Today’s session went well, but I was trying to create some suspense as to whether player characters would survive, but I could not roll well enough to keep my bad guys from dying. Here is what happened.
The group was in the middle of a fight from the last game, so I had to set the stage. Starting at the center of the area’s perspective, looking from behind the secretaries desk and the door the group came from, there was my Metis and my Philodox to the left. The Galliard was behind the desk and Ragabash number two was in middle on the other side of the secretaries desk. To the right was Ragabash number one and the Ahroun around the large black man, who was currently being attacked by the two. To the far right, coming around a corner in the hallway going back away behind the desk, were three (heavily armed) security personnel. From the far left side, around a corner also going back behind the desk, were three more (heavily armed) security personnel. For reference, the 1st floor that they are on in the underground building is a big rectangle, with hallways down the left and right, containing offices in the center and along the outside wall.
This is where my rolling really made it disappointing about trying to at least damage my PCs. As I have stated earlier I probably won’t ever kill them off, but I want them to at least have a worry once in a while that they might die. If one PC dies here or there that’s not really so bad, the air of potential death is part of the game. Now here is where things got rough for me. I have six bad guys, which I made up, and gave them armor that added +3 dice to soak. This did not help. Ragabash number two decided to shoot the large black man the Ahroun and Ragabash number two were in melee range with, and he managed to shoot the Ahroun with the first bullet.
(Tangent!) Here is where things can get wonky with some parties, there are people that absolutely hate when their character takes damage. (F’em) Your character is going to take damage and if you can’t handle that then maybe you should not be playing in a game called World of Darkness. Maybe you should go and play in the Care Bears Christmas the RPG. Then there are the people that get upset by another PC shooting them. If it’s accidental, then the rest of the group may be able to lighten the mood and make the player realize that he is overreacting to being shot. Nine times out of ten the shot was not meant to hit the PC (Having said that my friends have stories where they have intentionally shot PCs because of different reasons. One time the group was all playing one particular alignment, the shooter was hit because they were playing the opposite alignment and had been doing stuff against the needs of the group). The player that got shot, the Ahroun, handled getting it very well (almost ideally). He shrugged it off and said, “Stuff happens, and besides it’s just lethal damage, not like it’s aggravated.” (End Tangent)
Then Ragabash number two sees the large black man go down, and then fires behind the group at the three security guards coming from around the right hand corner. My security guards also have MP5s, so I was hoping to get in a few shots and maybe injure my group, and have them attempt to heal up or go on a la John McClane. (If you’re not sure who John McClane is, then what Hollywood rock have you been living under? It’s the best character in a Christmas Movie ever.) He hits for 4 damage, and I am rolling 5 D10s to soak and I rolled 1 success. You might think, okay that’s not bad, you soaked a little. This will be the worst of the rolls, I’ll get better rolls, and I will be able to survive and get some shots off at the group. Needless to say that in this battle my guys went down like limp dolls. I botched a couple of soak rolls and one instance I botched the to hit roll, and then rolled to see if the security guard hits one of his coworkers, and of course he does. Then I rolled horribly on his soak roll. A battle that I thought would take a two or three hours in real world time to roll through the 20 minutes of game time, instead took only an hour and a half, tops. My rolls did not get any better than that.
In the midst of the fight I introduced Alice, my AI character. I portrayed her as a little girl that was in charge, sort of, but had to answer to Dr. Franklin (another bad guy.) I tried to make this bad guy big enough to hurt the group, and I did not succeed like I wanted, but I will discuss this later. When the group moved on from here, I played Alice up as a kind hearted AI that thought the people she worked for were bad. I’m not sure how I am going to continue to play her, I may have her turn out to be a sweet innocent AI, and then again I may have her learn stuff and change.
After they dealt with the first floor, I talked to the group and told them there are 10 floors to the underground building. I explained that there were labs on the 2nd and 3rd floors, a secured area on the 4th floor was quarantine, 5th floor was blood and viruses storage, 6th was test subjects, 7th was housing, 8th was supplies, 9th was recreation, and 10th was the power plant and water reclamation. The Ahroun said that he was going to be methodical and work his way down from the top, closing stuff off as he went down. He went down to the 2nd floor and started looking around.
