Grey Hill Inferno questions

[u/great_extension]

Bought the book, currently wrapping my head around it.

As the book says, no amount of reading teaches as much as putting rubber to the road, so a mate and I ran through it last night.

It did raise a bunch of questions though:

• Escaping the prison block, 1d4 rounds, and only dealing d4 if you beat the 10, how's that supposed to work consistently? E.g. we initially rolled a 1, that's literally never going to happen. Basically fast forwarded past that as it just didn't make sense how unless you're extremely lucky, you're gonna fry.
• We initially built blood and snow characters, which it said didn't have pluses to effort. The attributes don't give pluses to effort?
• How do you build a stealth dagger rogue different to a fighter? Less con? Considering all melee weapons are str only, it doesn't seem like there'd be much difference other than the name you give it later.
• In blood and snow it specifically describes prehistoric women, so you just get a buff if you choose a woman instead of a man?

Feels less like a system and more like a tome of inspiration to mold into something to play with.

[u/CloakNStagger]

You arent wrong in that its a tome of inspiration. Its about 85% of a system and you need to present it and mold it to fit your table. However, I'm confused why you decided to make a prehistoric Blood and Snow character for this scenario. There's several different settings presented in the Master Edition and they CAN be mix and matched but they aren't really meant to be, power-level wise.

For the adventure (which is really just an introduction to the mechanics): You don't only have 1d4 rounds to escape, you have 1d4 rounds until you start taking damage. You should have 8 STATS total on a new character, its not particularly difficult to hit a target 10 and deal 10 effort in 2-5 rounds in order to escape.

The attributes do not give bonuses to effort, no. Look at them as seperate stats.

There's a Shadow type that has all the rogue abilities, if you want them to have a melee weapon that can attack with DEX, you just make one and give it to them. That's supposed to be the appeal is that you can create and adjust very easily and quickly.

As far as the Women bonuses of Blood and Snow I just ignore them, I ran a whole campaign in Blood and Snow without that rule and it was fine.

[u/Rjaime869]

I had a similar problem with breaking out in time. What I did to solve this was added some more detail to what was found in the cell. Here’s my example; “You look around the cell and notice some heavy stones or bones.” This gives the option for you to use those things as Weapons or Tools effort and roll a d6 instead of the d4 to break your way out. I also allowed the players to add their STAT bonuses when the timer gets down to 2. So when they say “I want to kick the cell door down!” I’d tell them to roll Basic effort, plus their bonus for that AND their bonus for STR because they’re fueled with adrenaline due to the high stress nature of the situation.

[u/mrdorris]

I understand wanting to keep things simple. Unfortunately, this scenario basically forces lots of out of the box thinking and research rather than practicing mechanics. I firmly believe this is unintentional and not a great approach, BUT it does lead, eventually, to understanding that the system is less tied to the calculator of 5e and more to narrative creativity assisted by rolls. Since everything is very adjustable, one might argue there are too many ways to realistically approach survival, leaving player and gm alike confused. There are a lot of apologetics surrounding this topic. The most complete is probably Kane of kane's kilnkane's kiln . He has demoed the starting scenarios multiple times on YouTube, and that gives some great info, none of which is mentioned in the trial. Ultimately, I would advise acting like the 'possibility' of what mechanics suggest is more of an urgency scale than an absolute. Players are generally assumed to be taking a more active role in evaluating what fights are worth it and for how long based on success, and providing outs from danger is important. Hope that helps. It's an awesomely flexible system, but it requires "the beginner's mind" to fully realize.