Mecha Against the Giants Sessions 15 and 16

Thursday is GURPS Day!

My online group is getting excited about playing in Castle of Horrors, and so we've shifted the schedule: my Mecha Against the Giants game is primary, and GURPS Chaos Scar is what we run when I didn't get my prep done in time. The goal is finish up Mecha Against the Giants, so we can move onto Castle of Horrors in early October.

Send in the Professionals

The pilots have been destroying all the enemies they've faced, from fortresses full of giants to civilization destroying dragons. Unknown to the pilots, the enemy has spied on them, and realized the unstoppable power of their mecha. And the enemy has decided to deal with the problem by striking at the mecha's weak points: their all too human pilots.

At the start of Session 15, the pilots were staying overnight in a villa in the countryside. It was their last fuel depot before they attacked the giants' final stone castle. I'd drawn up the villa based vaguely on historical Roman villas, and it ended up with guest rooms on the second floor facing an open balcony that overlooked a courtyard. We quickly established which pilots (the lecherous ones and the foolish ones) were wearing their pilot suits to bed, and which weren't. Then I announced they heard a muffled cry of "intruders!" from a night watchman behind the villa, followed by the sound of a body hitting the ground.

The pilots wisely grabbed and put on their helmets, so they had 360-degree night vision and head protection. Then they peaked out the window, just in time to see 8 figures armed with a variety of weapons (swords, bows, staves, twin bastard swords) slip behind a villa outbuilding. +Kevin Smyth dropped out the window with a plan to flank the assassins, while the other pilots grabbed weapons and started moving toward the balcony.

On the ground, Kevin's character spotted a pair of small giants lifting the bowmen to the top of the wall. In turned out that the guys with twin bastard swords had been shrunken giants, and now the giants had grown back to their full 15' size. The giants lifted the swordsmen over the wall, and then one hopped the wall to engage the pilots on the balcony while the other turned to charge Kevin's character.

On the balcony, the pilots started opening fire on the bowmen and swordsmen. Much to their disgust, their targets had high DX and Acrobatic skill, and could use the same Acrobatic Dodge trick that the PC's used to bump their Dodge skills to unreasonable level. Also, the bowmen were insanely high skill Heroic Archers with the Dual-Shot technique, and were firing very accurate, armor penetrating, poisoned tipped arrows at unreasonable speeds.

+Nathan Joy's pilot took some arrows that barely penetrated and lightly poisoned him, while +Uhuk of the Guard's character ran out and immediately got pinned down by arrow fire: he dropped to the ground in response to the first flight of arrows, and each turn he would get to his knees only to have to drop prone again.

+Theodore Briggs' character finally got a couple of lucky shots into the giant in the courtyard's brain, dropping it. One the archers ran up the stairs, so Uhuk's character shot him at point blank range and connected, dropping him. Nate's character took cover in the other stair well, only to be ambushed by a swordsman. Nate's character responded by frantically backpedaling and opening with fully automatic rifle fire, dropping him.

Things Get Worse, Then Get Better

Back behind the villa, Kevin's character used his Luck to avoid a critical hit from the giant, and then discovered that even his best blows with his swords were insufficient to deal with the giant. The next round, the giant got another critical hit, and Kevin was literally out of luck. Even DR 18 armor isn't up to an 9d attack, and Kevin's character was nearly killed and expected to have to spend the rest of the fight desperately defending himself. Ted's character responded to Kevin's character's pleas and shot the giant through the window, wounding it enough to drop prone. Kevin promptly moved up the giant and thrust his swords through the giant's eyes, then attempted to intimidate the last two staff wielding foes. Sadly, at this point his character passed out from blood loss.

The staff wielders jumped over the wall and then flew up onto the balcony, all while the last archer kept Uhuk's character pinned. Ted's character took a shot, but encountered a Reflect Missiles spell - and since he was the lecherous horndog who wasn't wearing armor, a single rifle shot was enough to nearly drop him. He kept on fighting for a round or two, but then passed out.

Nate's character took out the wizard immediately afterwards, and Uhuk's character managed to get behind the cover of one of the pillars after getting hit with an arrow or two. They combined to shoot the second wizard (who blew his Reflect Missile roll, oops) and then tried to figure out how to deal with the last archer. I pointed out that they had their helmets on, and their guns had cameras that fed into the helmet's HUD, and so they could take a minor penalty to poke their gun barrels out from behind cover without risking themselves. Nate originally said he was get an entire arm of cover to aim at the archer, but after having to duck behind cover to avoid a flurry of arrows, he abandoned that plan.

The last archer exchanged fire with them for a while, but they were behind cover and he was exposed on a wall. Eventually he gave and at fled. Unfortunately, the pilots had remotely started their mecha at the start of the combat, and one guy on foot cannot expect to outrun a mecha with only a minute's head start. Nate was very specific about his desire and plan to not just run down the last assassin, but to run him over and then stomp on him a bit. Given that the assassins had caused much more casualties to the pilots than any other foe, it was a pretty reasonable response.

We ended the session there.

Using the PCs' Tactics Against Them

I've played and run a lot of Dungeon Fantasy, but this was the first time that I got to see what a pair of fully optimized, Elven Scouts with maximum Forest Guardian talent could if they were on the GM's side. It was pretty ugly from the PCs' view: all their nasty tricks were being used against them. Obviously, they won eventually, but with half their group at -1xHP or worse and another with 1 HP remaining.

The big players on the assassin's side were the archers and the giants. The swashbucklers ended up being bullet fodder, and while the wizards did some cool stuff, it wasn't enough.

What Now?

According to my original notes, the next and ultimate set piece in the campaign was going to be an assault on the giant king's castle. As I got closer to needing to really prepare for that sequence, the less I liked it. It felt like a boring retread of the fight at the giant wooden fort.

However, the success of the assassins inspired me. The leadership of the giants know that their assassins didn't survive, but that they did badly wound several of the pilots. That, and some new tactics, meant that a rapid strike by the giants could give the giants 50:1 odds against the remaining pilots, and hopefully the ability to close with the mecha without getting destroyed at range. So that's what is going to happen next: a big open field engagement with the giants on the offensive.

And Then What?

Work on the Castle of Horrors wiki is proceeding, and should go faster now that I've got all my preparations for this campaign completed. So Castle of Horrors should start on time in October. As part of that, I've done some more work on using the Size and Speed/Range table for rapid fire, and I'm in the process of revising the default counts for ritual magic, which I'll publish here when it's complete.

Mecha Against the Giants Session 14: Dragonslayers

I ran another session of Mecha Against the Giants, and again, this was a sequence that I'd be waiting for. I slightly muffed up the lead-up, but the session turned out to be absolutely awesome, and that's what counts.

Setting the Stage

The session started with the pilots finishing the repairs on their mecha and having a grand review so that notable dignitaries would be reassured that the pilots were defending them and that the war against the giants would be successful. The pilots also needed to plan some logistics, which I hand-waved, but basically they needed a lot of fuel sent west so they could attack the giants major stronghold.

As part of the review, the pilots had a meeting with the local Pontiff. He beat around the bush, implicitly suggesting that the secular powers were not doing enough to support the Divine Champions (aka the pilots) and that he should lead a revolution leading to a theocracy that would support them better. +Nathan Joy played his character well here, ignoring the subtler hints while still gently tamping down on the Pontiff's schemes. Sadly, he wasn't forceful enough about it.

Later that day, there was a review of the mecha for the Consul and some other important people. I messed this up a bit, to my chagrin. My notes for this scene specifically called for the Oracle to relay a vision she'd had to the pilots, relaying a message from the Gods that they would be challenged shortly and should hold nothing back. Unfortunately, I totally forgot to do this and the players were a little hesitant in the next sequence.

So I skipped the sequence with the prophet, jumping instead to the arrival of a soot stained courier. The courier was babbling about a legendary monster known as "Downfall, the Graveyard of Nations" who apparently had destroyed the old kingdoms and was unkillable and generally horrible. According to the courier, the giants had revived Downfall and he was coming soon.

