Tried the example ‘Frayed Domain’ adventure again with the same two friends.

Changes:

  • Halved the number of enemies per encounter
  • Theatre-of-the-mind combat
  • No roll20
  • Quake soundtrack playing through Groovy 🤘

The good

  1. The players didn’t die!
  2. Combat was faster, although this was mainly helped by us knowing the rules better
  3. Using sidekick instead of roll20 involved less playing with character sheets, and more playing the game. You can still save rolls in Sidekick, either for your char, (e.g. $dex) or for the whole channel ($STUNT)
  4. I like dropping links from the QuakeWiki for reminders of what the enemies look like. If I could be bothered, I’d unpack the id1/pak0.pak and get their sounds.
  5. The Acid Vats level had vats of acid. The players did not need telling twice. The resultant explosion was very satisfying and really ruined the party of grunts next to it.

The bad

  1. The players didn’t take a single hit! I can’t bloody win 😖. Pretty sure they were just lucky, and the action economy is always swing-y.
  2. The Flayed Domain maps are confusing. The Acid Vats for example tell you there is a door to the room that the players face when they arrive, but not where it is in the room. Or whether it is locked! But I think this is me not being good at OSR.
  3. I’m not sure how the Danger Die works. It’s rolled “when travelling between locations”, so not in the location? Where’s the encounter if the Danger Die tells you to have one?

Summary

The players went through two rooms of the Flayed Domain and shot a bunch of grunts, fatally. And a dog. Deaths were still pretty similar although the acid vat provided some nice variety. We finished with one of them finding a Super Shotgun, which has more damage close, but is crap at distance.

This game feels like it’s running better, I strongly recommend playing actual Quake before running a game. It helped me have more rulings than rules:

    Player: What's the cost to change weapon in a turn?
    GM: Well, it's normally on the scroll-wheel.
        Let's start with "nothing" and see how it goes.

Having the music running is kinda cute, but:

  1. The Quake soundtrack is a bit variable in volume
  2. Groovy on its free tier doesn’t allow you to change volume for everyone
  3. There’s an 8MB limit on (audio) files you can upload, and my CD rips were just Too Damned Good

So if you’re in a rush, don’t bother. If you like that kind of thing though, it’s not terribly hard. And there are many other ways I could have done it:

  • roll20 has better playback all round
  • Groovy can play from other sources, e.g. YouTube
  • just broadcast from my computer I’m pretty sure

I still don’t quite feel I’ve got the hang of Stay Frosty, Slipgate itself, or the adventure. But I’m getting much closer! At a hunch I suspect I’d want to start players in rooms with more stuff, or basically at the equivalent of level 2. Either more weapons, more enemy types, or more environmental hazards would help.