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Post by ugavine on Nov 9, 2010 13:14:45 GMT
I was wondering if anyone has come up with any tricks for runing the Weeping Angels? They are such an awesome monster that I feel they deserve more than just running them as such. Some way of spooking the players or mini-game to represent the PCs blinking - without actually trying to stare them out in a blinking contest  One idea; I thought a secret die roll for each PC to represent which turn they blink on, the PCs have got to declare actions each turn not knowing when they will blink. The Turn they blink the Weeping Angel can act if no one else is looking at it? |
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Post by Curufea on Nov 10, 2010 2:29:11 GMT
I suggested somewhere that you make stamina rolls to keep eyes open which gradually get harder.
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Post by jeffrywith1e on Nov 10, 2010 2:31:23 GMT
Any die roll that comes up with a '1' is a blink.
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misterharry
Dominus Tempus 
Dalek Caan's Lovechild
Posts: 3,246
Favourite Doctors: Second, Third, Fourth, Eleventh, Thirteenth
Traits: Empathic, Face in the Crowd, Insatiable Curiosity, Stubborn, Phobia (Heights), Unadventurous
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Post by misterharry on Nov 10, 2010 8:43:22 GMT
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Post by Escher on Nov 10, 2010 17:51:44 GMT
I'm glad someone did this correctly. My biggest gripe with the Aliens & Creatures official writeups is that some are quite poorly done and the Angels are possibly the worst, with poor stats and no mechanics for handling the 'Blink'. Take away their time ability and they could be John the janitor. |
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Post by ugavine on Nov 10, 2010 22:55:08 GMT
That's a nice document. The Weeping Angels are one of those monsters I want to use, but handling the blink can be tricky. No real ideas on the adventure yet, but the idea isto give them a smaller challenge first like a Houix or Grask and just when they thing they've done that challenge... someone notices the statue, and it wasn't there a minute ago.  |
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jonsp
1st Incarnation
Posts: 9
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Post by jonsp on Nov 11, 2010 4:32:43 GMT
Very nice. I was thinking something very similar. I think I'd use Resolve+Awareness as default, base difficulty 12 unless the character is trying to do something else in the same round, in which case difficulty = 15. I also considered the +2 cumulative difficulty per round, but decided against it. Forced to make multiple rolls over several rounds, odds are people _will_ fail, so it's not really necessary, plus it creates a couple complications that I wouldn't want to deal with. First, it can become extremely high fairly quickly, resulting in no chance of success. Second, what do you do when someone finally fails? Do you try to reflect a real world "blink" by resetting the difficulty to 12 for that character (which would require tracking difficulties separately for each character--cumbersome) or do you just keep on increasing it, eventually making it impossible to succeed? Also, I'd use different results. (Note that these results assume you're not using any kind of battlemat or figures to track character positions.) Good or above: the hero manages to keep up to two Angels in sight, pinning them down for one round. Success: the hero keeps one Angel in sight, pinning it down for the round. Failure: the hero blinks or is distracted, but not fatally. One Angel moves to within striking distance, but the hero manages to pin it down before it can strike. However, if no one applies a success or better to it the following round, it gets an attack. (i.e. it's within striking distance--a second failure or worse will allow it to attack). Bad or worse: the hero blinks or is distracted, and one Angel moves to within striking distance _and_ gets an attack this round. Particularly effective, I would think (and depending on the maturity level of your group), if the Angel nails someone other than the character who failed the roll. Basically, that character's failure resulted in one of his friends getting attacked. Any Angels that aren't pinned down get to move in and attack. Also, one character's successes can negate her companions' failures. So if character A gets a bad result but character B gets a good, character B can pin down the Angel that would have otherwise attacked, plus one other. Of course, if there are three Angels lurking around ... |
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Post by knasser on Nov 13, 2010 0:00:20 GMT
