Of course when it comes right down to it, the best sessions are when the battles are incredibly horrible and savage. When there is only 1 player character left, he has 1 hit point, and all the others are unconscious from battle wounds, but the enemy is dead, horribly.
I remember one battle like that from our Aquila (Brown Trousers) C&C game. It was near the end (session 26) and Andrew was DMing. It was a hideous battle, but my character Thunderic used every last ounce of his mojo and killed the demon leader with a critical hit. While the campaign itself had left its tracks by that time, it was a damned fine battle.
The Slipstream adventure I GMed for Marlon, Bob and Jason was pretty much the same thing. Jason was left standing alone after defeating the dreaded batmen of space, with all the other guys wounded and bloody. That was freaking awesome.
The viking assaults on Smerkenberg were pretty cool too, lots of NPC's to die on both sides, and some really savage beatings taking place.
I think the thing I've got to keep in mind if I want sessions like that is to keep AC inflation strictly under control. I've set things up so that there are a lot of hit points, but need to keep it so that even schmucks can at least hit the heroes 10% of the time. I remember that in the Conan game, once the players got heavy armor, it sucked a lot of the fun out of it. Suddenly, only guys using great swords or bardiches had any chance of hitting the PC's and so there was less risk and danger. A similar thing happened with Knights of Orion when Marlon's guy's armor/toughness got too high. To hit him, the bad guys needed weaponry that would instantly obliterate anyone else. Keeping long-term balance in mind is more important for armor/protection more than anything other items.
If you look at the AD&D 1e combat tables, you'll see that "20" is repeated 6 times. It is not a strict progression, like in 3e, 4e or even OD&D. There is an optional rule that says that every 20 above the first is a "natural 20". But, I don't think I'll use that rule (most people do indeed use it). Anything that increases the number of hits on both sides, the better. Suffer, bleed for your gold!
As a player, I've always enjoyed the battles where I (or another player, or even the DM) do something that is so outside the box in a fight that it literally leaves the entire group speechless. Whether it be something like Bob killing Noviodunum, Dave doing a kamakazi on the bridge of a much bigger ship, or a game of warhammer RPG I ran where the players encountered the beastie from the movie The Thing (ogres and orcs, no problem...a horse suddenly growing a mouth out of it's stomach and biting a man in half, they freaked).
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I've never had much experience being the last man standing. My characters (with the exception of that one game Dave refers to here) always either die horribly (fighting giants with a rapier) or are never even close to losing.
You know, now that I think about it, I find myself thinking of 'chucking' myself concerning the repeating 20 that Dave is talking about here. I just recalled a game years ago where we were fighting a white dragon. The players were completely overmatched, but one wizard had a wand of skeleton summoning. He spent round after round after round summoning skeletons through the wand, and sending them after the dragon. We always played it as a natural 20 always hitting. It ended up that's what took the dragon down was several dozen of these skeletons crawling all over the dragon, slowly tearing it to pieces one natural 20 at a time even though they needed something like a 22 or so to actually hit it. So what Dave is talking about actually kind of makes more sense.
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