Targets and monster quantities

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Hello, so this evening I’ll be running my first game of ICRPG. All new players, there’s gonna be 2 kids and 6 PCs. We are doing the Last Flight of The Red Sword. I’ve got everything prepped but wanted to try getting some advice for a few things.

Mostly how many Reptiods to throw at them at a time and what kind of Targets should I have for the varies rooms. Also do you have them do anything to get to the ship? Like they start on their Warp Shell and the adventure starts at the Red Sword. Should this be a thing or just a “you fly your dropship to the Red Sword hanger”. Lastly, the One Shot suggests doing something to trap them on the ship. I was thinking of having them enter via a hanger with a force field (like what they’ve got in Star Wars) and give them a timer to stop a Reptiods from pulling a level and shutting off the force field. Leading to them holding on for dear life while their ship is flung into space.

Thanks for all the advice!

[Alex]

Here is some advice.

Monster encounter, improvement suggestions

As @Khan correctly intuited, there are too many variables at play here to diagnose whether the groups (PCs and monsters are evenly matched) just given the info we have. But it’s funny, I was just having this conversation with a buddy of mine, and below is the summary of my advice. A good dipstick for you will be to look at the ODDS for the player side and the DM side, and then try to bring those closer to 50/50 across both sides. Why? Because evenly matched battles get epic quickly, as the ti…

But in general, I’d recommend four reptoids up against four PCs with a target of 12. A target of 12 would work the whole night, although you might up it against the giant reptoid abomination to a 13, just so they feel that pinch.

Finally, consider watching Hank running it here for added pointers. His method is great in terms of how characters arrive and how each room is handled.

Good luck!!!

[chrisbynum]

Last Flight of the Red Sword is one of those adventures where I like to see the difficulty ramp up in keeping with the tension of the scene. I like to start at 10 as the PCs dock with the station and then slowly Rick it up all the way to 13 as they get deeper into the ship and into trouble.

I like to start Red Sword with a docking procedure as a warm-up. It’s in keeping with the tone of the game to have the players already paranoid when they bunch up in that airlock. I keep the Target Number low early on, but bad things can still happen, usually right as they are about to get further into the ship and encounter danger.

You have a large party size, but I still like to start out with around three Reptoids as opposition and then spawn more from unexpected vectors round by round once the shooting starts. You can 1) bring them in as direct replacements from a finite exhaustible supply, 2) spawn a fixed (or random) number for a fixed number of rounds, 3) set a timer for a reinforcement wave, or 4) if you’re really being nasty, spawn at least one more Reptoid every round until none are left standing at the end of a round. It’s up to you and how much pain you want to bring to your players, recognizing that in Last Flight of the Red Sword, the combat is not much of a highlight if at least some of the mystery hasn’t been uncovered. The game will be more satisfying if the group learns more about what has happened and what remains to be done on board.