Actual Play – Tricky, Tricky Kobolds! (8/18/2013)

torchbearer-rpgGM: Sean Nittner
Players: Four awesome gamers
System: Torchbearer
Game: Under the House of the Three Squires

My second Torchbearer game in Games on Demand. It went of much smoother because by that point I was in the groove. As with the previous game, I had all the pregenerated characters on the table ready for players to pick. We got Karolina, Taika, Beren, and Ulrik. Sorry Gerald and Varg, next time.

Delving Deep

Right off the bat this group way impressed me. When Beren and Ulrik were about to fall, Taika jumped into action, casting Lightness of Being on them and levitating them back up to safety. Then they quickly got to work on establishing safe passage down.

Later, when they were trapped by Kobolds and had the option of trying overpower them, Karolina lead them in an effort to trick the kobolds into letting them out. As it turns out Kobolds aren’t all that smart! It such good times.

Here’s a shot of the players after the game. Clearly they are smiling too much and I didn’t do my job.

Thoughts on this game

This ran a lot smoother than the previous one because I had my stride. Both the players and I were good about leading with description and letting the mechanics follow that.

Torchbearer has this weird trust thing, where the players have to trust the GM not to completely dick them over and call for rolls on every action they take. Some players are really cautions and I think that just make the game slow down. It also create a cycle that gets reinforced. If you think every time a roll comes up the GM is punishing you, then everything eventually becomes punishment, even when you’re awesome. I was really glad that this group just did things, and then rolled dice when they had to. Awesomesauce.

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