The Tabletop Report – Gears of War: Session 7 · 7:42pm Mar 14th, 2018
It’s time for Tabletop Report! For the uninitiated, Tabletop Report is a new series chronicling the adventures of my DnD group as I run them through a custom campaign and ruleset based off of Microsoft’s Gears of War universe.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Gears of War, and I’m totally not claiming otherwise. I just really love the universe, and have wanted to run a campaign set in it for the longest time. The system I built is entirely my own, and this game is a test-run of its viability as a full tabletop system.
This is the report summary for session 6! Prior sessions will be listed before the break if you need to catch up. Some knowledge of Gears of War‘s greater universe may be helpful. Now, let’s see what happened to our players after last week!
- Session One – Prologue
- Session Two – Act 1, Chapter 1
- Session Three – Act 1, Chapter 2 Part 1
- Session Four – Act 1, Chapter 2 Part 2
- Session Five – Act 1, Chapter 3 Part 1
- Session Six – Act 1, Chapter 3 Part 2
Session Seven – Act 1, Chapter 3 Part 3
This session was pretty much all combat, with a little roleplaying at the end. But the group came out alive, thanks to some lucky rolls on their part, clever roleplaying, and some absolutely horrid rolls on behalf of the Locust (which really was just dumb luck, all part of the game).
So, when we’d last left the group, they’d made their way through the woods to a downed King Raven chopper in a gully and found themselves ambushed. When this session opened, we picked up right where we’d left off, with the group making reflex rolls for turn order and caught right out in the open.
Their ambusher, a Locust drone, rolled a perfect 1, and thus got to go first, which made things all the more panic-striken for the group.
Well, it sounds like the combat is generally working well, although I'm getting the impression the players don't know how to use cover effectively because they should have put it to their backs for protection against the drones while they were shooting the wretches. Based on how much this whole fight seems to have hinged on luck heavily favoring the players (assuming the grenade would have been as damaging as I assume and the drone's poor accuracy wasn't the result of a bad accuracy stat) I think you might have overestimated them (or underestimated the locust), but the fact that they managed to survive at all when caught in the open makes me think you may be undervaluing cover in your system at the moment. Those shifts just don't do all that much in a d20 system which it sounds like you are using, so you may want to either increase the benefit or switch to a multi-die system (e.g. 2d6 like BattleTech) to get more of a probability curve to work with and allow smaller numbers to have bigger effects if they fall into the middle of the range and give players more room to take calculated risks when they are on the periphery.