Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 051: Bad Acid Trip.
I apologize in advance, but you’re going to get a pretty half-assed Talking Combat this week. I’ll try to make it up to you next week, promise. I don’t want to throw the curtains wide open on my personal business, but I had to get my daughter on a plane to England for grad school this week. So I’ve been in a bit of a whirlwind, both logistically and emotionally, and the Adventures of Tuttle and His Dumber Companions have been on a low simmer on the back burner. To say more would turn this into some sort of personal therapy session, and I’m not going to subject you that, but… there you have it.
As a brief aside, my daughter never caught the RPG bug like my son has, though maybe that’s my fault for waiting too long and introducing her to The Life when she was in the contrarian teen years. She played a few sessions of 4E, but she didn’t take it seriously and was one of those “pee in the punchbowl” players. Wanted to play an evil character, demanded all the treasure, would only begrudgingly help other party members… you know the type. She is more of a general gamer – had a WoW phase, plays an impressively cut-throat game of Ticket To Ride, we’d do family board game nights here and there. But roleplaying games never quite took hold with her.
Since I’m starting to feel the presence of an invisible man in a tweed jacket saying “Annnnnd I see that our time has expired”, let’s talk about acid.
I think the thing that stands out to me this episode is that for once, I was the dumbass who ran in without getting the lay of the land. I usually play a pretty cautious game – it’s usually John or Chris who are the ones boldly rushing in and setting off traps. OK, let’s be honest… it’s always Chris. I tend to hold back and see what’s up before I jump in. (Ezrik from Iron Gods being the one noteworthy exception; he was always the first one into the pool, because… chainsaw.) But this time… I don’t know if it was feeling useless from the last fight, feeling impatient about finding the entrance to the villain lair, or what… but I really wanted to get in there and start looking around. I think it was the presence of the corpse: I think my thought process was that the corpse represented someone trying to get in or out of the lair, so it represented a bread-crumb toward an entrance.
But I forgot the more common use of corpses: to warn parties that there’s something nearby that wants to eat your face. In this case, a tentacle-beast with mind control. And the fight gets off to a bad start. Tuttle and Mo suddenly think this guy’s their best friend, and Mo, in particular, has to deal with the Joy of Grappling (Bob Ross’ lesser-known field of expertise).
But then we catch two lucky breaks. The first is that Tuttle rolls the lesser of two evils and only dips a paw in the acid. A single die of damage in exchange for breaking the mind control? I’ll take that trade any day of the week. The next is that Tuttle gets lucky on THE BUTTON and rolls… (wait for it)… DAMAGE RESISTANCE. So, of course, that’s going to be acid, though I didn’t realize how enormously useful that would become. I figured maybe CHDRR would get splashed or he might fall in during the course of the battle.
What I didn’t expect (no, not the Spanish Inquisition) was that the opportunity for a “BIG HERO CHDRR” MOVE would arise. I realize I’m skipping a bunch of the fight, but Mo gets dunked into the acid. And stays in. And… yeah, he’s about to die – literally, one more round of even fairly minimal damage would do it. Meanwhile, I did some quick math on the fly, and… it’s really close, but it looks like, with the extra acid resistance, CHDRR would survive at least one round in the acid, even if Steve rolled max damage. Not much wiggle room for a) missing a roll to get back out, or b) the creature attacking or otherwise holding him in there for another round, but… we’ll jump off that cliff if we come to it. (Tuttle also could’ve survived the round of damage, but with his low strength, I thought the odds of him successfully pulling a full-grown vesk out were far riskier. And if Tuttle failed, half our party would then be in the acid.)
So in goes CHDRR, and one blast of the jump-jets later, we have our vesk back, while Hirogi and Rusty do the remaining work on the creature. Whew! Look for CHDRR, with a half-dead Mo draped on his back, to appear on a Wheaties box sometime in the near future.
This nicely folds into Steve’s GM tip about the application of damage. As he points out, moving the damage to the player’s turn is technically wrong – ongoing damage is technically supposed to happen on the creature’s turn. Steve’s point is that he wants to give the player a chance to do… SOMETHING… to avoid or mitigate such a situation, and moving the damage to the player’s turn (and specifically, to the END of the player’s turn) is a way to allow that to happen.
Thinking about it as impartially as I can, I think that’s a fair way to do things, as long as it’s consistent. My thinking is that combat represents six-second slices, happing semi-contemporaneously, anyway, so does it really matter SO much if you move stuff around a little bit within the round? Initiative should definitely be preserved because there’s real value to going first that someone earned by rolling high. But a DoT “tick” effect? Where that gets placed feels fairly arbitrary anyway.
As a lesser point, it’s a question of discrete vs. incremental damage. If you swing a sword, the damage happens when that sword strikes flesh. If you’re immersed in an ongoing effect… it’s not like the “tick” is a real thing where you take zero damage for five seconds and then on the 6th second… OW! It’s a game mechanic that’s already meant to be a summary of the previous six seconds, so if that “summary damage” slips a little bit in favor of giving the player options, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over that.
I did want to dip back into the podcast just to share a chuckle at Mo landing the knowledge roll when everyone else failed. There’s a tendency to think of Mo is the mindless muscle of the group, but Mysticism is one area where he’s really no worse off than anyone else. Now Tuttle is going to have to keep pumping Mysticism at every level because he’s not going to risk being second-best to Mo at anything knowledge-related.
(As far as real names of members of the Legion of Superheroes: somehow I still remember Garth Ranzz is Lightning Lad. And Mon-El is just Mon-El. Saturn Girl is… Irma, but I don’t remember a maiden name. Can I cheat and use Irma Ranzz since they were married most of the time anyway? So… guess I’ve got some homework to do.)
Annnnnd I see that our time is up. For real this time. Next week we continue our search for the cultist base – we’ll find it one of these times, I swear – and maybe I’ll try to whip up something PLUS-ULTRA for the end of our first year. Haikus? Dirty limericks? An audio supercut of every time Steve gloats when the enemies crit? This will take some thinking. In the meantime, pop by Discord or other social media and feel free to give us your questions, comments, or other feedback. (OK, maybe not a stream of incoherent profanity. But anything else is fair game.)