Thanks to all the NPC and volunteers for coming out to a one day. Having so many NPCs really increases the ability of plot to do new and varied things. It was truly terrifying to play an event with close to a one to one ratio of PCs to NPCs.
The pre-made sandwiches were a great way to handle food at a one day. Good Idea.
Overall, I really did not enjoy this event. I was very excited to get a fresh start to the Larping season and this event really just gut-punched the wind out of my sails.
Structurally, the plot of the one day was very smart. We went back to Springdale to do some work for Dragonreach before Alacar annexes it. The mine had multiple shafts thus multiple mods to do, so far so good. Tons of NPCs so most fights are gonna be tough, numbers win in Alliance.
We go on the first mod and it’s waves of moderately difficult mobs (we think rust monsters), Voice Radius Dispel on death, are healed by magic and reduced to weapon attacks, while we look for puzzle pieces and herd the cats. They also had an “I can destroy your harm protect MIs on some kind of an X count”, but that didn’t come into play much. Just a nice scary effect to count out and spook PCs. Since magic didn’t work, the load of the work was on the pipe-swingers. A few of the new CO things around (I like the concept, but it needs refining) so we try those out to get information, no dice. We find ‘some’ pieces to the puzzle, but not enough to solve it. So we go for the big 10 minute CO. As soon I heard the ‘ooze’ was a non defensible touch based DFM on ‘your choice’ of an effect or, presumably… die; I was pretty salty about the situation. Our MIs are on notice… cool. So, we pull the rock out of the ooze and the ooze in the first room stops. This is not a win, we didn’t solve the puzzle, we just kinda brute forced into it. It doesn’t feel satisfying but maybe we missed something. Let’s check the next room.
2nd room is bigger, with bigger, harder hitting mobs. Still don’t find enough of the puzzle, so we smash our face into it again with a young adventurer who has no magic on him. Nope… doesn’t work still need to a ritual to cure him, but we ‘win’. One more room to go.
3rd room much bigger, with harder mobs, not enough pieces of the puzzle to solve it. We sacrifice another PC who was already ‘infected’ with the ooze, to smash our way to a win. Victory??
I had a few issues with this mod. I’ll agree some may be due to player information versus plot information, but these are my concerns.
- Ooze based DFM in general was a giant eyeroll. “Hey, here’s some LCO ooze you’ve never seen before that you are interacting with within an LCO CO system we told you about 30 minutes ago, where we encourage you to RP out what you are doing. Oh you touched it? LMAO! Here’s a sweet LCO effect where you need to sacrifice MI’s to not resurrect. Thanks for playing, welcome to 2018”
- Healed by magic Rustmonsters. During the mod, I was ok with it. We tried a few spells, they all healed. Ok fine, this is not a mod for casters. I can stand in the back and yell at people. Apparently, and this is 2nd hand, it came up at the town hall that they were only healed by the ‘first’ spell that hit them. You’ve got to be kidding me. If I throw alchemy, and hear “Resist”, “Cloak”, “Dodge”, “Guard”, “Poison Shield” etc. I get information as a player that maybe I can try more. Perhaps they have 15 Resists, but I don’t think they are immune. If I throw Alchemy and hear “No effect” I stop throwing alchemy. If I throw fire (or a spell) at something and hear “Appears to heal me” I stop throwing fire. The interaction, if true, felt really …. clever, to me. The idea of only healed by a little magic, or something is fine in general, but change the call to something that implies a defense was spent. “Guard, Appears to heal me” or something. If they were permanently immune to magic ignore this point.
- The Puzzle:In general did not make sense to me, from a plot perspective. As I thought about it there were two options.
- I guess the missing pieces were elsewhere in the mine? This makes no sense to me, unless you want me to treat your plot like a video game. Somehow specific pieces were spread around the other shafts, but none of the miners found any of them in any of the 3 clean shafts? Furthermore, how did the pieces move around? Did the rustmonsters do it? Why didn’t they just eat the pieces? Were the pieces only in other mod shafts? OH! Maybe it was broken by Alacar, but then why would they leave pieces around? Earthquake? But then how did they get into other shafts.