Enter Downfall, the Graveyard of Nations

At that point, the pilots spotted a giant riding a flying dragon in the sky some distance away. Not being fools, they immediately sprinted for their mecha and began powering them up.  Rangefinders showed the dragon was less than a mile away, closing rapidly, and roughly the size of B-52: SM+6 in GURPS terms, and weighing upwards of 100 tons. While the players were digesting that, Downfall slowed and spewed a cone of flame on them from half a mile away: it did a remarkable 20d damage, and penetrated everyone's armor for minor damage.

As designed, Downfall's breath weapon did 60d of damage, being a 3 MJ heat ray from GURPS Spaceships. Half damage should have been 30d, but I took pity on the PCs and decided that since they were hit at the extreme end of the cone, it was reduced to 20d. I shouldn't have done that: 20d damage averaged 6-10 injury to their mecha after armor, and that wasn't impressive. Another 35 points of injury would have panicked them properly.

Minimal damage or not, when their weapons finally came online, the PCs were motivated to take out the dragon.

Dragonslaying Done Big

I played this fast and loose, because people were aiming for multiple seconds, Downfall was closing at various rates depending on whether he was preparing to breathe fire or not, and his breath weapon had a significant travel time (it flew at 300 mph, but he was more than 1/4 a mile from his targets for most of the fight). So instead of a strict turn order and initiative, we had something closer to each person deciding whether to attack or not on any given turn and just skipping the turns when people weren't attacking. Even so, the entire fight only took about 20 seconds of game-time and maybe two hours of real time.

+Theodore Briggs started with some aimed rifle shots at Downfall's wings, hoping to drop him from the sky. Given that Downfall had DR 125 and 300 HP, he was reasonably resistant to crippling from 25mm APEX rounds - the rounds penetrated armor, but didn't have enough remaining energy to get close to 150 injury. Nate decided to use his mecha's mortar to send an explosively forged projectile in the massive giant on Downfall's back: 6dx16 damage easily put paid to the giant, but didn't have enough remaining energy to penetrate Downfall's thick hide.

+Uhuk of the Guard  started looking over her options. She'd taken over from another player who'd dropped out of the game early, and so she's even less familiar with her mecha's equipment than the other players. I noted she had the same 25mm rifled cannon that Ted wasn't doing much with, and a pair of 125mm guided anti-tank missiles on the mecha's shoulder hardpoints. That woke her up, and the only thing to do was feed one of them to Downfall.

As it turned out, even guided missiles flying at 440 mph need a couple of seconds to hit a massive dragon 1/4th of a mile away. Uhuk produced a little guided missile token for maptools, and we moved it every second as it closed while frantically looking up the rules for guided weapons. At any rate, Downfall tooks some more hits from cannon on the way in, and had lost control of his flight when the missile hit.

Roll 80 dice, please

The missile's base damage was 6dx14 (10), and after subtracting 6dx6 worth of armor, that worked out to 80 dice of damage. Now, we play with Skype voice chat but don't use cameras, so I didn't see the expression on Uhuk's face. But I could hear the glee in voice when I told her to roll that damage - that's a larger bucket of dice than I think any of physically owned, and it's certainly the largest amount I personally have ever heard of being rolled in actually play, including some stints with Warhammer, Shadowrun, and Exalted. Fortunately, MapTools has die-roller macros, and it's only one more key stroke to roll 80 dice than it is to roll 2 dice.

Downfall took 457 damage from the missile: not enough to kill him, but enough to stun him and slow him. The rest of the pilots got into the act, launching a swarm of lighter, 70mm HEDP missiles at him and firing some rifle rounds into his neck and head. Downfall had dodged some of the earlier attacks, but that wasn't possible while he was stunned and slowed. He made his death checks and stayed conscious, and I think he even managed to recover from stun and pull out of the stall, but he was taking several hundred injury every second. Fortunately, I have a spreadsheet to do the math for me, and before Downfall could breath again, his injuries totaled 1957: enough to put him below -5xHP, and therefore dead.

I went ahead and did the math for how long it would take him to hit the ground (because I enjoy physics, okay?) and he ended up crashing just outside the castle walls. Somewhere in the process, he flipped over, and the (already dead) giant king on his back was crushed into powder.

Celebration Time!

I don't know if method role-playing is a thing, but my players were giddy after fighting. And so where their characters. Ridiculous suggestions for what to do with the body were proposed and executed, and everyone had a good time. The citizens of the local town spilled out into the streets, carving up the dragon's corpse for burgers and starting a huge party.

The pilots participated. Ted's character tried to get +Kevin Smyth  character drunk, so that Ted's character could go seduce the pretty Oracle without getting cock-blocked, but Ted blew didn't do well enough on his Carousing rolls and his character ended up in bed with several daughters of the local aristocracy instead. The other pilots had their own fun.

Good Bye to that Sub-Plot

At some point in the celebrations, the Pontiff held a prayer meeting that turned briefly into a riot. I had hopes for this turn of events, but no one was particular interested in it. I asked them what they
intended to do about it, and they all felt this was a bad enough idea that they would have to step in. Given that they were already Divine Champions and heroes of the hour for having killed an unkillable monster, plus they had invincible mecha, it was pretty easy for them to quench the riot and take the pontiff into custody. No one was particularly interested in it, so we just handwaved it and moved on. And pretty much ended the night there.

What Did You Think Would Happen?

As we were saying our good-byes, Kevin asked me if I was disappointed in how the fight played out. It was rather anti-climatic: Downfall was presented as being a huge unstoppable monster, but he went down in a dozen or so attacks and did very little damage. I responded that, to the contrary, I had always intended the fight to go down pretty much exactly as it had. An unreasonably tough monster, by Iron Age standards, was simply no match for anti-tank missiles and rockets.

Staging the fight the way I did reinforced two of the campaigns themes: escapist power fantasy, and that all problems are solvable with the right tool. The escapist power fantasy element was obvious: here was a massive, unkillable monster that the PCs took down in seconds, and everyone enjoyed that, even me. And the right tool for the right job has been a theme since the game started: the locals can't meaningfully harm the giants, but the PCs slaughter them in droves because they have the right tools in the form of their mecha.

In some games, the PCs have to snatch every victory out of the jaws of defeat through clever tactics and desperate use of every resource they have. Mecha Against the Giants isn't one of those games. The threats are real, and are grave if not countered, but the PCs should have the resources to deal with them if they act promptly. It's a lot of fun for everyone involved.

What Next?

The end of Mecha Against the Giants is approaching, which is good, because I want to move on to Castle of Horrors. I still have one more sequence that I'm looking forward to, and then a relatively straightforward climax, and this campaign is over. Of course, that'll still end up taking six sessions, so I'll be lucky to be done by Christmas.

Designer Notes

This is Downfall, as I wrote him up. Use him to challenge Dungeon Fantasy delvers that think they're really cool. He's certainly unstoppable by any mundane TL1-4 society, being flat out immune to any conceivable siege engine barring a critical hit.

ST: 300	HP: 300	Speed: 8.00
DX: 14	Will: 14	Move: 50 flying, 28 ground
IQ: 6	Per: 14
HT: 12	FP: 20	SM: +6 (20x3 hexes)
Dodge: 11	Parry: N/A	DR: 125 (6dx6)

Fiery Breath (18): 6dx10 Burn. Ranged Attack with Cone (50), Acc 9, Range 100/1000. Takes 6 actions to use and has a 10 second recharge.
Claws (20): 57d Cu, Reach 10.
Traits: Fearlessness +4; Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction 2 (Explosions Only); Magic Resistance 5; Nicating Membranes (50); Arm and Leg Strikers; Winged Flight
Class: Mundane?
Notes: Surprisingly low HT and lack of High Pain Threshold mean that it goes down easy in combat, if you can do 160+ damage in a single strike.

In Spaceships terms, which is where he started, Downfall is an organic SM+6 spacecraft, with Ornithopter Wings, Arms, Legs, and a 3 MJ Fixed Forward Main Battery containing a Heat Ray. He has 3-4 locations of Organic Armor per section. You can probably recreate the rest of him
yourself if you need to.

