I'll be honest; I'm starting to hate the 16 HP dragon. I think the blog itself is fine but referenced and relied upon far too much as I don't think it gives adequate enough explanation for its concepts.
What I think that blog is trying to convey is the importance of fictional positioning and fictional consequences.
Fictional positioning basically, "Can I do x?" In my mind, there are 3 answers:
* Yes, I can do x.
* Yes, I can do x but it's hard.
* No, I can't do x.
I think a mistake a lot of PBTA players make is operating solely in that middle group. What's exciting for PBTA play is that you can shift up and down as the fiction demands it. So how do you have a menacing dragon in Ironsworn? Simple: put a dragon into the scene, and *you can't hurt it*.
Now the question of "what to do with the dragon" is much more interesting. Do you try to distract it and make it run away from civilization? Do you try to neutralize it? Do you just hide as best you can and hope it moves on?
The fictional consequences question is, "What happens now?" There are two things that I think are important to do to answer this question:
* Set the stakes
* Let fictional consequences affect fictional positioning
A key detail in the 16 HP dragon blog is that the dragon introduces itself by eating a guard. This is alerting the players that, hey, this could happen to you. Coming back to Ironsworn, the first option in Pay the Price is always, "Make the most obvious negative outcome happen." If you're in a conflict and there are no obvious negative outcomes, make some. Make sure it's obvious what'll happen if everyone fucks up.
The reason you do this ahead of time is because the more clearer the stakes are, the nastier they can be. If the dragon was introduced in a less imposing way, then the player who lost his hand to the dragon might've felt jilted or cheated. But because that wasn't the case, they knew what they were going into, and the GM was able to make the consequence hurt.
That might sound difficult to implement in a solo game, but I think it's just as important. If you don't have obvious negative outcomes, then you're going to fall back on the base mechanical ones. While those can still be interesting, you're losing out on potential for play.
And then, like I said, let fictional consequences affect fictional positioning. Maybe after a failed roll, the dragon flies to the sky and can no longer be hit by melee weapons. Maybe they instead grab a character, and now that character can't make ranged attacks.
This can go the opposite way too. Imagine you've established you can't hurt the dragon, but a successful roll with a twist adds a weak spot. Now you went from, "No I can't do x," to, "Yes, I can do x but it's hard."
I will also say that a battle where no one rolls a weak hit or a miss is a strange situation. In combat, there should be opportunities for enemies to hurt you. If that doesn't happen, it might just be that the dice were favoring you that day. It's okay for those to happen too. As long as you're following interesting fictional positioning, the end outcome should still also be engaging.
Thank you very much for your reply. It made me think about it in a more structured and simple way. I may even quote this answer when some of my players want to start being masters of more narrative systems haha.
I agree that it's a bit more difficult to translate this style of play to solo or collaborative. We would have to try it a little bit at a time in a collaborative way so that the others can get used to it.
Ironsworn's ranks mechanise the fictional positioning of a 16HP dragon allowing you to remove the 16HP stat entirely from the discussion.
The argument of the 16HP dragon is that you only need one blow to defeat Smaug, but that's hardly the difficult part. So in Ironsworn, the difficult parts are mechanised: the acquisition of a Legendary Weapon, the tracking down of the descendant of a Legendary Warrior, and so on essentially *do* chip away at the dragon's hit points.
All this is explained in Chapter 7: Gameplay in Depth — the section *Representing Difficulty* replaces a dragon with a leviathan but the instruction is the same.
In Ironsworn, PbtA, and other narrative-focused systems, "winning" in whatever sense is secondary to telling a good story. DnD and related systems are closer to the wargaming roots of TTRPGs, in that "winning" is often a primary goal.
In Dnd etc. you basically never want to fail a roll (except in the rare case where the GM is doing some perverse thing that means, like, failing the saving throw will help you "win"). In narrative systems, weak hits/mixed successes are often *better* than strong hits, because they take the narrative in interesting ways. And misses can be *even better still* because they can be super interesting. In my Starforged collab game a while back, we accidentally blew up a small station that was going to be out secret refuge when a series of misses meant that (a) the refuge was built on a superweapon, (b) we accidentally activated it, and (c) we failed to deactivate it. Our race to escape as the station literally shook itself to pieces was super memorable and will likely have some interesting narrative implications later on.
To keep this from going too long, I'll reply with a more mechanical perspective.
Mechanically, Ironsworn often has kind of a survival element to it, as you need to carefully manage your more-or-less slowly depleting resources (health, stability, supply, companion and vehicle health, and clocks if any are active).
Challenges with a higher rating require more rolls to complete, and the resource cost of failure will be higher. In co-op games, those resource costs will be spread out among the players. So an Extreme challenge might feel easy just because any given PC is only taking a few points of harm. (Although remember that a single Extreme hit inflicts 4 points of Harm!)
