Cornelius

I played in a game where PCs had magical powers. It used KAP as its engine. Magical powers were like skills. The powers were usually not defined as single spells, but more a set of spells. So someone had a Fire skill. He could do things with fire. This ranged from a candlelight to a bonfire or more. Other had a Healing power. This ranged from healing wounds to healing disease.

Depending on the location and the effect you wished to create you suffered a number of d6 in damage. This damage was healed after a good night rest, but limited the power. Of course when you were on a crossing of ley lines you get more powerful spells, etc. The GM sometimes even let the spell get in effect if you failed the skill, but it had usually disastrous effects.

I like all three ideas. The second you could also do the other way around. The Pks are at an (Irish) court where the costums are so different. How do they react when a servant sits next to them?

I used the first year as a way to introduce some of the rules of the system. Especially if you are using supplements this is good way to introduce the extra rules.

I used the battle of Mearcred creek as a way to introduce battles. If you use the Book of Battle it is a good way to introduce it. The battle is simple and is explained in the BoB in more detail. 

If you use Book of Knights and Ladies to introduce knights from various areas I also recommend Book of Sires, as it gives more in depth background of those areas. As a matter of fact I use Book of Sires also to get inspired and get a good feel of the area and the relationships between the various lords and ladies living there.

A trial of Duke Gorlois would be a huge event and may even be a possible way to show the 'madness' of King Uther. This could in the end make it all rather nasty choice between loyalty or justice.

As for Madoc's survival. I would not let him survive the infamous feast. That would create a whole new can of worms for the Anarchy period.

I have never used it. I agree with @Morien that it seems too harsh. A lot of the adventures involve the Fey and getting such a passion makes them even more wary to deal with Fey and a lot of adventures unplayable.

I would only give it to a PK if it is played out that the character loves the Fey world better than the real world. In that case it seems apropriate.

Falling in love with a Fay lady I would deal with a normal Amor or Love passion. That will be a curse on its own.

I use the following houserule:

Roll for traits and passions as normal, with the normal modifiers. 

After rolling a player may choose one trait and one passion from the father to give to their new character. This is usually one of 16 or higher. As a sort of the effect the father had on the son. (as a sort of high honest character would say: always be turthful to your word, son)

I also usually look at how the father died. For instance I gave one of my PK the option to take a high Hate(Saxons) when his father was brutally slain by a berserker.

On 4/15/2020 at 7:40 PM, Atgxtg said:

Yes they should. If Loyalty started at values similar to skills, but didn't go up (since they aren't skills) then I think it would make a huge difference tot he players. Leaving the manor defended by two guys who are devoted to you (Loyalty 14-15 ish) seem much more reassuring that leaving in in the hands of a half dozen guys who aren't all that loyal to you (Loyalty 10).

I think I'll revise green troop to skill 7, and give troops a loyalty score equal to thier primary weapon skill. So the better veteran troops will be more loyal, which would make sense.

Why would a more veteran troops be more loyal? I would say that it more depends on the pay and the treatment of the lord. Also if they were hired before would be a factor I think. If they were hired before and were treated well their loyalty would probably be better.Also the length of time they are hired. If you hired them when they were fresh troops and are now your veterans they may be more loyal, but if they are treated badly and paid worse I would not bet on their loyalty.

On 4/15/2020 at 6:26 PM, Atgxtg said:

Okay, but that really wasn't what the passions are there fore. IMO you might be better served with the trait mechanics from Prince Valiant. There the players are free to do as they wish but earn fame (=glory) when thier actions match up with their traits. 

THe thing about that is players will rarely let thier character act in a negative way that they didn't choose, or if they believe their character is being tested somehow. 

I think that's a bad thing in Pendragon though. Quite a few of the adventures revolve around the characters having their traits or passions tested in some way, to see if they are worthy on some honor or reward. If the players get to chose then such adventures become a cakewalk. Frankly, you really can't run those types of adventures with that method as they players will always be able to pass the test.

 

As I said I may have been lucky that I have players who go with the story and like to get their PKs into trouble. So they go with the dice and as of yet I have not had any player invoke this rule.

Also I play the game more like that every choice has a consequence and that usually means their are no good or bad choices, only choices. Sometimes they think that they made the right choice, but will later find out that it had an unexpected consequence. As always YPMV

On 3/20/2020 at 7:58 PM, Atgxtg said:

I like the concept but I find the execution to be dubious. What if someone had Loyalty (Lord) 3 and Love Family (19)? If you just let the player choose then the passion scores do not note the strength of the passion anymore, only the likihood of getting inspired by it. 