Mecha Against the Giants Sessions 11, 12, and 13

So as part of the Great Summer Blog Hiatus, I forgot to write session summaries for Mecha Against the Giants. We have played a bit, and we finally got to the big scene I've been waiting for, so let me summarize.

Beware the Dead

When we left off, +Theodore Briggs had just poked a couple of dead dwarf corpses  that got up and objected to him. There was a brief exchange of combat, but the pilots backed off quickly. I guess the gold wasn't that important after all. The dead dwarves didn't want to be disturbed, and  they were okay with not being disturbed. After the pilots backed off, the dead dwarves laid back down on the floor.

The Ancient Fortress

The pilots then turned to the next bend, and found an ancient dwarven  fortress carved into the cave walls. A massive pile of rotten troglodyte corpses, filled with crossbow bolts and carved up by heavy chopping weapons, lay in drifts before the fortress. On the walls above, a couple of improbably armored dwarves (DR 18!) stood in watch, pointing their empty crossbows at the pilots.

There was a brief discussion of what to do, and I think a bit of inconclusive fire. The dwarf's helmets were thick enough to bounce carbine fire, and had thick wire grids across the eye slits that made the usual tactic of aimed shots to the eyes impossible. Stymied, the pilots pulled back and the players debated.

+Kevin Smyth  reasoned that they had access to dwarven armor from the dead troglodyte hero, and  that everyone pretty much looks the same if they're wearing 70+ pounds of steel plates. So he went  back, put the armor on, and knee-walked up to the fortress door, pretending to be a  dwarf. This worked, to an extent, in that he got to the fortress door without being attacked. Sadly, his Acting skill was not good enough to hoodwink the golems up close, and he discovered the flaw in his plan: the armor was heavy and bulky enough to impair his combat abilities. He was still faster than the golems, so he retreated while everyone else put down some covering fire.

The golems chased them out of the cavern again. Everyone passed the point of pursuit, restocked, and reloaded. The new plan was pretty straightforward: get in close and disable the dwarves somehow.

A Fortunate Mistake

At this point, Kevin noticed he had a Move and Attack technique on his character sheet, and started using his Move 7 to get behind the dwarves and kneecap them. Normally, I don't allow uncapped melee Move and Attack, because it's too unbalanced and confusing, but I figured I must have   changed my mind due to the escapist nature of this game. After the end of that session, I reread my notes and realized I'd let him buy it off for Ritter combat, not for personal combat. Sadly, the damage was done.

Between several of the dwarf golems getting hit with mud to the eyes, a couple of bolas that knocked them over, and Kevin kneecapping them, the dwarf golems stopped being combat effective fairly quickly. They were fairly easy to render combat ineffective, but hard to destroy completely, so the fight was becoming a bit tedious. Eventually, I just handwaved the end of the fight: there were another 4 golems coming as reinforcements, but they weren't going to do anything so who cared?

Alternate Solutions

At one point, the players asked me how I had intended to solve this particular combat challenge. I admitted that I really didn't have a solution in mind: sometimes, as the GM, it's interesting to put an improbably difficult fight that has hard counters to the PC's usual tactics and see what comes out of it.

After a few moment's thought, I did admit I would have solved it a  different way than they did. The 25mm rifles that their mecha carried could easily be dismounted from the mecha and put on a cart. It would have been hard but possible to manhandle the cart through the mine (the 25mm rifle weighs about 250 lbs). They could have used a pick axe to mine through the back wall of the fortress, which would have aroused the golems' ire but left the golems coming through a narrow tunnel in the cone of fire of the rifle. The golems were tough, but 25mm APEX rounds would have taken care of them very easily.

When I said all that, there was just a moment of collective silence from the players. That was a level of bloodymindedness that I don't think they were anticipating.

Things That Worked, Things To Change

Overall, the high-tech dungeon crawl was a lot of fun, so much so that it's going to be the focus of our next campaign. A couple of things didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. If I were going to do it again, I'd give the dwarven axe-armor golems ammo for their crossbows: without it, they just weren't effective enough against the PCs. And I'd definitely go back and reread the rules for everything, like the trolls that I messed up. Of course, I always tell myself to reread the rules closely and I rarely do.

Mecha Against the Giants Session 10

Thursday is GURPS Day! When I remember.

I got a chance to run another session of Mecha Against the Giants. In session 9, the mecha pilots found themselves in the midst of a dungeon crawl, in a cave full of stinky reptile men. We resumed from where we left off last session: the pilots were in a wide cave, surrounded by 30 or more troglodytes, with reinforcements coming from multiple directions.

Automatic Weapons Fire Solves Problems

Most of the pilots started dropping their melee weapons in favor of automatic carbines. Several seconds of burst fire later, and many more of troglodytes were dead and the rest were fleeing. The pilots shot a couple in the back, or picked up javelins and did what they could, but they generally let the masses flee.

I told them that they could heard troglodytes voices in the caverns, somewhere probably to the north. They decided to reload and look around a bit, then press north.

A Brief Interlude

The pilots wandered around a bit, and found an ancient portcullis in the raised position. After confirming that the winch was on their side of the portcullis, and that troglodytes had fled down the other side, they dropped in. The portcullis was made from solid iron bars and improbably heavy, so they weren't worried about any more troglodyte reinforcements from that direction.

The pilots then scouted north, moving toward the sound of the troglodytes. The pitch of their voices changed, with a brief silence before a massed yell and then more silence. +Nathan Joy surmised that the troglodytes had probably rallied and given themselves a big cheer and were now planning to advance in silence.

Final Defensive Fire!

Almost immediately, the pilots spotted the first troglodytes sneaking down the corridor, and the troglodytes spotted them. +Kevin Smyth's weapon master charged forward, convinced that he could hold against the 20+ troglodytes charging toward him. His allies behind him screamed in frustration, as they were planning to use suppression fire on the charging hordes and Kevin was now in the line of fire.

Regardless, they opened up with suppression fire.  +Theodore Briggs was playing a gunslinger and scoffed at the waste of ammo with wild, untargeted shots. But in a narrow hallway packed with hordes of troglodytes, every bullet found a target eventually. Admittedly, one of those targets was Kevin, who got bruised by a couple of bullets that were stopped by his armor and had one weak penetration in his left arm.

Kevin, in the midst of the horde and the bullet storm, did his best to carve up any troglodyte that got near. One of the troglodytes, larger than the others, was wearing a heavy mail hauberk and carrying a metal faced shield and wood and metal axe - a clear upgrade over the unarmored troglodytes and their stone and bone weapons. Surrounded by troglodytes, Kevin tried to have a proper duel with the troglodyte. As is often the case, the duel was pretty anticlimatic: there was a brief exchange of strikes, and then Kevin critically parried the troglodyte's axe, forcing the troglodyte to drop it. On his next action, Kevin carved through the troglodyte's knee (maximum damage easily blowing through the DR 8 mail), though he critically failed on the second part of his rapid strike, and lost his katana in the process. He suggested that he'd lost it in the troglodyte's knee, planning (I think) to grab it back next turn. The troglodyte frustrated that by rapidly crawling away, and Kevin was forced in a different direction by the troglodyte tide and his ally's suppression fire.

We played through a couple more rounds, but the troglodytes were not making it through the suppression fire, and any that did were getting killed by rapid aimed fire from Ted. The dead troglodytes were beginning to form a barrier, further constricting the other troglodytes' advance. Looking at the clock, I handwaved the rest of the fight, and the surviving troglodytes fled again, even deeper into the caverns.

Perhaps charging through the chokepoint
into automatic weapons fire wasn't a good idea.

I blame +Peter V. Dell'Orto 

After dusting themselves off, the pilots examined the armored troglodyte and moved up to the north from where the troglodytes had come from. In the distance, they saw heaps of metal that were probably dead bodies in armor and a glint of gold. Investigating, they saw three bodies in gilded mail, surrounded by long-dead troglodytes.

