Warrior's Companion - February 2009

[Hervé]

I don't find Permanent Damage misplaced at all in the game. The mechanics are really easy to use and are not too much incapacitating for the heroes. A nice alternative to traditional D20 endless HP pools (which I personally hate)...

I don't find the skills chapter too entrancing, but you can bet the book offers many other optional rules and combat options to enlighten your games, even for someone like me who is far from being a "D20 loyalist".

This is only a 6 pages preview of a 200 pages or more book, and we should wait until the book is out before making harsh judgements like "this book is not for me!".

As they say, "don't judge a book by its cover" (even if I must admit the cover isn't too much appealing :wink: )...

 

[Evil_Trevor]

Ohhhhh,

I thought when it said Warriors companion, it would be a book about Thieves and Temptresses, who are always hanging around warriors.

 

[warzen]

Hmmm. I said it before and I will say it again: Permanent Damage rules are totally misplaced in a Conan game.

I couldn't agree more. Why not also add all the RM critical rules...

I would have prefered that MGP spent its time and money on a more useful product for the Conan line.

W.

 

[MGBM]

Permanent damage can be fun if done correctly.

Example, my campaign of Aces&Eights, a realistic western RPG. Permanent damage is the butter and bread of PCs in that game, from not being able to run or sprint ever in their lives to total mutilation and loss of limbs. Doesn't make the game less fun though, on the contrary.

It all comes to the GM and how he uses the rules. Imagine a warrior with only one arm, with the player deciding to make the PC the best warrior of the land despite having only one arm. The potential for great sessions is there.

Truth be told, I do agree that Howard never really wrote about any character with permanent damage so bad as a lost limb, but it does make the game more interesting for me, then again I view PCs not as heroes but as a person as any other in the world, which is why in my last Conan session I spent 6 hours watching the PCs digging a well for a village. Best part, they all loved the session.

I'm more of the school of thought of making PCs act more like ordinary man and have them make ordinary tasks as any other person. The trick is in making the task a challenge. Because trying to loot the tomb of an Acheronian sorcerer long dead for millennia or digging a well for a thirsty village that agreed to pay them with food and shelter can be equally exciting, especially if in digging the well a fresh corpse is found, potentially tainting the water source, and making the PCs make decisions like leaving the corpse there and end the job quickly, risking the lives of everyone in the village, or trying to remove the corpse and, perhaps, making some past wrongdoing surface.

 

[Clovenhoof]

Yeah, well. I guess that's what they mean by "Your Mileage May Vary". I get to do ordinary tasks in an ordinary world all week long, you might say I'm an ordinary person and that is sad enough. I have absolutely no interest in playing an ordinary character and doing the same ordinary stuff again in my weekly gaming session. As I like to say, I want to play Sword & Sorcery and not Bankers & Bookkeepers.

An adventure hooked on finding a corpse while digging a well is not the problem. But the digging should damn well better be dealt with in a matter of minutes at the gaming table, so we can get to the good parts. Cut to the chase, to put it that way.

 

[warzen]

It all comes to the GM and how he uses the rules. Imagine a warrior with only one arm, with the player deciding to make the PC the best warrior of the land despite having only one arm. The potential for great sessions is there.

Yes, I agree, and some rpgs are including this kind of rules when creating the PC... except the permanent damage rule here is not player deciding to remove one of his arms, it's an additionnal effect of a wound.

W.

 

[Trodax]

This is only a 6 pages preview of a 200 pages or more book, and we should wait until the book is out before making harsh judgements like "this book is not for me!".

You're right; I might have spoken too quickly and too harshly. I guess it was a knee-jerk reaction to the permanent damage thing (which I really do feel is quite unsuited for the type of gaming I think of when I think of Conan). However, it is clearly written up as an optional rule, and I'm quite certain no one will be bending my arm until I use it, so I'm not sure why it upset me so...

...oh, actually I do know; it was a pretty clear-cut case of nerdrage.

