Second game session. OUCH!! (Hackmaster Basic)

[Treebore]

Well, I am running the free adventure that leads into the new Keep module coming out.

So these are spoilers, so if your primarily a player, quit reading.


The final battle went brutally. Two rules type things though. The kobolds were in a totally dark cave, but in their descriptions, in the module and in the HMB, they do not have any ability to see in the dark. None. So I just went ahead and assumed they did.

Second, I did not spot a map scale. Is there one? I assumed 10 feet per square, was that correct?

Now, for the fight.

Party composition was a Dwarf Fighter, Halfling Cleric, Human Mage, and Dwarven Thief. Attributes ranged from 5 to 17, with the vast majority being around 10. We did old school roll ups, IE by the book, and no switching, so they got the +50 BP bonus for doing so.

No ranged weapons, no one could afford them. Except a sling for the Halfling. Who worships the NG god of Healing.

The Halfling hates Kobolds. The Kobolds were noted as hating Halflings. This comes into play shortly.

The Dwarf Fighter leads the way into the cavern, with a torch. They did not know the cavern was 70 to 80 feet deep. So the dwarf enters. Lit by the torch. Arrows fly. The range has them doing d12. Dwarf's Defense was +2. So I thought he had a fairly decent chance.

I rolled a 8. The dwarf rolls a 5. Damage ensues, two ones. Next roll. I roll an 11. Dwarf rolls a 10. Damage ensues. Third roll, I roll a 10. Dwarf rolls a 15. Good, he may live after all, because he was beat up by the wolf and the snakes on the way here, and was already down 10 HP when this fight started. The next two d12 rolls both beat his defense rolls on a d20. He is now down to 3 HP.

He runs behind the wall when the count gets to 12. The party is freaking out at this time because they now realize they would have to run through a valley of arrows to get to the Kobolds. So I freeze the count and the party debates strategy.

They finally decide on having the halfling go out and taunt them, and when they come in close enough the mage will cast his last Deep Slumber of the day upon them. He also casts Aura of Protection on the halfling to help hiim from being caught by too many arrow hits, which gives the Halfing a total of +12 on defense. (Guess who had 16's and 17's for his attributes?)

So now the count resumes, the spell is cast and the halfling goes out, and by this time the count is to 18. As the halfling comes out to taunt, the Kobolds are ready to shoot their next volley, so they do. Despite the range, and the fact that it was a halfling, one arrow still manages to hit the Halfling.

The Halfling taunts, I have him make a roll, calling it easy based on the Kobolds description of hatred for Halflings. They take the bait and run towards the halfling, dropping their short bows and drawing their daggers. The Halfling stands there screaming insults as they charge him. The MAge, peeking out around the nearby corner, casts Deep Slumber as the group gets within range. Much to the consternation of the mage three of the Kobolds resist his spell, 3 do not, including the leader. The three remaining awake fail to understand the significance, apparently due to their hate filled attention on the Halfling (rolled a 100 for them to understand the change in the tactical situation, FAIL!!)

So as these Kobolds move to close in on the halfling, everyone else moves out. We engage the Halfling and the Kobolds on 22. The Halfling rolls badly on defense and fumbles on his attack. Guess what? The Kobold rolled a Nat 20 on his PERFECT DEFENSE! Halfling gets hit a few times, but is still up. He has 10 HP at this point. The rest of the party engages on 23, all missing. Again, a kobold rolls a PERFECT DEFENSE on the Dwarf Fighter. Fortunately for the fighter I roll a total of 4 damage, so he take s 2, 1 HP left.

To sum up, rolls continue to go rather crappy for the players PC's, and well for the Kobolds. The Halfling tells the thief to go around and Coup De Grace the three sleeping Kobolds, he does. By the time He kills the leader, the dwarf goes down, before he finishes the second one, the Halfling goes down. The mage runs. The kobolds give chase (I made another roll to see if they would remember the thief behind them, they don't). The thief shrugs and kills off the remaing two while the Kobolds chase the mage.