There was a brief discussion about what to do. I pointed out that Nate's and Ted's character's were greedy, and would probably want to recover the gold. Kevin pointed out that the pilots were Heroes of the Nation (Kevin was very insistent that his character, as a Russian, would prefer that over Divine Champions) and could get whatever gold, silver, or other material goods they wanted from the Zosporbi. Given that the oracle had told them to be wary of the floor and the dead, and that the advice about the floor (well, the grey ooze) had paid off, everyone was wary of the bodies. That was enough for Nate, but Ted wasn't able to overcome his greed. Nate attempted and critically failed a Leadership roll, and Ted headed up to investigate the bodies closer.

At which point, as was more or less inevitable, the corpses rose. And I ended the session, because I've learned a thing or two about timing cliff-hangers over the years.

We'll pick up some time in the future with a fight against animated dead bodies in metal armor with axes and shields. I expect it will be interesting.

Mecha Against the Giants Session 9

I originally proposed Mecha Against the Giants to my group because I wanted to play a tactical mecha game. One of the side benefits of the campaign was the possibility of having high tech heroes do a dungeon crawl. We started that dungeon crawl last session, and continued it this session, but with many more troglodytes.

Enter the Hordes

The pilots had entered the mine, shot up a couple of disorganized troglodytes, and fought their way past a couple of trolls. Now all they had to do was deal with any other troglodytes, find the metal stash, and deal with its defenders.

They moved cautiously through the tunnels, and encountered a small group of troglodytes: about a half dozen or so. Violence quickly ensued, but the troglodytes' primitive weapons and lack of armor meant they were quickly dispatched by ultra-tech melee weapons wielded by soldiers in a nigh-invulnerable armor. After a few seconds of watching the weapon master dismember their allies, the remaining troglodytes fled. A few that had started a great deal away managed to escape, but most were cut down or shot from behind.

The pilots regrouped and began cautiously advancing down another corridor. After a few minutes, they heard noise behind them and in front of them, and came around a corner to face a good sized group of troglodytes, with more coming down the corridor behind them. There was more violence, and it quickly became apparent that the troglodytes had reserves and were willing to use them. They also had a pair of 9' long, tentacled, caterpillar things that could run along the cave ceiling and attack foes on the group with their long tentatcles.

The caterpillars absorbed a number of rifle bullets and sword strikes, and the pilots began to realize that the situation was getting hairy. +Theodore Briggs opened up with a burst of rifle fire, dropping a half dozen of them, but more kept coming. +Kevin Smyth waded into the fray with reversed wakizashi and katana, and taught the troglodytes that you can't really grapple a weapon master with all-around vision.

Even though the pilots' armor was mostly invulnerable to stone-tipped javelins and crude axes, the number of attackers was daunting. Sooner or later, the troglodytes were going to overwhelm everyone but Kevin and beat them to death through their flexible armor. +Nathan Joy dropped his axe and shield in favor of an automatic weapon.

That's where we ended the session. The troglodyes are getting a stream of continuous reinforcements every second, ranging from 0 to a dozen or more, and the pilots are rapidly running out of maneuvering room. On the dubious bonus side, the piles of troglodyte bodies are beginning to create areas of bad footing.

Active troglodytes in orange, heroes in white, and dead and unconscious troglodytes as bodies on the floor. The odds are currently 24:4 in the troglodytes' favor.

Fighting Hordes

From the GM's perspective, this was an odd fight to manage. The individual troglodytes aren't very effective: low strength, low skill, terrible weapons, and an unfortunate tendency to get murdered by the PCs if they somehow manage to do something effective. So there's a fair bit of dice rolling, but in the end it doesn't come to much. There's also a lot of busywork in just moving the tokens forward, since after each turn, the troglodyte's previous front line is mostly dead.

Still, this is shaping up nicely in my view. The pilots are beginning to feel stressed, and while they have ways out of their situation, they're much less complacent about the troglodytes. I suspect any future waves of troglodytes are going to be meet mass ranged gunfire, which should give the "Colonial Marines gunning down alien hordes" feel I was going for.

Interrupt of Service

My group's regular GM, +Uhuk of the Guard, has mostly managed to unstress her life enough that she can run games again. In a way, I'm a little bummed, because I really do enjoy MAtG, and I want to run it more. But our regular game lets me playtest Shamans and College Ritual Book magic, and that's pretty useful too. It also has Kaz the Coleopteran Barbarian Wrestler, and there's worse ways to spend time then watching a giant beetle beat kobolds to death with other kobolds.

At any rate, MAtG will probably resume its normal irregular schedule, and I'll need to find something else to post about for a while.

Mecha Against the Giants Session 8

One thing I'd always intended to do with the Mecha Against the Giants game was to run a dungeon crawl. In keeping with the escapist and awesome tone of the game, it didn't have to be a particularly long or difficult dungeon crawl, but there was always going to be one. Last night, we got started on crawling that dungeon.

Mines and Methane

Shortly after the end of the last session, I wrote the players an email explaining the premise: thanks to a faulty sensor in the mechas' self-repair systems, they needed to acquire a lot of aluminum and titanium. The natives knew of an old dwarven vault that had ingots of both, but it was guarded by golems and in an abandoned mine. The mine had been overrun by cave horrors, which the D&D-savvy players recognized as troglodytes.

Except these troglodytes emitted a gas that wasn't just nauseatingly stinky, but also highly flammable. The natives couldn't clear the mine of the troglodytes, because carrying open flames into the caves tended to kill them, and they couldn't stand the stench of fighting the troglodytes in close quarters anyway.

Fortunately, the pilots had IR vision from their armored pilot suits, LED lights on their helmets that wouldn't ignite the methane, filter masks that would stop the stench, and lots of guns. Although they were a little worried about the golems (hypothesizing that they were some kind of robots), they figured they could take the rest of the mine with no problem. A couple of them picked up shields from the TL2 native stock, and they descended into the mine.

One of the quirks of Mecha Against the Giants is there isn't much magic in the world, but there is a little. To reinforce that point, I had the friendly oracle give some vague warnings: beware the floors and beware the dead. The pilots weren't too sure what to make of that at the time, but at least some of that advice turned out to be useful.

We started play with the pilots well into the mine and established their current weapon load-outs. Everyone had a rifle, a pistol, a superfine combat knife, and most people have at least one other melee weapon: the ultra tech utility axes or the duelist's antique daisho. Everyone but+Kevin Smyth's duelist started with their rifles ready, and I introduced them to the first set of troglodytes.

A combat between a half-dozen stone age primitives armed with flammable stink auras and a fire team of 23rd century infantry is pretty guaranteed to go poorly for the primitives, and this was no exception. The primitives were scented, people snuck around around until the primitves were spotted, and then violence occurred. Unfortunately for the pilots, the troglodytes had been wandering this section of the mine for a while, which meant the air had plenty of methane but not too much. And the muzzle blasts of the guns had a 1 in 6 chance of setting off the methane. Because I'm a nice guy, I let the players roll to see if the methane went off. Which it did, just about every time they fired their guns, enveloping them in clouds of flame.



Fortunately, their piloting suits were mostly fireproof, but unfortunately for them, mostly doesn't mean completely. Some high damage rolls and a couple of the pilots were lightly cooked, and every started dropping rifles for their backup melee weapons. Except for +Theodore Briggs gunslinger, who for some reason decided to pick up some smouldering javelins from the well roasted corpse of a troglodyte. Attempting to throw those javelins at the second wave of troglodytes were enormously successful, in the sense that they ignited the air again and wiped out the troglodytes. The pilots who got burnt again (I let +Uhuk of the Guard roll her own damage, and she used her Luck, and didn't roll less than 8 on 2d6-1 on 3 tries) were a bit less impressed by this tactic.


This entire sequence was hilariously funny to me, and I think everyone did enjoy it a lot. The change from the overconfident pilots, casually dispatching the primitive troglodytes, to the frustrated and annoyed pilots trying to convince +Nathan Joy's officer character to "not set anything else on fire, please!" was really great.

Choices, choices, choices

After dealing with the early troglodytes, the pilots moved deeper into the mine and found three branching corridors.