I don't find the skills chapter too entrancing, but you can bet the book offers many other optional rules and combat options to enlighten your games, even for someone like me who is far from being a "D20 loyalist".

In contrast to you Hervé, I actually really like the d20 system. Or, rather, I should say, I like how the basis of the system runs. I also think Mongoose has done a great job with a lot of aspects of the Conan system (very flavourful classes and sorcery-rules, for example).
However, I am very much opposed to the idea that *everything* has to be covered by crunchy rules. A "Sharpen" skill, for example? :roll: Definitely don't need that. And I really think the system would become a monstrosity if I tried to use all these "variant skill uses", that all have certain DC's and give various, small bonuses.

That being said, Mongoose has actually been churning out a lot of adventures this last year, which I think is great, so I guess it's "OK" wink if they release one book filled with crunch for those of us fans who like that sort of thing.

...which is why in my last Conan session I spent 6 hours watching the PCs digging a well for a village. Best part, they all loved the session.

:shock: I would actually be interested in hearing how you pulled that off. To me, it sounds utterly boring, but if you all had fun... well, then it must have been fun. Did the players roleplay a lot among themselves, or did you have a bunch of NPC's that they interacted with?
(And I'm really not being snarky here; I'm actually intrigued.)

 

[Demetrio]

Unfortunately much of what is in the preview typifies what is for me wrong with much of d20 - extra rules which may, or may not be interesting in themselves (and generally I think the ones seen thus far in the preview are pretty uninteresting) but add nothing in the way of appropriate flavour.

I mean sharpening... because characters in the Conan stories are forever sharpening their blades aren't they... and even what they've come up with is just odd. A very sharp weapon will cut leather armour, cloth and flesh more easily but will be worse than a blunter weapon against metal armour (unless penentrating a crack via finesse attack). For this mechanic to make any sense, damage should be increased against leather, cloth or flesh and AP decreased against metal. No Conan flavour here.

Permanent damage. I tend to Clovenhoof's pov as regard this for a Conan game (in other settings it might be a very worthwhile concept to introduce). It seems to be implemented okay but the justification for having it in a Conan game seems weak - how many crippled warriors do we encounter in Howard be they heroes or no? If a GM wants it, okay but it adds no Conan flavour to the mechanics, let's be clear on that.

New skill uses I'm all for in principle, especially stuff dependent on having a certain number of ranks. But, for example, 'Fighting Meditation' isn't that sound an introduction for the Hyborian Age though - it's just a 'oh let's have an idea for how a warrior could use the Concentration skill'. And it's an okay idea but it's just not very setting appropriate in my view.

And the combat use for Appraise is just plain daft. okay, you can use your Appraise to tell how good an opponent's weapon is. Fine,. No quibbles. How does that make it easier to break a high quality weapon? You're not identifying weak points, you're assessing it's strength. Again, I can see the idea, give some incentive for combat characters to take Appraise ranks. But there's very little logic to the actual mechanic that's been presented.

And the armour modifications just plain stink. Again, they are concepts that might be okay in some fantasy settings. But quite honestly...Headbutting Blades?

All that creative effort could have been put to better use sorting out the thorny questions concerning weapon damage and sorcery style balance in my opinion.

I hope the actual supplement contains more setting appropriate material than we've seen so far.

 

[MGBM]

It all comes to the GM and how he uses the rules. Imagine a warrior with only one arm, with the player deciding to make the PC the best warrior of the land despite having only one arm. The potential for great sessions is there.

Yes, I agree, and some rpgs are including this kind of rules when creating the PC... except the permanent damage rule here is not player deciding to remove one of his arms, it's an additionnal effect of a wound.

In Aces&Eights when you enter a gunfight at best you'll get a scar. At worst you lose both legs to gangrene, or both arms, or you die in less than 2 minutes of play, like it happened to a player of mine.

