Recalled from Action - Report

 I made a challenge and here I am doing it myself now, so I'll proceed to explain to y'all how I ran a scene that I haven't run.

The system that I didn't use to run this scene is the same I use to run most of my tables with, using Lamentations of the Flame Princess as the baseline with rulings and random fancies thrown in here and there as applicable. 

What follows is a fake play report, which turned out to be a rather fun little excercise as well in figuring out how I might have handled a fight like that. I tried justifying things with game mechanics where applicable and figuring out how I would have ruled some of the more unorthodox things that happened in the fight.

I hope it feels believeable and not too forced, and maybe you can even pick up an idea or two from all of this.

For bit of context, our PC Guts has been on the run from a force of knights and got cornered at the dead end of a winding city street.

He has mowed down knight after knight with his massive two-hander of a sword very onesidedly to the point that the knights have lost their morale which has lead to a standstill in the fighting.

The knights still having a numbers advantaged, I ruled that they haven't fled despite having broken their morale but at this point were just standing there, weapons still meekly pointed towards Guts the PC and if he would have stepped forwards the knights would have let him pass for the sake of keeping their own lives.

Now however, the knight captain arrives at the scene. The rest of his troops will not back him up after having just broken morale, but he of course doesn't know this.

The timing of his arrival is unfortunate, but I had used a d6 to determine how many rounds it would take for him to finally get here and had rolled a full 6 meaning that Guts had all the time he needed to weed out the regular knights first.

Nothing too spectacular here, as the knight captain steps in the situation doesn't quite immediately devolve back into a fight but rather he attempts to intimidate the PC out of the fight by boasting the difference in the height and build of the two.

However upon seeing that just the threat of violence isn't enough to make Guts the PC to back down the captain decides to escalate the situation and attempts to mash the large two-handed sword that Guts the PC is holding straight out of his grip.

To the player of course I described the large military pickaxe the knight captain was holding and how he deliberately raised it up and was readying a swing, which prompted an action from the player which in turn prompted an initiative roll to see which party is faster.

Since this is essentially a 1v1 situation, we used d6 + DEX mod for the initiative rolls for both sides. The knight captain of course didn't have any sort of statline at this point so I quickly rolled a 3d6 to see if he had a modifier or not.

The dice were cast and the knight captain won initiative.

The knight captain finishes the swing at the blade of Guts the PC.

I believe I was ruling this as non-lethal damage that on max damage roll would have disarmed the PC since it certainly wasn't quite something that would have fallen under grappling/wrestling.

The attack did however miss and as such the only thing damaged or sent flying was bits of the cobblestone pavement.

However this guy is no pushover, they're a captain and thus have two attacks per round.

Seeing as the disarm attempt failed, the captain decided to Press his next attack.

For those not familiar with the concept, in LotFP Fighters have access to two combat "manouvers", or rather methods of fighting/attacking. Pressed attacks give +2 to hit but make the attacker suffer -4 to AC untill the next time they act, and Defensive attacks give -4 to hit but provide +2 to AC for the attacker untill they next act.

Since the rest of the regular knights had already broken morale they were pretty much just expendable set pieces and thus I thought I'd highlight the brutality of the captain's fighting style by having his second attack force his own men to step aside out of the way or get impaled by the pickaxe as well.

The attack would land, but Guts the PC is a Fighter who has not yet acted this round so I reminded the player that if they wanted to they can spend this round's action to Parry the attack.

For those not familiar with LotFP, anyone who has not acted on the round can declare to parry an attack made at them to temporarily increase their AC at the cost of their action for the round. For non-fighters this is a +2 to AC, whereas for fighters this is a +4 to AC.

At this point however the player informed me that even with a parry the attack would just barely hit them so I offered them a bargain:

Either Guts the PC takes the hit that they can already see coming their way, or if they use the parry I'll allow them to avoid the damage but they will have to tell me how avoiding it put them in a worse off situation as a trade-off.