One corridor sloped steeply downward into a cavern with damp, water slick walls. They weren't sure what to make of that, but decided to avoid it

A second corridor led to a room filled with dewy cobwebs and massive spider webs, but noticeably absent of cave insects. Some rocks were thrown into the webs, and they could barely make out some scuttling movement on the ceiling. After some more discussion about the advisability of setting the webs on fire, everyone decided to go some place else.

The last corridor led to a deliberate pile of rocks constricting access to the passage. The pilots could squeeze past the rocks, but it would be slow and leave them exposed. While they were considering it, a pair of 7' tall green skinned man-like creatures (aka trolls) approached from the far side of the obstruction. There was a brief conversation, and the trolls offered to let them pass for a lot of gold. How much gold? Well, the trolls weren't going to set their prices until they knew exactly how much gold the pilots had available. +Nathan Joy wasn't playing that game, and the pilots walked away to evaluate their options.

Door #1

No one wanted to tangle with the giant spiders, so they got out their ultratech rope and tied off a belaying line for the downsloping cavern. +Kevin Smyth went first, with everyone else waiting until the established an all clear. As he got near the cavern floor, he noticed it was slightly wet and glass slick. Worried, he tossed a rock at it, and then the grey ooze's multiple pseudo-pods rose up and tried to grab him. He desperately retreated while the other pilots pulled him up, and the only casualties were a yard or so of rope. The ooze couldn't pull itself up the slope, though it tried.



There wasn't a lot of discussion about trying that again. The spiders were still a no go, so the pilots went back to the trolls.

Bullets versus sponges

Kevin went first again, trying to sneak past the rock pile. He got most of the way before the trolls noticed, and then squirmed the rest of the way out, drew his wakizashi in a reversed grip, and went into close combat with one of the trolls. The troll got a maximum damage critical hit of a bite early on, but even that wasn't enough to penetrate the ultra-tech armor, so this combat turned into a farce of the troll trying to grab at Kevin while Kevin slowly hacked it up. He was somewhat penalized by the troll's mouth-grapple, but his usual strategy of "chop off some limbs" seemed to work okay.

(It wasn't until later that I actually looked up the rules for Injury Tolerance: Independent Limbs, and discovered that Kevin would have been making his life much worse by doing this. Oh, well).

The other troll casually knocked over the rock pile and advanced on Nate and Ted. Several center of mass shots later, and that troll was... surprisingly hale and hearty, thanks to its lack of vitals. Ted then switched to our usual strategy for dealing with extremely nasty foes: shoot them in the eyes. He shot out an eye and expected the thing to fall over, but trolls don't have brains, either, so that wasn't a lot more effective. He didn't notice it, but the troll's eye regenerated almost immediately, so it wasn't very badly effected at all. However, trolls don't regenerate nearly fast enough to handle being shot by a dozen or more rifle bullets, and it eventually collapsed.

The pilots, having previously established that the methane concentration in this area was heavy enough that it would no longer randomly ignite (methane stoichiometry is weird and particular), tried to burn the bodies, but for some reason the troll didn't burn. So they chopped them into pieces sized for convenient carrying and lugged them over to the grey ooze tunnel, and then tossed them down.

This is when I finally looked up the rules on Independent Body Parts, and realized that the trolls' limbs should have been attacking. Still, it was late and the trolls had been fairly beaten, so we glossed over it with some Fright Checks for when the limbs animated and attacked.

We ended the session with the pilots victory over the trolls. They're still looking for the vault of industrial metals, and they suspect there's more troglodytes to overcome.

Prepping the Dungeon

This was an odd dungeon to prepare. I kept having to fight my usual DF instincts of "make the dungeon as challenging as possible" and stick with "let's be cool and awesome."

Troglodytes aren't exactly a favorite, nostalgic monster race for me, but they worked nicely as a "You must be this tall to ride" monster to explain why the natives hadn't cleared the mines. As I set them up, they're an extremely difficult foe for non-magical TL2 delvers to clear out of enclosed spaces: horrid nauseating stink, deadly methane fumes that deprive the delvers of light sources, and decent enough combat skills. For the ultra-tech pilots that ignore most of these problems, they weren't much of a problem, at least in small numbers. We'll see what happens when the pilots face dozens of them at a time.

After I'd set the troglodytes as the primary obstacle, I knew I wanted to include some iconic encounters to see how the ultratech pilots would handle them. I didn't want anything that would be clearly too hard, so no insubstantial ghosts or monsters that needed magic weapons to defeat. But oozes, giant spiders, and trolls are things that very much go back to the hobby's roots. And the trolls already had adequate stats thanks to +Peter V. Dell'Orto's work in DF Monsters. I was pretty happy with how they worked out, though a little sad that the grey ooze didn't get to corrode anyone's armor.

I was actually worried about the danger of the trolls, though it turned out to be a non-issue. They just weren't dangerous enough when they couldn't penetrate the pilot's armor. It might have gone the other way if the trolls had managed to get a solid grapple going and started bending the delvers into pretzels. Or if I'd remembered that the pilot's armor is flexible and Kevin should have been experiencing some blunt trauma from the troll bites.

What Next?

Sometime soon, we'll continue this dungeon crawling experience with hordes of troglodytes and the dwarven golems. It should be fun.

Now I'm also tempted to run this dungeon in a standard DF game. Poisonous, flammable air would be a nice challenge for experienced delvers, and it really does change tactics in a lot of ways. "Just burn it out" becomes less viable when you set the air around you on fire, though there are wizardly ways to get around that I suspect.

Mecha Against the Giants Session 7

My online group's regular GM was absent again, so we finished up the fight at the giant wooden fort in Mecha Against the Giants.

The inevitable result

During the last session, the 30' giant warlord had grabbed +Nathan Joy's mecha's leg, in order to get Nate to stop kicking at him. That prompted a post on how Technical Grappling works when dealing with SM+2 and SM+4 warriors, and that post concluded with the observation that it was all for nothing, since the giant warlord was probably going to lose an arm when the next PC attacked.

Unsurprisingly, the giant warlord lost his arm when a 25mm APDS shell went through his elbow. He collapsed unconscious (third crippling hit) and let go of Nate. That danger adverted, the rest of the fight proceeded to go even more poorly for the giants.

Intimidation and Wild Fire

In the northeast room, +Kevin Smyth's pilot was dueling a 24' giant and a constant stream of weak and medium sized giant reinforcements. Unfortunately for the reinforcements, they could either drop their weapons and fail to grapple Kevin, or strike at him with weapons that couldn't reliably penetrate his armor. Either way, he parried any successful attacks, stabbed fools who crowded him too much, and generally caused mayhem.

Finally, the large giant got too close, and Kevin stepped into his flank and hamstrung both his legs. Kevin then activated his Follow-Up perk, succeeded the resulting Intimidation check, and got the group of 8-9 medium giants that were trying to engage him to critically fail their Will resistance roll. It was quite impressive. The giants fled, and Kevin had to stab a couple in the back when they didn't get out of his way fast enough.

In the main hall, Nate got involved in a running fight with a couple of giants, including one that eventually realized what a gun was. I generally let a giant realize that the mecha's cannons were killing people at range with a successful IQ test, and then the giant could attempt to dodge the gunfire. This one giant survived long enough to not only realize was gunfire was, but to cry out warnings to his fellow giants and give them a bonus on their IQ tests. He also successfully parried one of Nate's attempts to murder him with gunfire.

Eventually, Nate got exceedingly tired of this one giant, backed off a bit, and sprayed automatic fire at him and the two adjacent giants. Immediately after he made the attack rolls, we noticed that Kevin's mecha was quite clearly in the line of fire though shrouded by walls. Of course, 20mm APDS is quite capable of going through a small giant, a 12" wooden wall, and possibly penetrating the back or leg armor of a scout mecha. Everyone got quite a chuckle out of this, and Kevin took a couple more points of damage in a friendly fire incident.

