The Topaz Championship -Part Two 'a fistfull of character sheets'

My online Topaz Championship campaign completed yesterday so in the manner of the last I will be putting up a brief description of what happened and some GM notes on what I did wrong and what went well and what went less well.

2nd Competition Day

The gang rocked their rolls today with some very dominant performances. Masako continued her now storied tradition of entering the law contest with a ,' don’t know anything about this so I will just wing it' and promptly rolling about eight explosive success consecutively. She must just be really lucky.

GM Notes - Ren managed an actual Haiku for the poetry and as it was correctly formed so I was almost tempted to award an extra XP. BUT it did not have a reference to nature, did not have the context split of one of the lines versus the other two and finally was very arrogant (if I remember correctly the judges did not like it either). Here it is

I am the greatest

Nobody can surpass me

I am beautiful

As an example of a (perhaps) more traditional one  (this by Steven Hepburn)

Spring rains, warm and wet

Fall fast on welcoming soil

Empty street cafes

Note the nature link and the sudden context switch in the last line.

Moving on. I noticed half way through this that I was calculating the winners incorrectly. I should compare the bonus successes to the number provided in the guide. Instead I was comparing all the success rolls. Thus  the team was perhaps winning more of the rounds than they should. Several of them were 'story aware' though so were also getting the correct ring every single time so it was a biased field anyway.

One thing here we did do better was to use the opportuntiy better to find out information or reduce strife and ,something I had forgotten, to use opportunity to reduce strife in someone else. Interestingly it looks like there are discrepancies in this (or mis -prints) between the printed rulebooks and the pdfs as at least one person did not have *+ but instead could only see *

The Evening Meal

The party presented their gifts and they mostly went down well. Matasoko's was particulaly well thought out and unique which also pleased Toshimoko drastically. Hitoshis outburst was also nicely handled.  Sugi tried to carry out the infamous, 'put my arm around their shoulder and force them to sit down using strength' that any group of friends will recognise from drunken outbursts from their mates but did not succeed. Then Ren attempted to distract the audience with a spiel about the wonderful gifts and with a magnificent roll actually succeeded - this allowed Sugi to get Hitoshi to sit down.

GM notes - I loved Ren's approach here as it was not direct, 'listen to me, a new teenager, trying to advice the head of the Kakita dueling academy' but instead approached the problem obliquely with a distraction technique that played to the strengths of the character. On the gifts there was a lot of copying existing gifts - which is to be expected when it is sprung on you at short notice and at least one which shows the character had potentially listened to one of the podcasts of the campaign as it was identical (and I only recognised it as I had listened to the same podcast that afternoon to provide me with inspiration).

The Dueling Competition Starts

The party responded quickly to the severe wounding of Hitoshi and pounded after Sugai. Sugai initially went well but rapidly lost pace as the venegeful party swept up.

Notes - Rather than make everyone roll I moved on to the next check as soon as one party member had succeeded. Right or wrong it allowed this section to be sped through.

The Fight at the Docks

Our valiant gang arrived at the docks having cornered Sugai and five of his henchmen. The fight that ensued was actually quite vicious with Masako actually being seriously wounded and knocked out. Aki, Ren and Sugi were also all close to being overwhelmed. The fight ended in the third round when Aki, Sugi and Heiei all attacked Sugai and each managed criticals.

Notes - I had been sligjhtly mean and added an extra ruffian so the party had its work cut out for it. Saying that it should still have been a walk over except that Masako decided to use his Roar skill (so did not attack round 1) and everyone else missesd. This meant the ruffians had at least two rounds of fire attacks of their own with some managing three and unfortunately my dice rolling was hot. We were also using core rules (with razor edges) for this fight so had ramped up the complication quite drastically.

In retrospect it was too complicated though this is partially down to the sheer numbers involved. I had generated printed sheets to track each round but these rapidly got mixed up. Next time I will write a program to track this stuff and avoid the paper entirely.

Due to the party missing (a lot) and me absolutely not missing anything (except for Ronin 4 who was obviously drunk) it was starting to look worryingly like the party would lose the fight so I made the executive decision that only Sugai and Ruffian 1 (Hiatoshi) would take critical hits,the rest would just collapse unconsious if their endurance was exceeded.

It was still a near run thing though. Deadly fights look to me like a race to the first bleeding critical hit. If you get that then okay your opponent can switch to void (to avoid strife) but that restricts their options and take void out and everything they then do  has vastly increased fatigue due to bleeding. When armour is involved things will get longer still as most hits would need one or two bonus successes to even get past the armour which would then mean it would take 5-6 rounds to get to the auto-crit level. This explains the common tactic of people sitting in earth stance for fights as it avoids the one risk of opportunity criticals.

I need to do some more revision on how fights end as I am not certain I was 'completing' these correctly.

The End

Our valiant party managed to stabilize Masoko (who was bleeding heavily) though Aki notably failed and it was Sugi's first aid which did the trick. After explaining away the situattion the emerald championship continued. Masako decided that due to her wound from the fight she could not participate (I awarded an extra XP for this excellent role play of the situation in hand). The Topaz Championship itself was quite exciting. Aki did extremely well in the Shugenja competition  and then Doji Ren (Ren!) took on the Kakita duelist in the next round. Ren fell to Sugi before the final duel was Sugi versus Heiei with Sugi winning and being crowned Topaz Champion..

Notes

I did not like the books method for resolving the end so decided to do it this way instead

• Leading character in points fights the Kakita
• Other characters can then challenge the winner of that fight
• When down to the last two then we carry out an actual first hit Iajitsu Duel to determine the winner but that winner would need to beat the bonus Successes scored by Aki in the Shugenja competition.

Since Aki gained 5 bonus successes so this would actually be hard to beat.

For the duel I asked both competitors to private message me their staredown strife bid with Heiei going for zero and Sugi 3. This meant Sugi would strike first. Her initial roll was excellent even after Heiei making her re-roll one (with his Dragon two sword technique) and she ended up with a around 7 bonus successes. No crit was caused as it was a blunt weapon (Deadliness two so quite easy to block) but this gave +3 first strike and +1 caused fatigue. Heiei's counter did 9 bonus successes which Sugi also easily blocked meaning Sugi won by 3 points. Basically I think Heiei made a slight mistake not bidding. If it was a duel to the death then that would have been a better choice. One to first hit perhaps not unless he was expecting Sugi to miss. Considering the 'large stature' ability basically allows two re-rolls per round in applicable situations (and fighting it applicable) this makes the Crab a veryeffective combatant.

Summary

Gming can be hard work so I will be working at improving toolsets to reduce maintenance overhead. I think I might have made an error in allowing five in whilst learning. Three would be much easier to handle. The party is continuing to the follow up adventure before rolling new characters for whatever comes after that. This will probably be the latest downloadable though I am also working on my own campaign. As ever thanks for reading..