A&8s made me like permanent injuries because not only their forced on you in the game because the rules are realistic to the point that if you get a cut you might get infected and die, and the PC won't even know that until the last couple of days, it also opened my mind to the perspectives of what a GM can do when a PC gets permanently maimed. And sure enough, after dealing with a good deal of PCs who got blind, lost legs, arms or worse, I came to realize that a permanent injury is a potential adventure by itself, like anything in a RPG. Though I do agree, to get the most out of this and in order to be fun both for the PC and GM you better have some damn good rules to support this, which is something I'm not seeing in this preview unfortunately. I wish they brought Vincent back, he did manage to adapt D20 to Conan as best as I've seen.

As for ordinary tasks, I approach every session with the mindset of everything can be an adventure, even the most boring stuff. The fact that the PCs decided to leave the corpse, with the consequence that a good deal of the village died horribly while the rest found out the cause and hired a group of mercenaries to track the PCs down, from which the PCs are still running away from, just shows the best axiom all RPGs hold, you can turn and twist anything, no matter how boring, into an exciting adventure.

I do share the opinion that Mongoose should be focusing on other areas for Conan, like regional sourcebooks for instance.

 

[LucaCherstich]

I'm intrigued by stuff like sharpening Skills and Permanent damage rules (which do not look to be too complicated) but, before I can say whether they are good or not I wait until I've tried them in my games.
AND IN ANY CASE, these are optional stuff: you like it, you use it, otherwise not.
I'm fond of regional books (PLEASE!! TURAN!!!, PLEASE, V.Darlage as the author!!) but I find a combat crunch book for Conan something quite logical.

HOWEVER, I do not understand why you all are discussing about rules while THERE IS ANOTHER PROBLEM...

This is only a 6 pages preview of a 200 pages or more book...

Unfortunately this is ONLY a 92-pages book...I hoped for more pages...and I still do not understand why this book costs as much as Secrets of Skelos (£15.00 ) which is 160 pages...

Until a few days ago the book was advertised as a 120 pages book...what happened to those 28 pages???

 

[MGBM]

...which is why in my last Conan session I spent 6 hours watching the PCs digging a well for a village. Best part, they all loved the session.

:shock: I would actually be interested in hearing how you pulled that off. To me, it sounds utterly boring, but if you all had fun... well, then it must have been fun. Did the players roleplay a lot among themselves, or did you have a bunch of NPC's that they interacted with?
(And I'm really not being snarky here; I'm actually intrigued.)

Well, the session went more or less like this. The party was in between travels from Turan to Hyperborea. They had a lot of stuff to do in the travel, like for instance producing rope since nobody thought of bringing it along. So they had to scavenge the countryside for materials to make a strong rope, then make the rope. That was quite an adventure that involved the involuntary consumption of lotus, with not-so-hilarious results following, with the party going at each other throat's, literally.

Anyway, after this episode the party happened to come across a small village, that village. Obviously the village didn't have an inn or tavern or anything and the PCs were quite tired. So they bargained that in exchange for food and shelter they would do some small work. After a nice night of negotiation between the PCs and villagers the party came to the agreement of digging a new well for the village, since the old one was drying out.

First, they had to find the best place to begin digging. Oh boy, a party of mostly soldiers trying to figure out where the water was was quite fun to watch. This alone presented a lot of opportunities for the players to roleplay their PCs in a situation that the PCs were not prepared for nor had any idea of solving the situation. This alone was a whole 6 hour session, the PCs figuring out where the best place to dig for water was. Lots of research was involved from the PCs, lots of talking with villagers and a passing merchant. To add some excitement to this I kinda put a timer to this. The dry well went absolutely dry, and there were no water sources nearby, so the PCs had to find a solution quickly and under pressure. This was enough for a fun session.

Anyway, the next session the PCs had the knowledge and started digging the well. They found the soil to be quite moist as they dug more deeply. In the meantime they found a corpse, already showing signs of severe decomposition. They decided not to tell anyone about the corpse and kept digging, while one of the PCs looted the corpse. Amidst the loot was a silver ring with an Aquilonian phrase that read the name of one of the noble families of Tarantia. Since most of the PCs were Aquilonian, they came to the conclusion this was a noble from one of the most depraved noble families of Tarantia, so they decided not to say anything about that either.