The player decided they didn't want to risk a high roll from what they had intuited to be a d10 as the knight captain was similiarily to Guts the PC handling a heavy two-handed weapon.

As such, the player nominated that while avoiding the attack their character had been cornered and now couldn't run away from the fight.

Boths sides have now acted.

Knight captain with his two attacks, and Guts the PC with his parry.

New round ensues and initiative is re-rolled.

The knight captain went first again.

Another pressed attack from the knight captain, both because I had figured he'd be rather pissed off at this point and because he needed everything he could get to break through that +4 AC from a fighter parry that Guts the PC's player could use to defend with.

Knight captain rolled a 21 for their attack, something that not even Guts the PC could manage to parry with their AC of 16.

I was already rolling for the damage when the player asked me something that I couldn't turn down. Could they try to do the thing that the knight captain did at the beginning of the fight where they tried to mash the weapon off of Guts the PC's hands?

When your player gives you fire like that you can only pull through with it.

There was already a set example of a similiar manouver within the same fight too, and the PC hadn't acted yet.

I ended up ruling that if Guts the PC can with his own attack beat the 21 that the knight captain had rolled, he'd get to roll damage for his weapon and then reduce the incoming damage from the knight captain's blow by that amount.

Which the player proceeded to do. 22 beats 21, 10 damage reduced!

Seeing as Guts the PC's player's 10 managed to beat the 6 damage I had rolled the knight captain's attack to inflict when the player had asked me about this crazy manouver Guts the PC came out of this exchange unscathed.

Furthermore, since they had rolled a max result on the counter swing, I decided that instead of just simply deflecting the blow the weight and strength of the two-hander that Guts the PC was wielding was enough to reduce the knight captain's warpick unusable as it's metal shaft bent backwards and it's sharp blade shattered from the force of impact.

At this point I figured that even though he hadn't lost any hp yet in the fight, the knight captain probbaly should roll morale since he had just had his weapon rendered absolutely and utterly unusable.

He failed his roll.

At this point the entire force of the knights had failed their morale checks, even the captain having lost his will to fight.

Normally I might have still had the knight captain pull off his second attack that he hadn't used yet this round but I figured with the failed morale check he'd have had enough of this fiasco for now.

As such, we dropped initiative but I did still allow the player to roll another attack against the knight captain now laying on the pavement and covered in large beads of cold sweat.

"Just something to kinda sell the whole message you know, I'm gonna kick his teeth in and try to scare the knights off now that I've beaten their boss."

Max damage. Granted with a kick so it's still just 2 damage but does drive home the point.

Just to be on the safe side, I rolled reaction for the rest of the knights to see if they'd still at least stand their ground or if half of them were already runing at this point.

Snake eyes! They must have not liked seeing their captain kicked around like that.

From there on things moved along and surprisingly it didn't result in combat but rather an escape by Guts the PC despite the knights having regained some fighting spirit, but that is outside of the scope of this blogpost or even this writing challenge really.

reCalled from Action - Blogging Challenge

 Or how I had a cool idea that I wanted to turn into a blogging bandwagon because by god I need to write more of these.

I'll also be compiling takes on this prompt/challenge to this post as I either come across them or am informed of them so de feel free to check back here every now and then.
So far myself,  Havoc of Lonely Star blog, Mr.Mann of The Foot of Blue Mountain blog, diregrizzlybear and Justin H of Aboleth Overlords have taken the challenge for a spin.

I would also like to apologise in advance, the formatting of images is not exactly one of blogger's strong points so I couldn't make this post look exactly super pretty. Hopefully it should still be readable and not go too janky on mobile view or anything of the sort.

The what now?

So this is an idea I stumbled myself into after witnessing another user on the OSR discord server going over their re-read of Berserk and talking about it's fight scene of Guts facing off against Lord Zondark and how some of the things that happen in the fight might translate to stuff players could do during combat in a tabletop rpg.

You wouldn't believe how difficult formatting this on blogger was,
there's no way to make text wrap around images

Some amount of spitballing ensued, and I wanted to try getting people on board with this for couple of different reasons.

