SPLATTER-ELF Playtest #2

By on
Last week, appropriately enough on Friday the 13th, we played the second-ever session of SPLATTER-ELF: The RPG. I had a new group of three completely different players from the first session, which works out well to get new perspectives on the game. It was also great for me because I got to reuse the same adventure!

In the first session we had three people who game just for fun and didn't really care about the rules. They had a good laugh though, and really enjoyed hacking the shit out of everything they ran into and accidentally choking out enemies with their own intestines.

The second session had two guys who were more familiar with and comfortable with game mechanics so they went out of their way to try different things, which from a testing perspective was very helpful. The third guy hadn't gamed in years so he was just having fun being there.

It was interesting to see how the two groups reacted to the same situations. In some instances they did the exact same thing (both groups had at least one player try to sneak out of town to bury their treasure, only to get attacked by violent lepers). Both groups had a player who tried to lower his encumbrance by spending money on whores. The second group (wisely) did their best to avoid the lake monster, rather than trying to kill it like the first group did. Subsequently no one in the second party got any boobs bitten off.

The most beautiful moment of the second session came when the party was negotiating their price for uncovering the secret of the disappearing cows. The cattle rancher offered three methods of payment: coin, cattle or one of his daughters, to which the Uff character replied: "Only one?" The sleazy rancher pointed out that he could only marry one of the girls. The Uff shrugged and said "I don't want to marry her. How many do I get if I only want to fuck them?"

(For reference, they eventually settled on 500 pieces of gold and 2 daughters.)

We played a more stripped down version of the rules than I presented here a few weeks ago. I've been going back on forth on the finer details of the game (I have no less than three versions of the rules now!) Last night's version did away with levels, a lot of the skills, and the damage calculation. It uses the same basic mechanic (roll a d12 for all actions, opposed by your opponent's d12). If you beat your opponent, you "hit"; each character can sustain a certain number of hits before dropping. Of course, each hit is described in as much gory and bloody detail as possible.

We used Roll20.net which has it's own set of quirks to meander through, but once we got over the bugs it worked pretty well. Jason Salvatori recently convinced me to stop making elaborate maps and detailed encounters and it's much less painful now. Instead of huge maps and battlemats, now I just use the tabletop as a whiteboard to sketch out battle details as necessary. If it's not a large complicated battle I'll just throw up a picture of the area or monster to help set the scene. It saves me a lot of time and headache, and feels way more organic than fiddling with all the tokens and map components like I used to use.
It may not look like much, but this the aftermath of a pitched and heated battle where both sides fought with the fervent lust of crazed dervishes and no quarter was given. The fields are fertilized with the blood of the fallen, and the blades of the victor drip crimson gore that is their trophy. Did I mention this fight was over five gold coins?

So how did it go? Pretty good I think, considering we started late and then had to stop early because real life pulled people away. The two hours we were actively playing moved along at a good clip despite using new rules that no one was familiar with and having one player who had never used Roll20 before and hadn't played an RPG in over a decade. The system is pretty straight forward and nothing flashy - I really think the fun in this game stems from how willing everyone is to be over the top and ridiculous.

This. This is the level of ridiculous you have to be willing to go to.

I continue to be encouraged that this might actually work. The best part came out of the discussion we had after the session, debriefing and going back and forth about what everyone wanted to see in the game. A few lights went off in my head and I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board, but I am excited. The final game is probably going to look way different than where I started from.

Side note in closing: I've run this adventure twice and I still haven't gotten all the way through it (and it really isn't that long). Neither group has been able to find out the secret behind the "mysterious disappearing cows." I'm also trying to find a better name for it than "The Secret of the Mysterious Disappearing Cows." I've come up with a few possibilities:
  • Cattlegate
  • Cowbotage
  • Rustlemania
@sethdrebitko on Twitter also suggested: The Bovine Boost

 @allforjury suggested: This Adventure is No Bull

Any thoughts on those? Anyone have a better idea?


Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting at Rule of the Dice.

Greatest Hits

Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

By on
Image
There are many bands out there who like to play loud, ass-kicking, speaker-bursting music with thrashing guitars and pounding drums. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of them are total geeks. They may look like hard-ass biker leather fetishists, but in reality they're just D&D and Lord of the Rings nerds who hope that if they sing about dwarves and elves loud enough, people will think they're tough and not pick on them anymore. He was almost cool. Then he opened his mouth. Although I'm sure we could list thousands of bands that could fall into the genre, I'm just going to list The Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaigns. Actually, they're just my 4 favourites, but whatever. 4. Iron Maiden Seriously, how many kids back in the 80s ran home after school to play D&D and listen to Iron Maiden? Well, probably not THAT many, but if you're reading a blog about role-playing games and you're over 30 years old, you know what I'm
Read more