The well was dug and all was fine and dandy, except for the fact that the corpse fell down into the water source without the PCs seeing that, poisoning the water. The PCs left the village the same day the well was dug with a lot of travel food and well rested. Meanwhile, a few days later, the villagers started to get real sick and dying. The survivors found the corpse, thought the PCs had poisoned them on purpose and hired a group of Nemedian deserters to deal with the party, to which the Nemedians agreed with pleasure.

Right now I'm working on the corpse's history and what it may mean for the party once word comes around to the noble family that their brethren was found dead in a remote village and that a party of soldiers, the PCs, was somehow involved with it.

The party had a fight with the Nemedians, which resulted in a broken leg for one of the PCs. Now the group is trying to figure out how to heal the leg or if they should leave the PC behind.

 

[Ichabod]

The point of a preview is marketing.

The marketing of this book seems entirely towards people who want more crunch. That could be because the book is just crunch. Or, it could be because that's the best audience for sales.

I don't seem to get marketing when it applies to hobby gaming, so I don't care that much which it is and am not suggesting anyone avoid buying it before they see it.

It's just being marketed as something I would think would only be of interest to a suboptimal portion of the playerbase, which seems notable.

 

[Vambelte]

About permanent damage, I've introduced it in my campaing, about a year ago, when we faced a intriguing situation. The players were fighting some archers, and it turned out that I had just one player standing, a bandit, against 2 archers. I rolled to attack and I got a crit on the bandit, the damage would put him down, and beeing the last one up, it would mean the end of the game. So I said to the player, if you want, you can spend a fate point and I'll let you standing whit 1hp, but you will face a permanent drawback. He took the chance to win, and the critical turned to be a arrow straigh in his right eye. He lost one eye, but won the fight and saved the whole game. This same carachter also lost his left arm, but that's another history...

Another case of permanent damage accured, again, in a intricate situation. A soldier from the group was pregnant, of 3 to 4 months, and they got attacked by stygian assassins. It ended up that the poisoned blade, of the assassin, killed the pregnant soldier, and she was without fates points, so that would be the end of her character. But I gave her a chance to be left for dead, if she lived whit a drawback. I imposed a heavy penalty, -3 to Fort saves, because her body never recovered, fully, of the combination of the strong blow, the poison and the baby, that had to be removed.

 

[Trodax]

/snip/

Thanks for the writeup; quite nice.
I must say this sounds very, very different from the sessions I run, especially with Conan. To get so many hours of fun gaming out of mundane tasks such as digging a well and making a rope is something I'm sure I could never pull off. You are probably much better at engaging your players than I am.

 

[Magister_Ordo_Lyrae]

Hmmm. I said it before and I will say it again: Permanent Damage rules are totally misplaced in a Conan game. I find it funny that the flowtext says something about putting the grittiness of REH combat into the game. I can't remember a single instance of any character in a REH Conan story being crippled and live. Least of all the hero. When last I looked, Conan didn't have a pegleg and an eyepatch.
In the RPG, the PCs are the heroes. There's absolutely no call to force some kind of permanent damage handicaps on the players. If a player decides he wants his Barbarian to be scarred, he will say so himself. If a player for some off reason wants to play a crippled character, he will do so. For NPCs, these rules are totally moot, as nobody at the gaming table cares about what kind of maimings any mooks that for some reason survive their encounter with the PCs carry from the battlefield.

I agree emphatically, in fact in the sword & sorcery genre it seems the axiom "that which does not kill you makes you stronger" is something of a constant truth. In the literature Conan takes considerable punishment at the hands of his enemies (crucifixion, torture, beatings, wounded almost to the point of death, etc.) however Conan is never permanently harmed by this. In fact as the conan stories progress Conan only becomes stronger, faster, smarter and wiser. His only evidence of this physical punishment is a large collection of minor scars. Conan is never permanently crippled in any way. Certainly there are times when Conan is pushed to his very limits and sometimes beyond but he always recovers fully, even if it takes a couple of weeks of recuperation.

