she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real
Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)
cohost is fritzing and the OSE SRD is down. i am unable to post ruminations about polearm weapons in BX and i am unsure if this is a blessing or a curse
the gm assigned detailed encumbrance, so all my strategizing with spears and javelins have been thrown out the window
the Brain Bugbear i'm having is that plate armour is marquee AC, but the movement debuff will come to the fore against enemies like zombies, probably in the form of a death. i've never really experienced BX in the players' seat, but i have futzed with it in solitaire (which is doable but made me miserable after a bit). zombies consistently have torn shreds through characters. they don't check morale, there's no reaction roll, they just throw themselves at the party until they're all killed. they're a joke if kited around by a party with a move of 30', but if improperly kited at a move of 20', it often devolves into a standoff slinging missiles. They have a statistical edge through their hit dice of 2d8 and plus one to hit. Their d8 damage per hit is pernicious. Their AC is nominal but with their higher health pool it's often a matter of keeping up regular DPR.
They always fail initiative, so that means they also fail pursuit, even if your movement rate is identical. But in that really grim set of circumstances, I was figuring I'd take a polearm and exploit its Brace. This doesn't work. There's no procedure for holding actions in BX and the polearm's Slow means you go last. The wording has this effect take a higher priority than failing initiative, which the zombies do. I'd be letting them roll for a free hit, where they'd have a 30% chance to inflict damage that sets me up for death from the next hit. Zombies' no. appearing means that's a single casualty in a group averaging 4-6, with an approximately 50% chance to score a hit. This assumes a sensible chokepoint, which isn't hard to set up. This is still folly. You can't beat an enemy who can't fail morale tests in a game of attrition.
Tentatively, I traded the polearm in for a spear, a shield, and some javelins. The fact my fighter has a sword goes without saying. Javelins are damn good, actually. It's the one handed action of throwing knives but the ranges are better and that can make up for my reduced movement. Shortbows are too expensive and take up both hands. I am anticipating a megadungeon where we're going to find a stable base camp after the fact, hence why our PCs are rolled up like it's AD&D (which honestly if the gm wanted a better shot at us surviving, they could bump our sorry butts to level 3 - BX combat just doesn't function until PCs have an actual health pool and the cleric can use cure light wounds). I will worry about needing to deal with outdoor ranges when we survive long enough to be outdoors. Now the action economy of drawing weapons varies, but it's still flexible to throw something downrange if the sword isn't quite handy.
The spear? Good in the instance where i might need the polearm
boy howdy am i overthinking this. this is kind of on purpose. i'm coming back to another system with RED brain and i'm trying to identify what's helpful and what's useless perfectionism.
the worst thing RED did to me was make me unable to tolerate numerical risk and feel like i was a failure if i didn't not only complete scenarios perfectly within the session time but also did so without taking a single hit point of damage. the hard part about that is RED wants this mindset and approach to its mechanics. you get more xp if you are perfect, you get more xp more consistently by being perfect in the context of mission completion, failure jeopardizes perfection, failure at the things you want your PCs to do makes your PC a liability in the pursuit of perfect scenario completion. this taught me how to efficiently make my way through a session, especially one shots which i previously did not know how to contend with. it unlearned my love of risk and acceptance of failure when eating risk, which got mistreated and misunderstood in the context of RED's community
i've been paying attention to a lot of discourse lately on the ttrpg tags on the d20 as an engine of randomness. mostly in a bad way and the OSR's cachet of "well if you're specific, you benefit from bypassing a roll. bypass all the rolls. it's a failure state to roll" is avoiding what might be a needlessly punishing mechanic on the face of it. but for my purposes i need random right now. i have to figure out how to develop a relationship with risk that's more healthy
I’ve looked at currently advertised OSE westmarches and I’m thinking that’s a tad intense for what I need. One going the rounds on Necrotic Gnome forcibly retires all your PCs if you leave the server, which is a little much. What if you want to clear up some mental real estate and that means leaving a very active and very demanding format? Even if it’s a good kind of demanding, if we want to be generous about this hypothetical.
Also, I had the moment where I was thrown into a deep frier trying to keep up with a lot of standard operating procedures in RED westmarches, I don’t want to deal with that for OSR play. I’ll need a bit to build my repertoire, if I can. I have a feeling that with a two hour timeslot and the sloppiness the game master has taken to discord server management (event signup was thrown into general chat, why?!), this might not be as long as I think it’ll be. On the flipside, there’s no weird interpersonal tensions, not yet anyway. What it will be is a healthy contrast to this RED table I’m stuck with to ween off the dude who shouted “get fucked to death.”
Like, consider what I’m doing here: sweating over a 25% chance to take damage in an encounter that isn’t worth fighting, all because plate armour can potentially make other encounters worth fighting (to an extent, since no. appearings in dungeon level one encounters are often fill to bursting with fodder who can mash you into bits from the action economy)
They’re allowing a mix of RACs and choosing race and class, which is a problem because humans are meant to have particular buffs if you do the latter (and no choice is really a good idea for my delicate stat spread paired with a desire to gain xp quickly). There’s no point bothering the gm about this - nobody at the table wants to use non-RACs either so it’s moot - but something about that feel sloppy
How is this related to my javelin plans being thwarted down to two missile attacks an encounter you ask? Having the variant human’s leadership buff would help me give randos more javelins, or some bespoke ranged weapons so I don’t have to stress this. There’s the kind of dubious defensive stance rule at the back of advanced fantasy that adds str bonus to AC if you forego an attack, and that’s my ticket to start weathering a lot of hurt if it comes down to that