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endoperez
2013-09-01, 04:56 AM
I'm planning to run a scene where a monster is being chased by an angry mob that includes the player characters. I'd like to get ideas for how to make this chase interesting for the players, instead of just rolling the dice until X amount of successes has been achieved.

I'm writing down my thoughts here, feedback is welcome.


1. Chase, building excitement.
A chase scene needs to build up in excitement. When you're far from your prey, people should be roleplaying and chatting while occasionally rolling the dice. When you're close, things should be interesting. All the players should be expectant, all attention focused at the same thing. In that regard it's going to be like a horror game. I won't be putting up a Jenga tower, but I want to have some sort of a visua representation of "the chase". Colored baubles, numbers rolling down, something of that sort. Abstract, not just markers on a map.


I'm probably going to adapt Ars Magica's health system. Players will roll for finding tracks and markings and such things: d10 + stats - environment against a target number that represents the distance to the monster. Every time they exceed the target number, the target number goes down by at least 1.

At high target numbers, they're following cold trail. Successes will be difficult, only the best trackers or magical aid can manage it without crazy plans. The other players will rely on crazy plans.
As successes build up and the target number goes down, they find more and more signs of the monster, and it will be easier to reach it.
Getting successes will be difficult in the beginning, but once they get close, the successes will be rolling in all the time. Hot trail, they're very close, a good roll from any player will bring them closer.
If it goes long enough, the target number will go negative and every roll will be a success... at that points, it's just a matter of time that the monster is caught.


To catch the monster, they need to exceed the target number by a big value. I haven't done the math yet, but something like exceeding the target number by 15 means they know exactly where the monster is and it can't hide and it doesn't have a fast route to run away. This might be a 3-striker. There will be 3 "distance" baubles on the table, and each represents the monster having enough time and strength to get away before the mob catches it. It prevents one lucky roll from ending the chase instantly, but once the target number is low enough, it's not that difficult to catch it any more.


There's also another thing I'm considering that will complicate matters.
There will be a time limit too.
The monster has a chance to escape.
The monster can actively work against the mob.
The monster will be be played by one of the players


Here's some more information for those who aren't just interested about the mechanics:

This will be a story-based game based on Ars Magica, but playing the rules rather loosely. I've got some background in game design and game mechanics, and while I adore the world and some of the rules of Ars Magica, I think the story and the making the players feel comfortable is more important than blindly following the rules.

The monster is a magical wolf with supernatural abilities. In its prime, it would've been a step down from the giant wolves of the Ghibli movie Princess Mononoke - it's something like a king of wolves, noticeably bigger than the others, it can command wolves and has some magic related to finding prey or hunting. The wolf is wounded and one of its legs is both unusable and unrecoverable by any means available to it. This has forced it to hunt prey humans find unacceptable.

The mob is a group of villagers angry at the wolf. They're peasants and hunters armed with spears and bows, they have dogs to track the wolf, and they're moving in a group that's too big to fight. The player characters will be, in true Ars Magica fashion, of wildly varying power levels. Some will be the leaders of the mob, but ordinary peasants otherwise. There will be a powerful wizard and his companions and servants, who could be anything from knights to witches to monster-hunters to a crazy hermit who thinks they're dealing with a fairy.

endoperez
2013-09-01, 05:42 AM
2. How to encourage roleplaying during the chase
As I said, I don't want this to be just rolling the dice all the time. I need to come up with something that gives the players a cause to talk to each other in-character.

I can't enforce things such as "you've made 5 rolls, now roleplay for 10 minutes". I want it to be encouraged by the rules they're playing by. This will possibly tie in to the risk of the monster getting away - there's a time limit of some sort. For example, the mob only has a set amount of food for this trip before they have to turn back. Let's assume that they have a week or two, that's 7 to 14 days, and there are about 4 players in the mob. One will be a tracker, one will be the mob-leader, one can use magic, the fourth might have a special ability or skill or specialty as well.

Each day, each character can only roll for tracking or related activities once. Only one or two players will have a chance of tracking the cold trails the players start with. If the rest want to be useful, they need to come up with a crazy idea or a plan. There's a big problem with this - they might not come up with a plan! I made that mistake the last time. The players spent a few hours coming up with things I, having more knowledge about things I hadn't revealed, thought were crazy and bad and wouldn't work.

To encourage them to come up with plans, I'll accept anything they come up with and it gives them a bonus to their roll. If I like the idea, it will be a big bonus.
To represent the plans and how much I like them, I think I'd use some sort of a physical item. A blue card for a plan I don't like (it still gets the bonus and might work), a red card for a good plan with risks, a yellow (gold) card for a good plan without risks. Each plan can only be used once. Each plan takes one day's time-slot for one player.