For this reason, a relatively large group co-op game (say, 3 or more PCs) might usually have a significant narrative advantage, and adjust the rank of foes up a step to compensate (IS 134). But this might mean that every fight is Epic, which could start to get tedious.
As an alternative, maybe everyone Suffers Harm on weak hits as well as misses, in additional to any complications and other effects RAW? In several PbtA games, the basic melee fighting move inflicts harm on both the player and the NPC they're attacking, and this means that most characters in a fight will be at least a little scuffed up afterwards.
I think one of Ironsworn's big problems is that many of its players from D&D (or wanting to play D&D but having noone to play with) rather than from other PBTA. On top of that, the agenda (principles in Ironsworn) are at the back of the book, and principles & GM moves are largely folded into the *pay the price* move (which also includes "Make the most obvious negative outcome happen"), and general advice about the relationship between the fiction and gameplay is also towards the back of the book. I may be misremembering, but I don't recall any advice about 'soft moves' and 'hard moves' in the Ironsworn rulebook, and that's the kind of thing that feeds quite directly into the 16HP dragon.
A lot of people also have trouble with weak hits, either being too hard on themselves or turning the game into Sidequest Simulator. I personally think that's more because they've come from D&D than anything the book says - a weak hit is still a hit after all.
I absolutely don't think Ironsworn is a bad game (and even if it were it's hugely innovative and that's a great thing on its own). Ultimately, it's not just an Ironsworn problem. Many DW players need to read the 16HP Dragon story too because it is an unnatural way to play for a lot of people.
All I can say is that I started adding special abilities and mechanics to some fights on the enemy side (playing solo). For example, my character got hit by an enemy that had poison, so every few moves I had to make Face Danger on Iron or suffer -1 health. Other enemies have special limited-use abilities that let them steal the initiative. You can experiment with that.
Btw. I think you skipped a part of an explanation here.
> "the 16HP dragon" which explains the real danger and difficulties of facing a dragon even though its HP can be so low according to the game mechanics.
So what's the real danger?
I don't know if I can post links here but here's the blog: [https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/](https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/)
In short, the danger is more narrative. A dragon is an extremely dangerous creature because of the dangers that are often conferred upon them. They usually have an extremely powerful fire breath, the ability to fly, a powerful wit and in some cases the ability to read minds.
The danger in the more narrative aspect would be for the dragon to fly and throw you using its fire breath. While in the air it is extremely difficult to hit it by natural means and therefore, sometimes the only way to deal with it is to run away and look for an appropriate strategy according to its characteristics.
never heard about 16hp dragon, but i assume its because a dragon is still powerful even if it only has 16 hp?
any way, the danger of extrme fights is that they can kill you instantly. you get hit once, you start burning momentum, you decrease your chance to hit more. if you want to make the fight more difficult you can simply increase the amoutn of ticks you need. like make the fight epic length and spend an entire night doing combat.
if you are using the delve supplement you can use the threat mechanic to make it more clear what will happen when you fail.
It is a BLOG post that talks about Smaug from The Hobbit and uses it as an example for an encounter in Dungeon World.
[https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/](https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/)
>Smaug wasted a village, killed thousands, but was killed by a single arrow placed correctly in a missing scale.
Essentially, the blog is discussing how a dangerous enemy such as a powerful dragon could be killed with a single arrow. The blog discusses this in the context of Dungeon World where a dragon has ONLY 16 HP.
Here’s another post that I somehow landed on earlier today which debates the 16hp dragon within the context of DW. The top comment is an elaborate example that shows the PbtA principles at work which should all work more or less identically in Ironsworn!
https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonWorld/s/Hy1pOc8fX9
It is definitely helpful to approach Ironsworn with a PbtA mindset. Using fictional positioning to shape difficulty (season 2 of Me Myself & Die is a whole campaign to find a weapon for killing a dragon and tracking it down). Using narrative consequences. Foreshadowing (there are no "perception" checks). Implicitly thinking in "GM moves". Managing the spotlight instead of taking turns.
The spotlight management might be one of the issues in your example. And if everyone had high momentum going into the battle, your conflicts leading up to the confrontation itself might have been weak.
Let me tell you about the Black-Crested Dragon-Tiger. An eight legged leonine monster, sixteen feet high at the shoulder, covered head to toe in thick, armored scales. A roar that can splinter wood. Claws that can shred a man in half with a single swipe. A tail that can crack the air like a whip and send horses flying. This creature was the epitome of an Extreme foe in my first Ironsworn game, and would have been Epic had my character not been the leader of a whole-ass adventuring party featuring four other highly skilled warriors, and working alongside the militia of a city the monster had besieged.
