TOPIC: True Grind Feedback

Fiddy wrote: Not a huge fan of the traitor mechanic, as one traitor could effectively negate a large part of the remaining party. Did find it amusing that we did more damage to the evil creatures when attacking the traitor though since they wanted to protect the traitor.

This was one of the variances between how Raven and I did it.

My original plan was to have the "Innsmouth Look" mainly for atmospheric reasons. At lower difficulty levels, it would mainly result in Fear checks. At higher difficulty levels, it would result in a Charm or possibly Dominate effect.

For lower level parties, I did indeed make it just an occasional Fear check (often stopping at Room 2). For higher level parties, the checks could be as often as every round (until the end of the Grind). If a player failed the check, I would mainly have that player interfere with their comrades (using their sliders to knock away the others, just like with the old Blink Dog mechanic). Only if there were no hits on the monster would I consider having that player attack their teammates.

Then again, I had plenty of players attacking each other through starvation and/or confusion. Raven mentioned she couldn't really get anyone hungry!

I wish I had communicated things better (it's always hard when there is so much info to explain) to my DM's. Or maybe Raven was just so eager to finally utilize the type of traitor mechanic I have used in the past. She tended to offer the player with the "Innsmouth Look" a choice whether or not to betray their party and it seems all too often they were willing to do so.

I run with Valetutto's group (I'm the Paladin) and we had a ton of fun at grind this year. The brain swap was really great, since it gave some of our folks with worse stats the chance to fight more; our fighter would almost always affected by fear, but the way his face lit up when he realized he was now the monk and had saved! And our bard could have survived, if he would have let Sammy keep his treasure!! Greedy bard!

I'll add my thanks to Eric, Brad, Shelly, Raven, and Kirk! True Grind was amazing as always, lots of cool things going on as always and my token bag is always lighter when it's over...my hungry players went through a big bag of 1 point heals and then some, my cleric and wizard blew through all there scrolls..but we prevailed and it was all worth it! Looking forward to Eric's analysis about difficulty levels played, overall outcomes and character deaths!