Firstly, there really isn't that much player-facing advice out and about on the osr blogging circles, or if there is I have ran into pretty much exactly none of it, and I figured something like this could kinda be used to highlight to the players how you can pull off all sorts of cool stunts in a fight in order to attemp to level the playing field instead of just resorting to the "I hit you, you hit me, I hit you, you hit me" that I find B/X combat can often devolve into.

Secondly, I thought it would be really interesting to get to take a peek inside the heads of different GMs and see how they approach adjudicating these type of more unorthodox fighting manouvers in whatever syster, hack of one, or other amalgamation of rules and procedures they use to run their games with, as well as seeing how two different GMs might adjudicate the same scene with the same ruleset in a completely different manner to kinda highlight how the OSR scene is often more about rulings made during play rather than hard rules recited from a book and a number of GMs aren't afraid to let players pull of cool figting manouvers just because there's no rules precedence for them.

The Challenge

It really is as simple as:

1. Pick a fight scene that isn't just two dudes hitting/shooting each other back and forth. Preferrably something with clever/weird manouvers and unconventional fighting techniques.
2. Run as through how you would have adjudicated the fight, what kind of rulings would you have made to allow the players to pull off all the cool manouvers. 

I would of course love to see as many people as possible run us through the same scene to get to see how differently it would run between numerous systems and GMs.

As such, the scene that sparked this all is from the manga Berserk and takes part during The Guardians of Desire chapter between Guts and Lord Zondark.

Here's the short of it, you can go find it yourself if you'd wish to read around it for more context or just prefer not squinting through series of screenshots on blogger.

Also, how would you run mass combat? Do you got a cool scene that displays all sorts of things that might come up during adjudicating the clashing of armies or just fighting against swarms of mooks?
I would love to see your thoughts on running something like that!

Thoughts on (mega)Dungeons & the experience of crawling them

We all know what a dungeon is, right?
A dungeon can be a hole in the ground, a cave, a crypt, an old abandoned castle or even a full city depending on how it gets framed by the GM. The common denominator in all of these cases being that a dungeon is a hostile environment which a regular sane person wouldn't wish to set foot upon, and from where treasure hunters and the desperate go to and sometimes return from with enough shinies to comfortably sit back and live a good life for a year or two.

What'll follow are some of my musings regarding dungeons and the experience that I personally would wish to evoke among those crawling through them.

 A dungeon should be information warfare

• It should be important to scout the place and try to learn of it in order to understand it's traps and dangers better, thus being able to anticipate and avoid them.
• Initially, decisions are made based on incomplete information and like with a puzzle the PCs keep acquiring new information to fill in their gaps in knowledge untill eventually "mastering" the dungeon.
• As such, planing about future delves should hold some importance other than just making sure the party has enough torches and rations for the coming delve. Different types of gear required for specific paths, traps or even entrances to the dungeon in order to safely traverse the locale.
• The dungeon and it's denizens can likewise learn about and prepare for the party as they delve deeper, creating a kind of tug-of-war between PCs and Dungeon trying to learn more of each other and figure out how to handle and navigate around the dangers they pose to each other

This is something that obviously works the better the larger a dungeon you're working with. A small five room dungeon doesn't have a lot of room for mystery and hidden secrets, let alone to imply them and slowly trickle in information about them for the PCs to find and intuit out.

In a larger dungeon, let's say closer to 20 rooms and all the way up to mega in size there starts to be noeugh breathing room so that you aren't constantly peppring the players with clues about the place as if every room contains five clues and hints to the true nature of the dungeon and it's workings I can see t becoming very exhausting not only for the players to keep track of these things but also for the GM to continue presenting them in a consistent and interesting manner.

TL;DR I want dungeons to be something that can be learned and eventually mastered, if not in their entirety then at least in chunks of certain areas and wings of them. Not "system mastery", but in a sense "mastery over the fiction".