Risky plans would come with a downside - hunt for food to have more time, but the monster has time to run away, separate the party (can it ever end well?), talk to the fairies (besides being a risk on its own, they might also decide to help the monster), etc.

Do you think this will be enough?
Will this encourage the players to roleplay, or just to talk to each other? Is it bad if the players just talk and plan and have a good time?
What can I do if someone doesn't come up with anything or feels left out?



3. What Ifs.
How could things go wrong? What should I look out for?

Players might not come up with any ideas.
* I could make a deck of cards for random things that can happen, so that if someone doesn't come up with anything he can take a card instead. I think people would be intrigued by the mystery cards and would prefer to pick them instead of coming up with their own plans.

* I could also come up with an NPC who arrives to talk with the players and helps them out. A hermit, a traveling bard, or maybe a mystical creature of some sort. He only appears if the players don't seem to have a good time on their own, or can't come up with ideas. How do I avoid this becoming "Gandalf the White the GMPC saves the day"?

What if the players talk too much?
* There's a chance that the players will keep arguing and arguing and arguing about plans for Day 2 for several hours, because they only have 1 gold card, 1 red and 100 blues. They want to have 3 gold cards. At some point, I will just have to say that this is taking too much time in-game, and they have to decide on something right now.

What if the session drags for too long?
I want to play the moment where the mob catches the monster. I'll get myself a clock and keep an eye on it, and hurry up the players if things take too long. If the players have fun and the time runs out, I can make it a two-parter and continue the next week.

What will I do if the players roll godlike rolls from the very first moment and the chase takes no time at all?
Well, it's a possibility. The mob is supposed to have a good chance of catching the monster though, and that will hopefully be an interesting encounter as well. It might make the session to be a bit shorter than intended, but if I manage to play up the chase as something difficult and it's a single character who breezes through it, that player should feel awesome. The mob will be worshipping the ground he walks on, he'll be a local hero, fairy lords will send him gifts, the character will get Reputation (Ars Magica mechanic that basically lets people find you with skills equivalent to D&D's Knowledge: Local/History/Nobility etc) and so on.

What if the players fail?
There is a chance that the players will fail to catch the monster. That is a possibility. The monster gets away. How can I play this out so that the players still find it interesting? I could give them a second try, probably at a different session. That way, they can spend a week or so coming up with new plans, better plans.


Any other ideas?

Fosco the Swift
2013-09-01, 08:20 AM
For your what-ifs part, what kind of players are in your campaign? Experienced? Average? Noobs? If its one of the first two, then how do your game sessions usually go? Does alot in the storyline get finished, or does your group talk, sit around and crack jokes? Do they walk into a room with a kick-the-door-down style, or plan and ready themslves before taking on a foe. Answering these questions will give you a pretty good idea on what you should be expecting.

For example, if your players are new to the game you should expect them to have diffiulty coming up with a good plan and you might have to expect a GmPc to jump in to help out if you don't want them to fail.

If your players sit around cracking jokes, then you should expect the chase to go past how long you have.

The idea looks pretty cool so keep working at it.

endoperez
2013-09-01, 10:41 AM
This will be a new group, and it's likely that at least some of these people won't have spoken to each other before the game, and that some of them likely won't have played RPGs before. New school year is starting and there are lots of new students. I might even run this twice if there are enough interested people, depending on how it goes.

Fosco the Swift
2013-09-01, 11:06 AM
So does this new group consist of people new to the GAME? Do you have any idea what these people are like? All you really need is one PC that everyone else will listen to. Haveing a leader in the party who has good ideas will easily make the chase lots of fun, otherwise it might turn into choas and go nowhere.

endoperez
2013-09-01, 12:09 PM
So does this new group consist of people new to the GAME? Do you have any idea what these people are like? All you really need is one PC that everyone else will listen to. Haveing a leader in the party who has good ideas will easily make the chase lots of fun, otherwise it might turn into choas and go nowhere.

Ars Magica isn't well known and it has some rare concepts and mechanics (wildly varying power levels, players can control NPCs too), so there will be people new to it all.

I haven't met the whole group yet (I know some people who are interested, but I won't meet the new guys until tomorrow), but that is very good advice. I was going to give some of the hunters conflicting goals (kill vs capture the beast), but now I think I'll wait until I know more about the players and perhaps abandon that idea if they don't have much experience with RPGs.

There are two characters who could easily end up in a leading role, but one of them, the wizard, would prefer to not be revealed as a magician. I'll ask the more experienced players to play those and to try to keep things moving. If the other one can't get the story moving, then the wizard can step in and impress the peasants with magic, or something. That's a funny thing about ArsM, the wizard can basically fill the role of a DMPC.

endoperez
2013-09-02, 12:12 PM
I've decided to run the monster myself, as the DM, at least for the first run. I'll ask the hunter-players after the game if they would be interested in playing as the wolf in a different session, if there ever is one.

