@jasonlutes have you gotten any feedback on depriving people of restful sleep? It doesn’t strike me as the most interesting or fun thing to do to my players. What’s the thought process behind it?
Freebooters on the Frontier 2e Discussion
@Tacoforce, like so much in this world, it depends on your definition of “interesting” and “fun,” 
So far I personally have found it an interesting way to add a bit of color while underlining the need for decent sleeping conditions in order to assure HP recovery in the morning. Most often I’ll hit one or more party members who are least prepared for a relatively warm and comfortable rest; this encourages the making of fires and purchasing of bedrolls. If everyone’s well-prepared across the board, I might tell the person with the lowest Constitution that they just can’t get comfortable, or I’ll ask a specific player what dream, nightmare, or troubling thought keeps them getting much shuteye. You can use it to touch on the residual effects of an earlier traumatic event, or the tension and fear a PC might be feeling from their immediate circumstances.
For a safe/unsafe/dangerous/perilous locale, there’s a 13.9%/16.7%/13.9%/11.1% chance of rolling “Someone of the Judge’s choosing fails to get restful sleep,” so it’s not happening with great frequency. In any case, I would love to hear complaints from people who don’t like the way it’s been working for them in practice.
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@jasonlutes @Tacoforce The ‘Pass The Night’ move was well received in my game, the only quasi-complaint was for the roll of a “9”. Assuming we are reading it correctly, it offers a benefit for folks who don’t need a restful night of sleep to gain a +1 Forward instead. Which I think is a great idea. The problem is that when the group rolls a 10+, the players who don’t need healing would do that and don’t understand why it’s a “lesser” option.
@Haaldaar, having that option appear on a 9 ensures that it only happens occasionally (16.9%/13.9%/11.1%/8.3%). The Set Out and Pass the Night moves double as encounter rolls, not affected by ability scores, so they do not strictly follow the “higher is better” model of most rolls. Set Out in particular is structured according to probability as opposed to the usual success/tradeoff/failure model. I arrived at this after a lot of experimentation and am pretty happy with the way it plays, but I can certainly reevaluate the specifics of that 9 on Pass the Night, and am open to suggestions!
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Wow. I just skimmed through the new versions of the booklets. I love the Deity generator!!! I love rolling up clerics, because it means I get to roll up some weird beliefs. But finding good random domain generators added a bit more hassle than random character generation should.
I would question the need for different tables for different alignments. I see the reasoning behind it, but I would argue that part of the fun in random generation is making fun of nonsensical results, and it leads to arguments about categories: cannot pleasure be good and lawful? Can’t you imagine an evil god of work and labour? Can’t life and growth be chaotic?
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I like the idea you seem to be suggesting of fitting the domain to the alignment, instead of having that be prescribed by the text.
You’ve received many responses already, @Haaldaar, and it sounds like you’re mostly good to go on this query. Something I’d add, though, is that – IMO – the most interesting thing regarding Traps is the Thief move Pick Locks & Disarm Traps, which has some narrative-enhancing results/consequences already built into it (making your GM job easier). I’d probably be looking for ways to get the players to that Move, as it’s dynamic.
It can sometimes be interesting to look for traps, and to fail, and then to have to Get Lucky or Make a Saving Throw. But it’s probably not as interesting to do that in great repetition. If your players are leveling WIS off of failed Perceive (for traps) rolls alone, you may be putting too many traps in your session.
To add some thoughts on Perceive–as I’ve discussed above my table tends to use it more like a “putting the pieces together” kind of thing, much more akin to an Insight or Investigation check in D&D rather than a straight Perception check, which I think is generally the most boring roll in D&D. Like Jason says, if they can reasonably see a thing, they just see it–so for us Perceive is about getting further details or insight, really digging in. We’ve been basically treating it as the same as Discern Realities from DW, but adding in the possibility of asking other questions. And adding the question to the trigger means asking something like “do I see any traps?” or “is there treasure in the chest?” doesn’t even trigger a roll, because those are–if not obvious, necessarily, it’s reasonable that someone can answer those questions without too much extra work, and the least interesting answer–you don’t find anything isn’t going to get in your way.
We love Pass the Night and failing to get restful sleep has been a great tool in my Judge’s tool belt. I really like the things that have both mechanical and fictional consequences. I’m trying to get better at enforcing the latter in addition to the former, which is much easier to do.
@jasonlutes thanks for sharing the clarification about “party checks.” Those rules make a lot of sense to me. Stacking up to +4 seems a little crazy to me, but it is reasonable that if a whole party is attempting to do something, they’ll have a better chance of accomplishing it. And if they don’t–well, that’s a good time to spring something on the character with the lowest Luck, isn’t it?