+Theodore Briggs had been moving around the central hall through all of this, lining up shots and killing multiple giants with a single shot. He did a lot of dodging and retreating, and illustrated that if you're fighting enough people at once, it's not enough to rely on a decent Dodge score and a retreat. He was attacked by multiple foes from different directions, and was unscathed only because of a use of Luck, a well timed Retreat, and a critical success on an Acrobatics roll to set up an Acrobatic Dodge. He also took a direct hit from a weak giant's crossbow, but the 9d bolt shattered against his DR70 armor.

At the end of all this, he was south of Nate and facing north, with a couple of giants in between them. He lined up his shot, fired, and critically failed. Nate still had a Tactics reroll available, and there was a brief discussion if Nate should pass it "to that filthy incompetent enlisted ape" or save it for himself. The ape pointed out that the most likely result of a critical failure at that point was a 25mm APDS round penetrating the weak back armor of Nate's mecha, and Nate agreed to hand out the reroll. I was sad, but what can you do? Ted succeeded on the reroll and another two giants bit the dust.

It was approaching our usual cut-off time, and there were only a few giants left, so we just hand-waved the rest of the slaughter. Which was good, because it gave us enough time to deal with an attempt at some post battle intelligence gathering.

Failing First Aid

Nate proposed that they attempt First Aid to staunch the wounds of the giant warlord and interrogate him. As it turned out, no one had an effective skill at First Aid (Human) of more than 10, and between some unlucky rolling on their part and the physiology penalty, they never succeeded on a First Aid roll. The giant, not having a particularly high HT and badly wounded, didn't succeeded on many of his rolls to resist bleeding either, and suffered a mortal wound after about 8 minutes. The PCs failed to staunch his bleeding again, he failed to resist his next bleeding check, and he died a minute later.

The entire thing was a farce, and we laughed about it, but it wasn't the PCs' most shining moment. There was a brief question if that was reasonable, but to my mind, it was a replay of the (historical and well-attested) soldier in Black Hawk Down who died when the field medic failed to find the cut in his  femoral artery. If a well-trained medic can't necessarily find the wound on a human being, it's entirely possible that a couple of soldiers going off their first aid courses are not going to be able to do it for an enormous giant.

At any rate, the PCs found enough information to point them to the giants' big fortress in the mountain, which would normally be enough to set up on the next big set piece battle. But not in this case, because I have something else planned.

Dismounted Fighting

The PCs' mecha took enough damage that the self-repair systems are low on some essential and rare elements, and the only way to get those elements is to go into the dark, abandoned mine and clear out the horrible creatures that live within. That's right, we're going dungeon delving, only with TL9 body armor, hyperspectral vision, and automatic weapons. It should be a blast, at least until the PCs meet up with some of the nastier DF monsters. Mmmm, trolls.

I've got a couple more surprises that I'm waiting to spring, but they'll come out in due course.

Role Reversal

One thing that did come up in this session was the disparity in abilities between the giants and the mecha: the mecha look like weak giants in strange plate armor, but are faster, stronger, much more heavily armored, and much, much heavier (as many a giant attempting a slam has found out to its cost). The mecha also have guns that can easily shoot through 2-3 giants at a time. Basically, the PCs are beginning to get a little contemptuous of the giants.

So now I vaguely want to run a little scenario I'm thinking of as "the last stand of the 12th legion." The PCs would be 200-300 point centurions and junior officers of the Zosporbi 12th legion, armed with the finest TL2 equipment and commanding the most elite soldiers the Zosporbi military has. They'd be tasked with holding the advance of a handful of weak or medium giants while civilians evacuated. And they would all pretty much die without accomplishing anything.

Sadly, I don't think my players would enjoy that depressing and futile scenario. And honestly, I don't think I have time to run it, what with having a half dozen other sequences I know I want to run more. But I do think it would an interesting and illuminating change of pace.

Mecha Against the Giants Session 6

My group's regular GM vacation was unavailable again this week, so we continued on with Mecha Against the Giants. Specifically, we continued the big fight against a giant fortress filled with giants.

Further Experiments in Overpenetration

I had cleverly pre-rolled all of the HT checks for poison and IQ checks for recovering from stun for all the giants, and just noted down when they would activate. That didn't simplify this battle, but it sped up play a bit.

The pilots continued fighting the giants in the main room, using automatic weapon fire to take out multiple foes at once. They quickly realized that their guns could reliably penetrate at least one giant and still disable a second, and that with some luck, a single APDS round could kill 3+ weak giants if the giants were obliging enough to line up. So that's what they started doing: trying to see how many giants could be killed with the minimum number of bullets.

On the east side, Kevin quickly discovered that his pilot, highly specialized in melee weapons as the regimental duelist, was not skilled enough to shoot multiple foes in close quarters. He switched to melee weapons as multiple strong giants started charging him. He dodged a slam attempt, and the giant punched through the wall behind him, opening up the northeast room in the great hall complex.

At this point, the observation drones alerted the pilots that the various giants in the barracks along the exterior walls were coming out to fight. There were some cries of dismay and a change of plans: instead of holding the doors from the outside while killing all the giants in the main hall, the pilots would have to move into the main hall and use the doors as choke points against the coming waves of reinforcements. The south team moved north, Ted moved east, and Kevin found himself dodging into the armory through the hole in the wall, killing the vulnerable large giant as he went.

Kevin found himself to be in something of a bad situation, since there was a second large giant with a 24' long, 500 lb greatsword to duel, and Kevin's 80 lb katana was liable to break on a parry. This brought up a quick discussion of GURPS weapon scaling rules, but I stuck to my argument that every version of those rules is bunk, and weapon weight scaled with the cube of relative size. That had always been my mental model, and it was simple and not entirely insane. So Kevin was somewhat dismayed to be fighting someone who forced him to use his relatively low Dodge instead of his excellent Parry, and who could reliable damage his ritter through his armor, and who had enough armor that Kevin's swords couldn't penetrate for much damage. It was going to be a long duel, but Kevin did have superior mobility and could murder any of the weak giants that were coming around as reinforcements.

The other three pilots moved toward the center of the main hall, shooting giants as they went. Nate fired into a cluster of giants surrounding Adam, killing off several and bouncing a spent shell off Adam's armor after it went through a giant. Apparently, not all overpenetration is good. Ted killed off the rest of that bunch, and then killed 5 of the giants coming in from the east with 3 bullets, relieving some of the pressure on Kevin.

The situation at the end of the session. Hordes of orange giants are approaching from several directions, but also getting shot. The pilots are converging to the northeast. Most of the giants that started in the main hall are dead.

Throughout all this, the Giant Warlord had been lying on the ground, shot through the hand and leg by Kevin. He was still shouting orders, positioning the reinforcements to act as flankers, and Nate decided he'd had enough. On the last two rounds, he jumped over some tables and started kicking at the Giant Warlord. Amazingly, the Giant Warlord managed to parry those attacks, and after the second one he managed a Grabbing Parry (I didn't understand the rules on his first try, and missed the opportunity to use a Leg Grapple because I hadn't read Technical Grappling closely enough). This led to a "what happens now" question, which spawned an interesting blog post. Fortunately, the game ended there.

This was a very fun session, with lots of crazy but awesome things happening. The players had set up a good plan to defeat their enemies, but the waves of reinforcements (coincidentally focused on the east side of the map, near Kevin) forced them to change that plan and forced them to move to keep from being defeated in detail and to keep Kevin from being overwhelmed. As a GM, I find that's its hard to set up a situation where one person in the group is separated and about to be overwhelmed, but it's very exciting when everyone else needs to figure out how to break off from fighting their current foes and rescue an ally.

What Happens Next?

The giants are going to lose the next time we play: that much is pretty obvious. If the Giant Warlord had two or three uninterrupted seconds to deal with Nate, he'd smash him into the group, sit on him, and start pummeling him for damage through his back armor. But Ted or Adam are going to shoot the Giant Warlord well before that happens, and there just aren't enough giants nearby to stop that from happening. The thirty or so remaining small and normal giants may get some damage in, but the PCs are faster, better armored, better armed, and fully capable of killing them just by running them over, so those giants aren't really a threat.