Fosco the Swift
2013-09-02, 04:07 PM
All sounds good to me. You might need new mechanics for the PC's getting chased. I'd love to help if you need it for that. Have fun.

elliott20
2013-09-03, 12:40 PM
re: the mob itself

you said that the mob is of a diverse group. In that case, I would action try to make some distinctions between the people in the group, if only for the purpose of making it a bit more interesting.

I would basically split it into two major categories: the groups that has a chance of catching the monster, and the groups that are basically there for window dressing when the monster is caught.

You really only need to do this if the mob all have their own agendas and own methods of tracking the monster. If it's just a bunch of people chasing after the monster in unison, then it's okay to treat them as one group.

But if NOT, IF you have a different groups working at different paces, then the interplay between these groups can ALSO be a great source for roleplaying.

i.e.
the wizard group wants to capture it, examine it, and then do all sorts of magical experiments on it,
the nature loving group (maybe headed by a druid) wants to find it, heal it, and help it get away
the local regent just wants to remove it from the area because it's causing everyone to freak out, and don't quite care how that happens (kill it, chase it off, doesn't matter)

Each group moves at different paces. Using your system, they might get different roll bonuses for their plans. To make this simple though, just let them have one consistent plan at all times just so it's easier to follow. (Unless somebody interferes and throws it off course... *coughplayerscough*)

as for the mechanics themselves, I like the fact that your system has moving band, but the risk of it being over too quickly, depending upon your players crunch-fu, can be very real, as you have said.

I think the best way to handle this is to make the distance between monster and chaser itself variable. Maybe treat the distance more like a hit points, and anything that makes it more difficult like a cold trail, difficult terrain, etc, act as AC. (Or to map it to the skills, AC is the task DC) At 0, they have not just located, but have actually managed to visually see the beast.

anything the players go over the DC takes it from the HP. The monster itself can probably take actions to increase the HP (signify it putting more distance between itself and the players / mobs), enhance the DC task (masking scents, using distractions), or healing itself. (gives him better results when putting more distance between him and pursuers)

If either the HP or the DC check gets too high, the chase is over. (either the beast has just gotten too far to be chased, or the DC is too high that it is now distracting the pursuers)

Add another mechanic where the actual HP also impacts the bonus roll and you have a good start here. (i.e. between 20-30, +1, 10-20, +2, and so on)

A GREAT one to have is to show the wolf's political savvyness by having it plant a trap that puts the groups at odds with each other and turn on each other, thereby consuming more actions.

I think it would be good if each group has it's own tracking HP, so you can track all of the groups progress. If two groups HP are close enough, they'll run into each other.

Not sure if you like all of this or not, but that's how I would approach it.

endoperez
2013-09-03, 02:47 PM
Multiple groups is an interesting idea, and it's actually a possibility that I hadn't considered at all. It might even come up organically during the play. Thanks a lot for the warning, that never even crossed my mind.

I won't be able to use HP or AC as those are D&D terms. The current system is pretty much the Ars Magica damage system, with some simplifications. Wounds and exhaustion hamper your rolls and it all adds up; that's the target number going down. Life-threatening disabling wounds, KO and death come when you exceed the target number by a lot - that's the capture here, pretty much. I'll check the rules for armor and shields in ArsM, there might be something in there I can use.

The actions I'm giving to the wolf include the following. It can do one of these after each "hunting day", i.e. after all the players have taken one action:
*resting or using restorative magic (target number is increased by a little)
*using tricks to mask its trail (target number goes up a lot, but only temporarily)
*using illusions and/or animal control to trick the mob into following a different wolf (hard to pull off, but if it succeeds the wolf gains lots of distance and TN goes way up)
*commanding other wolves to attack the players or to distract them
* hide in a magical area invisible to normal eyes, but with only one exit. The target number goes up a bit and finding it requires a bigger difference, but it can't run any more and the TN can't go up. It gives it an extra day or two, at most, and the players will know there's something magical in that area.


It's a oneshot and I have lots of control over the characters, so crunch won't be that big of an issue. It's basically good as long as they have only one good hunter. I'll be in trouble if more than one player wants to be a hunter, I'll have to think about what to do in that case.


It would be perfect if there was a bit of drama between the player characters as they're getting close to the wolf. Maybe it can somehow reveal something someone wanted to keep a secret, or something. That sort of a political savvyness would work quite well, I think. It would also establish the wolf's personality before the players reach it.