Reavers wyvern fight session report

The following is a recollection of a fight from a session about a year ago, which I count as one of my worst gaming experiences. Not long after this I ended my tenure as referee in this ongoing game. It was particularly disappointing as I had had many of my best experiences in that same game in the previous three or four months.

The game is Wolves Upon the Coast, a game inspired by OD&D (whatever that name means to the author of this game) with an integrated setting. In order to understand this play report, you need to know that:

• To attack, a character or monster rolls 1d20 and adds their attack bonus and their opponent’s armor class, both numerical values between 0 and 9, plus some kind of circumstance modifier, and tries to hit 20 or above.
• Characters and monsters have health points, 1d6 points per “hit dice”. Monsters get +1 to their attack bonus for every 2 hit dice
• Most attacks reduce a character or monster’s health by 1d6. Hits generally have no other effect, and combat is extremely abstract; there are no rules for injuries, for instance
• At 0 health a character or monster dies
• Some attacks (poison, magic) ignore health and have a flat chance to kill something
• By default, nobody gains a mechanical benefit from killing anything (i.e., you don’t gain “xp” from fighting)
• Characters do get a mechanical benefit (+2 attack bonus or +1 hit die) from making boasts that they can accomplish suitably heroic tasks. If they accomplish the task they keep the benefit
• Every day, there’s a chance that the characters will encounter some kind of monster as they walk around the world
• When characters encounter a monster, the referee is supposed to roll on a chart to determine its demeanor

The characters, many of whom were quite new, set off from a city to get some opium for its pirate queen. I rolled that they would encounter a wyvern. In the region the players were currently in, there was one wyvern, which roamed the whole place and was supposed to be an apex predator. I was really excited to see this result, because I enjoy playing powerful monsters and being scary. While I am or try to be neutral for most of the game (I say what I think is most likely to happen, not what I think would be most interesting, for instance) when I control a monster I enjoy trying my hardest to defeat the other players.

This monster was particularly scary, I thought. It had 6 hit dice, so it was as strong as 6 men, its scales were as hard to penetrate as the heaviest armor (armor class 2), it could fly, and it had a poison sting that could instantly kill anybody it hit, ignoring their hit points

I rolled for its demeanor and found that it was hostile to the players. Hunting probably. The creature was once a human, and probably intelligent; it could even talk, if it wanted to, I guess. I also decide that it will attack with its tail sting whenever I roll a 1 or a 2 on a d6.

So the wyvern swoops down to attack the characters’ pack horse. It misses. The horse attacks the wyvern back. One of the players boasts that his character will rip the wyvern’s wings off while it is still alive. Now his character is honor-bound to follow up on this boast. He might not survive, but he has to try. If he doesn’t give it a good enough try, he may as well give up the character; it can’t ever boast again. (The other players vote to decide if he’s given it a good enough try.) So now at least one character is committed to trying to fight this thing.

The boasting character wants to stick a grappling hook through the wyvern’s wings. Normally there’s no rules for such a feat. I decide to dig up the hit location charts from the Blackmoor book by TSR. I am pretty pleased with this decision. The character manages to hit the wyvern’s wings with his grappling hook. He’s attached the hook to a rope, and attached the rope to the pony, which he now smacks. The pony runs off, dragging the wyvern behind it. He wanted to pull off its wing, but this will do.

The characters chase after the wyvern with a net and manage to cover it. The wyvern spends its turn clawing free of the net while the characters try, and mostly fail, to hit it. It yells at the players, asking them how they dare to lay their hands on it. (It was a prince, once upon a time.)

The wyvern gets free of the net and stings the pony, but the pony doesn’t die. (It targets the pony because it’s tied to the pony.) The players all keep trying to attack the wyvern, incrementally racking up damage. They try to pin its tail and cut it off, but keep hitting other parts of its body instead. I think the wyvern gets free of the rope, but I don’t really remember.

The wyvern keeps trying to hit them or anybody and keeps missing. When it gets down to half health I roll for its demeanor again, to see if it flees or fights to the death. The demeanor table tells me it’ll keep fighting.

Combat continues, slowly, with a lot of misses on all sides. I have a strong desire to simply skip it, give a summary judgement, but a single successful hit from the wyvern will probably kill any single character, so it seems too important to skip. I want the wyvern to fly away, but I already rolled for its demeanor; doesn’t it have to stay now?

Eventually one of the players manages to disable the wyvern’s wing. (Not the one who boasted about it.) No running away for the wyvern now. Combat drags on longer. No hits from the wyvern. They grind it down to 0 hp, and it dies.

The whole fight takes about 2 hours to resolve, even though it’s tactically pretty simple. Part of this is because so much time is spent whiffing, and part of this is because the players were simply taking a lot of time to say what they were doing and roll the dice.

After the fight, the characters continue on their way. We have a bit of fun joking about the horse which resisted the wyvern’s poison and dealt a fair bit of damage to the creature. Otherwise nothing has changed for any of the characters.

My immediate reaction was to blame the system. It’s ridiculous on its face that the wyvern (6 hit dice) has +3 to hit, barely better than a starting character, when it’s supposed to be an apex predator. I still think this is true, that the numbers fundamentally don’t make sense here. But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem with this session was that I had turned the game inside-out. I wanted all the specific subsystems of the game (hit locations, demeanor rolls, random encounter rolls, etc) to sort of play themselves; I looked at them as the substance of the game. Now I think instead that they provide Bounce in the game, but they are supplemental to the substance of the game. (They certainly do other stuff as well, but I’m not concerned about that right now.) The substance of the game is: do what’s reasonable and honest, given the motivations of everybody involved and the constraints of the fiction.

A wyvern is a pursuit predator like an eagle. It should circle potential prey from above, so high it can barely be seen, and then swoop down and pick its prey up in one move. It should never willingly land to fight on the ground. This wyvern in this game was once a human, so it should be even smarter than an eagle, and make far better choices. As soon as it failed to take out the horse, it should have just left.

There’s no doubt more to say about this encounter, and I’m curious to see what others think, and focus on.