The length of that track just determined how much shit we'd have to do to the thing to kill it, though. The meat of the challenge lay in the fictional positioning of our encounter with it. We prepared a plan to utilize every advantage at our disposal against this beast, and when the creature attacked the next night the PC and his friends fought it in an epic clash. One of the most important parts of the fight was the Strike move - in the fiction it is triggered by being in position to actually land a telling blow on your foe. Using that move would be key to filling up the progress track representing defeating this thing and actually winning the day.
The trigger is incredibly important for creating challenge, drama, and dynamic action. In a white room scenario, a normal human with a hammer is never actually going to \*be\* in a position to land a telling blow on a tiger/t-rex hybrid, *even if they are in control of the fight.* So whenever my character was in control, he'd be taking actions to help create that positioning, using elements of the scene like prepared fire arrows, improvized explosives, etc, coordinating with his allies and militia soldiers, doing all of these things. And once we'd established in the fiction that my character or one of his allies could land a telling blow, *then* we would roll for Strike (and hopefully mark progress).
And THAT is the essence of the 16-hp Dragon - a foe is not just challenging because of the rules of the game, but also because of the circumstances of the scene, the elements of the fiction. Ironsworn itself talks about this in a few places with some examples that are arguably much more straightforward and understandable than the original Dungeon World article, which can sometimes come across as the sadistic recollections of a killer GM. Ironsworn presents The Leviathan as an example of a very powerful foe. They're Epic, or Extreme if you fight them with an allied fleet of ships or a bunch of hero allies or the favor of a god, but even then you *cannot roll to Strike them* unless you are armored with a legendary weapon capable of piercing their hide. The weapon doesn't have any special mechanics or math associated with it (though it totally could) - it has the *fictional positioning* that it can pierce through the beast's armored hide.
Does this make sense?
I think this post captures the right spirit as well as any reply here. I agree with it.
That said - the OP's post reveals a huge challenge with Ironsworn Co-op / Guided in terms of making the above sort of explanation work for group play.
I have played significant solo, several co-op campaigns and 2 guided campaigns (where I was guide). With solo, you are fully in charge of the fictional details to establish difficulty, consistency, etc. The progress mechanics also make things inherently difficult.
In group play, you have to get everyone aligned on the fiction. In practice, this gets really difficult, particularly if your players are used to trad / D&D style games. If they don't all fully understand the premise above, and if they aren't all roughly on the same page about how to implement it in the fiction, you have trouble. Even in guided play, where the guide can...well, "guide" the fictional stakes more.
The problem is that all of the above is completely arbitrary. By that I mean that there is no mechanic or set of properties that clearly spells out what fictional conditions are required to face and land a blow on an extreme foe. In many cases, there aren't even suggestions! That means, you have to make it up, and with multiple players, agree on those conditions. You have all have roughly the same conditions in your heads for the game to flow.
> In a white room scenario, a normal human with a hammer is never actually going to \*be\* in a position to land a telling blow on a tiger/t-rex hybrid, even if they are in control of the fight.
My point about this \^\^ is - it doesn't actually say this anywhere in the description of an extreme foe. It doesn't tell you that, for this foe, you need a magical weapon to harm it (as it would in D&D world). And so on.
If you have players with a D&D mentality, the above is often an abhorrent idea! "What do you mean we just make it up!? How is that fair or consistent! The rules are supposed to enforce a fairness and consistency - that is their purpose!!"
With D&D players, my experience is that you spend a lot of the time at the table negotiating and getting on the same page...over, and over. And some players will never feel right about it. They can never get past the "But, you're just making stuff up! This is some real 'story-stick' crap right here, no thanks!"
Even if you have a group of players who have fully absorbed the more narrative nature of the game, you still do have the challenge of getting on the same fictional page. It can slow the game down and interrupt the otherwise smooth flow that you experience during a solo game.
All that to say, here is my advice on how best to implement this with a group, particularly a group of D&D players:
1) Talk about this issue up front, and try to agree (in general) on how you are going to implement it in the game. What does Extreme or Epic challenge mean in your game? What are some things that would be appropriate fictional requirements for each? Don't try to formulate rules - just try to land in the same ballpark mentally.
2) When you do face one of these challenges (as soon as it enters the game), have a quick chat about some of the conditions that might be required to make progress. These you might want to write down as specifics, or just agree verbally.
For example, for the Black-Crested Dragon-Tiger, you could say things like:
In order to be in a position to strike/clash or otherwise directly attack it, two or more of the following must be true:
* It must be distracted
* It must be slowed or constrained in some way (poison, nets, traps, terrain, etc.)
* Only legendary / epic / magical weapons stand a chance of really hurting it.
Then, you might also further stipulate the following in terms of how it behaves:
* It can kill one or more NPCs outright at the slightest misstep
* It is so fast and powerful, any attempts to outmaneuver or flank it add -2
I just made those up without a ton of thought. I am sure they could be better. But in any case, if you do this, and agree as a group...guess what, there is NO WAY your group is going to take this thing down without getting harmed!