It is a bit of a grey area I admit, but I have players who like to tell a good story, so usually go with the result of the dies, even if it means the result means they lose a notable passion.

It is mainly used when for instance they were in similar situations and acted diffirent or their passions are formed because of similar situations. If the player feels that the roll does not reflect the way his character acts he can change it, but it usually means we talk about it and how it relates to the story as a whole.

The main reson I use this rule is to give the player the control on how the character acts and not the dice. To be honest I like to let the players first explain to me what they wish to do and then change the passions depending on their actions and motivations, and do not use dice rolls. 

In my game the PKs had in actuality taken over Salisbury. While they were loyal to the young Earl Robert, he was not of age to deal with it. So besides their own manors, the PKs were able to use the full force of Salisbury.

Also in the year after the death of Earl Roderick some knights in Salisbury wanted to make someone else the earl. The PKs prefented that from happening. So Countess Ellen was sympathetic to the plight ofthe countess of Rydychan.

Since I play a more political game they also used some of the others knights of Rydychan who were less commited to the usurpers.

In the end they retook the Rydychan from the usurpers and made it a vassal of Salisbury. They also placed several loyal knights of Salisbury in Rydychan. One PKs uncle, a very famous knight, married the widow countess and ruled Rydychan as a Steward until the young Earl came of age.

I would say that if it is not decided beforehand than it would fal to the highest glory. But as there is a hours time they could decide another if all agree.

I agree with @Morien that it would take more than just being in a war or battle against each other. You need to get into a situation where both passion contradict. For instance your lord who orders you to kill your kinsman. If you get in that situation I would usually let the player decide what he wants to do or let both passions rolled against each other (oppossed). Even if one is 16+ and the other not. The winner is the passion that rules the situation.

So yes this can mean you do not act the way everyone expect, maybe even including yourself. It is the drama after all. You may not act as rational as you think. Afterwards the PK can lament on his choice and the unfairness of life. For me this is the core of KAP. You must make a choice and sometimes both are bad ones. And yes, eahc choice will have consequences. 

I do have a houserule that you can decide to act in a different way, but this will affect both passions (usually a +1 or -1 depending if you act for or against it)

On 11/13/2019 at 3:36 PM, Atgxtg said:

It's not, n or should it be. But it dos give the character certain predispositions and can affect how the react to a situation. In the adventure presented the PKS come across a group of Saxons abducting a Young lady, who begs for help, and the Saxons tell the knights to push off and that they do not recognize the King's Law only the law of their own Saxon lord.

So the knights are supposed to fight the Saxons, and have little incentive to want to send a group off the their hall in  order to negotiate with Saxons who do not recognize the King Law (that's treason right there, as is attacking people on the king's road, abducting maidens is also a crime). Hatred are only going to make the knights reaction more extreme and seem more justified.

It's not that everyone is riding along the road when suddenly Sir Hates-A-Lot draws his Sword and starts cutting into some other travelers because they are "Saxon scum!" It that Sir-Hates-A-Lot is riding along and stumbled across a group of Saxon raiders in the acct, and expecting him to let it slide

 

To be honest in my group they would intervene. Not because they hate Saxons as well that they feel they must help the Lady. They see that as their duty as a knight. Of course a Hate Saxons helps them in this regard.

2 hours ago, Morien said:

What was her crime? She was still obeying her husband.

Her crime being the wife of a robber. She is not seen as a separate entity from her husband. So she could (and in the view of others probably should) atone for her husbands crimes.

this is how I would handle it:

First of all I would split the crimes. You have a killing a traveler and the robbery of the traveler. Second I would split up the legal consequences and the social consequences.

1) Killing the traveler. 

Legal: This all depends on the justification of the knight. since you did not describe how or why the knight killed the traveler I am not sure how this would be percieved. Since the knight is dead it is all irrelevant now. The wife is in the clear. She did not kill the traveler, neither could she be prosecuted for failing to report the crime. 

Social: This has not much effect. Again the justification is important, but during the Uther or Anarchy phase it does not matter much. It is just a commoner after all. During Arthurs period this may be frowned upon if the justification is deemed unjust. 

2) Robbing the traveler

Legal: This is seen as unknightly behavior just to rob a person. The knight in question would get punished for that. Of course the wife will not as she is legally bound to obey her husband. Of course there is a difference if the person attacked you. It also depends who is the one you robbed. If the one you took from is a raider or bandit there is no problem.  Also raids are different and not seen as robbery.