It also seems permanent damage in some ways is too "realistic" and anti-heroic. Once again heroes only gain strength from suffering; it forces them to overcome the suffering. Heroes do not degrade in sword & sorcery. They are on an upward trajectory even if there are setbacks that they must overcome. This is why there are fate points, to allow characters to survive even when they should be dead or suffer wounds that would cripple a lesser man. Certainly sword & sorcery can be gritty and brutal, but to confuse or conflate "realistic" grittiness with "heroic" grittiness is a mistake. Heroes can be pushed to their physical or mental limits and are even sometimes required to draw on hidden reserves pushing them beyond those limits, but they are never truly broken. Even when Conan is in his direst straits he is never defeated, he always finds a way to escape or recover. In other words permanent afflictions are something that happen to NPCs not heroes. Heroes have a great power of will and too much of the blessing of fate to suffer from something unrecoverably. Heroes are defined by what they overcome and triumph over; to have a hero suffer something that they cannot recover from engenders a feeling of helplessness that is decidedly unheroic. While certainly temporary attribute damage is completely reasonable and is a terrible if appropriate hindrance at times.

Furthermore a hero in the sword & sorcery sense is defined by their ability to make themselves heroic. A characters abilities and skills (in a rules since) define their ability to be heroes. It speaks to this in both the RPG and the literature, in permanently crippling a hero you reduce this ability and therefore make them significantly less heroic. To quote from the introductioin to the RPG "whatever destiny you have is what you wrest from life with your own mighty arms, or cut from it with your great sword!"

I think permanent damage does not fit the theme nor the style of sword & sorcery.

 

[DimitriX]

The permanent damage in the book isn't really permanent. It's just a condition that affects a character until a proper Heal check is made or until a certain amount of rest or both. I think the only permanent damage is the ability to instantly kill a character with a head blow (which is difficult to accomplish). The new permanent damage rules are just an option to make combat even more dangerous and realistic and that can have a lasting effect even after combat is over. But, it really is for players and GMs that like combat and want to take it to a different level than what's in the core book.

 

[Jotenbjorn]

Having a -2 penalty with your maimed arm or your speed halved because you have a peg leg is decidedly uncool. That's not something that would ever, ever happen to a hero in a Sword & Sorcery tale.

Fafrd lost a hand. Conan was injured to the point that he required weeks or months to heal several times. Those are two examples just off the top of my head. Serious injury is a major part of Sword and Sworcery.

 

[Magister_Ordo_Lyrae]

I will admit I forgot about Fafrd (that Swords against death? Its been about been about 10 years since I read Leiber). I also think that more seroius injuries that requires some significant heal checks to get the character back up to snuff seems OK. The problem becomes when only super rare things like the golden wine of Xuthal is the only thing that will restore you. It also seems like these rules add a significant amount of bookeeping. It seems like they might be useful for characters that use fate points for left for dead or other such circumstances.

 

[Teriudin]

Just yesterday got my copy of Warrior's Companion - I haven't read enough yet to do a respectable review, but there is more in there than just the permanent damage tables.

A few feats, a few new combat manuevers, a lot of new prestige classes (well, 6 I think) that are general enough to be useful to players. Martial Disciple is reprinted - I think it is the same as the old version. Martial sorcery allows for a variant "style" that is more for warrior scholar types and looks interesting.

It isn't all crunch either, there is a section on the typical warrior types of various nations, the prestige classes has examples of each type that are rich and interesting, and there is a whole chapter on famous warriors. I do not believe that any of them are characters from the Howard books, but I also haven't had a chance to look deeply at that part either.

Anyone else have a copy yet? What's your take?

 

[Sting52jb]

The chapter on famous warriors along may be enough to purchase this book alone. But the section on the typical warrior types of various nations sounds interesting also. I may be purchasing this book shortly.