Lethality – suggested changes

For a game that’s intended to be “gritty” the spectre of death seems to be awfully far away.

I’m not sure I accept your premise. First, I’d like to unpack the above statement so my assumptions are more clearly laid out. There are 2 distinct though related “games” when we talk about the living campaign – the rules as written, and the campaign itself.

With regard to the rules as written (RAW), the ability to heal wounds by spell does not present itself outside of Psionics until Tier 2 as a push reaction (Stabilize) and not in a sustained manner until Tier 3 (Mend Wounds). Characters run the risk of stat point loss or additional wounds and corresponding penalties through the standard healing rules. With base rules, Wounds are rare as crits are rare. When they do rear their heads the level of danger depends upon how close skilled healers are, or how many ranks the individual PC has in Heal. As with many other factors, grittiness is in the hands of the GM.

The Codex of Heroes specifically introduced additional gritty options such as the massive damage rule, negative stamina tracking, critical hit effect and permanent injury. All are covered in the “Gritty” Rules section in Appendix 1. That said, the introduction of those rules should be taken at face value. Specifically:

“Arcanis is designed to be forgiving to the Heroes and abstract in its treatment of damage. It is very difficult to suffer long-term injury because the PCI design team thinks it is not a great deal of fun for a great hero to be maimed and/or crippled.” CoH p.186.

Based on the above, wounds are challenging, but another obstacle the heroes are expected to overcome. The GM is able to tune the level of grittiness to fit the players and the desired level in a home campaign.

The second “game” is the Living Campaign itself. Rather than use the base rules they have implemented some of the gritty rules, specifically the massive damage rule and typically the permanent injury rule as well. Given the constraints of the format (living game), tuning becomes far more difficult for a variety of reasons.

1. Player expectations and desired level of challenge and grittiness varies. While in a home campaign you can set the bar at an agreed to level, it becomes more challenging if you’re not aware of exactly what characters can do or players are capable of.

2. The level of grittiness should be selected to *increase* the level of enjoyment of the players at the table. In the end, the goal of every table – GM and players alike, should be to tell a wonderful tale that’s interesting and exciting. GMs that steer too far from that ideal especially going grittier than the players want to deal with are likely to draw consequences. This could be everything from having a lousy time, to never wanting to have that GM again to completely quitting the campaign and sharing their negative experiences. While player actions have consequences, so do GMs.

3. A constantly changing set of characters with any given mod can have a 1.1 or 1.5 diplomat sitting down with a 2.10 combat monster. While it’s certainly possible for experienced GMs to juggle those kinds of discrepancies it’s not always easy.

4. Longer term effects are harder to deal with given the format. It’s not expected that each table manages their extended care healing risking additional wounds and stat point losses before wrapping the session. That’s simply hand-waved as part of the living format. Make it through the final combat without dying and your hero returns hale and hearty to face the next mighty adventure in whatever mod gets played next. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

5. Encounters must be built for average parties at each tier and can’t be tailored. Depending on the stat blocks of the characters the same encounter may be hard and challenging or incredibly lethal especially if massive damage rules are in effect as they are for the campaign.

All that said, if there’s a desire by the players to increase the challenge / lethality there are a number of different options available. You’ve mentioned a couple. Other options are to use the negative stamina tracking and critical hit effect optional gritty rules.

Whatever options are considered, they should be agreed to by the table playing under them. Again, the goal is for the level of grittiness whatever it is to enhance the enjoyment of all, not make it something to suffer through.

One other note of caution I would add. Part of the reason to have limited healing in the original system was that healing inevitably leads to longer combat encounters. It also increases the need to have a healer at the table rather than more flexible party configurations. I’m not sure I want to get into a greater arms race given that many mods already run to time or over.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

The “avoid death by taking a flaw” rule needs to be written down and put into play more commonly than the spoken understanding of BI folks then (or is it in the codex under fate i dont recall)

The “avoid death by taking a flaw” rule needs to be written down and put into play more commonly than the spoken understanding of BI folks then (or is it in the codex under fate i dont recall)

It’s the “Permanent Injury” Optional Gritty rule, p 186 of the CoH or a variation of it.

“When a Hero would die as a result of failed Healing Action rolls, the Hero can “succeed” instead. The Hero obtains a physical Flaw instead of dying. Suitable examples include: Physical Weakness, Feeble Attribute or One Eye.”

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

I agree with what others have said. I don’t think the lethality needs to be increased. Being killed is no fun (gaining numerous physical flaws is also no fun). I always assumed the reason why we didn’t see a hallway full of traps is because it’s no fun to deal with (even in D&D, it just drags on and has no lasting effect).

The whole point is not to kill characters or really even to challenge them. The point is for the players (and GMs) to have fun and to feel like they were challenged (often but not always the same thing as challenging them). I don’t think anyone died at the Origins BI but every single person I talked to felt like their table had been challenged. The 3.1 table seemed like they were at serious risk of dieing – last count I heard was 18 wounds and that was not at the end. The all-Elorii table had over half the group down in 2 (I think) scenes. The BEAST table had the advantage of (iirc) 4 people with AR7+, 1 with AR3, and 1 with AR3 or 0 – we had few people drop but took a total of something like 5-6 wounds (and no way to heal them) and definitely felt challenged.

