Pendragon Play Report - Year 2, Sessions 2 & 3

05 Oct, 2024

Session 2 was just a big combat so I'll present it abridged here instead.

We left off with our knights helping Arthur find Excalibur, Da Sord In Da Lake. Maybe "helping" is a bit too much, but they were there.

I hope you enjoyed that, because Session 3 is what I've been calling mentally "the Bad One." We'll get there.

King Ryons' Fight, a.k.a. Session 2

So, after last session I sent my players a little downtime event that happened between games. In the Grand Pendragon Campaign this is played, I assume, but I didn't want to do a monologue.

It's basically a big cutscene where a woman shows up with a sword in a belt and asks if there's any knight who's man enough to grab it. Sir Balin shows up, gets the sword from the belt, refuses to give it back, and the lady curses him.

As he's going away, another lady shows up, the (or "a"?) Lady of the Lake, and she demands a boon from Arthur: the head of Sir Balin. Listening to that from the door, Sir Balin turns back and chops her head off, then flees the scene. Lanceor of Benwick went after him, jousted him, and was killed. The PCs' entire role in this is to say 'I go after Lanceor' to find him dead and a Cornish nobleman named Mark (yes, that Mark) eulogizing him and building a tomb for him.

The whole thing is a setup for both King Mark (see Tristan and Isolt), a fight that he will has with Lancelot in Lanceor's tomb, and Balin's Dolorous Stroke.

• DM's Note - Fun fact: the fight between Tristan and Lancelot? Not on the GPC. It's foreshadowing for an event around 20 sessions away that doesn't even happen lol.

This was in late spring. Early in the summer, Arthur gets word that King Idres of Cornwall is on the march, and he has the king of Gwynedd with him, Ryons, rumoured to be a half-giant, as well as his brother Nero. They're currently sieging Terrabil, which belongs to Sir Eliduc, a friend of Arthur's and his mom. So we march with Arthur, meet the aforementioned Mark (now styling himself Prince Mark) on the way, and arrive on the siege. They camp for the battle tomorrow to relieve the castle.

Elias the squire gets wind that Ryons is meeting with his lover, the widowed Lady de Vance, on a moor nearby, and the knights go along.

There isn't much to say, they showed up and beat King Ryons with a lot of difficulty (and me forgetting certain parts of the system). It was fun, Elias got hit so hard that he was thrown back a few yards, Sir Eogrim jumped on top of Ryons after he fell down and Sir Valerius bashed him on the head until he was unconscious, then grabbed his glowy sword.

"Cool!" Said I. "The Pendragon combat is as simple and fast as I remember!"

The Battle of Terrabil, a.k.a. Session 3, a.k.a. "The Bad One"

The following day for the characters, and the following week for the players, was when Arthur and Mark hit Idres and Ryons Bingus Bongus Splinfy Splonfy. Sorry just added some extra proper nouns there to check if you were paying attention. That's kinda how Pendragon feels sometimes.

I decided to check the Pendragon 6 battle system. Some background: I hate mass battles in Pendragon. Last campaign I had lasted something like 2 years, and after the third battle (read: roughly third session) I said "This is stupid and robotic and I hate it, let's never do it again", so instead I gave the player some small unit tactics and missions to do instead. Fighting Ryons could have been that.

So, this is roughly how the system goes: Battles are divided into turns, this one had 5. The knights have a Morale score which, if it gets to 0, they need to go to the back row and rest a bit before charging back.

First the GM announces what will be the encounter this turn, the commander rolls to check for a charge opportunity; GM rolls under a number to check if the encounter will be normal, doubled, or if the players can try to roll and pick a new encounter.

• DM's Note - I didn't know this, so every turn I was asking for rolls for them to pick the encounter. Ultimately, I don't think it made any difference.

Every encounter drains a bit of Morale, the players say how many rounds they're gonna fight, and then we run a normal combat for that number of rounds.

For each player.

A full combat, in a killbox (because the battlefield is flat land), for each player, with at least 2 combat rounds per battle turn.

But also: every time you hit someone in Pendragon, you need to check a few modifiers. Are you mounted and they aren't? -5. Oh, they have a spear? Forget that then. Multiple opponents? -5 for each of them. Reckless attack? The enemy gets +5 but you don't get a negative modifier. Want a bonus? Roll a Passion, it might give you +5 but just for this battle turn!

Remember: you got hit and the damage exceeded your Size? Roll to see you fall down. The modified damage (Damage minus Armour) is equal to your Constitution? You're unconscious - oh but don't forget that if you get a success and still gets hit, you apply your shield, QUICK WHAT'S 24 MINUS 18?

Oh and did I mention that most encounters have up to 3 enemies per player totaling twelve active combatants and nine NPCs for me, the DM, to track?

What proceeds is what feels like an extremely drawn out 5e-style bossfight. Every combat round the players go "ok we sword these guys" and then either succeed on it, fail and get hit, or succeed on hitting but deal no damage due to armour.

