OSE: Hole in the Oak - Session 13 Report
On Friday, August 28th, I ran the 13th session of my Hole in the Oak campaign. This was actually mostly a bookkeeping sessions, getting back into the swing of things. Due to a family tragedy, we hadn’t played in a while. So, in this session, we went through some shopping admin and settled on a few new houserules. Therefore, this post is a little different from the usual fare.
There were a few things bothering the players about how it’d been going so far. Here, I want to post our considerations, with a reference to some houserules we’d set up. I’ll make a separate page listing specific houserules at some point, so they can be more easily referenced. These houserules are mostly taken over from the wonderful 3d6 Down The Line crew; specifically, their Arden Vul playthrough. I liberally took from their houserules page those rules that seemed to address issues we had.
Experience progression
The players felt that progression was slow; or, at least, that levelling up seemed so out of reach and 1st-level characters could do so little. Now, while I personally feel that my players are very cautious and therefore overall progression is slow, I’m also not one to force a certain playstyle on others. So, to address their concern in a way that may fit their playstyle, I decided to make use of 3d6DTL’s Feats of Exploration: a system that awards additional experience for achieving certain goals.
Spellcaster Usefulness
The players also felt spellcasters to be useless. In part, I think that might also be because play happened quite sequentially–there wasn’t much going back to town, resting up, going back in, and so on. In all fairness, I haven’t made town a particularly interesting place to be, because the adventure is in the dungeon not the town. Additionally, one of the players is interested in exploring the history and lore of the dungeon, and wanted to ask their magic-user retainer for information. However, given that the retainer is their character, I had to repeatedly stonewall those attempts: the retainer knows as much as the players do, essentially. So, with the retainer not being able to cast as much magic as a level 1 wizard or sorcerer in, for example, Pathfinder could, and that they aren’t a DM-npc there to provide additional information, the retainer felt rather flat to the players.
So, I adopted some of the houserules from 3d6DTL, such as giving magic-users more spells in their spellbook at level 1 (but keeping the spells/day limit). On top of that, magic-users get a detect magic skill like the Mage from Carcass Crawler #1. Lastly, and most crucially, magic-users can do a ritual casting: casting spells above and beyond their slot capacity for the cost of 1 turn per spell level. That, hopefully, should make mages a powerhouse of utility.
Combat changes
I wanted the players to feel a little bit more comfortable going into combat, as they’ve been struggling so far. I’m adopting the classic “Shields Shall Be Splintered” rule (PCs can choose to sacrifice their shield to avoid damage), to give more survivability. On top of that, rather than OSE RAW, where 0hp is death, we’ll be using Goblin Punch’s Death and Dismemberment rules. Broadly speaking: when a PC gets below 0hp, they get a Fatal Wound based on how much damage they have. Using those Fatal Wounds, you roll on an appropriate Death and Dismemberment table, and decide what happens. This way, there’s a little buffer between 0hp and death, but still with quite some consequences.
We’ll also be adding some of the other 3d6DTL tweaks, such as setting damage to HD (to encourage more flexible weapon usages) and setting a thief’s backstab damage to power them up.
Things to improve
FoundryVTT encumbrance
We were using item-based encumbrance on FoundryVTT and it’s been…weird. For one PC, equipping a weapon meant their encumbrance went down by 4 items, and we could not figure out how that worked. One PC was heavily weighed down by all their items, and yet another with a comparable inventory, there was no problem at all. Item-based encumbrance seems sensible to use at a table, if humans brains are trying to do the bookkeeping. However, the system seemed to be broken. In this case, if we have FoundryVTT taking care of the “coin weights” of things, we can try the software route for a while.
Retainer usefulness
The players view the retainers as not really worth it much. Particularly given their frustration at the slow XP rate, having characters around that soak up a share of that XP seems like too much of a negative for them. I think that the players prefer a character-based perspective of roleplaying, by which I mean they want to embody a specific character in a larger fiction that surrounds them. OSR-style gameplay, as I understanding it, though, requires more of a party-based perspective. As players, you’d look at a stable of characters, and maintain the group. As a result, it’s easier to park a mage for a while to create magic items, or to have a character convalesce from a serious injury. Obviously, you still enjoy playing your specific character, but there’s more of a spread out sense of party, I think.
Now, the main goal of running games like this is having fun with friends, not to embody some kind of purity of system or philosophy. I’d like the players to see the retainers as something valuable that belongs to them. Basically, I guess, an item in their inventory that can move around and interact with things. I suspect that the sheer number of retainers and hirelings might have been an error. There are three retainers with three players, effectively doubling the party. In retrospect, it might have been much smarter to have just one retainer for this adventure as a heal-bot following them around.
I’m hoping that, as far as hirelings go, that they’ll start seeing the advantage in automating or offloading certain things. For example, they were thinking about taking a bunch more oil to the dungeon to fully set the place on fire. However, they struggled with the idea of getting it over there and moving it in. Buying a draft horse, cart, and a hireling or two to port things would make things a lot easier. Similarly, getting a crew to dig out sections, build barricades, or break down walls are good options. I think I should try to encourage such solutions a little more, so they can experiment a bit more with the freedom that OSE can bring.
Your comments are welcome!