Why does challenge only have to be rated by PC deaths? Could you not frame scenes around things like “stop the Ss’ressen from getting past you”, with the challenge coming from stopping them before they march past you? Hell, this one is basically the Anti-BI, because usually the Heroes have to get past a succession of creatures to get to the gate/wall/objective.

Or how about timed encounters, like having to get save someone before they get dropped in acid? Or the room is collapsing and you have x ticks to get out? Or down a certain number of enemies before the ticks run out and they teleport elsewhere to thin their numbers?

Or how about environmental encounters, where you have to make Balance checks on a heaving ship in shark infested waters? Or how about fighting in a desert where you are all Exhausted?

Or how about encounters in which you have to choose for or against fighting, with the enemy not being clear and it becomes a moral dilemma?

At the BI I took a wound in Encounter 1 and a second wound in Encounter 2. It would have been two wounds in the second encounter but my GM (Matt Flinn, bless him ) said he didn’t want me to die halfway through the BI. I was strangely (for those who know me) fatalistic in the Origins BI. I guess being a Beltinian and having all that undead goodness to beat up made me happy enough to lose the character if need be (go out in a blaze of glory as it were). To be honest I was almost hoping to get a physical flaw like losing an eye or some such. Makes my Exorcist more scary. I mean in our first fight in Dark Heresy I had my foot blown off, everybody else got really beat up and one guy ended up in a box…as in full body cyborg with just an organic brain. So yeah THAT game was lethal… I think now that I have had time to play under the new gritty rules I’m pretty happy with the way things are. I’d say don’t tinker with it just yet. Just my two cents on the matter.

I should be in bed, but this thread is important enough to deserve a reply.

I agree with the majority of the posters here that I do not want to see more character deaths in the campaign. Because there is no way back from it in this system. Dead = new (probably significantly weaker) character. That’s not true in all systems. At medium to high level D&D death sucks …buts its really a status condition not much different than petrifaction. You usually don’t stay dead unless you choose to. Eventually your friends drag your PCs body to a temple and you get a raise or a resurrection (depending on “how much” dead you PC is) and then you go back into action with a minor drop in power.

On the other hand I agree with Josh that I wish it was easier to make combat in Arcanis scary. I have definitely seen some scary fights in and out of BIs…but they are few and far between.

While there are many elements of Arcanis that I love (the clock, weapon tricks and MTs)…I find the rule set to be somewhat schizophrenic on what tone the mechanics want to support. No resource management in spells or stamina/hp leans towards swashbuckling (with no meaningful external restrictions on how much the PCs can do in a day.) Horror checks could lean away from that and potentially impose external restrictions on heroes…except that they most often work as a Fate tax. If I’m facing “the big bad” with Tukufu I’m probably just spending a fate point to pass the check and not roll. So I don’t think Horror works very well in the campaign as it gets played. Wounds are also a little strange. In tier 1 they’re a Big Deal. By Tier 3 they aren’t.

Altogether this means that for something to be challenging it needs to push the PCs at “Full Power”…but anything that pushes the PCs at full power also risks TPKing the party. I think this is true for one of the fights in Desecration and again in Gleams of Fire (the two fights outside of BIs I think are really dangerous). I think its hard mechanically to write a scary fight in the Arcanis rules system that isn’t in danger of being unfair to the players.

Outside of really rough fights where I had to dig deep into the reserve of my horde of “stuff” there are only two kinds of scary scenarios (that I thought were fair to me as a player) and I’d wish we could see more of them in modules.

The first is you basically are in danger of “running out of gas” on your way to the final fight. I call this the “Ravenloft” scenario. The first Battle of Semar was like that. Resources got chewed up. When I ran it for the Portland players years ago the table really did believe for about 20 minutes that they were watching the end game of their PCs in what would be a TPK…before the Trogs left the field of battle after the Ssethric officers all went down. The old origins delve into the Lavender Way where some PCs chose to fight a VO for the first time was also like this.

The second type of scary scenario is where you reach “game over” without ever getting to the fight. Maybe a clock is ticking down…or you’re trying to sneak into somewhere where there is overwhelming force if you get caught. Either way you need to make good choices or you may fail before ever rolling initiative.

Collectively I believe the Arcanis rules do not support the “Ravenloft” scenario where the PCs are slowly ground down over an adventure. That’s not a story the rule system supports.

That leaves the second type. Most good writers are aware of the second type. For those at Arcaniscon who pursued the Harlequin, they only had 48 Ticks to find and save the “important person” at the final encounter (despite all reasonable efforts on my part they got there at tick t38…next time I promise to try for another 9 ticks worth of dirty tricks). In a different mod, I was various shades of nervous for over two hours playing a special table where we sailed to Ymandragore to steal a McGuffin…because NO ONE is tough enough to fight off the Isle if it goes on red alert.

If we want a grittier feel to the campaign and/or a heightened sense of danger for PCs i think the best solution is for module writers to look for those opportunities to include these kinds of scenes for their modules.