Developmental Notes: Have the first conflicts been too easy?

Note:
Developmental Notes are concepts and comments that arise while play-testing and developing the rules for FATE of Stolvorden. If you are interested in little details about how the game rules are adapted, applied, expanded and condensed, these are the posts for you. If on the other hand, your interest is in following the story of the characters and their adventures, you may ignore this post and go on to the session by session summaries.

In our last session, I presented the players with a physical conflict in the form of a battle with a monster. The monster stats are not to be revealed now, since the players are not familiar with this beast. Absent any aspects or story reasons, there is no reason for the characters to be familiar with this either, although we can expect that they will be VERY familiar with them in the future. 


The conflict was resolved almost immediately in favor of the characters. There was one magical ability used to immobilize the creature temporarily and another character shot at it with a bow. As presented in the story, a character was frustrated that he didn't even had a chance to do anything. This was a direct reflection of player frustration. "What? I didn't get to do anything!" He complained before deciding to mutilate the already dead body with his sword.


My impression of this 'battle', if we can call it that, and of the previous conflicts the party has encountered before, is that they have been perhaps too easy. I am thinking here of the social combat with the young bandits and the soldiers in the various barricades, as well as the distraction of the weapons dealer while stealing 'grandpa's knife'.


Player frustration over the quickness of combat may be related to expectations created by other role-playing games, including computer ones, where battles last long and everyone gets a chance to attack the monster, heal each other, use items etcetera. If we consider realism, though, it is clear that an arrow to the neck of an unarmored foe can and would usually be lethal. That said, if the characters can go around the world, one-shooting every enemy, the game itself will become less challenging.


The physical combat portion was interesting for me. The creative use of elementalism was fun, and I expect that the Elementalist Player will make more creative use of her character's powers once she continues to learn what she can do. I think the fact that magic powers are not too powerful by themselves (she can't cast a meteor on her enemies, for example) With creative use, they can be very effective. This works perfectly well with the atmosphere I want to create for Stolvorden.


As far as the conflicts being too easy, there are a couple of things that I have to keep in mind:

• The experience (power) level of the characters, and
• The number of enemies.

As far as the power of the characters, the thing to keep in mind is that player characters in s FATE-based game don't begin the game as "level 1" hero wannabes like in most other systems, but they are relatively experienced, battle-tested individuals. Perhaps my own background in other systems has to be considered as well as that of the players, when we talk about the feeling of the combat being "too short".


It may be good to think also of realism (or what can be termed realism in a fantasy setting). When one reads fantasy, a couple of things are apparent. First, the characters don't usually go around killing everyone in sight, but when battles occur, heroes usually dispatch most common foes with very few hits. This of course, changes when facing the 'boss battle', which is usually longer and requires more resources to finish. This is the reason common enemies usually rely on numbers to accomplish their battle goals, and this brings me to the second point.


Common enemies usually outnumber the main characters in fiction. For this introductory adventure (I told the players it was the proverbial tutorial at the beginning of most computer rpg) I decided to present a single enemy. Even though the enemy was tougher than the characters, that strength could not be brought to bear when the characters used their abilities to quickly neutralize it. In a more dramatic scene, a single creature might not have ventured into the camp, but would have brought extra "baddies" to overpower the characters. This may have added more excitement to the fight, as no matter what the character did, or how easy they dispatched individual monsters, there would be some, at least one, that would manage to take a shot at them.


During the next few sessions, I will keep in mind that these characters are not 'level 1' and will experiment with the power level and the number of the enemies, as well as with more complications to other conflicts.


We'll see what the next session brings...