for any sort of ancient/mediaeval/fantasy provided that (i) you're happy to have magic be mosty on the GM-side (as per my OP) and (ii) you're happy with a fairly light game both in rules-terms and thematically. It's certainly not a viable substitute for dungeon-crawling, combined arms D&D. But I think it is much better than 2nd ed AD&D for many of the games that I've seen people trying to play using that system. At our table we think of it as "Burning Wheel lite". The rule for archery, which we extrapolate to thrown knives, is that every success over the obstacle is -1 to Brawn. Zero Brawn = hors-de-combat. The rules expressly leave it up to the GM how to interpret this (and I gave an example in the OP which is the one where you ask whether death was a possibility) - exhausted/stunned (which is what happened to Twillany when the Bone Laird knocked her(?) away with a blow from the flat of his greatsword) or bleeding/dying (which is what I ruled for Sir Justin when he was defeated after fighting with the Bone Laird for several exchanges) or even dead. For PCs the rules strongly encourage GM leniency ("Normally death [of PCs] is not an important part of Prince Valiant"), but for NPCs I tend to follow the fiction if there's a logic to it, or ask the player (which, from recollection, is what I did when Twillany took down Sir Ainsel). The only PC death we have had was actually in our first session, when I was still getting the hang of the play of the game and used a scenario that, numerically, was probably a bit tough for starting PCs - and so one of the PCs ended up getting run down by the Wild Hunt and so going to hell. (That player brought in Sir Morgath in our next session, who at that time was just a squire but since has been knighted and married the daughter of the Duke of York.) With the chase and then ambush, there were rolls involved - I'm guessing, again with inadequate recollection, Sir Morgath's Brawn + Agility vs something appropriate for the NPCs. The ambush will have been the result of some sort of failure by Sir Morgath's player. The precise framing of the ambush is subject to GM decision, though I will have drawn on information in the scenario about the number of thugs. The game leans heavily here (and the rules are pretty clear about this) on GM judgement - (i) in framing situations that are not utterly hosing for the PCs and therefore players, and (ii) in not being too punitive when failure strikes. The game was written in the late 80s (the Kickstarter is a re-release), so before designers like Luke Crane and Ron Edwards had formally articulated the "fail forward" idea, but because Greg Stafford was a genuis the game clearly anticipates it. The second. One thing I like about the rules is that they are very clear where the GM has discretion - framing, setting difficulties, adjudicating consequences, awarding Fame (= XP) and Stortyteller Certificates - and equally clear about what the rules do (eg rolls are what they are, and there is not even any discussion of fudging, secret rolls etc). This fits well with the way my group has been playing for at least the past 10 years (when my group in its current formation started a long 4e D&D campaign). And the systems we play are well-adpated to it. The mass combat rules are the most complex sub-system in the game. As I try to bring out in the OP, there are opposed command rolls (on Battle + Presence) to determine the overall result of the battle, and then each PC also makes individual rolls per exchange, against a difficult set by the GMs roll of a number of dice determined by number, quality, position etc of the opposing troops - one of these is Battle + Brawn + arms and armour (to survive unscathed) and the other is Battle + Brawn + arms and armour (to stand firm and not break or panic). It took us a few goes to get the hang of them, and it requires some GM judgement and deftness in narration to make everything hang together. For what I think is my most elegant display of this follow the link in my OP to my previous post about our campaign, where I describe the rolls and narration for a tournament melee and try to bring out how I and the players made it all fit together in what was quite a satisfying experience. With the two mass combats I describe in the OP of this thread - the pirate and the huns - I bumped into new constraints and considerations (the ship stuff I mentioned, and the splitting of forces vs the Huns) and this required a bit more ingenuity in adapting and extrapolating the mechancis. I was not that happy with the pirates, but quite liked how the Huns worked out. One thing I have felt is a bit ironic is that this game is, mechanically, much further from a wargame than eg Traveller, or most versions of D&D, but perhaps precisely because of that is the only game I can remember playing or GMing where PC control of a growing warband is not just an off-screen thing but a central aspect of play. The