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View Full Version : Marshalling the Wierd West Queries (Deadlands Classic)



Kantur
2010-09-02, 07:01 AM
So, to cut to the chase:

I'm about to start running a 4-5 month Deadlands campaign with my RP group and generally I'm just looking for any hints and tips anyone may have for running the Wierd West - favourite adventures, plot hooks, area books that are must reads, etc. I have a rough plan how I'm expecting the story to go; start, middle, some particular adventures I'm wanting to use, where I'm wanting it to end, etc. but just want to know if there's any I should seriously consider or that live on in memory years after a campaign.

I've read through the initiative, fate chip and combat sections of the rules a decent number of times and think I have my head around them comfortably between reading them and a one shot adventure we played a while ago.

There's just a couple of things I'm specifically looking for answers with:
- Simple jobs; roughly what should the pay be to make jobs enticing without leaving the posse rediculously rich? For example, investigating a crime for a sherrif who has to make sure the suspect won't get lynched if he tries to properly investigate, delivering a package/letter to another town, wagon/caravan guarding, etc.

- Mooks, minions, etc. Is there a nice, quick way of dealing with numerous enemies if there's a need for large combats?

Thanks all!

Brock Samson
2010-09-02, 07:52 AM
I've only played the Wasted West, but my DM found a simple solution for us having too much money/gear: it gets stolen/broken a lot. Also reminds players that all things in life are fleeting.

Darrin
2010-09-03, 08:12 PM
There's just a couple of things I'm specifically looking for answers with:
- Simple jobs; roughly what should the pay be to make jobs enticing without leaving the posse rediculously rich? For example, investigating a crime for a sherrif who has to make sure the suspect won't get lynched if he tries to properly investigate, delivering a package/letter to another town, wagon/caravan guarding, etc.


In the 1870s, most workers made about $0.15 to $0.20 per hour, and assuming a 12-hour work day, that's somewhere around $1.80 to $2.40 per day. And that may be factory wages... unskilled railroad work might be a lot less. A sheriff offering $5 to $10 per day would be extremely good pay, enough so that any local townsfolk within earshot would probably drop everything and threaten/browbeat any competitors to look someplace else for employment. Most frontier sheriffs can't afford to pay daily wages, so they are more likely to offer a small lump sum for a specific task or "bounty", in the $20 to $50 range. $500 for the whole party should be a huge incentive.

It's hard to set the right tone for a frontier economy... very little money, not a lot of jobs beyond "room and board", food (particularly good food) is exhorbitantly expensive. If you want to keep the PCs from stockpiling cash, charge them a lot for food/bullets/lodging, and if they don't eat right, give 'em some random -1 penalties for tummy-aches, squirts, etc.

Access to the Smiths & Robards catalogue can also drain a lot of that extra cash away... gyrocopters ain't cheap. Be careful of the armored dusters/hats, though... those things can make PCs extremely difficult to hurt.



- Mooks, minions, etc. Is there a nice, quick way of dealing with numerous enemies if there's a need for large combats?


Never roll for mooks if you don't have to. Don't bother with quickness rolls, just give each mook two cards. You can also group the mooks into squads/teams and give the group two cards each. In the later rulebooks, the designers strongly suggest you don't keep track of hit location, wound modifiers, wind, etc. for mooks. Keep track of the number of wounds (damage divided by size) and put a number of chips under that figure for each wound. After 5 wounds, remove the figure. You can still roll for wind damage as normal, in which case each 6 wind (or size equivalent) represents an additional wound. Also, don't worry about stats or skills for mooks. Just assume you roll 3dX for everything:

Greenhorns: 3d6
Veterans: 3d8
Elite: 3d10

Why 3 dice? Because they're more likely to Go Bust, and players love seeing bad guys go bust. For important NPCs, mini-bosses, bosses, etc., then you can still roll quickness or keep track of individual skills, but keep it to a minimum.

Other things to watch out for...

The Guts/Terror check TNs need to be recalculated from the book values. Pretty much everything supernatural starts at a 9, and you're supposed to add the Fear Level on top of that. Beginning PCs trying to hit TNs that high on 2d6 Guts is too difficult. Also, since the TNs start at 9, the lowest results on the Scart table hardly ever come up. Grit helps, but it doesn't scale up quickly enough once the TNs start to go up past 9. For creatures the PCs have already encountered, reduce the TNs to 7 or 5.

The designers also changed the Massive Damage rules, although they didn't quite fix them. The original rules had each wound location rolled separately, which led to some odd damage spreads, and ultimately, massive damage wasn't all that scary enough for the PCs not to load themselves down with dynamite at every opportunity. The new rules have you calculate wounds (damage divided by size) and each wound hits every location on the PC simultaneously... although you can still spend chips to reduce the damage, this also makes avoiding massive damage still fairly easy. If this comes up a lot, consider adding a house rule to make spending chips on massive damage more expensive, maybe spend twice the chips for the same effect, or declare that at least one wound level always gets through and can't be negated.

The movement rules were also changed in subsequent rulebooks. You used to have to break your movement up over every action card you had, which had the odd effect of making faster characters appear to move slower. The new change allowed you to move up to your full pace on any action you liked, so long as you didn't go over your total for that turn (you can still spend an action to Pick up the Pace for another 1d4 yards).

The magic rules for anybody except the Blessed also are a lot more difficult than they need to be. Most hucksters have an extremely difficult time making a decent poker hand that does anything useful... I usually gave my Huckster players some kind of artifact that allowed them a couple extra redraws. Unfortunately, drawing more cards also causes their brains to ooze out of their ears that much quicker. Shaman rituals also have some very high TNs just to get appeasement points... if you're too strict with the shaman rules, it's just too darned difficult to get enough appeasement points to do anything.

Be careful with monsters that are vulnerable to bullets... most Fearmongers in Deadlands are immune to everything except a particular weakness that needs to be researched/discovered. This can quickly become frustrating, particularly if they blow all their investigation rolls, but the alternative ("Just shoot it!") can be even worse. Most groups of PCs against a single creature that isn't "Immune to Bullets" can completely obliterate it with a hail of gunfire in about two rounds.