Bad Game Last Night, New Game In One Month
Last night I ran Hack-N-Slash and the game was awful. The combat was incredibly complex for what should have been a simple encounter. The magic system fell flat as well, and overall the players were not happy. The session just did not click, and despite my friends and I trying our best to make the game work we all agreed that the system was not for us.
I do not know if it was the rules as written, a misinterpretation of the rules by myself as the game master, or if the character builds were just better suited to a different type of encounter. The player feedback put the blame on the rules, but I did ask the players to tell me what rules they did like despite the game being a stinker. This is what the players liked the most about the mechanics:
- Improvement through extreme success and failure. Hack-N-Slash has a rule that whenever a player rolls either four negatives or four positives that the character may improve in the skill that was used. The player rolls the dice again for an unopposed check against the same skill at that skill’s current rank. If the result is equal to or higher than the current rank the character improves the skill by one rank.
- Combatants may evade an adjacent opponent by winning an opposed trait check. We allowed for the character to follow an evasion with a move action, but the character could not attack following an evasion attempt.
- Simultaneous combat where both opponents used one roll to defend and attack with. The players did not like how complex it was to determine the results for this purpose, but the majority did like the spirit of the rules and the results were interesting.
Despite last night’s game not being my best Fudge event ever (more like one of the worst) I am glad that we played Hack-N-Slash and experienced these rules. I am going to work on my own rules for these aspects of a RPG for SinisterForces to see if I can achieve similar effects.
We will not play Fudge again for another month, so I hope to have some better material ready for the next game night. I might run Fudge for a different group this coming Saturday though, and I would love to have any new rules ready for that game.
One last thought – the feedback I got from my group last night was excellent. It is something about this hobby that I love: You can have a bad game but still have a good time hanging out with your friends. I am very lucky to have great players who understand that not every game will be the best, but that every session can still be fun.
There are cooler things between the covers than I’d thought from the name Hack-N-Slash… I’m ripping off the bullet points shamelessly.
I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened, however:
–combat can be as simple as the GM & players want it to be. It can be a complex as the GM & players want it to be. I like some crunch, but not huge amounts. I know a number of players that like lots of crunch and line-of-sight and other things that make me cringe whenever I hear “attack” and “opportunity” in the same sentence. And that’s fine… except when you want one and get the other. I don’t have a good solution for that – yet.
–magic systems tend to fall flat in play because people are used to the magic systems they’re used to. And that’s fine as well… as long as the game designer is on the same page. I’m working on having ways of having a persona-based magic system for The New Project: basically the caster decides how they model magic – and sticks with it/is stuck with it. However, it means that if they find magical goodies that don’t fit their model, they’re mildly hosed unless they start taking levels in Different Model… at the expense of all other character advancement bits. I’m not sure how it will play long-term, but it seems to have decent legs with the AI testing.
–the simultaneous combat complexity issue sounds like it might have been a fluency with the stats rather than something inherent in the system. Again, not there to witness it… but it sounds likely from what I’ve seen of H-n-S. There might be other ways of handling it – I’m working on a card mechanic for narrative rights for conflict phases/turns that depends on value and suit – so… I’d not throw the bathwater out yet, much less any babies in it.
And yeah – the whole point is to have fun. Can’t be a bad night if you had fun…
We were playing Hack-N-Slash to test it out compared to how I normally run Fudge. I’m running lots of Fudge games published by others to find out what works and what doesn’t.
I like Hack-N-Slash when I read it, and I have played it but now realize that the GM must have changed some of the rules. I re-read the rules again and I was running the game correctly. It just did not play as well as I had hoped it would have for this group. Others might find it very fun, and I still recommend that Fudge GMs pick up a copy as a resource. The PDF is cheap, and it has some great content beyond just the game (spells, monsters, etc.).
To address your three points:
Combat: We all felt that the system was trying to be both cinematic and realistic. It was too crunchy to feel cinematic though, and at the same time it was not very realistic for all of the crunch involved.
Magic: The system fell flat because it had a very high failure rate. The players were experienced with many systems, and the system just was not fun. Magic was not worth the trouble, and we all felt that only the tank fighter type was able to play well with the rest of the game world. Thieves, rangers, and other type suffered the same problem.
Simultaneous Combat: The group was mixed on this one on some points, but we all liked the attempt and I am very interested in how I might improve upon this. I like the concept that combatants can both be injured during the same action.
I really need to work harder on my own system though, so I cannot give Hack-N-Slash too much grief. It is a published game, and mine is just a dream until I complete it.