Corsairs Session 6: Discovery

 Session 6 got a bit explosive and we had some action this time around. Sleve & Sinnea spy on the miners a bit, then the group regroups to decide on their next step.

They send the runner back through the caves, intending to have a two pronged attack on the now verified repellium mining operation. Waiting was a nail biting experience, or should have been - being a game it magically happened in a few minutes while I rolled a couple of agility rolls for the cabin boy for his solo return trip. Over sink holes and past pissed off fire imps. The players never saw that part and there were enough successes that I went with that. Otherwise, Ordo, Ylervan and Sleve may still be waiting for some sign of the attack.

Finally, the Fools Errand comes round and fires off a fulisade against the moored Dancing Crester and doing a hull and gun deck hit. The attack made the sailors and miners rush to the front of the mine, and that's when our group set up the dynamite. I use the sailing skill as the general purpose engineering roll, and Ylervan made a fantastic roll for the placement of the pony keg of black powder. Setting a short fuse, they light the keg and charge out, yelling about a cave-in in the back of the mine. The Lady Grysby is shouting orders to free the Crester while the captain is also yelling out orders to return fire. At this point, the explosion happens and the miners are running for their lives down the mountain, while our group heads up the mountain to get a better vantage. Except for our brute sailor fighter who charge the Lady. Which ended up being a huge mistake as she is really good between the Steady Wind bonus plus the well-balanced sabers she carries. The dread fighter sailor was no match and was cut down in a single round of combat. Wonder if he was wearing a red shirt?

Ordo at this point is cutting down the sailors attempting to release the final mooring line. Being a crack shot, he kills the first sailor on the docks in a single shot. He also manages to kill off two more as they attempt from the deck to cut the line. By this time there is a second ship combat round (a ship combat round is 15-20 minutes, and I did not see a personal combat round, but going with a vague "something a lot less than 15-20 minutes to just use the timing for plot advancement). The Crester manages to get a shot off and hits one of the sails and the gun deck. The Errand manages to hit the sails, another gun deck and a crew. So they are doing a lot better as I was cutting the gun rating in half for the Crester as half her guns are facing the dock and unable to fire. Finally the Lady Grysby cuts the line herself as Ordo maims the captain, leaving the first mate Rey now in charge. Still feeling as though they have a good fighting chance, the Crester finally moves off the dock and starts to turn about for combat with all guns being available. 

Seeing her ship leave, the Lady starts running down the mountain as well, knowing she is out-numbered from our small group. Ordo manages to actually maim her despite her athleticism as opposing dice. So she falls on the ground and almost bleeds out before our group can get down there to administer first aid. Which did nothing but at least did not kill her - the healing rules when a person is maimed can actually kill the patient. Realistic and terrifying for our resident slacker healer Sleve. 

The final round of ship combat had the Errand take out the last sail and rudder of the Crester. Being unable to steer, the Alderil sailors give their word to stop hostilities. And this was the end of session 6.

There was more adventure this time, and I think we handled the ship and personal combat a lot better (see, practice does pay off!). I still need to get better organized, but I did print out a ship sheet to track the battle there. I do like the ship combat mechanics: simple and while pretty random in some ways, it makes for a fast combat which the point for this RPG. Some of the game may have been faster had I the printed copy, which is in the mail at this point. But I'll have it for the next time we play!

Next session we'll wind up a few things, then I believe we'll be playing another game with another game master. I'll post my feelings about the game once we get our first adventure completed, but after a couple of rough starts I do enjoy the game.

And just had a thought: I could bring this game into my Fantasy Trip world: sudden magical portal created by a mad scientists. I've had Traveller characters end up in D&D. These characters would not be your 32 point starting characters though, but probably at least 35 or 36. But as always, I digress...

Corsairs: Setting up the next session

The players are probably going to meet some of the main NPCs for this adventure, so I've printed them out, and will see about getting my notebook better organized for play. It is one of those smaller 3-ring notebooks, but for some reason I have a pretty old-school hole punch that allows me to adjust the hole punches. So cutting a landscape paper in half, these fit perfectly. Good do know! Both are the equivalent of a steady wind, which does mean that all interactions against them are cursed: exploding 1's for failure!  

I've also named the other ship, a size 3 ship, that is being used to run the black market repellium: the Dancing Crester. Yes, using an animal from yet another Kickstarter as mentioned in another post. This ship only has 1 gun deck, the 2nd is now being used as a cargo bay for the illicit cargo. 

So, what are the plans for the game tomorrow? They are currently in Brawicke and at least know of Captain Horn and the Lady Gysby. I need to come up with some additional rumors, such as

• there are job postings for sailors willing to go for extended voyages
• a large ship that looks like a large corvette, passes through every 4 weeks or so.
• Captain George Horn was a well known Alderil Empire Navy Captain back at the height of the war
• Lady Gsyby has a strong Roche Empire accent and has been known to peruse weapon shops about town
• it has been a while since the ship was last seen so it would not be surprising to show up in the next few days, heading west. 
• my cousin in Coastone heard that miners are being hired but they have not yet returned home
• sky whales have been sighted much further south this year than ever before
• there are Alderil spies on Teboa
• there are traitors in the Council
• Joycie Gelnne (local council member) has sold out Teboa
• Joycie Gelnne is one of the few honest Council members other than Sir 

While I do like me some good deck plans, playing via Skype means the combat is all theater of the mind. Combat between the ship crews is really abstracted out via die rolls, though the characters can get in to help with an extra die I believe. I need to re-read the ship combat as I did miss a step last time. And if there is a combat, they are going against a larger ship. One with a steady wind as her captain...

