Too Many Swords

[LouisGoncey]

Place a curse on the world that makes metal extremely brittle.

[womble]

12? Twelve? Players? In one group? Man you're either a masochist or bloody good at running a combat, and so are your players (the amount of goofing-off and distraction that would ensue in any table with 13 round it that I could build from my gaming 'padres would preclude slick and speedy tactical resolutions...)! Respect.

[JohnnyAppleseed098]

12? Twelve? Players? In one group? Man you're either a masochist or bloody good at running a combat, and so are your players (the amount of goofing-off and distraction that would ensue in any table with 13 round it that I could build from my gaming 'padres would preclude slick and speedy tactical resolutions...)! Respect.

 

Well Thanks, I Try My Best!

 

 

 

As Words Die, We Discover The Reason 13 People Works Well Is The Fact That I Speak Too Loud.

[Manic Typist]

Are they having fun? If so, perhaps they don't want to pursue the plot thread you had in mind. If that's the case, you might need to change things up.

 

Most importantly: have you talked to them about the issue? If they are having fun but you aren't, that needs to be communicated. I would personally be very upset if I was having a grand time playing with 11 of my buddies as a group of adventuring swordsmen and then all of a sudden was punished out of nowhere with a plot contrivance that made my character useless (a curse that makes all metal brittle) for an extended period of time.

 

This could be a case of different expectations, which CANNOT be solved by trying to force them to play your way. 

[JohnnyAppleseed098]

Are they having fun? If so, perhaps they don't want to pursue the plot thread you had in mind. If that's the case, you might need to change things up.

 

Most importantly: have you talked to them about the issue?If they are having fun but you aren't, that needs to be communicated. I would personally be very upset if I was having a grand time playing with 11 of my buddies as a group of adventuring swordsmen and then all of a sudden was punished out of nowhere with a plot contrivance that made my character useless (a curse that makes all metal brittle) for an extended period of time.

 

This could be a case of different expectations, which CANNOT be solved by trying to force them to play your way.

 

This is one of my problems. Yes, most of players are having fun, but my magic users, especially the cleric, are not. I'm trying to prevent this by having more of my party use magic so they don't always have to deal with behind cover penalties and a constantly damaged party. I just want ALL of my party to have fun. I do have somewhat of fun, but I feel more obligated to make my party happy first.

 

 

 

As Words Die, Yo Ca Barel Undestan Thi Writin Witou Hel.

[bigbywolfe]

Why are the magic users not having fun?

Why would forcing those who want to play swordsmen to use magic make the magic users happy?

[JohnnyAppleseed098]

The magic users are suffering from

 

1) Behind Cover Penalties

2) Having to heal more than attack.

3) A Dominating Swordsmen Ratio That Allows For Them To Force The Spell Casters To Follow The Swordsmen's ideas instead of their own.

 

 

 

 

More Mages =

 

 

1) Less Behind Cover Penalties

2) Less Time Healing

3) Less Swordsmen Mentality Which Means More Free Decision Making.

 

 

 

 

 

As Words Die, The Troubles Of My Party Are Shown

[Scott Baker]

I know it's been mentioned before, but Manic Typist said it most recently: this appears to be a communication problem. You and the players need to talk about what is/is not working rather than trying to come up with some way on your own to try and railroad the players into changing their behavior.

[DasBroot]

The magic users are suffering from

 

1) Behind Cover Penalties

2) Having to heal more than attack.

3) A Dominating Swordsmen Ratio That Allows For Them To Force The Spell Casters To Follow The Swordsmen's ideas instead of their own.

 

 

 

1 - Remove cover penalties for spells.  Either just do or give casters a few Penalty Skill Levels to counter cover penalties for free.

 

2 - Why? If the casters are having to heal more than attack in my own game either I would think  1) the swordsman defences are too low for my game or 2) my damage is too high.  Both look the same on paper but reasons can separate them in practice.  Falling back for recovery actions on occasion as their fellow swordsmen defend for them really should be all a Hero character needs to stay on their feet for the fight. Save the healing for the end of the fight.  Hopfully it's not 3) The mages are fireballing the pesky fighters that keep getting in their way (tempting though it is). 

