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Great stuff Jack. I added a horse race to the first episode in the last Monsterberg update. Hunting and wrestling contest also sound great. How you are using the skills seems good, I just let them roll any skill check that seems applicable. They intentionally overlap a bit.
Thanks Lenny. Lets give it a day or two though, looks like Sam made a back cover so I may have a print ready version sooner than I thought. Stand by!
I just got a notice, I think Charles’ books may arrive today. He may need Monsterberg printed out though, we don’t have a (print on demand ready) cover for it yet. Do they still have Kinkos?
Ok so, notes on the last session for Playtest Group 4. Jack, please share this with your group.
Jack having spent a week working on FOV every night was required to focus his attention on more important matters than gaming, and therefore was unavailable. So Sam ran the session as a “Session Zero” – meaning an opportunity for his guys to familiarize themselves with the combat rules.
To do this, they did a kind of Battle Royal between Nils, Johann, and Kalina, with Kunes coming in at the end to finish things off. I was invited to jump into the Discord session towards the end of this so I listened to part of it and gave some (somewhat garbled) advice in real time.
The result was that Johannes, who was a good defensive fighter, well armored and equipped with a ‘mini pavise’ shield, was able to fend off both Nils and Kalina and eventually killed Nils, but not before Nils destroyed his shield. Johannes was also fairly seriously wounded. Apparently there had been an exchange of gunfire before I arrived to the game.
Then Kunes entered the fray with his montante sword and killed the now shieldless Johannes with a bypass attack which brought him below 0 HP. We rolled on the catastrophic damage table just for fun, which indicated a severed lower leg.
Comments – points of confusion (hopefully) clarified
One thing that happened before I got there was that Nils destroyed Johannes shield with his boar spear. He apparently did a multi-dice attack, attempting bypass, and rolled a Crit (natural 20). Problem was, even with the natural 20 he didn’t have enough of a bonus to hit with a bypass, so they ruled it as him destroying the shield. This is fine, because ‘common sense’ is rule 0 for codex. But it could have also been done another way…
A Critical Hit
Codex rules state that a natural 20 is always a hit. The only possible exception is if the defender also rolls a natural 20 but we can skip that for now. Question is, does it count as a bypass? I would say no. But it’s a multi-die attack, resulting in a Critical, which means it does extra damage – one extra dice per die thrown into the attack. So if say, it was a 2 dice thrusting attack with Nils boar spear, it would be D8+2 (normal damage) + 2d6 piercing crit damage. Also, the spear has +1 AP, reducing the protection of the armor by 1. So this means between 5-22 damage, vs. armor of 7. This may well be enough to seriously hurt Johannes in spite of his armor, (or to damage his shield. But in the latter case the shield has to be targeted).Attacking shields – shields can be destroyed, but they have a DR (like an armor value) and a lot of hit points. The type Johannes had was a ‘Mini Pavise’ which is listed in the system as having a hardness of 6 and 8 HP. Somewhat hard to break but not impossible, the best method may be to make multiple single-die attacks. Anything over 6 damage will hurt the shield so big weapons are best for this.
Johannes high Defensive value – The character sheet only showed the defensive values (active and passive) with the shield, so when he lost it this was another point of confusion. The shield is worth 4 points to both Active and Passive Defense. Once it was gone both his passive and active defense should go down by 4. I think we left this off due to space limitations on the character sheet but I’ll amend the sheet to show two values. Shields also always grant a Free Dice on every Active Defense roll, something to keep in mind.
So how do you deal with a badass?
Johannes, unlike Nils and Kalina, is a professional soldier, so he is a hard nut to crack. Taking apart his defenses such as by neutralizing his shield is a good idea, but there is a larger principal to keep in mind. The Martial Pool, your dice pool, limits how many things you can do in a turn. Special Feats may enhance this, but basically you will have no more than 4 actions per round – attacks, defense, movement, things like reloading, or attacks of opportunity.This latter part is especially significant. Once Johannes spends his pool, such as by fighting with one (or both) characters with Attacks or Active Defense die rolls, he is out of pool and can only use his Passive Defense. This gives his opponents a good opportunity to do something like grabbing his shield, or grappling him and using their combined strength to bring him down. This is often one of the best ways to deal with an armored or particularly skilled opponent in the Codex System.
And it’s why being ganged up on is so dangerous in the Codex rules.
Grappling from a distance
In addition, Nils had another option – Grappling from a distance. Any weapon with a grapple bonus (like Nils’ boar spear) can be used to make grapple attacks while still at Onset or Melee range. A hit means you can initiate a grapple, essentially a contested strength check, and success can mean for example that you strip away or temporarily neutralize your opponents weapon, including a shield.Anyway, overall I think the fighting went well and seemed to go more smoothly than it did in the first session. I hope this commentary is helpful and / or amusing!