Social: I would rule that robbing is not accepted, especially during Arthur's reign. There are of course a lot of loopholes here as well. Taking loot from vanguished foes is not a problem and not seen as robbery, but attacking people solely to get money is seen as robbery. Raids are acceptable as well, although during Arthur they are frowned upon. For the wife here is probably the biggest fall out. Since she knew about the robbery she and the family will suffer socially. But it is interesting what she does to atone for her crimes. This may mitigate some of the blame.

If a high hatred means you become a frenzied killing machine every time you see that which you hate, you will probably not live long. In my games a high hatred does not mean you go out killing everyone you hate. Of course you do not trust them and will assume that they will be trying to kill you. and since you interpret every action negatively it may lead to insults and eventually a fight. Imho there are other ways to work your hatred into the game. You can set up your liege not to make deals with them, work so others will view them as untrustworthy or such things. And you will not accept anything that will benefit them. 

In my game the players went into the Pennine mountains and came across a village attacked by raiders. A group of Saxon warriors defended the Cymric inhabitants of the village. This gave them a view of the honor of the Saxons, although the PK with the high hatred still assumed that the Saxons would stab them in the back at any time. He was also usually the spokesperson of the group, but in this one of the other PKs took this up (He did not have a Hate(Saxons) at all). Also the PK with a high Hate(Saxons) had a high Hate(Picts) so it 'worked out' in the end. (BTW the Pk is a knight who collects hatreds. Aside form the Picts and Saxons he also has one for Irish, Cornish knights and Merlin. It makes negotiations interesting and difficult)

Not much to add to @Atgxtg's comment. So a bit my experience:

What I like about the BoB system is that it gives the PKs the idea they have some influence on the outcome. (as mentioned by @Atgxtg during scripted battles I do not roll dice, but add and subtract depending on the script of the battle). BoB gives a lot of maneuvers, but not many are used. Most of them are only in certain circumstances. 

I find that the system makes it easy to add some special events to a battle and it makes it easy to control the battle as a GM. It takes two or three battles to get the an idea of the system. So do not be overwhelmed when you start. 

What I try to do is put one round in the battle that is special. Something the PKs can act in reponse to. That will make the battle memorable and will remove the idea of a lot of the notetaking done during the other rounds.

On 10/11/2019 at 8:20 PM, Morien said:

Since Passion modifies the Skill itself, you add it before you divide the Skill.

However, since reflexive modifiers depend on the opponent, too, I always apply those after dividing.

So let's say we have Knight A with Sword 18, impassioned +10 to 28, on a horse and fighting against two other knights (B and C, Sword 15 each) on foot. Knight A can divide his 28 any which way he wants, but let's be boring and say it is 14 and 14. Now, because he is mounted and B and C are not, +5/-5 modifier applies against each of them, resulting in 19 vs. 10 match-up.

Yes, this is great as long as you are on a horse, but if we flip the situation and A is on foot and B and C are mounted, the match-up becomes 9 vs. 20.

If B is on foot and C is on horse. It means A vs B is 19 vs 10 and  A vs C becomes 14 vs 15.

As Morien explained so well. reflexive modifiers are used after dividing the skill, because these can differ for each opponent, while the passion is not.

On 10/3/2019 at 7:51 PM, Atgxtg said:

Ah. So is Realmworks good? I've been looking for a better way to track things in my campaign. Currently I just try to keep things in documents and spreadsheets, and often I have to search through older adventures to dig up character names, stats and other details. 

I like it. It creates links between names and entries easily. It also gives me a way to organiswe all the npcs and link them to events like battles.

Unfortunately the developer Lone Wolf has decided to pull the plug out of the system. So there will be no new features in the foreseeable future. I am not sure if you can still buy the product. I heard that a others will try to bring out a similar product, called YARPS. It is currently not available and it will go out as a kickstarter next month.

On 9/28/2019 at 7:19 PM, Atgxtg said:

Wow! Did you do anything special to track that? Some sort of database, maybe?

I thought I was bad when one of my players asked me to help with a document he started to keep track of the various NPCs he encountered during the game and I expanded it to over 100 characters. 

 

As I mentioned I have an excel that helps roll 300 survival rolls each year. Furthermore I use the Realmworks database to keep track of the events over the years. For the PKs closest family I abuse a genealogy program. (MyHeritage). The last one is purely to make family trees, which Realmworks cannot do.