The mage eventually outruns them, so the Kobolds return. Meanwhile the dwarven thief hides behind the crates to the right. When the Kobolds come back in they see that their leader and two others are dead.

They shrug their shoulders, pick up the Halfling body, and head over to have a feast and drink to their most recent victory and victuals.

An hour later, the kobolds full on halfling and wine, go to a deep glutonous sleep. (Rolled a 6 on their check). The Thief sneaks out of his hiding place. I decide that since they are stuffed, and at least moderately drunk, that it would be "easy" for him to sneak around and Coup De Grace them in their sleep. He successfully does so, all 3 rolls perilously close to being failures.

Meanwhile the Mage had come back and decided to wait outside the cave for the Thief. His desperate need for someone to still be alive, besides himself, keeps him there long enough to see the Dwarven Thief walking out to see if the mage had actually gotten away. When he sees the Mage stand from where he had been waiting he says, "I, El Bandito the Fourth, have slain all of the kobold scum!" The mage whoops, and they go in and strip the kobolds, their dead comrades, and the cavern of everything of wealth, including the lead powder. They decide to bury their friends here, near the lake.

They then go to the lake to quickly clean themselves of the smell of urine. They then transport everything back to the wagon, re install the wheel and locking pin they had removed, and go back to town to collect their reward, sell their loot, and drink to the deaths of their friends.

A fine Hackmaster finish, I think.

 

[Votan]

Yikes. A fairly brisk body count, though. Is Hackmaster supposed to see 50% fatality rates or was this just the result of terrible rolling on the part of the party?

 

[Celebrim]

Yikes. A fairly brisk body count, though. Is Hackmaster supposed to see 50% fatality rates or was this just the result of terrible rolling on the part of the party?

In the early levels of 1e I often had 30% fatality rate per session. Generally I had every player bring two characters to play, and at times we'd end up shuffling characters to players that didn't have one left. Almost everyone would end up bringing a third or fourth character before the carnage was over.

After a half-dozen sessions or so, you have the beginnings of a party of heroes and survival rate starts going up. By fifth level, PC's start to get reasonably hard to kill.

I'm not sure I'd ever again want to play quite that 'old school' again but it does teach you not to get overly attached to a character (I've played with people that didn't play this way, and they take character death really hard and often personally). Attachment to a character is inevitable if he survives through enough with you (and losing a character you've spent 100's of hours on is tough for anyone), but I've seen so players get attached to their dream of what they want the character to be to the point that they pretty much demand of the DM wish fulfillment.

 

[Treebore]

Their dice rolls certainly did not help them. I mean I would roll a crappy 5 on attack, and they would roll a 4 for defense. It was that kind of night for them.

It would also have helped if they had maybe waited a night to heal up a little bit more from their previous injuries and to allow the Mage to get his full spell points back so he could have cast two Deep Slumbers instead of 1. They chose to press on instead, and the dice rolls helped ensure the morality rate, but the two remaining PC's still pulled it off, mostly due to the gutsy move of the thief.

Which was primarily due to the player wanting to see if the Thief could pull something like that off in this game. If it had been any other edition of D&D he would have failed with his rolls, but because of how skills work in HM he only rolled close to failing.

It did help that I determined the challenge level to be "Easy" due to the stuffed and inebriated condition of the remaining Kobolds.

 

[Melkor]

So Treebore,

What is your overall impression of HMB after playing a bit?

I have read the rules, and created a character, but haven't done much beyond that. I do like what I have seen though, and I think HMA is going to be a great product line.

 

[Treebore]

My group and I keep on wanting to play it, so I would say its pretty good.

 

[theemrys]

I've been running a game for a bit myself and I found the lethality can really vary by players... and luck.

There are a couple of groups I've run through some adventures, and only one death so far... although my last two sessions got REALLY close to TPKs... The last encounter one (2 second level and 2 first level PCs) had my players getting the dice out to start new characters almost when they pulled the fat from the fire and won... but most of them were down to single digit hps.

