Great Ork Gods AP report: Big trouble in Little Uplingham

I ran Great Ork Gods last week for four other players: Adam, Patrick, Never, and Bulb. I had never spoken to Never before. I had played countless sessions with Adam and Patrick across four or more games, and ran maybe a dozen sessions with Bulb.

We played in the included scenario, the raid for the mayor's daughters in Little Uplingham. I used Watabou's fabulous village generator to make a map.

Character creation is a bit dodgy; in future games, I'll go with random distribution of points only.

We had a few rules hiccups, mostly my fault. As we played the game, goblins simply remove one level of difficulty, no matter whether it's from spite or natural difficulty. Also, I forgot that the God assigns difficulty naturalistically, not based on their desires -- whoops!

We made one unintentional rules change that I really, really liked. When you lose an ork, you record their Oog score. Your new ork starts at 1 as usual. At the end of the game, we compare scores between all the orks played by everyone, not just their surviving orks.

Scores and other metrics, very useful to have them all recorded!

 We had some trouble ordering actions. Since the game I have read through some Forge AP reports and found that many others had the same problem. Essentially, there is no IIEE in the game whatsoever. It's down to me to simply declare what happens when. (I guess we could roll for the god of movement as a sort of initiative, but that didn't occur to me at the time.)

We also had some trouble with repeated failures, especially in the fight against the elf and the dwarf. I don't know how many orks died to those two, but it was a lot! Progress simply stalled as every player had to make a new character at least once, and maybe twice, in one brawl. (In hindsight, they may not have been playing skillfully... Maybe they should have tried simply escaping the elf and the dwarf!)

Some gods get lots and lots of play, others get little or none. I guess that's fine, since the game is supposed to be unfair.

Play lasted for maybe 140 minutes, of which 110 were quite fun.

I intend to play again. I'll do the same scenario with a different playgroup, and/or a new scenario with anybody I can drum up. The new scenario would probably have a larger social element. I'm still new when it comes to creating and scoring scenarios, so I anticipate that it will be a challenge. In the AP and development threads on the Forge, Ron suggests adding some game-theory challenges in the scoring. For instance, in the prewritten scenario, everybody can earn 2 points if all the daughters are saved... or one person can earn 1 point per daughter slayed. That kind of thing.

Oh, and here are Bulb's fantastic illustrations of our dying orks; really wonderful!

The boy can draw!

 

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