Curious if anyone would be interested in me posting session recaps? Or would this not be a good thread for that? The ones we write up tend to be more “let’s turn the session into a short story” than a discussion of mechanics and dice rolls and the like.
You can read some previous recaps here (as well as my attempts at maintaining a wiki that was written in character–a fun idea that was far too much work to keep up with; between that and discovering Chronica we ended up abandoning Obsidian Portal all together …)
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Yes! But maybe in a new thread with “Freebooters on the Frontier” in the subject line. This thread is awesome yet massive already… just my perspective.
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Agreed with Chris. I would of course love to hear all the deets of your campaign, @jexjthomas, but another thread where you can lay it all out is probably the best way to go.
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Just a reminder, please review the “About…” posts for different categories and this post before new posts: A Few Best Practices For Posting
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Hm. I agree that it wouldn’t really work well in this thread, but I’m wary of starting a new one dedicated to my own session recaps. Perhaps I’ll figure out a different solution.
Thanks for the input.
I will note that our session today went swimmingly. It was probably the most roleplay-heavy session we’ve had and I didn’t feel like any of the mechanics stood in the way of that. We all took a moment to reflect afterwards how good a job Freebooters (and PbtA in general) does at using the mechanics to always drive things forward in an interesting direction. As I think I’ve stated before, I’m very low prep for this campaign. I went in with basically nothing and it ended up feeling very organic and like things were meant to go the way they did. The ability to equally balance the more RP-heavy, story game elements with the more OSR/OD&D style hex- and dungeon-crawling is pretty remarkable. Freebooters has actually been so far one of the most purely satisfying gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
That all said, I do have a question.
One of my players, a thief, just leveled up and is taking the Menace to Society move which allows her to multi-class as a magic user. Is there any particular guidance anyone can offer in terms of multi-classing? All of my DW campaigns were short-lived and I’ve never actually seen it in play. Does she get all the base magic-user moves, and when she levels up again can she choose from both magic-user and thief advanced moves?
Thanks!
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Wow, did she spend a month of downtime studying spells? Awesome. Yes, she gets all of the magic-user starting moves. Each time she levels up after that, she can choose to level as a thief or as a magic-user, with all of the concomitant benefits. You track levels separately, so each time she levels she’ll decide in which class to advance. I definitely want to hear more about that!
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She actually hasn’t yet–so maybe it’s more accurate to say that she’s made known her intention to take that move once it’s applicable. One of her personal side quests as we prepare to head into the big city is to find a spell book, or a wizard who might train her (Pealinn, the capital, is home to the only magic academy in all of Ihmisten Kot) and she’s cool deferring any other advances until she’s met the requirement. Now that I think about it, I might encourage her to take a different advance in the meantime and hold on to that one for once she’s ready. We can use this to somewhat guide where her story is going, knowing what she’s most interested in. And as we are heading into the city, it’s likely that sessions will be more RP-heavy with less dangerous combat (though we’ll see–I’m not about to go easy on them) so hopefully she’ll survive to actually get to use it.
The player has been consistently the least engaged of everyone–she tells us she’s having fun, and I do believe her, but I think since the beginning she’s kind of felt “stuck” playing her character, rather than enjoying getting to know the character through play (which for me, and most of my players, is the fun of rolling up characters randomly). We took a break from the main campaign last session because one of the players couldn’t make it and did a one-shot set in the very distant past of our game world; we played using One Shot World and she picked the druid playbook and was so much more engaged and loved getting to do all the cool stuff that came along with it. So this is going to be a good move for her.
Glad to know it works how we suspected! I’ll keep you updated on how it goes in play, once we’re rolling with it.
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There is even a play-report tag - so session recaps are totally legitimate topics in #rpg-chat.
(For example: Play Report: Blades In The Dark: Locke Lamora Style)
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Heck yes, let’s see more actual play reports!
I don’t wanna be the only one. And also, I have some real distinct memories from enworld about a million years ago, of some truly fantastic D&D posts. I’m hopeful we can tell stories with just as much awesome.
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Thanks Shane, I wasn’t sure what you meant the first time. Appreciate the clarification. Looking forward to surfing that category.
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Another question for the experts. My wizard (and myself) are having a hard time wrapping our minds around the numerical values for spell durations. I know it’s suppose to be thematic on if your spell lasts 2 minutes, 2 hours, 2 days, or 2 years, etc. But, it seems to stop the flow of the game as we think about it. I was thinking about doing something like this instead.
Power Cost Duration
0 A second (instant)
1 A minute
2 An Hour
3 A day
5 A week
9 Permanent
But, before I do, are we missing something where this should be easier? Or would the above be a disaster waiting to happen as the wizard gets higher in level?
Thanks!
I say go for it — I don’t think it’ll cause any trouble.
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