The first battle turn took 1 hour for 3 rounds. Session started 2:30 PM, chat log has me asking for stuff for the following battle turn at 3:30 PM. A lot of this is due to some bookkeeping and lack of familiarity with the system, but it slowly degenerates into repetitiveness.

The players know there isn't a lot they can do besides striking the enemy with the sword because that's the optimal strategy; and they ARE winning. Two of them don't even get hit, but they're grinding attacks and minor choices and constant rolls that at some point we stop even trying to imagine what the scene looks like in-world to be able to focus more on how much damage the enemy is doing, and what combat round we're on (Billy chose the Valorous posture so he fights for 2 rounds, Bobby chose the Reckless so he fights for 3 rounds, etc). Mind you: I'm running on 6 hours of sleep because I went to sleep way too late and was woken up way too early by my digestive system.

We soldier on. First turn, get an opportunity to seize the banner of the enemy, fight some knights.

Second turn, fight some Welsh Archers (23 minutes). In the distance they see Sir Balin whirlwinding on the battlefield. Trying to keep my spirits and energy up.

Third turn, fight some footmen, 4 per player (26 minutes). In the distance they see Gawain and his clan, as well as a teenager dressed in a curiously eastern fashion¹, all squires for the moment, charging and yelling. Probably characters in a more interesting game.

Fourth turn mercifully spent in the rear, healing ourselves and wondering if death is near.

Fifth turn, we missed it but apparently Idres was killed by Sir Pellinore, so the army is routing. This gives the chance to free some captive knights - four more rounds fighting dismounted squires (25 minutes). At least Valerius fumbles a lance roll, buries the tip on the ground and is catapulted from his horse, landing flat on his face, splayed out on the ground, and unconscious, which got a chuckle out of me.

And then we ended the session. Eogrim got a messenger telling him and Elias that one of his cousins, Sir William of Wiltshire, needed to speak to him in Gwynedd (the kingdom of which Ryons was king of) for an important matter, and that if he couldn't manage to get to him until the end of summer - which he won't, Eogrim needs 2 full months of rest to get back to 100%, and Elias needs less but is more debilitated at the moment - then he would seek him in Cair Lion himself.

He also got notice that one of his semi distant cousins had married above her station and that his family and Elias' now has a brand-new knight to call upon: Sir Gunnvaldr of Durrington, a few miles out from Amesbury in Wiltshire, Barbington Mormington Shirestam Shrimpland. Oh good, you're still awake.

And then we parted ways after a brief chat about how I dislike mass battles, disliked this system, disliked whoever made it, and how my life was permanently worse for having played it.

DM Shop Talk

This fucking sucks.

Thank God my players are lovely people and good sports who were trying to keep the energy up and going "chaaarge!!" and the like, because this is the kind of session that kills campaigns for me. It was exhausting, boring, not one of my best, AND full of little choices and rolls that didn't add anything meaningful to the game and put me in the place of yapping constantly while my players listened, which is always a terrible sign.

The thing that is disheartening about a session like this is not only that it reveals that an important part of a system you enjoy is fucking garbage, or that it confirms a bad expectation you had, but also that it reframes the entire campaign.

Players are knights in Pendragon. Knights fight, usually in wars. I do have plans to avoid that in the future, but one of the prime setpieces of Arthuriana is the Battle of Badon Hill, the other is Cam Lann. "Knights fighting in mass battles" comes with the territory. And that territory now stinks.

I'll bounce back and focus on other bits of the game, but now I have to intentionally work to avoid battles, or find a way to do them that is quick enough and doesn't get in the way, at which point what are we doing here, really? That's not a game element, that's a chore. It's a tax you pay to be able to play as a knight.

Here's another thought: I fucking hate mooks. I fucking hate the concept of "mowing down mooks" and "chopping down waves of faceless, nameless guys". I didn't grow up with that kind of media, the books I read and cartoons I enjoyed always focused on one-on-one fights, because that's where the DRAMA happens.

We spent ONE of FIVE battle turns fighting knights. And even them were kinda boring, but at least I saw my players engaged in some ways. The footmen from turn 3 weren't even able to deal enough damage to get through the character's armour! Who fucking cares about that?

So that's where I'm at right now. Fuck mass battles, fuck mooks, fuck all the overlapping and self-neutralizing modifiers to end up rolling with a -5. From now on it is either one on one or one on many. Many on many is just hateful.

Will Eogrim and Elias visit their relatives and find out a more interesting thing to do rather than be dragged by the ceaseless march of time, pawns in a game they don't know or comprehend but that will nonetheless grind them to dust? Will Valerius speak Welsh?? Will Havoc Alec Baldwin himself in the fucking head after trying and failing to think of a way to make all these massed battle slogfests be interesting???

FIND OUT NEXT TIME, ON...

SUNRISE QUEST!