only time I remember it coming up in D&D was when, at low epic, one of the PCs briefly had command of a contingent of drow warriors which gave him a minor action AoE attack - in the ficiton, he gave a command to direct the hand-crossbow shots from the drow contingent. And in our Traveller game the PCs have a crew of about a dozen or so NPCs, but they don't normally work as a warband. There is no mechanical correlation at all between checks and resolution (on the one hand) and the passage of time in the fiction (on the other). Even with healing, the rules expressly make this a matter of GM fiat. For me, this is similar to some of the other games I've mentioned in this reply - eg Burning Wheel, the Dying Earth, even 4e D&D once we're in non-combat resolution - where the GM has responsibility for managing pacing, including the opening and closing of scenes. With the particular event you are repsonding to - ie Algol returning with the reliquary - what is happening at the table is that one of the players is saying something like "Is Algol back yet?" and I respond "Well, it's possible but it will depend on how fast he has ridden - make a check for him against such-and-such a difficulty." Another pacing decision that I think I mentioned or at least alluded ot in the OP was about when Twliiany (and Rhan, but as a NPC she's less important) could return to the main site of the ction after finding andd exploring the wooden dais. This was decided based on a combination of in-fiction considerations (a fight is generally quicker than riding, exploring etc) and also table considerations - Twillany's player has done some stuff and so now it's Sir Justin's player's turn. The decision was also influenced by the fact that, once Sir Justin was downed, Sir Gerran delibrately held off to see if Twillany would return with help of some sort. Another consideration in all this is that, similar to Apocalypse Wold and Dungeon World, there is no initiative system. It's GM decisions about pacing and faming that dictate this sort of flow of events. And another comment that links the mass combat aspect to the pacing aspect - you can see from the OP that I am using GM authority over framing to set up some situation involving the whole band, and other situations as involving the PCs (and perhaps some close NPCs) only. That's deliberate on my part. Our combat resolution - opposed checks until one pool is reduced to zero, so a definite death-spiral aspect - is pretty similar in terms of tble techniques to other RPGs we play. The focus is normally on the mechanics, not the narration, unless something significnat in the fiction is changing ("you're downed and bleeding"; "he gets past you to the NPC behind you"; etc). The imaginative element is supplied to a significant extent by the minds of the players. When it comes to social conflict, the narration becomes much more important because it establishes (i) what exactly the PC is doing, and (ii) what the range of likely "meanings"/options is for the NPC response once the dice are rolled and compared. Because of (i), the player narration helps build up the imaginative element. And because of (ii), the narration on both sides establishes the trajectory of the encounter, in a positive feedback loop (ie the GM narration of the NPC response/consequence provides an important part of the context for the next player action declaration). It's this combination, which produced a dynamically evolving shared imagination, which makes the game fun. I guess in that sense it's a "story game" rather than a wargame, although [I]story game[/I] is a term I'm a bit wary of because of the connotations it can bring to a RPG discussion. That doesn't surprise me. Even though Prince Valiant is very different from Rolemaster, which I played and GMed for a long time (decades), it feels closer to RM than it does to (eg) most D&D. And I think that's because of what you mention - the divesity of PCs and diversity of situations, which makes it very different from "combined arms dungeon crawling" which is perhaps the core D&D experience. About 3 hours, sometimes 4. Normally we start some time around 1-ish, there's some lunch and catching up and boardgaming as we wait for the stragglers (especially if I'm the straggler, given I'm normally the GM!), and then the RPGing starts between 2 and 3 and finishes between 5.30 and 6.30 depending on who has what sort of curfew constraint. I'm not sure for the first of the two sessions in the OP, but the second was I think 3 hours almost exactly. I'm quite happy with the amount of "story" we get through in these sessions. I don't feel they're dragging. The players sometimes want to linger on the logistical/equippage aspects more than I think is interesting or really supported by the system, so I tend to push us past that as best I can without just running roughshod over their bean-counting. [/QUOTE]
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