Kevin will probably take another couple of hits, one way or another, which is good. He's already taken enough damage that I can justify my scenario to get them out of their mechs, but every additional point of damage makes it more plausible. That will set up the ultra tech soldiers go dungeon crawling storyline, and everyone is looking forward to that.

Awesome Gaming and the Risk of Inaction

There's a theory of gaming that says all victories should be hard fought, with the PCs out of resources and only winning after a clever plan, audacity, and luck. This game isn't like that: it's an escapist game, where the PCs outmatch their foes at every turn and are rarely in real danger.

Though they aren't in real danger, they are in potential danger. What I'm looking for is stories that start with "If you hadn't..." If Nate and Ted hadn't shot up the giants around Adam, Adam might have been defeated. If Kevin hadn't ducked away from the onrushing giant hordes and if Ted hadn't shot the nearest five, Nate and Kevin both would have been in a bad shape. And so on. The PCs are aware of oncoming peril, but thanks to their awesome skills and abilities, they can nip it in the bud. If they don't act, though, things will go very bad fro them.

The combination of easily overcome but very real threats makes for a fun and exciting game. And gaming, in the end, should be fun.

Want to Join?

I set up this game for myself plus five gamers, and for various reasons, it's being played with myself and three other people. There's space for another player or two, if this game sounds fun and exciting.

We play irregularly on Wednesday nights (Central Time) for about 4 hours. You need a working Skype voice connection and the free MapTools software to play. Email me at mark.langsdorf@gmail.com if you're interested.

Giant Robot Wrestling

Thursday is GURPS Day! When I remember to write something, at least.

Last night was session 6 of the Mecha Against the Giants game. In session 5, the PCs attack a fortress full of giants, and at one point the leader of the giants got shot in his left hand and left leg, dropping him to the floor and mostly out of the fight. His weapons were a repeater crossbow and a two-handed sword, and he couldn't use either of them. He still could give orders, and after a while Nate's character got tired of it and went to boot the giant in the head. The giant made a one-handed wrestling grabbing parry, and that's when things got complicated. Fortunately, that's also when the session ended, so I had some time for research.

Doug to the Rescue!

Doug Cole wrote Technical Grappling (TG) and comments on this blog, so I pinged him about some questions I had. Namely:

• Grabbing Parries are at 1/2 ST. Is this because they're always one-handed, or is that an additional penalty and a true one-handed grappling parry is at 1/4 ST?
• How do being one-handed, highly trained in wrestling, flat on your back, and twice the size of your opponent all interact in TG?
• Assuming I'm a one-handed SM+4 ST160 Wrestling at DX+4 giant lying on my back with a weak grip on the leg of an SM+2 ST85 mech that is trying to kick my face in, what are my best options for defeating this guy?

Doug was kind enough to take a half hour out of his evening to answer my questions, and then excited enough to write about it at some length. Thanks again!

Doing the Math Myself

As helpful as Doug's write-up is, I need to through this step by step and work it out for myself. I don't quite "get" TG yet, and the only way to learn is by doing.

Our Contestants

Giant Warlord: SM+4, ST 160, TrST 208, DX 12, Wrestling-18, Combat Reflexes, Enhanced Parry (All) +1, Weight 25,000 lbs, BL 5120. Wearing plate armor for effective DR 60. Currently crippled in the left hand and left leg and flat on his back, with stability from his torso, right leg, and left arm.

Lt. Renault in an Artillery Ritter: SM+2, ST 85, TrST 102, DX 13, Wrestling-15, Weight 12,000 lbs, BL 1445. DR 100 (DR 40 to the rear). Currently standing adjacent to the Giant Warlord with plans to render him unconscious for further questioning, with stability coming from both his feet.

How we got here

On his turn 11, Lt. Renault kicks the Giant Warlord in the face and connects. The Giant Warlord parries at -6 (-3 for prone, -2 for a grabbing parry, -1 for a grabbing parry on a leg) and succeeds. He immediately acquires a grapple with one hand, and rolls 9d for CP (one handed grabs are at ST/2 or 80, and thrust damage for ST 80 is 9d). With an average of 32 CP, he'll give a -1 DX penalty and a -16 ST penalty to Lt. Renault's leg, and a -1 DX penalty and a -8 ST penalty everyone where on Lt. Renault from referred control. Lt. Renault also unstable since he has only one ungrappled foot.

What Happens Next

The most likely thing to happen next is one of the other two PCs in line of sight fire a 25mm APEX round in the Giant Warlord's arm for 16d pi++ injury after armor with a 2d cr ex followup, blowing it off and rendering the rest of this discussion irrelevant. However, that's boring so I'm going to assume that they miss or something.

On Giant Warlord's turn 12, he can spend CP for double effect for a Force Posture Change. He gets +2 to DX and +30% to TrST for being bigger, in a contest of Wrestling or (scaled) TrST. Taking someone to the mat is a roll at -4 (or at -6 to end up on top, which would be really useful here as Doug points out). The Warlord's effective TrST is (160+48+48)/2 or 128, while Lt. Renault is at 96 (base 102, and 8 referred CP on each of the torso, neck, and head, summed and divided by 4 for 6 CP) and no DX penalty to resist a force posture change. So it's a contest of Wrestling-20 or (scaled) TrST 16 versus Wrestling-15 or (scaled) TrST-12. With the -6 penalty for the takedown, the Giant Warlord is rolling at a slight penalty, with a +1 bonus for every 8 CP spent. He also gets a +4 for his grappling weight modifier (BL 5120 versus 12,000 lbs of mecha and probably 8,000 in carried weight). If he burns 26 CP, he's still got a weak grip on Lt. Renault's leg and a decisive bonus on the quick contest, so Lt. Renault ends up face down on the ground with the Giant Warlord lying face down on top of him.

A nearby weak giant will probably run over to join the fun, but won't move far enough to have an effective attack.

On Lt. Renault's turn 12, he'll be in bad shape. The nominal leg grapple is no big deal, but as Doug points out, he's at -11 (penalty slightly offset by his Wrestling skill) on any break free or change posture attempts because there's 12 tons of giant lying on top of him. All of his weapons are forward pointing, and his weak rear armor is exposed. I'm not sure what he should do next, really. Probably take a Wait action to roll over and shoot someone as soon as the Giant Warlord is unconscious. Knowing Nate, he'll attempt to use the backpack mounted 160mm mortar at point blank range, which I'll allow because it's awesome, hilarious, and liable to do as much damage to Lt. Renault's mech as it does the giant.

On the other PCs' turn 13, they'll be in excellent position to take out the Giant Warlord with their guns. It's vaguely possible that the Giant Warlord might get missed by two attacks, but iterative probability means that by the 3rd or 4th attack, an attack is going to connect. And with roughly 1/6th his HP remaining, it won't matter how strong or weak the attack is, as long as it connects. Lt. Renault might have to spend a couple of turns crawling out from under the giant's corpse, but this threat is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

What Does This Mean?

You can be the best wrestler in the world, but it doesn't help that much in a gunfight. Which is fine. Threats that seem dangerous but that can be quickly overcome are an important part of awesome gaming.

Mecha Against the Giants 5

Thanks to scheduling difficulties, my group had back to back weekly sessions of Mecha Against the Giants. There's a possibility of three sessions in a row, but the regular GM may be back for some random Dungeon Fantasy stuff instead.

Interrogations, Plans, Poison Gas

We ended last session with the defeat of the giants guarding Isentor Bridge. This session started with the pilots interrogating the giants, and finding out very little that they didn't know before: the giants aren't very bright, and they don't conduct a census, so the various giants are completely unsure of how many giants or even giant tribes have invaded. The pilots did manage to learn that the giants are more established farther to the east, and that there are some working forges producing advanced plate harness that the captured giants would sometimes trade with. They also learned that in a few days, there would be a big feast and strategy session at the local giant chieftain's fortress.

They did some math and figured it would take them less than two days to return to their base at Muken and travel from there to the probable location of the giant fortress, and that they were also a little low on fuel. So they headed back to restock and restore. They improvised some heavier shields by riveting multiple giant shields together (I am officially dubious about this but it hasn't come up so far) and Nate decided he wanted to home brew some poison gas shells for his mech's artillery mortar.