I'm glad someone did this correctly. My biggest gripe with the Aliens & Creatures official writeups is that some are quite poorly done and the Angels are possibly the worst, with poor stats and no mechanics for handling the 'Blink'. Take away their time ability and they could be John the janitor. Thank you. Your comments are really appreciated. One thing that I tried to do with the Weeping Angels is deal with the various ways players would try to deal with them in a way that didn't seem like the GM saying "no you can't defeat my favourite monster just because!". Hence the somewhat extended pieces on how hard it is to not blink. I have a written up adventure (not on my site) called Sunset which uses a single Weeping Angel to good effect. It's actually not the primary antagonist but is a fearsome presence. And in the context of Sunset, I actually don't mind how much the PCs come up with ways not to take their eyes off the Angel, because the Sun is going down, the power is running out and in the end, eyes open or shut doesn't matter in the dead of night on a starless world.  It also led to a moment where I had to try hard not to grin when the players decided that whatever was killing their enemies must be a natural ally for them. Oh, were they wrong about that. EDIT: You asked if there were any tricks that could be used. As is so often the case, the answer is "anticipation". For example, in my write-up, I'm very clear to specify that the Angels literally cannot be harmed when observed because they are "quantum locked" - they do not exist as actual things in reality as such, they are outside the continuum. Remember the Doctor saying "it's not physically possible" when River Song is trying to open the trailer that Amy is trapped inside. I don't like frustrating my players so I wanted to work that bit of flavour text into the game (via a recorded message from the Doctor in this case) to make it explicit. Things like this are important. Compare and contrast the following two scenarios: Scenario One: GM: The angel is pinned, arm outstretched toward you, for now... Player: I shoot the Angel with my gun. GM: The bullets ricochet off it. There appears to be no damage. Player: Okay, I use the laser weapon and shoot it several times. GM: Again, there is no visible damage. It's not even marked. Player: I pick up the biggest rock I can find smash it against it's outstretched arm. GM: It's unharmed. Player (frustrated): !@#!! Well how are we supposed to damage this ~@!''!"L thing? Scenario Two: GM: The angel is pinned, arm outstretched toward you, for now... Player: It can't be harmed while it's quantum locked. Let's make a run for the factory and try and lure it beneath the concrete sluice and imprison it. One scenario seems like the GM repeatedly saying: "no, you can't hurt my monster, I'm going to keep saying you fail". The other scenario the players aren't frustrated because they understand the rules they're playing under. |
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Post by Escher on Nov 15, 2010 0:45:50 GMT
Thank you. Your comments are really appreciated. You are welcome. Modeling a Dramatic Effect with rules or suggestions should be a default feature of any official writeup. Everyone I know that has read that Angel entry said "huh? What -no blink rules?" |
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gmjake
2nd Incarnation
Posts: 47
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Post by gmjake on Nov 23, 2010 4:31:03 GMT
ya know, I've been thinking about the fact that they said that an image of an angel becomes an angel.
that girl handed the tenth doctor a whole FOLDER of potential angels.
What about an adventure centered around a mob of angels in the tardis?
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Post by albruno3 on Feb 10, 2011 2:52:10 GMT
My biggest wonder is that if the Angel's Primary attack is the whole 'throwing you backwards through time' thing. Is that enough of a threat for player characters? Especially if they have a Time Lord on the team?
If Player A gets knocked back 30 years but Player B has access to a TARDIS. What's to stop one player from rescuing the other and that's that?
The Angels in the 5th season killed people but is that the difference between scavengers and regular Angels?
It is something I have pondered when it comes to using them...
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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Feb 10, 2011 3:13:14 GMT
Throwing people back in time is just a temporary setback for time-travelling PCs, unless the one who controls it is separated from their way of travelling - which would probably be a major tactic of the Angels, to get the pilot first, as a time machine is a portable source of vast amounts of time-space energy. And would you want to rely on the Doctor's ability to find the right time and space if you were lost in the timestream? Neck-breaking is a fall-back position for causing immediate deadness to armed people, and possibly making brain-eating to gain knowledge possible. And then there's the countdown effect just to be mean-spirited... |
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Post by albruno3 on Feb 11, 2011 2:40:00 GMT
Of course if you are on a space cruiser or a skyscraper and you get thrown back around 50 years you're dead meat...