If we go into personal combat, there could well be a dual. Sadly the player playing Harmony-Rose is unable to make tonight's game, and it would have been fun to have the two women in a dual should it come to that. And I may see if we can make it come to that. Duels are a thing in the world of Teboa. And if I am reading the rules correctly, the players can do all the rolls: they roll their attacks as well as the difficulty dice of their opponent; then when the opponent attacks, they roll their opponents attack as well as their own difficulty dice. At least that is how I am going to try & play it. I think it gives the players a lot more interest in the combat versus waiting for me to roll. And as with a lot of groups, this groups rolls pretty badly at times. Which is often a lot more fun!

And re-read part of the rules and yes, the player does all the dice rolls. As noted by one of my players, some of us are not fans of dice pools. Yet this particular mechanic is actually a lot of fun and we are both enjoying it a great deal. Plus it means I need to buy more dice as one can never have enough dice!

If a character is being shot at by an enemy with a pistol, the player will roll their Grit Skill Dice, and roll the opponents Crackshot Skill Dice as the Difficulty Dice.

My expectations are that there could be a number of possible encounters, both within the town of Brawicke and aboard air ships. We'll see how much skullduggery the players do. And since we're all learning to play this, I'll need to let them know that they can make these rolls for gathering rumors, and I allow charmed if they role-play it.  Perhaps I can expand out the list of rumors, and they get as many as their draft...

Some more interesting view of Brawicke. The first is a more upscale residential area, the 2nd towards the ports.

And the docks. The docks for the sky ships are all well above ground. The ships nose into the U-shaped docks with crew hauling ropes to bring the ships into the dock. Open on all sides, but with a gang plank and overhead cranes for loading and unloading cargo. Brawicke boats 6 docks at the western side of town. Prevailing winds are usually to the west, allowing for easier sailing away from the town. 

Traveller Combat

Traveller combat started off very D&D like: your armor affected how easy it is to hit you, but damage was not adjusted. So a sufficiently dexterous and skilled knife wielder could take down someone in powered armor. Over the years, several versions of combat came up. Here is a (very) brief synopsis of the ones I've actually used.

Classic combat, of course. I was never happy with that as I always thought armor should help absorb damage. Later, I understood that this was a simple abstraction. To hit required looking up a matrix of weapon versus armor, so that every weapon had a different chart essentially. Of course, Traveller was written by wargamers, so charts were the normal way of handling things at the time. Ranges were also more abstracted out, and maps were not really needed.

Snapshot the board game made it a grid-based system but was essentially Traveller combat played with action points based on the characters dexterity and endurance. As with classic (if I recall) both are 15 second rounds. The lowest AP actually goes first, but higher AP characters can go before if they choose. This gives higher AP (DEX + END) characters more control over the situation as they have more choices as to when to act. Movement and actions are all the same in terms of player turns.

Striker came out as a miniatures game, with extensive vehicle and weapon building rules. This version, while more suited for miniature wargames, is what I ended up using more for combat. The basic 8+ to hit and armor absorbing the damage made more sense to me. And I really enjoyed creating fusion powered vehicles for some reason: it was the vehicle version of High Guard.

I never played Megatraveller, but I believe it was more or less classic. Could be entirely wrong.

While I also have most of GURPS Traveller, I never got it for the rules, but for the fluff. Although Far Trader was, I thought, really good if you wanted a big ship universe. As I prefer a small ship universe, I usually just divided those trade values (cargo tonnage, passengers) by 10 or so.

Mongoose Traveller uses armor as damage soaks and maintains the 8+ to hit. It has some additional rules for reactions, and breaks things into significant and minor actions. Initiative is determined by choice of INT or DEX and use the effect as the initiative order. Effect is basically the difference between the target roll (8) and the roll. A negative effect is possible obviously. See p59 as with no index, the Mongoose v2 book makes things harder to find than it should. Did not realize there was no index until the middle of a game, and as I don't have the book memorized or bookmarked...

Traveller 5, or T5, uses dice pools and a fairly complex set of things to figure out to determine the to hit target. However, I think once you dig into the T5.10 rules, it is actually explained a bit better, and there are some really good ideas in there. Part of the modifiers for the to hit include the distance and the size of the target: a huge target far away is easier to hit than a much smaller target closer.

I'll be presenting the Snapshot & Mongoose summaries for combat next session and we can decide ahead of time which version they would like to play. They all have basically cloth armor on so that will help either way - harder to hit or absorbs damage.