- There were no other pieces anywhere and we had to sacrifice MIs to win.
I totally get it’s hard to incorporate puzzles directly the world and lore without feeling super forced. I was pretty jazzed about the implementation at the start. Old Rune magic needing to get put back together, sounds good. I was on board. However, the level of punishment to try and get information was real steep in my opinion, and left me overall very salty and frustrated.
One mine shaft down, morale has taken a hit, but we persevere. Break for tasty sandwiches.
Bears: This was fine. We clearly brought everyone on something that was intended for just a few people, or maybe lower level people. AFAIK, we didn’t have any indication of that ahead of time, so whatever.
Elementals: I was really interested in this one, from an out of game standpoint. Elemental body bloat was one of the reasons stated for having to LCO nerf weapon auras. So, I was ready for some lower body elementals. I did not ‘feel’ like they were lower body. Obviously, I don’t have stat cards to compare but the ‘feel’ was that if you didn’t have lightning to swing (only two people did) the weapons weren’t getting a lot of work done. So, that was frustrating. It kinda reinforced my fear that the Aura removal was more about taking tools from players, rather than rebalancing things.
Myconids: I guess Myconids are meant to be the Darth Vader creatures intending to strike fear into the players. Message received. Instantly, infinitely repopping anywhere they want, paralysis carrier swinging creatures with a ton of NPCs. Yeah we didn’t win. I’m fine with losing. I figured we were going to lose. I’m not mad at the stats (I’m a little mad at the stats) I’m mad at the plot surrounding the encounter. Going in the plot was: We were going in to close an old dwarven door, to protect the mine shaft. So, complete the objective, don’t fight the mobs forever. Ok makes sense. So boom, I’m heading to that door. Let’s go let’s go. The town follows, we get to the door, and there’s a cool dwarven puzzle/ keycode thing. By the time we get to the door, it’s pretty clear to me that unless we stem the tide of paralysis carrier attacks, we were going to lose. One player starts on the puzzle, another player comes up big time with a wall of force on the door to buy time. Heck yeah, mental high fives. Just clear out these remaining mobs and we should be good. Oh…wait... they just burrow under the wall of force and continue to destroy us…..cool. This is where it breaks down for me. So what was the door going to do? Let’s pretend we did succeed and closed the door, were we then going to have to flee in some dramatic “But wait it’s not working” situation, that would be pretty awful. Or somehow, the dwarven door closing also created an impenetrable barrier around the mine, sure. In the immediate aftermath, it felt like a lose-lose situation. So, all the PCs are down/or paralyzed. Then the monsters begin saving us and moving us out to the mine entrance. Felt like plot not wanting to TPK the event, which just cheapened everything more.
Overall this event just wasn’t... fun for me. Every step was like that gif of sideshow Bob and the yard of garden rakes. I was really looking for hooks and motivation to get excited about the new season, but it just cemented my concerns with the LCO changes, and made me feel like a powerless failure up against a “too-clever-by-half” plot team.
Sure, “Mad cuz bad, git gud” or whatever you want to say. The end result is I don’t want to play this kind of event again. Sure, once there’s some heroic cred built up and people are having fun, the occasional being knocked off your high horse is warranted. I want to have fun at an event. I spent all last season trying to be engaged, unfortunately it was mostly spinning my wheels and nothing seemed to work. In the off-season, multiple LCO changes that felt very player unfriendly, but a “trust us it’ll be good” vibe. One event in, I’m not excited for 2018.
I know this post has a harsh tone, so I want to end with what I did like from the event.
I loved the rep of the Dwarven key code. Well crafted, seemed reusable. I liked that we were able to get Dwarven numbers from the Miner guy early in the day.
I liked that the Myconids were interested in my book. Perhaps a sign of greater intelligence. I’m never interacting with them again, but perhaps it will be fun for someone else to figure out.
I’m hopeful that the stating issues were a factor of the plot team not used to having enough NPCs. I hope they have enough NPCs in the future to get more practice in, and knock the rust off.
I liked the idea behind the CO slates. It needs refining, but there’s something there.
See you all at the opener.
Sword combat is not my forte but that will come in time... it's Be All You Can't Be, after all 