Realmworks is a database system that was intended to be used as GM for tracking your story. Unfortunately Lone wolf, the developing company, has pulled out of the project. So there will be no new developments. .

On 9/23/2019 at 7:20 PM, Morien said:

I would much rather have a nice family tree of named characters*, and some of whom would actually link the PK families together. One's uncle could be another's aunt's husband, and so forth. Rather than an 'Army' of nameless 'Family Knights'. And since some of them are shared by the PKs, this makes the whole world feel more interconnected, and ensures that other PKs are more inclined to go looking for Cousin Larry, too, when he goes missing.

* Who then populate a Family List of 20 rows (rcvan's suggestion), where you can easily roll 1d20 to see who it is this time rather than coming up with the duds (grandfather and father already dead by default, potentially no brothers nor sisters left, etc...).

Since KAP is a generational game I wanted a more fleshed out family tree to begin with. So we worked out the entire family tree. thus the family knights were placed in there as well. after that I have gone wild and I am currently tracking between 300 and 400 npcs. This list also  includes some of the more notable npcs that they met during the game. 

The Pks now also have a family relationship. In the first year one of the Pks had 3 sisters. He married them to the other PKs and a he married a sister of another PK. The fact by the way that he had a large family (many aunts and uncles) has led to the running joke that his family is running the county.  

But there are more links between the families. For example the grandmothers of two PKs were sisters. 

I have a excel that does all the dice rolls for me, and I use Realmworks to record the history of all the npcs. So I know what happened to them in the years before.

I am not too generous with glory, although we are currently in 515 and I have noticed that the battles are the big ones. Currently the elder knights are around 50 and have around 12k or 13k glory. 

When we started the family knights were (great)uncles. Most of them were household knights. And since household knights are 24/7 working for their liege they were not available to the PK on a whim. He could ask for their help, but this must be with the consent of the liege lord. Those uncles who were vassals themselves have their own liege lord and of course they also consider the liege lord and his wishes. By the way most of the vassal knights were maternal uncles (older brothers of their mother). On the paternal side the uncles were household knights if they were knights at all.

Currently being they are the privy council of Earl Robert. They are also estate holders and have household knights of their own. Some of them have chosen to keep their sons as household knights, although others are currently serving as household knights to Earl Robert.

On 9/14/2019 at 7:16 PM, Username said:

I really like this. My players pump points into their weapons skills spending basically every glory point and most of their first decade of training and practice into their combat skills making the average for the group of 40 year olds like 25 at this point. (Most are in the 5000-8000 glory, one person has had their glory soar into incredible levels and has a correspondingly higher combat skill.) So when they use passions it becomes boring knicks to death interrupted by a sudden brutal beheading. I increased the tie critical damage to 1d6 which sped it up considerably, but it's still very deadly since most of the critical on a 5 or higher when impassioned. 

Still, I wanted to check the probabilities on this so that I didn't run into any troubles with decreased chances to win to my players. And, it works really well. I did some random battles and calculated the chance to win and it turns out that the situation where the likelihood of one player criticaling while the other would get a regular success decreases with your changes. It's small, but noticeable. Further, the situation where the higher skill person would "automatically" win (e.g. Skill 26 vs 22, the 26 always wins if the 22 rolls a 1-4) stays the same. All of this while reducing the total number of criticals. So, seems like nothing but good things. The only time when the probabilities are changed drastically are when the situations of one opponent always criticaling such as with a skill of 39 or greater. In those situations, this system strongly works against the higher skill person for obvious reasons. 

Overall, I really like this and I'm going to try to introduce it into my game. Thanks!

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I also really like this lady's marriage is equivalent to being knighted for glory plus glory for who they marry. I think that's great and works to the advantage of lady player characters.

I like this idea as well. But I also have a rule to keep the scores higher than 20 a bit in check. I dislike it when everyone has skills above 20. They should be rare. So I want a skill of 29 to be unique. 

To increase the skill above 20 there are two options:

- Roll 20 on a check.

- Use glory points. To increase the skill you need glory points equal to the current score -20. So to increase a skill from 22 to 23, you need 2 glorypoints to do it.

The glory point rule I also use for Traits, Passions and Attributes (the last one the limits are the racial maxima)

Currently the older PKs have sword skills between 20 and 25, but the younger ones do not.

Your maps are very interesting. So I would like to see more.