Wednesday 3 September 2014

The Zoo of Worlds, part 2

Tourist Traps

This is a scenario dreamed up by Arthur, there are no spoilers here, so listen away as you please. As always, be aware that the podcast is not really family-friendly, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Some episodes feature teasers for upcoming actual plays, after the closing music. Just so you know.

Episode 2

The Episode

We kick things off with basically the only kind of premise you can reasonaby use for a completely randomly-generated dungeon consisting of a string of fights. It works, because of the Magic of Roleplaying, by which you agree to enjoy doing something essentially preposterous with one or more of your mates.* Also because Arthur is pretty good at whipping up a framework that's convincing enough and solid enough to hang a game on, despite being extremely simple. In fairness, fantasy games really help with this, because magic explains so much.

I was pleased by just how quickly the encounter went, compared to both most other RPGs and the Fighting Fantasy books. The switch from 2 damage to a damage roll, plus using a full party of characters, just speeds up the process enormously, but I suspect probably doesn't change the odds much. The higher-skill party is always likely to win, it's just a matter of how many rounds of rolling are needed. With three players rolling, you're essentially thirding the time to win.

*So basically the same as all human leisure activities.


Copyright and suchlike

Beyond the Pit is copyright and/or trademark Arion Games, as far as I can tell. The podcast theme music is Vltava from Smetana's Má Vlast as taken from Wikimedia Commons under the CC0 licence. The episode intro is a mashup of the Funhouse theme with In The Hall of the Mountain King. The outro is One-Eyed Maestro, both by Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.

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