From that time forward, he was known as Sartak the Mighty Goblin and became the leader of the group. The human and elf, properly cowed by their failures, agreed to follow the goblin and went along with him.

Despite the success of the group and the need to get past the door, as a GM, this rubbed me a little bit the wrong way. If the big burly fighter couldn’t crack the door, then why would anyone think the weaker, smaller goblin wizard could accomplish the feat? I’ve seen this a great number of times in many different role playing situations. How do you, as GMs, put a stop to this kind of dice rolling behavior? Any advice other than to flat out stop the weaker characters from even attempting the die roll?

We we broke out the notepads, pencils and dice we found quite a few flaws with the system. The list is really too long to go into here, but I’ll share the most hilarious one with you.

Some setup: There are hit locations in the system, and we decided that each location would have its own hit points to reflect the fact that an arm could be disabled before a person goes down for the count. We also decided that we didn’t want people to track overall HP along with locational HP. It just seemed too cumbersome. All good thoughts, but the end-result was, well, flawed. Any experienced gamer out there will see the problems right away, but we were too close to the project to notice.

The end result was a system in which a character could have their arms and legs cut off without suffering any form of death. Only if the torso or head were destroyed could someone die. Yeah. Not quite right. We didn’t give up, though. We went back to the drawing board and revamped the system to keep the hit locations, but make HP work more logically. In the end, we came up with a decent system that we actually played for about a year.

I’ve recently revisited the system on my own and totally rewritten it with a new method of approaching the dice rolls. I’ve put lots of time and math into the game to make sure it’s fair and balanced, and I think it’s a good one. I hope to get my current group into the game in the near future to see what they think of it.

The players around the table actually got so concerned for me that they broke character and asked me if I was doing OK and used my real name in the process. It took me a few moments, but I snapped out of the broken and battered head of the boy and managed to compose myself. It was at that point that the players realized how powerful and evil the Baali were. They prepared extra carefully and applied additional caution when attacking the evil cultists on their home turf. Because of my method acting, I feel they were much better prepared for the encounters and, therefore, had a greater level of success against the Bad Guys than they would have otherwise.

It was also a great deal of fun to scare the bajeezus out of the players sitting around the table.

It lead to the end of the campaign through a TPK (total party kill). All my fault, too.

What happened was the terrorists in the source book were geared towards demolitions, combat and stealth and not much else. The Orion spies were equally potent, if not more so, but they had spread their skill selections out across things like driving, flying, diplomacy, carousing, stealth, B&E, combat and a multitude of other things. While the PCs were very powerful spies, they just didn’t have what it took to take out the Bad Guys that were solely built for killing people.

I’m still very happy to own the book (I actually own every book published for Top Secret S/I), but I wish I had saved it for a different campaign with different characters that were intentionally built to be the combat specialists required to do counter terrorism in the modern age. To the GMs out there, learn from my mistake. Just because you bought a book, you don’t have to whip it out midstream in a campaign and incorporate elements into the current game. Sure, you can do that, but do it with more intelligence than what I used back in my youth.

My message to all players and GMs out there: work with each other.

As a GM allow your players to have fun with their characters, but don’t let a player use his character to overshadow everyone else. That drains the fun out of the game for the rest of the group, and this is a group effort after all.

As a player, ask for what will make your character more fun to play, but don’t try to steal the spotlight from everyone else. Yes, a character needs to shine, but he needs to do so alongside everyone else. If you come up with a great idea, try to ask for it in a manner that will not force the GM to say no, but don’t corner the GM and force him to say yes either.

I’m still trying to puzzle out why the game took so damn long. We didn’t dally or waste time. There were no length breaks taken. I really don’t know what happened. Yes, we had two people at the table that had never played, and the other three of us around the table had played before, but not for some time. However, Talisman is such a simple game that it only takes a few minutes to get the flow of things. I was hoping to get in at least two, if not three, games that night, but it wasn’t in the cards.

Congrats to Nat for a game well played and for the solid win. Only two of us made it to the Inner Realm (Bill being the other one) and he didn’t make it very far before getting lost in the Mines and ending back up in the Tavern. I tried the Portal of Power several times and failed every single time. Ugh. Of course, my attempts were rushed in a desperate attempt to try and get to Nat before she finished us all off with the Crown of Command. I didn’t quite have the Strength or Craft to manage the Inner Realm, but I was going to try and get lucky. Of course… I didn’t and she won with ease.

I hope to get back into a steady Pathfinder game next week. Don’t get me wrong. I love board games, but I would much prefer some good old role playing to board/card/dice games any day of the week.

Midnight was the master of wielding two long swords and rampage through enemies with wild and reckless abandon. Today, I would play him much differently, but this was in my youth (high school days for me) and I was also wild and reckless at the time.

