Monday, April 10, 2006
Ironclaw concluded
Last night, Logan ran the second half of the Ironclaw adventure he started running a couple of weeks back. Things went fairly well, although the game ran just a bit long so we could finish up the big climactic battle (which probably would've been a bit shorter if not for the comedy of errors of bad dice rolls).
The gist of the adventure is we were hired to go south to find a con artist who had a deed, get the deed and bring it back. To do so, we ended up taking a job with the con artist, only to get royally screwed over by a corrupt (or overzealous) magistrate. Still, we got the deed, brough it back and ended the game.
I liked the mechanics of the game. You get different dice to roll based on your abilities and skills, and then you take the highest number rolled on all the dice to determine success. That's more or less the basics, although damage rolls take into account all of the dice rolled and compare them to the soak dice rolled by the character getting hit.
A few things kind of threw me off, though. My atavist (kind of like the barbarian from D&D) had abilities that I never really did learn to use properly. Magic is a bit odd. At one point, Rawl's wizard tossed a haste spell on me, and it seemed a bit of a chore to figure out what the increase was. Once we got it down, we went ahead and ran the battle with the haste on, but it wasn't immediately obvious what my new dice would be. More experience with the game system would probably help, but with one-shots with games you're not familiar with, you're kind of stuck not knowing how everything works.
The game is themed as anthropomorphic animals in a medieval fantasy setting, but the anthropomorphic animals theme doesn't really come through in play. I found it a bit difficult to picture people as wolves, foxes, bears, gorillas, mice, cats and whatnot. Maybe it's because I'm not a furry. ;)
Overall, though, I enjoyed myself. I had some difficulty getting into the midset of my character in the first session, but it was easier last night. I think I'd definitely give Ironclaw (or its sister, Jadeclaw) again. However, next up in two weeks is probably something in the horror genre. I think I might be running Call of Cthulhu.
The gist of the adventure is we were hired to go south to find a con artist who had a deed, get the deed and bring it back. To do so, we ended up taking a job with the con artist, only to get royally screwed over by a corrupt (or overzealous) magistrate. Still, we got the deed, brough it back and ended the game.
I liked the mechanics of the game. You get different dice to roll based on your abilities and skills, and then you take the highest number rolled on all the dice to determine success. That's more or less the basics, although damage rolls take into account all of the dice rolled and compare them to the soak dice rolled by the character getting hit.
A few things kind of threw me off, though. My atavist (kind of like the barbarian from D&D) had abilities that I never really did learn to use properly. Magic is a bit odd. At one point, Rawl's wizard tossed a haste spell on me, and it seemed a bit of a chore to figure out what the increase was. Once we got it down, we went ahead and ran the battle with the haste on, but it wasn't immediately obvious what my new dice would be. More experience with the game system would probably help, but with one-shots with games you're not familiar with, you're kind of stuck not knowing how everything works.
The game is themed as anthropomorphic animals in a medieval fantasy setting, but the anthropomorphic animals theme doesn't really come through in play. I found it a bit difficult to picture people as wolves, foxes, bears, gorillas, mice, cats and whatnot. Maybe it's because I'm not a furry. ;)
Overall, though, I enjoyed myself. I had some difficulty getting into the midset of my character in the first session, but it was easier last night. I think I'd definitely give Ironclaw (or its sister, Jadeclaw) again. However, next up in two weeks is probably something in the horror genre. I think I might be running Call of Cthulhu.
// posted by Chris @ 11:36 AM 
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