 

3 - That's the only thing not within your power to change instantly as the GM.  If the spellcaster players are literally being outvoted by their fellow players that's a serious problem at the table - and making the dominating players be mages won't fix it. If their style is the kick the door down and kill everything as a fighter there's a good chance they'll still kick the door down and kill everything as a mage.  Many, many times over the decades have I seen the softspoken player who made a character with all the social skills not get to say a word because Mogdar the Cha 8 Barbarian's player is a much more vocal and forceful person in life.

 

I don't know the details of your setting, game, or world - but maybe mix in a few things not that only mages can deal with at the expense of fighters (a super armored golem) but in addition to the fighters (a couple of things with Desolidification affected by magic mixed in a fight with other things. The fighters mow down the necromancer's skeleton legion while the casters blast at his spectral allies.

 

Or slip into Advanced Mode and have the party split every once in a while - run simultaneous fights as the fighters lay waste to a room of orcs as the spellcasters slip by to deal with their master.  The power differences in my own Champions game are such that the team very *rarely* fights together - but they always fight at the same time.

[bluesguy]

I could not run a group of 12 players at one table.  That is way beyond my skills.  I couldn't run combat scenarios with that many players.  And the role playing portion of my games would turn into 30 minute skits with one person and everyone else watching. 

 

It is nice that you have 12 players who want to play together.  I would suggest you divide them into 3 groups that play on different nights/days in a common area of your campaign world.  This works if you are not running a dungeon crawl but rather something more wide open.  The group that ends up with the mage and/or cleric is going to turn out way more effective because of the versatility.  Don't let the other players 'find/buy/hire' healing options.  Make healing body as hard as it is described in the book.  Guess what the other players are going to change their tune.

 

I bet you will have more fun.  I bet everyone in the long run will have more fun because everyone will get more 'stage time'.

 

Right now our gaming group is 4 players and 1 GM.  That changes the dynamics a lot about how we engage in conflict.  One player gets seriously hurt and the whole party might die.  Where other parties might charge in the players have learned to sneak/negotiate their way past problems.  It also means more focused time for each player and that is more fun.

[Doc Democracy]

Yeah, 12 players is more than I would attempt. Five at most, even in D&D.

[Manic Typist]

I'm not why the magic users are dealing with behind cover penalties and the fighters aren't.... unless: 

1) The magic users are smarter than the fighters

2) (this follows from one) The fighters are just counting on magic users to replenish their health

3) The magic users lack the same level of protection as the fighters. This can be fixed by investing in defensive spells.

 

Let's be clear- getting the fighters to use magic more will in no way address your issue. It just doesn't follow. It sounds like the fighters are using the magic users almost like NPC heal-o-matics. That is a interpersonal problem, not a mechanical build issue.

 

However, some useful suggestions have been offered that could give more meaningful attention to your magic users:

1) Enemies that they are most effective against (spectral/Desolid, something vulnerable to magic or clerics, something that needs to be dispelled, etc.).

2) Introducing a group that doesn't trust fighters either because they're violent, non-religious, or inferior (a mage's guild that views them as stupid and ignores them in favor of talking to the obviously important people, the magic users)

2) Splitting the group more.

3) Having a conversation about the issue.

4) Having the magic users say "No, we're not doing X. If you're going to go off and engage in an act which we believe to be wrong, we will not follow your leadership and you can find someone else to stop you from bleeding out on a muddy patch of roadside in the wilderness. Good luck with that."

[mallet]

Since you haven't started running this new campaign yet, you do have a few options that while might seem a bit "heavy handed" could still help you get what you want with out totally ruining player's control over their character creation. My first choice would always be to use the setting and storyline and char gen rules as away to influence character creation, rather then rule changes. Less to keep track of, and a more organic approach I feel.

 

One option might be:

 

Created/enforce a "shared" background for the group. This isn't D&D so there are no "classes" and 400 points is a lot to play with in a fantasy setting. Say that all characters are all coming from a specific force/legion/sect in the Fantasy kingdom where children are raised from birth to be both masters of sword and sorcery and trained in both to be more effective in combat. You can work out the story aspects (explanation) of this but in practical char gen terms just tell the players that that they need to take 50 (or 40 or whatever number of) points in their non-primary focus. So if they are making a swordsman they still need to spend X points on magical abilities. If they are primarily a mage or cleric they still need to spend at least x points in melee skills. As this represents the training they've been undergoing since childhood.

 

Then during the game, once the player that were always swordsmen get a chance to use and experience magic you might find some of them starting to spend their xp on magical abilities.