If I'd been thinking a bit more clearly, I would have just said no, because the gas ground the game to a halt twice: when it was proposed, there was a flurry of looking up things in rulebooks and arguing, and when it was used, there was a huge flurry of dice rolls and making notes. This was one of the times when having access to a huge GURPS library was something of a difficulty, since I knew that somewhere in a book I owned there was a listing of realistic, low technology poisons. I just couldn't remember which section of which book. Nate eventually found the reference (somewhere in Low-Tech) and after some discussion, decided to weaponize lime. That entailed a separate discussion of how poison damage should scale with size, which never was entirely settled to anyone's satisfaction. I really should write a post about that sometime.

Eventually things resolved enough that we could move in play, and so we moved to the next scene: the big, wooden fortress of a giant chieftain.

Big Wooden Fortress

I described the fortress as under construction: currently made entirely of timber as a temporary fortification, but being reinforced with masonry and concrete as the giants had time. There were three gates, and two watchtowers, each guarded by a couple of giants with crossbows as well as a guy on overwatch in the watchtower. Finding all this out was mostly handwaved, since the mechs explicitly have access to reconnaissance drones.

The players debated strategy for a bit: approach quietly with their camouflaged vehicles, or snipe the guard towers from a distance? GURPS detailed rules came in handy here, since there's a convenient table for how loud gunfire is and how likely people are to hear it in High-Tech (and I know where that table is, having pondered this question during prep). After a while, everyone decided to just sneak up, murder the guards in hand to hand, and then evaluate the situation some more.

Which they proceeded to do.  Kevin's character pushed up a gate slightly, then stabbed the giant that came to investigate and throwing his sword at that giant's partner. Ted's sniper used a javelin to take out the overwatch in the guard tower. In a bit of hilarity, Nate reflexively used hand gestures to co-ordinate the attack, only to be brought down by Kevin pointing out, "we have radios."

They proceeded to move to the other two gates and basically repeated this process, each time saying "surely, the giants won't fall for this trick again." The giants made some poor rolls to detect an ambush, though. In one case, a wary guard moved back to cover the other giant investigated the door, but the pilots had two guys inside the fortress as well as a guy outside, and the wary giant moved himself into "throw a javelin into the skull range" without realizing it. The giant in the other watchtower was sniped from the first watchtower, and since the giants in the main hall didn't know what gunfire even was, they failed their roll to "hear" it.

With the external patrols dead, the pilots moved to deal with the main hall. They didn't know what was inside it exactly, except for a lot of giants. It also had three doors, and they put a mech on each of the side doors and the last two on the main doors. The plan was pretty simple: use the gas mortar shell to disrupt and disable as many giants as possible, and then shoot any giants making for the doors.

Nate opened the main doors, and saw a long hallway to a main chamber filled with giants: four or so massive giants, a half dozen or more large giants, and twenty or thirty of the smaller sizes. The gas shell caught them all by surprise, but the giant chieftain had Combat Reflexes and a lucky roll to resist the gas, and ordered his troops out. Most of the giants were to charge down to the main doors and attack the intruders, but the large and massive giants were to go through the side doors and flank the intruders from outside the building. The pilots braced for the attack.

I'm simplifying what was really a huge number of die rolls: stun checks for forty or fifty giants, recovery checks, checks to avoid breathing poison gas, and so on. Things really slowed down for a few minutes here.

We only played through a few rounds of the combat, but things were already going poorly for the giants. The two massive giants closest to the main door charged down the hall toward it, but were gunned down by automatic weapons fire. The massive giant on the west side caught some 25mm rounds to the vitals and died instantly. On the east side, the giant warlord was smart enough to cover the door with his crossbow as it was opened, but not fast enough to win the contest of Waits against the ritter pilot with an autocannon. (Even though the rules for Cascading Waits are clearly listed in Martial Arts and I knew that, I spent a minute searching for them in a sidebar instead of the main text). Kevin walked fire between a couple of giants, and while he didn't kill the warlord, he did cripple a hand and a foot, more or less taking it out of the fight. The warlord's last crossbow shot barely missed, but barely is good enough.

The map at the end of play. Blue dots are the PCs, orange circles are active giants, and most of the rest is dead giants, especially near the gates.

The pilots' big problems in the next few turns are going to be dealing with the last few large giants from the main hall without getting overwhelmed by waves of reinforcements coming from the outside barracks that they never cleared. I expect it will be a lot of fun.

What Next?

I'm really hoping that one of the mechs will be badly damaged in this fight, because I want to get the PCs out of the mechs for a dungeon-crawl. I have a back up railway to make that happen if necessary, but it will be more organic if there's a badly damaged vehicle in need of repairs.

After that, I've got plans for a quick, less than one session episode, maybe some "political" stuff, and a grand finale that I'll need to flesh out as it gets closer. I'm not preparing too far in advance because I don't really need to and I have other things to do with my time. But this game has been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to continuing with it.

Mecha Against the Giants 4

My gaming group has been playing GURPS Fantasy for a while, and then had a hiatus around Christmas (this was a bad year to schedule a game on Wednesday nights!) The regular GM is on a much deserved vacation, so it we went back to a session of Mecha Against the Giants.

Technical Difficulties Solved

For once, everyone was pretty much on time and didn't have any technical difficulties. There was a bit of weirdness since one player was waiting for a pizza and wouldn't hear the door if he had his new noise cancelling headphones on, but we solved that by using text chat for twenty minutes or so. After his pizza arrived, we moved on to voice chat.

Vanquishing Giants

We finished up the second half of Isentor Bridge. It was pretty straightforward: the players had mostly figured out that small and normal giants weren't a threat, and focused on the big giants.

The small giants have a problem that they're slower and weaker than the mechs, and that the mechs can trivially kill them by slamming into them. The small giants want to surround a mech and smash it from behind, but it's trivial for a mech to move around or through any attempt to be surrounded, or shoot multiple giants at point blank range if absolutely necessary. The giants can't even safely slam the mechs, because the damage disparity is too great: the giants are knocked unconscious and the mechs rarely take damage. Which is fine, because this means the players feel awesome as they smash their puny foes.

The big giants are more of a threat, but so far they've been outnumbered by the mechs and easily killed. Soon, the set pieces are going to feature many strong and massive giants, and things will be much more difficult for the mech pilots.

Actual tactics for this fight were pretty straightforward: two pilots finished off the last of the wounded giants in the south, while the other two pilots charged up the center and ran over anything that got in their way.

There were a couple of notable moments, as usual:

• One of the large giants managed to grab one of the mechs, which caused a quick discussion about how Technical Grappling works when dealing with ST75 SM+2 combatants. I'd planned to have Douglas Cole on hand to answer those questions, but that didn't work out. We muddled through. 
• A large giant made an all-out great axe attack on a mech, missing narrowly. The pilot responded by head-butting the giant with a telegraphed all-out attack. Fortunately, the giant had already been badly wounded by an anti-tank rocket, and the headbut was enough to knock him out.
• The gunslinger wanted to shoot a medium sized giant that was standing behind two small giants. There was a bit of bitching and moaning about cover penalties before I pointed out that, per Campaigns p 408, he could just shoot through the giants at a minor penalty. The pilot had plenty of APDS ammo, and gave it a try. End result: two excessively dead small giants, and one dead medium giant with an APDS shell dippling his back armor. I predict that there will be more shooting of clustered giants, just because it's hilarious.
• The relatively unskilled but lucky lieutenant drove through a couple of giants, bouncing over their bodies at high speeds and almost going off the road and into the grass. All this meant multiple control rolls at some penalties, and the player rolled an 11 or less on three dice about 4 times in a row. The odds of that happening aren't especially high, but what the heck, the lieutenant really is lucky.

Continuing On

I think the GURPS GM is unavailable again this Wednesday, so I'll probably be running this again. I've got most of the next chapter prepared, and what's going to happen is probably obvious based on the campaign theme, but I'll keep everyone in suspense.