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Yeah mea culpa in the jean thing,
My plan is to do this play through for experience and record a second play through for marketing.Yeah no worries on the name, that is just one of those artifacts of communicating 90% by typing online and not talking in person. It’s like my many awful mispronunciations of European names and words.
I think once we have done 2 or 3 more sessions and y’all are more familiar with the system, we ought to be able to record some combat which runs pretty smoothly, and that could be a big help with codex. Videos of play-throughs are very popular right now and watching people use Codex rules for a fight will help explain it a million times faster and better than I can or even than reviews can.
Speaking of which, Monsterberg, Quick Start and Superno all still need reviews. Neither of you two should write any, because you are a little too close to the development of this, but if you know other people who might write a review, let me know.
Same for Twitch groups who run games – I don’t know any or even channels to look at. If you have any recommendations, let me know!
Possibly with a roll20 adventure that you can buy.
Yeah, I’d love to hear more about how this works. Your current Roll20 mod does not seem to be sharable (I’m assuming) because you so far seem to mainly just invite people into the one you are using for your playtest group. How do you make it more ‘generic’ or whatever so you can share it to the public?
And you didn’t mention it here, but the guys in that game were a little thrown by referencing the size of the area they were in as being twice the size of “New Jersey”. Even to me it sounded like an odd comparison. Maybe compare things that folks on both sides of the pond could understand easily enough, like comparing to the island of Great Britain or some other modern European country. I think even Americans (especially those interested in this game) will be able to understand a Euro-centric reference easily enough.
Well, this is why we do playtesting! To find out these little things I would have never thought of that can unexpectedly throw people off. I have already amended that infamous remark to now also include Wales as a point of comparison, which is coincidentally about the same size in square miles as New Jersey, and about half the size of Silesia.
As was mentioned about the costs, if that’s written in the scenario about Marks but all of the characters are carrying Gulden, then you may need to make sure a table for exchange rates would be handy. And while it gives a sense of having different monies to deal with I’m not sure it’s something most players are really going to want to deal with that often. It might get in the way of the role-play if it’s too cumbersome or comes up too often.
There is exactly such a chart in the book. I have emphasized to Jack and his guys, it’s the sort of thing you might want to print out. There is also the option to just convert everything to “gold pieces”, “silver pieces” and “bronze pieces” if the money is too confusing.
Beyond that you need to check out some of the RPG groups on Twitch, maybe even get one of them to run either a single-session game or maybe even a multi-show mini-campaign. Not sure the best way to try to do that, though. Still, having it recorded is pretty cool and made me think of getting one of the well-known groups to run something like this. A group like that might even help out with setting up some Codex specific stuff for Roll20. So thanks for sharing, Jack!
We hope to record a few game sessions, in fact I need to give them feedback on their last session which I think I will do here right after I finish this post!
By the way Lenny, your Beta test game should be starting soonish. Due to Charles’ lack of a functional computer, I sent him printed copies of all the Codex rule books which should arrive by this weekend I believe (except the Monsterberg book itself, which isn’t set up for printing yet unfortunately)
Once Charles has the books and is able to read them a bit I expect he’ll be beginning your game, assuming there is room in the busy gaming schedule. 🙂
Yeah Lenny I forgot to tell you about these guys making a partial Roll20 hack for Codex, I remember you had been nudging me in that direction years ago…
Yes the Iron Pillar of Delhi is remarkable, though I don’t know if it has any chromium in it.
I was being a bit provocative with the ‘stainless’ comment, though the presence of chromium could actually mean something like that. I’m sure somebody knows, but I don’t know who would. Maybe Dr. Manning who is active on this forum…
Apparently this source Göte Göranssons’s Gustav Vasa och hans folk (1983) states that citizens of Stockholm reporting for routine guard duty were required to bring a crossbow, an iron kettlehat, pollaxe, messer, and a shield. It also lists at least one woman who in 1512 had to take up weapons and armour in place of her husband, who were off on pilgrimage when it was his turn for service in the watch
yeah, it’s an astonishing amount of money, by medieval standards a Florin should actually be a bit more than a pound according to my sources, but there must have been some debasement here. I know currency values fluctuated wildly in the 16th century. 90,000 pounds or marks seems an insanely high amount for one small castle, let alone 900,000 or whatever it works out to. That is literally a king’s ransom. I suspect that currency may have been mistranslated. Usually in Poland it would be Złoty which used to be the equivalent of a gulden, and for Germans they would estimate large figures like that typically in marks or gulden, or sometimes thalers or groschen in that area (Silesia).
600,000 Groschen should work out to about 7,500 marks which sounds a lot more reasonable.
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