 

If you don't like "forcing" the players to spend point this way, try a little psychological ploy and instead tell them that this will be a 350 point campaign, let them make their characters how they want (swordsmen, mages, etc...) then after they are done give them +50 "free" character points that can only be spent on their non-primary focus. Players love free points, so if you give a 350 fighter and extra 50 points that they can only spend on magical skill and powers they'll be happy. And you still end up with the 400 pt characters in your campaign that you planned for.

[zslane]

From what I can tell, the "problem" here only really manifests during combat. And if it has become a serious problem, then that says to me the game is perhaps too focused on combat. It also says to me that the way combat scenarios are constructed rewards a direct assault, melee-oriented strategy at the expense of other strategies. The mages and clerics in the group hide behind cover and do little but support the fighters because the fighters dictate a fighter-centric approach to combat, and success proves them right all the time. Players are smart; they will find the path of least resistance--or rather, the path of easiest/most reliable success--and stick to that path again and again and again until it stops working.

 

So I would first recommend reducing the importance of combat in the campaign as a whole. Second, I would suggest constructing the conflict scenarios so that combat isn't necessarily the best, or even a feasible, approach. And when it is, try to construct scenarios with multiple (simultaneous) challenges requiring diverse skill sets so that a fighter-centric solution isn't always going to get the job done. Obviously, you want it so that having fighters in the group is helpful, but you don't want it to be the trump card. You could even skew the campaign world such that fighters are seen as a lower class of citizen/hero, and that mages and clerics are more celebrated. A few well-placed in-world incentives can go a long way.

[Markdoc]

Yeah, 12 players is more than I would attempt. Five at most, even in D&D.

 

I did actually run a group with 12 players for a while i.e.: weekly for about 6 months (actually I did it twice, but one time didn't count, because I knew it wouldn't stay 12 players for every long <Evil Grin>). It got to be too much of a grind for me and the game split fairly naturally into two 6-player groups (the Wednesday night crowd and the Saturday night crowd) which was more fun for everyone.

 

Of course, sometimes, it's not so easy - a common reason you can end up with 12 player groups in the first place is because all your friends want to play, so it's hard to say no.

 

cheers, Mark

[zslane]

Our groups always had more than one capable GM in the mix. If more than 8 players showed up, we would split into two groups and run two different tables. It simply wasn't worth it to try and run a single game with more than 8 players; our experience was that everyone had much more fun in small-to-medium sized groups.

[Doc Democracy]

I did run a group of 12 once.  It was a competition.  We pretended that one of the 2 GMs had not turned up and they would have to play in a large group.  The first encounter however was witha the ultimate opponent wielding a soul sword equivalent that killed half the party.  

 

That half were then taken from the room to another room where the second GM ran them in a spirit world scenario that mirrored the main one.  We had a runner coming down to the main room providing information of what was happening on the spirit plane that would affect the success of the main group.

 

They did not seem to notice at the time that I had killed precisely one of each team participating but I think one or two had twigged something along those lines was going on before the end.

 

The main party was very concerned about the lethality of the game and it made the main session very different than it might otherwise have been.  They all got together at the end though, spirits combining with mortals to increase the strength of both to face the main opponent - more than half died the second time too - but this time the bad guy died, not just the PCs...

 

Very stressful and time consuming in my opinion!!

 

:-)

Doc

[phydaux]

A more important question is "Why are all the swordsmen stepping on each other's stchick?"

 

I know that if I were a new player in the campaign and the game already had several swordsmen, then I'd get myself Deadly Blow with longbow and a few Penalty Skill Levels to offset Range and Hit Location with Longbow.

 

Or up my DEX & INT and max out my skills, with maybe two levels of Deadly Blow with daggers, bought as Only From Behind.

 

Or play a Cleric, because the role play opportunities in playing lecherous monk can be hilariously awesome.

[TheDarkness]

A more important question is "Why are all the swordsmen stepping on each other's stchick?"

 

I know that if I were a new player in the campaign and the game already had several swordsmen, then I'd get myself Deadly Blow with longbow and a few Penalty Skill Levels to offset Range and Hit Location with Longbow.

 

Or up my DEX & INT and max out my skills, with maybe two levels of Deadly Blow with daggers, bought as Only From Behind.

 

Or play a Cleric, because the role play opportunities in playing lecherous monk can be hilariously awesome.

I love when we get a party that has your(and my) attitude about it. Fun chance to make something interesting!