One of my greatest conquests was fighting off three wraiths single handed at level six. I had in my hands two +1 long swords. Everyone else in the group had around +2 (or maybe a +3) weapons, but since I had two magical weapons, I had to settle with the “paltry” +1 bonuses they gave. If you recall wraiths from AD&D 2e, they had two attacks and each one could drain a level. This meant I was facing six attacks and each one could drop me a level. Since I was 6th level, I could have easily been turned into a wraith in a single round. Ouch.

The reason I charged in and took on all three wraiths was that they and their masters were holding the local druid enclave prisoner. We had to rescue them to allow them to stop a horrible plague that was tearing across the lands. No druids meant no cure. No cure meant thousands of untold deaths in our area. I knew that I had to get in there and save the druids, so that’s what I set out to do. When we got to the opening of the large cave complex that the druids took refuge in, we found the three wraiths. Everyone else held back because they didn’t want to lose their precious levels. I charged in because that was the thing to do with this character. Once I downed a single wraith, the rest of the group snapped to and charged into the fight at my side to help me out.

We all came out unscathed… at least from the initial encounter. The rest of the venture into the cave complex didn’t run as smoothly because of some ill-timed turn undead attempts by our clerics.

To this day, I don’t know if Sam pulled his punches and allowed me to be the hero of the moment, of if his dice truly failed him at that critical moment and allowed me, and the rest of my group, to escape the dangerous fight without a loss of level. I’d like to think the dice fell where they wanted to, and we all just got a little lucky against the wraiths.

I ended up making a Dwarven artifcer who turned into an adventurer with his final lifepath choice. I ended up with more resources than anyone else, but I spent most of my resources on a place to live and a business to own. Had we been playing a campaign, I think it would have been a wise choice because I ended up with three dice on my resource check. That’s pretty good for a starting character from what I’ve read about that game. However, since we were running a one-shot combat to see how things would flow, I should have gone with my original plan of Dwarven Mail, Dwarven Axe and a shield. I think I would have been better served by those items than a store and hovel that I would never use. Ah well, such is life.

The first few rounds of combat went really slowly as we looked up rules, figured out the system and moved through the fight. By the end of the night, things were moving much more smoothly. Of course, my character was knocked out by the Medusa, so I, as the player, had tons of free time to look up rules and peruse the books on hand. This helped speed things up quite a bit.

I think in the end, the Burning Wheel system is usable, and we may play a campaign using the system some time in the future. I have to say that I’ll probably never play an archer, unless I can find a way to max out my Speed attribute. The actions for nocking an arrow, drawing the bow and (optionally) aiming a shot before releasing the arrow seem a little harsh to me. Then again, each action is a second long. Most people are used to the 6 or 10 second-long rounds (or 3.2 if you’re playing Cyberpunk) which makes for a different mind-set of combat.

I don’t like 1 second action increments (even in GURPS, which is one of my favorite games!) because of the play impact it has. If someone has a “extraordinarily long” action that takes 3-4 seconds, the player is sitting for 3-4 go-arounds the table while everyone else takes an action. I suppose that if everyone had long actions, then it would even out, but that never happens. There’s always that guy that manages to take an action every round. If rounds are done in 10 second increments (my favorite method) then “long” actions that take 3-4 seconds can actually be done twice a round. This allows for a player to do 2 things per go-around the table, which is much more player friendly.

My character is an Elven Druid named Tallinhaldorian Milladorius (Tallin for short). I like the name. It’s sufficiently long to make Ed Greenwood proud. I had quite a bit of fun with my eight move, my powers and my abilities while wild shaped. It’s going to be a good campaign, and I can’t wait to get into the meat of things.

We were exploring a cave system full of elementals, demons, cultists and these strange ant-like creatures. I forget the name of the creatures now, but Pomek was having a rough time hitting the various Bad Guys in the cavern. He came to call it the Cursed Cavern because of this. As a player, I knew it was simply bad die rolling and I knew my luck would eventually turn for the better.

It did.

When we first encountered the ant-creatures, I was taking up the rear guard. The rest of the party charged into combat against the Bad Guys after they had thrown some stone spears in our general direction. I had quite a bit of distance to cover to enter combat, so I pulled out my extra monk movement and charged. I managed to, in addition to the charge, hit for critical damage and destroyed the thing I had hit. It was a glorious moment for Pomek. The rest of the fight went just the same way. I rolled 19s and 20s for my to hit rolls and managed to roll out near max damage for each strike. I unleashed my Flurry of Blows time and time again and hit with them all. The fight was very brief and in the end, I had killed 90% of the Bad Guys all on my own.

It was wonderful. It was exhilarating. It was a great time!

We ran into more of the ant-creatures in the Cursed Cavern, and my dice remained hotter than ever. I flew right through them, and we started making running jokes that my thunderous blows would tear right through anything with a chitinous covering. I really wanted to make my way to a sea short and track down some mutated, gigantic crabs and lobsters to make a living as a fisherman.

The moral of the story: When your dice are sucking for you, just stick it out. Eventually, they will turn in your favor and make for a great story.