The ampersand game versus Iron and Gold

Iron & Gold

I am in the final bit of Curse of Strahd, and what is in D&D a minor nuisance is possibly going to kill the group, because of how I chose to adapt it to this system and how the game system works.

The monster? Two swarms of rats.

In D&D they are a CR 1/4 opponent, +2 to bite. Someone in plate doesn’t worry about them at all, and they do minimal damage. To characters who are level 9 or 10, they are nothing. You ignore them.

Here’s the situation: the characters are in a room in Castle Ravenloft, holding a particular portrait hostage, because they’re trying to call out the bad guy (Strahd), and the portrait is all he has left of her. (Campaign reasons…she’s out of his reach. See the writeups if you care.) They have two items that are powerful against vampires: The Sun Sword, which creates sunlight (bad for vampires) and does extra damage against vampires. (In fact, the wielder has offed two vampires by beheading, which is possible given the change in game systems.) They also have the holy symbol, which operates on charges. While the holy symbol works, it might be able to stop a vampire for a minute, whereupon the adventurers can stake them. It works on charges, so Strahd’s tactic is to send wave after wave of vampire spawn at the heroes, until the holy symbol is out for the day.

In D&D, armor makes you harder to hit. It has no effect on the amount of damage you take, and by this point in a D&D campaign, even the wimpiest of characters has more than 50 hit points and armor class 15 or better. The rat swarm has to roll more than 12 to hit, and the character can probably take bites for a couple of turns. A swarm of rats is a nuisance, but frankly, you’re more worried about the vampires and the tremendous amount of damage they’re handing out. Plus, the likelihood of being hit doesn't change much.

In Iron & Gold, the chance of a rat hitting is higher (I have the rat swarm a chance to hit on ≤6, and the heroes are all ≤9 or better on their fighting skills, which is great if they’re only dealing with rats, but their attention is on the vampires instead; in Iron & Gold the chance of hitting is better if your opponent is actually dealing with something else); armor might stop damage but only might, and you only have 5 levels of damage you can take. A rat swarm can do three levels of damage in a round, and by the end of the second round, you might be dead.^[1]

So the vampires keep the adventurers busy but the rats keep biting them, and sooner or later, they wear the characters down…

Very different situations:^[2] in D&D, the rats do damage only 20% of the time, and when they do, it’s for less than a tenth of total HP. It means that in Iron & Gold there isn’t any ignoring a threat. Everything can be dangerous.

This leads to play style changes: in D&D, you can charge forward. In Iron & Gold, you try to get things in your favour. In this case, the characters sealed all the exits to minimize enemies, but didn’t realize that (a) there was a secret door and (b) the seals they could put on the doors were not proof against strong vampires who live in the building. Vampires broke the doors down, rats flooded in, and suddenly the characters are fighting on more than three fronts.

...Geez, it’s like I’m running this in Runequest or Harnmaster...

[1] Though, to be honest, a rat swarm can kill a bog-standard commoner in D&D as well.

[2] As an example, a swarm of rats, according to Wizards of the Coast, has about 27 hit points, does 7 damage, is +2 to hit, and does 7 (2d6) damage. The human fighter that Wizards of the Coast has on DMsGuild.com has 79 hit points at Armor Class 19, with a longsword. The rats hit AC 19 only on 17-20. In Iron & Gold, Ninefingers, my sort-of-fighter, has high dueling (≤10) and scale armor (means that an individual point of damage is only 2/3 as likely to penetrate). A swarm of rats is ≤6 to bite, and does three points of damage, reduced if the swarm gets smaller. (I had to invent mechanics for swarms of rats, so this is not official.) Assuming that Ninefingers is distracted by the other threats, he's less likely to get hurt (a little over 14%) but if he gets hurt, it takes away a fifth or more of his health.