[NuSoardGraphite]

It sounds to me that you have too many people in your games. Keep the party to 5 or 6 and you will probably end up with 1 rogue, 2 spell casters (1 mage, 1 cleric) and 2-3 warriors. Which isnt a bad ratio at all.

[Markdoc]

A more important question is "Why are all the swordsmen stepping on each other's stchick?"

 

They don't have to step on each other's shtick: in the last campaign we only had one pure spellcaster (out of 6 players) the rest were swordsmen of various flavours - that ran about 5 years of regular play without significant overlap. In the campaign before that, which ran for a similar length of time, 4 out of 6 PCs were swordsman/martial artists of varying flavours (though to be fair, that was a low-magic game). Again, no shtick problems.

 

It's all in character background and player interaction. The idea that each PC needs to have an identifiable shtick that is his (or hers) alone, is just so much bumfluff.

 

cheers, Mark

[JohnnyAppleseed098]

They don't have to step on each other's shtick: in the last campaign we only had one pure spellcaster (out of 6 players) the rest were swordsmen of various flavours - that ran about 5 years of regular play without significant overlap. In the last campaign, which ran for a similar length of time, 4 out of 6 PCs were swordsman/martial artists of varying flavours (though to be fair, that was a low-magic game). Again, no shtick problems.

It's all in character background and player interaction. The idea that each PC needs to have an identifiable shtick that is his (or hers) alone, is just so much bumfluff.

cheers, Mark

I wish your mentality is the one my party would have.

 

But Sadly, No.

 

 

 

 

 

As Words Die, The True Reason I Haven't Gone Insane Yet Is Because I Already Am

[Old Man]

- Replace all monsters with oozes, golems, or undead that take no damage from blades.

 

- Equip all villains with ranged weapons.

 

- And terrain features that prevent swordsmen from reaching them.

 

- Drop into the campaign a really powerful magic... flail.

 

- Magneto.

 

- TPK.

[massey]

I've played in games where the only solution to any problem was to stab it.  There were some monsters around, and the GM would rather be castrated than let you get out of fighting them.  "I got out these monster figures, and by god, you're gonna have to chop through the hit points of every last one of them."  One particular fight, the gamemaster had our 7th or 8th level D&D group encounter a thousand skeletons.  And we sat there and hacked apart every damn one of them.  And he counted the hit points and had them all numbered.  That fight took like three hours.  If I hadn't been 19 and stupid, I'd have probably got up and left.

 

In a game like that, players are going to respond to what works in the campaign.  In that guy's game, priests were the best.  In another guy's game, fighters were the best.  It just depends on what you emphasize.

 

Now I've played in other games where we were allowed to roleplay our way through obstacles.  Skill use and creative thinking was very important.  We went through one dungeon (a cave) where we knew there were a bunch of monsters waiting for us.  There were going to be pit traps and poison dart traps, and other things like that.  So we decided that cheating was better than dying.  Since we had some money, we asked the GM how much a cow costs.  "Umm, like a piece of silver?"  We had lots of silver.  So we bought a huge herd of cattle (like maybe a thousand), got them near the mouth of the cave, and then used a fear spell to make them stampede right through that dungeon.  They piled into those pit traps until they were full, and then they ran over the bodies.  Poison darts dropped a cow or two.  They busted right through wooden doors.  They trampled orcs and goblins, and smashed skeletons to pieces in their panic.  Warded hallways exploded with magical lightning, and the cows ran right through it.  We followed along at a safe distance, ready to take on anything that survived the stampede.  Not much had.  We cleaned up that day, and I don't remember rolling a single die.

 

When we suggested doing it again on another dungeon, the GM said "no".

 

I told that story because it's funny, but primarily to illustrate that if you let something work, players will want to do it.  Let the agile thief sneak into the castle, avoid the guards, steal the gold, and slip back out.  Then everybody will think that's awesome, and they'll want to be a thief.  Right now it sounds like you've got a game where being a fighter is a clear choice.

[zslane]

A clever DM would have made it difficult to conduct a successful, unchallenged/unmolested, cattle drive of that size to a dungeon. And a cattle stampede needs relatively open spaces and/or clear channels. Caves do not offer a stampede-compatible environment unless your DM thinks underground dungeons are composed of nice, big, square corridors like at NORAD or something. It's a cute story, but it takes a pretty dim DM to let that happen, unless it is entirely for the humor value of it.