Re-Recalled to Action - Wolves Upon the Coasting Lord Zondark

26 May, 2024

My previous contribution to the Recalled to Action challenge was made with a game I had already played for about a month, Pyrrhic Weaselry, and felt relatively confident that I knew what was up with it.

This time around I wanted to try something else: what if I grabbed a game I never played and tried making calls, imagining what I would do if the player asked me that during the game?

To emulate the limited time that a narrator would have, I read the rules and went through the pages giving myself just a few moments to think of how I would rule that in practice, were the game happening right now. This broke down immediately, as you'll see.

I'll be using Wolves Upon the Coast, a modified version of OD&D that I'm considering using for my upcoming campaign. I won't rehash what exactly happens in the story of Berserk like last time and turn it into a narrative; read that one if you want context, but I don't think you'll need it.

Much like last time, though, I'm imagining a Duet using Black Streams where Guts deals damage directly to HD instead of HP. His Dragonslayer Sword seems to be a Greatsword that can do both the normal Greatsword special effect:

Upon a killing blow, the wielder can roll another attack. This effect can be triggered multiple times.

But also Riposte:

Riposte: Attacks against the wielder which score below 7 (before AC is applied) result in the wielder being able to attempt a counter-attack, resolved normally.

Guts himself is no level 1 spring chicken, so let's say he's level 3. The rest we'll see as we go

The usual content warning for violence and gore.

So the beginning, with Guts cleaving through waves of men, looks to me like a textbook example of the usage of Fray Dice. This means that Guts isn't even rolling to hit, he's just rolling straight up damage, and since these are all normal men (lvl 1), he's devastating them.

Lord Zondark shows up. He's more serious, that's a lvl 2 or 3 man who doesn't know Guts is stronger than he is. He's got a pickaxe, but the translation goes with warhammer, so I'll consider it one too.

I figure the other guys had failed their Morale test¹ and are hanging back. They had started an organised retreat, which I choose to interpret as "waiting for Zondark to deal with this".

So the big conundrum here for me is: Zondark attacks 4 times before Guts decides to hit him back. Why is that?

In the fiction, it seems like Guts is either looking for a breach or toying with him. Guts' facial expression indicates that he's taking it seriously, so I think it's the former.

It seems to me like what's going on here is that these are full exchanges of Guts rolling shit dice, and Zondark getting many close calls.

See, in Black Streams, when you roll damage, if you roll a 1 you deal no damage. It seems like Guts either rolled a bunch of 1s or failed to meet Zondark's AC and, instead of the DM saying "you hit but it's ineffective", he describes how Guts is biding his time and running back, being pressed into a corner by Zondark.

Zondark hitting his allies is actually Guts' Fray Dice being reframed inside the narrative - it doesn't need to come from Guts, after all.

However, Zondark is rolling too high to activate Guts' riposte, and when he does roll low enough, Guts deals damage like a heavy weapon. Does it need to be Guts' heavy weapon? No, so Guts' player describes how he uses his riposte to shoot the hammer back at Zondark, and deals maximum damage, which knocks 2 out of Zondark's 3 HD and prompts a Morale roll which he promptly fails.

But is that interesting or satisfying? I think it can be, but not when describing it clinically like this.

Another thing I'm not sure I was able to square up is that it seemed like it was Guts' intent to draw out the fight like this, and in an RPG it doesn't seem like he'd have any incentive to do so. Zondark at this point is just a normal man, particularly powerful man but still not supernatural, and this is important because in the next chapter he does become supernatural.

But then, is that a bad thing?

My main interest when I started ranting about Berserk on Discord was specifically the "Guts homeruns Zondark's weapon into his face", and I think "he ripostes but uses his enemy's weapon damage instead, since they're the same, plus he breaks it because it makes sense" is satisfying enough. But the rest of the fight just isn't very RPGy, and that's ok.

I think my main takeaway from this was that comics and RPG are trying to tell different stories, and sometimes it's just not desirable to replicate one into the other.

I sure wouldn't like to miss 4 fucking attacks against a guy on the same level as me during a game...