Because of the opposed rolls, I found that luck can make a big difference, but the use of tactics is the biggest factor. My group quickly learned that full parries, fighting withdrawls, giving ground, and "shield walls" were essential to surviving combat. Also, I'll give them credit for being lucky and gutsy... especially for pushing on even when pretty heavily wounded.

In my case they're playing an all dwarf party and at one point (when all down to 1/2 hp) said "No point in running. We're dwarves and the orcs will just hunt us down since they're faster", so they pressed on and cleared the caves, despite the odds.

All in all, we've been having a blast with it, especially since the power curve is a bit shallower than other games so there are no "easy" fights that are a given... at least so far.

 

[MoxieFu]

Because of the opposed rolls, I found that luck can make a big difference, but the use of tactics is the biggest factor. My group quickly learned that full parries, fighting withdrawls, giving ground, and "shield walls" were essential to surviving combat. Also, I'll give them credit for being lucky and gutsy... especially for pushing on even when pretty heavily wounded.

You know, that sells the game to me so much better than anything I've read in years. A game that plays better when you use real-world tactics rather than in-game mechanics to achieve success.

At 20 bucks I'm gonna have to seriously check this game out. Can someone tell me what else needs to be purchased to run the game while I go check it out?


Also Treebore that description of the game was great!

 

[Treebore]

Converting D&D to HM Basic...

I also posted this on the Kenzer boards:

I have been using an old school module newly written by Barrataria games available via Lulu, and I have to say it has been surprisingly easy to adapt. Mostly because the monster have already been written up in HMB, or had close proximity type creatures for me to adapt (such as adapt wasps to carnivorous giant flies).

So far even using the random encounter charts have worked, but I think that is mostly due to me not rolling any encounters when they rest.

I also thought at first that healing spells were very, very whimpy in HMB, but the explosion potential seems to make that a wrong perception. Like tonight I had my game and my son, playing a cleric rolled 5 3's in a row, healing 12 points of damage. Then another player, of another cleric, rolled two sixes in a row on an annointed PC healing for 15 points.

So generally they are pretty weak healing spells, but when those explosion/penetrations get going, watch out! Combine that with regular and effective use of healing skills, I have been finding the healing very effective.

Plus my mage player cast a slumber spell and added 50 SP to it to have it effect up to 140 HP, which ended up being well spent because the Brigand leader, with 25 HP, and 5 of his lackeys, with 23 HP each all failed to save versus his rolled 19. Very cool! Which left only 4 brigands for 3 of the party members to fight, while the thief and wizard coup de graced the sleeping 6 brigands. The whole combat only lasted 38 "seconds".

The only tough part was to decide how to convert D&D treasure values to HMB. Since most of the party was 2nd level, and within only a few hundred XP of third, and I have been so stingy with loot to the point where they only had 78 silver on the richest character, and were still in studded leather, at best, and only had medium shields, at best, I decided to go pretty generous on the conversion. So I let the 10 gold stay as gold, I converted the 100 GP gemstones to 100 SP gemstones, and I converted the 1,750 gp necklace to a 175 GP necklace. Combine that with the human brigands being equiped with short swords, short bows, studded leather, 1 long sword, 1 heavy crossbow, and 1 Wand of Illumination with 14 charges, there was more whooping and hollering about the treasure than I have ever heard for even the treasure hidden in the module "Sabre River" when I had a group find it. (BTW, the loot in Sabre River was well over 1 million GP in value).

I hope you guys at Kenzer get the advanced rule book out soon, because the whole group is within a couple hundred XP of third level as it is, now. ( I couldn't find any clear guidelines in the book tonight, but I did not give XP for loot, only for the monsters/bandits, otherwise they would be 3rd level.)

So we continue to have fun. A couple of players are having problems with the skill system and are still getting confused about initiative, but over all they have enough fun they keep wanting to play, to the point where we have scheduled an extra session this Friday.