I wonder what happens if they grab an immortal like Captain Jack
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Post by albruno3 on Feb 11, 2011 6:42:17 GMT
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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Feb 11, 2011 15:30:51 GMT
Of course if you are on a space cruiser or a skyscraper and you get thrown back around 50 years you're dead meat... I wonder what happens if they grab an immortal like Captain Jack Where you come out isn't necessarily where you were - Kathy started in 2000s London and ended in 1920s Hull - so while she could have landed anywhere, she landed somewhere safe. And Captain Jack speculates on how far they'd have to send him back in the Monster Files... he'd rather not find out. But the Doctor ends up in 1969 along with Martha and latterly Billy, so presumably they were touched by the same Angel, whose "displacement setting" threw them back the same length of time, even though the Doctor has centuries more life to drain. |
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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Feb 11, 2011 15:31:30 GMT
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jonsp
1st Incarnation
Posts: 9
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Post by jonsp on Feb 11, 2011 20:36:23 GMT
My biggest wonder is that if the Angel's Primary attack is the whole 'throwing you backwards through time' thing. Is that enough of a threat for player characters? Especially if they have a Time Lord on the team? If Player A gets knocked back 30 years but Player B has access to a TARDIS. What's to stop one player from rescuing the other and that's that? The Angels in the 5th season killed people but is that the difference between scavengers and regular Angels? It is something I have pondered when it comes to using them... Player A gets knocked back into the past, Player B has a TARDIS, _but_ Player B doesn't know where or when Player A is. Player B has to find the Angel who zapped Player A back in time (which can get very complicated if there are several Angels operating in the area) and scan it somehow to figure out where/when it sent Player A. And let's say, just to make things fun, the only way to get accurate coordinates is to actually hook the Angel into the TARDIS console ... which is exactly where the Angel wanted to be all along. So now Player B has to tangle with an Angel inside the TARDIS and keep it from letting the others in. Meanwhile, Player A is having her own adventures in the past, waiting for Player B to rescue her. Let's say she got bumped back into WWI ... right into the German trenches. So now she has to survive long enough for Player A to come back for her. And if you really want to complicate matters, maybe she looked into the Angel's eyes for a little too long, and the clock is ticking. So, yeah, I'd say getting thrown back through time can definitely be a viable threat. The trick is instead of just causing injury or death, it creates complications, generates situations that the players have to deal with. However, I think it really needs an entire story (or at least a large portion of one) built around it to work well. |
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jonsp
1st Incarnation
Posts: 9
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Post by jonsp on Feb 12, 2011 5:05:32 GMT
Some more thoughts ...
One neat thing about the Weeping Angels is their versatility. You can build a whole story around them throwing one or more members of the group back in time (ala Blink), or you can make them a more visceral threat by just having them stalking and killing the group (Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone).
I think one thing that makes the Angles particularly scary is that they're very smart and very malicious. They're not just mindless attack dogs. They plan and scheme, and they enjoy tormenting and torturing their victims. Maybe playing that up is really the way to create a strong sense of threat about them, even if the players can easily pop through time to retrieve time-displaced companions. (Example: your players are trying to find and deal with a single Angel on a large space ship. Seems simple enough, probably a little tense, but not too bad, only one Angel, after all. Then they discover the thing has been mucking around in the communications center and suddenly all hundred or so monitors aboard the ship activate at the same time ... each showing the image of the Angel. I think the players might crap themselves a little, even if the only real threat is getting popped back in time.)
I can see the Angels killing people just for fun, just to cause terror and taunt/torment their victims. It would be a matter of their needs at the time. If they're hungry or want to dispose of someone quickly and efficiently (say get that annoying Time Lord out of the way so the group can't use the TARDIS), then use the time zap. But if they have a little time to play, stalk and kill the members of the group one by one (or at least threaten to), just to make them squirm.
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