Episode 83: Sub-Standard Crocodiles

[RogerBW]

This month, Mike and Roger consider the phenomenon of the Adventurers’ Guild, start a Monster Hunters campaign, and look at what goes wrong with combat.

We mentioned the Betamax judgment, GURPS Banestorm, Numenera, Monster Hunters series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost Girl, Sleepy Hollow, Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey, and Dragon Warriors.

Here’s our tip jar.

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

[Agemegos]

“Hard to Kill”, good. “Hard to Subdue”, bad. Doesn’t make you tough, makes you dead.

[Agemegos]

I took up discussion of the battle mapping issue in a dedicated thread:

You have the right to a hex-grid…

Back in the late 1980s my friends and I played a lot of ForeSight, which is a SF/GP RPG with a detailed combat system regulated by turns and a grid. We were most of us living and running our games in college rooms (dorms) or shared digs and family homes where we were lucky to get the lounge room and seldom had the luxury of a dining table. What with one thing and another it always seemed like more trouble than it was worth to break out the hex grids, dry-erase markers, and tokens for what was li…

[Phil_Masters]

I cobbled together some notes on a Monster-Slayers’ Guild many years ago, more as a post hoc justification than as a serious attempt at sociological speculation. The article that came out of it is available online (for free) here or here.

[DrBob]

The older and more curmudgeonly I get, the more I like the Cortex+ combat system, where:

1. The players decide the initiative order, with the only caveats that everyone (including the bad guys) has to get a go, and whoever goes last in this turn decides who goes first in the next one. (So leaving the bad guys until last is not tactically sound).
2. You can spend plot points to avoid being “taken out” of the fight.
3. Even with the spending of plot points, the fights are really short.

What stopped me using hex battle-maps and miniatures was the change of venue for my regular games. We went from the large tables in a well lit room (student union) to small, wobbly tables in an ‘atmospherically’ lit (translation: dim) pub. Too many miniatures got knocked off tables, and there was no room for a decent sized battlemat.