Love, Sex & Dice

By on
Image
Because of the special romantic holiday we celebrate this week, I decided to come up with a special romantic theme article. Did you know that February 15th was National Flag of Canada Day? Sexy. Of course, the holiday I'm referring to is Valentine's Day, and the special theme is lovin' and bangin' in role-playing games. For those of you who are uncomfortable with this topic, you can stop reading now, and go here instead. Does love and sex have a place in table-top role-playing games? It obviously has a place in video RPGs, if Final Fantasy VIII and Dragon Age are any indication (WARNING: That second link is probably NSFW). But many players are uncomfortable acting this at the table and I can't really blame them. Sitting around the dining room table with four other sweaty guys drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Cheetos can make it hard to look into your friend's eyes and profess your undying love for him - I mean, his character, Mistress Clitoria Hexblade. It&#
Read more

10 More Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

By on
Image
Last year I shared a list of 10 Random Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios based on my ad-hoc zombie survival/horror game (which is kinda like a DCC Funnel but set in the modern world, and with zombies). It was actually one of the most popular posts I ever wrote on this site (people still really seem to like zombies , go figure) so I thought it was time for a sequel. Last time the set-ups were pretty standard fare. Scenarios you've seen in many zombie movies, games and books. A rag-tag bunch of strangers, thrown together in an every day situation (a crashed bus, locked in a mall, hiding in a cabin in the woods) and they must survive the overwhelming onslaught of the undead. Death is rampant and expected (each player begins with four 0-level characters), and only the best (or more likely luckiest) will survive. This time a few of the scenarios are quite a bit weirder and may take some more prep work. If you don't want them, don't pick them, or if you roll them randomly,
Read more

The 5 Most Despicable Things Ever Done by Player Characters

By on
Image
Player characters in RPGs are generally supposed to be heroes. Many games and game masters insist their players only choose "good" alignments to enforce this assumption. However, despite everyone's best intentions, whether through accident, greed or sheer boredom, players and their characters often end up doing horrible, horrible things. I mean, in D&D alone, the "heroes" make their living by robbing graves, murdering intelligent creatures and stealing their life's savings. And that's when they're on their best behaviour. I'm not here to preach about the morality in gaming (that's a post for another day). Today I just want to share some despicable, shouldn't-be-funny-but-they-kinda-are stories about nasty shit I've seen players pull off in the name of a "game." Without further ado... The 5 Most Despicable Things Ever Done by Pla y er Characters 5. In a post-apocalyptic zombie game (Dead Reign), the players were be
Read more

Why My Favourite D&D Class Sucks

By on
Image
I don't get to play D&D as a player very often. I usually end up on the DM side of the screen, which is cool because I generally enjoy it more anyway. But from time to time it's a nice change of pace to only have to worry about a single character instead of an entire world. It's also fun to throw down and beat the living daylights out of some monsters. My current D&D of choice, for better or for worse, is 4th Edition. The first time I got to run my own character in this edition was at last season's D&D Encounters event ( Keep on the Borderlands ), and I made the damn fool mistake of playing the cleric. ( See here for why Clerics, especially 4E Essentials clerics, suck. And while we're at it, here's a good argument for the suckiness of Monks). Next I tried a Gnome Bard for a high-level Living Forgotten Realms game, but that turned out almost as bad as the cleric. Seriously, what was I thinking? For the new Encounters season, I almost made
Read more

How to Make Super Heroes That Suck

By on
Image
I recently discovered 4-Color Heroes , a retro-clone of the old TSR Game, Marvel Super Heroes . I mentioned before that MSH was one of the first RPGs I ever played, and even though we never actually read the rules, we played the shit out of that thing. We had a blast making up our own heroes to do battle with the top players in the Marvel Universe (it was so satisfying to punch Cyclops in the face). The coolest thing about MSH, which 4C-Heroes has retained, is the ability to make completely random characters/heroes. Random stupid characters bring a nostalgic tear to my eye: my very first character's only "powers" were lust-inducing pheromones and a boomerang. Seriously. It could just as easily have been a guy who could stick to walls and fart rainbows. No game balance, no logic, just roll some dice, spit out a bunch of random stats and powers, then try to explain how the fuck it works. To be fair, this is probably how most comic book writers and artists create chara
Read more

Why Clerics (Still) Suck

By on
Image
There are some jobs that are just terrible. Cleaning industrial septic tanks. Being that kid with the drum at the front line of those old army battles. Even working on a porno set, which one would think is the best employment in the world, has at least one position that downright sucks (pardon the pun). Seriously, would you want to be the guy that has to mop up/towel down/hose off the actors and set afterward? Depending on the genre of movie being filmed, you may have some seriously screwed up stuff to deal with. Know what’s even worse than all of those things? Being the cleric for an adventuring party. It used to be worse. Through third edition, clerics were treated like a walking first aid kit. You were one of those little boxes with a red cross on them like in Wolfenstein or Doom, but with sexy legs that stick out of the bottom (that’s how I always pictured clerics, anyway). Your job was to cast healing spells, and if you ran out of healing spells you got out of the way whi
Read more