Death Spiral and Multiple Opponent Penalties

From: SARAH <sarah.newton5_at_...>
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:30:04 -0000


Hi everyone,

We've just played our third session of HQ2 today, and are having a blast. The party stumbled into the Cinder Pits on the Starfire Ridges in the dead of night (travelling from Irnar's Peak into Colymar Lands to warn Gringle!), and encountered two of the fire demons bound there. Vigorous combat ensued, including judicious running away, the "killing" of one of the demons, and the defeat and driving away of the other.

We're using the Death Spiral rules for physical conflicts, as I like combat to be very hazardous. Today we had an interesting situation when combining the Death Spiral rules with the Multiple Opponent rules. I thought I'd post about it - it's not a question as such, just an observation of how I think the rules are meant to work, and if anyone has any comments :-)

We had a foe with a resistance of 10W - a fire demon with flaming bat wings, fire breath, the whole shebang. There were three PCs attacking it - the first faced the full 10W resistance, the second faced 7W, and the third faced 4W.

Now, when one of the PCs won an exchange with the fire demon, he inflicted RPs as normal, but also, according to the Death Spiral rules, he inflicted the actual damage that victory level would cause. So, for example, PC #1 (facing 10W) achieved a marginal victory, inflicting a Hurt which imposes a -3 penalty, as well as the 1 RP. So, the resistance he was facing was reduced from 10W to 7W next round.

I then wondered how this would affect the resistance faced by PCs #2 and #3. I decided that the "Hurt" result was something which would affect the fire demon against *all* the opponents it faced (unlike RPs, which apply only to the single opponent in that exchange). As a result, PC #2 now faced 4W, and PC #3 faced 1W.

This seemed to work well (although the bookkeeping was a bit active!), and made "ganging up" actually feel very effective, rather than being three separate unrelated combats which not using the Death Spiral rules would mean.

As a side note, when PC #3 actually struck the fatal blow (getting to 5RP in his own conflict with the fire demon, who by that time had been reduced to 11 resistance due to the Death Spiral), I only awarded him the lingering benefit from the contest ("Eagle Eye Arrow Shot +6") - it seemed fair to only give the *actual* finisher of the contest the lingering benefit. Maybe I was being stingy, but it felt right.

That's it! I'm enjoying learning the rules - we're using lots of Serial Contests (often a Simple Contest such as Ambush, Detect Ambush, Try and Avoid the Fire Demons (!), followed by an Extended Contest (Fight!)), and the contest resolution is working fine. The Pass-Fail cycle is still my default way of setting resistances, although in today's session I gave the Fire Demons a base resistance of "Very Hard", meaning they were +9 above the default 15 session resistance, ie 4W. In combat, I then modified that 4W according to the pass-fail modifier of each combatant - so if Hrothgar the Bull, our resident Storm Bull maniac, had 2 victories in his pass-fail chart, he was facing a +6 resistance in combat on the fire demon's 4W, and not on the default "background" resistance for the session of 15. It made the demons as scary as hell, which was cool :-)

That's it - happy gaming all!

Cheers,

Sarah

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