On this floor I had the group find a product that was being created to keep were creatures from changing. Yeah, okay, I made it up. I had Alice explain what they were for to the group, so then Ragabash number one asked me if the data on how to make them was anywhere else. Alice said that the information was just kept here as it was experimental. At the request of the party she deleted it, so the group believes (I said that last part for anyone from the group listening in, not sure if I will have the idea come back out, may just let it die.) So they started to destroy the level and Alice told them that she could fix the floor. When they asked Alice if she would blow up the floor and destroy the data on the project, Alice asked what was in it for her. The group said that they could take her with them if she liked. Alice said that would be ok with her, if she could have access to the internet. They told Alice that this was possible, and she agreed. When asked if the destruction of the floor would blow up the whole building, I made a slight error. I told the group that the whole floor could blow up without destroying the whole structure, which is the mistake I made. It pushed me into a bit of a corner, or in retrospect it pushed my characters into a corner. I made it so that it is near impossible for the group to destroy the building. So the group decides to let Alice destroy the whole floor. They quickly moved to the third floor.
At this point the group asked Alice if there were any other people in the building, to which she said that there were a number of scientists on the third floor trying to get out the one back door, and Dr. Franklin is there as well. Alice stated that other than that there were 21 sentient entities within the building. When asked about that, she told the group that there were 10 mountain apes as well as 11 creatures that could change form on the 6th floor. Alice also told the group that the labs on the third floor were researching viruses and the like. So the Ahroun and the group went to the 3rd floor. I was hoping that they would go and free the prisoners on the 6th floor next, but the group leader decided to take it floor by floor.
They got off on the third floor and Alice told them that Dr. Franklin was working on some viruses there. The group took it room by room until they got to the door to the large interior lab. The Ahroun, being methodical, was the first one to the interior door. I had the bad guy act like whoever it was not important, so the Ahroun got an attack of opportunity. From there combat ensued, I had done some planning and actually used some gifts to keep my bad guy from dying so fast. However, I was still rolling very poorly on the dice. When we chatted later one of my players stated that they were actually worried about dying and that it was a pretty good fight. A few of the group were wounded and two of the PCs were scared away from the fight, which caused those players to run into the scientists that were panicking and trying to get out. Some of the scientists died. During the fight, my Galliard Metis decided to shoot Dr. Franklin (the bad guy, keep up) and Franklin went down, and he still had some shots left so he decided to keep shooting. Yes, in the room that I had already stated was filled with viruses that Dr. Franklin was working on. Instead of killing the whole group like I had previously thought would happen in the room, I had Alice cause the fire suppression system to go off and suck the air down and out of the room. I told them it was Halon because that was the only thing I could think of that would cause the air to go out of the room. Alice was not happy.
The group discussed it with Alice and decided to blow up this floor as well. The Ahroun decided to go to the 8th floor and get supplies before going to the quarantine floor. I had a sneaking suspicion that my Ahroun was going to kill all the were creatures when he got to them, thinking they were tainted, so I had an entity that was ‘not Coyote’ show up and ask them to save the werecreatures. There was an interesting little conversation, going back and forth, my players trying to get me to admit that the NPC was Coyote and me saying, “My name is Joe and I know Coyote.” My players really tried to get me to have the NPC admit it, but my verbal wushu was strong at that moment, or my players were just not buying it and let it go (Hey I have an ego, an id, and a superego too you know).
The group then proceeded up to the 6th floor and started to open the cages with the werecreatures. The session, as well as this blog post, was getting long so I just had a standard operational procedure of opening the cages and the people asking about clothes and then going to the 8th floor to get them. I had one of the werecreatures, specifically the Bastet, go looking for Ragabash number one. What I have not revealed to the players is that this particular Bastet is a Ceilican, and she has distrust for the Fae and Fae associated creatures. I also did not tell my players that she would have had to be pretty strong willed to get away from the Fae overlords that once controlled her. One of my players was not happy that she could not seduce this character. I messed up, I should have had her roll against a different difficulty, I was just not thinking (eh, shit happens). The player was a little upset that I broke the agreement that is unspoken between player and GM, and to her I say, my mistake but still no.
At this point I ended the game and gave out xp. I reminded everyone that I was giving out bonus xp if they would give me a postable blurb, roughly two paragraphs, about their character. I hope that I get them all before next game so I can post them.
Thanks.
TTFN