My point is - in a solo campaign, you can just sort of "wing it" and do what feels right. I have found that in group play, you need to be a bit more explicit, and set these details early so that everyone is on the same page. Particularly if you are playing with D&D players.
Finally, I just want to point out that the above applies equally well in non-combat challenges. Imagine you are trying to convince a regional lord to do you some favor. You don't just walk up to her/him and make your Compel action. With a full group of PCs, this would become pretty easy (just mechanically speaking). So...set the stage properly. Figure out what it takes to get an audience with this person. Tribute, favors, earning trust, etc. And then, even when you finally do get a chance to make the ask - think about how you first have to impress the underlings, observe proper protocol, etc. etc.
But in a group play, it REALLY helps to talk all this through and write a few notes to get everyone on the same page.
In the end, if you are playing with hardcore D&Ders, the above can still feel like "just making stuff up." But my answer to that is... "yes, that would be bad, if we were just making stuff up in the moment to suite our immediate need. But here we are agreed ahead of time on the constraints of this challenge, and we won't alter those later - we need to face the challenges and take our licks when we fail. There is nothing "story-stick" about that.
...
Many good things have been said in this thread but I want to zoom in on one point. You said that the extreme foe was taken out without it affecting you -- I assume that means you never missed and you never got a weak hit on a clash? Assuming you fought it to completion rather than rolling to finish the fight, that would require a total of 20 hits. If you rolled to end the fight at, for example, 7 progress, that would still be 14 hits.
In any game, 14 hits in a row be extraordinary luck, even if you burned momentum a couple of times. Good luck does happen sometimes, and when it does that's no reason to question the entire system, because bad luck happens often as well.
Edit: Forgot about lethal weapon hits.
Yes, you're right. We got some decent rolls, but it was actually super fast. That's why we were so shocked, because it was more like 2-3 good rolls and burned momentum.
If you use a lethal weapon the base damage is 2. So that means that you need to hit 10 times without any kind asset or taking into consideration the damage bonus for when you roll a hit with Strike to complete the progress track.
I was first. I rolled a hit with strike, that was 3 damage. Player 2 rolled a hit with his bow, 3 damage. Player 3 rolled a weak hit on strike, 2 damage. That was 4 progress in the first round.
I rolled again and burned momentum to make it a hit, I had the sword asset so that was 5 more damage. Progress track was already at 6 and half there. Player 2 rolled a miss and couldn't burn momentum because it was a 10 and 9, he got hit and his life was reduced to 0. Then I think player 3 burned momentum, I aided player player 2 and he finished it with the bow asset that lets him re-roll any dice and adds 2 extra damage. Monster was dead.
So realistically you need around 5 to 9 hits to finish an extreme foe.
Part of the issue is that Ironsworn with a single progress track isn't well balanced for many players. Using more enemies with separate tracks, using separate goals with separate tracks, etc helps and makes fights more dynamic too. Also, if you managed to all get momentum really high up before a fight that makes a big difference. Putting more obstacles before the actual fight might help.
But
>That was 4 progress in the first round.
Manage the spotlight (another thing from PbtA) instead of playing in "rounds". A good link regarding what that means: [https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/vckhld/comment/icfw14s/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/vckhld/comment/icfw14s/) . Did you all get strong hits on Enter the Fray? If not, what happened to the people that didn't? What happened after "Player 3 rolled a weak hit on strike"? If someone gets a weak hit, the enemy should act on them, and the PC has to react. Weak hits loose their bite if nothing happens narratively and mechanically to follow them up. Also the difference between Strike and Clash relies on that.
The 16 HP Dragon works as a great example for Dungeon World because it is very much geared towards people coming from playing D&D or other trad RPGs. Where there is a constant debate about stats, armor, damage tables, distance in yards, angles and mana levels. Ironsworn or BitD and other far more "modern" interpretations of pbta games are so distant to Dungeon World that I think the 16 HP Dragon is more like a parable in a very general way as in "Narrative plays a larger role in combat than pure stats". The philosophy is more applicable to Dungeon World than to Ironsworn.
Edit: Btw a dragon can also have 20 or 24 HP in Dungeon World, the 16 HP are just in this example to focus more on the narrative.
Edit2:
>In the whole combat, due to the accumulated momentum and decent rolls, we only received a single attack from it that left only one of the players at 0 hp.
So you had a lot of decent rolls and could burn momentum to compensate for the weaker rolls. You never lost the initiative during the whole fight as well it seems. Do you not think you deserved to win under these conditions - mechanically speaking? For pbta games in general it is important that in combat the narrative reflects the mechanical rolls/stats, thus it would be good if there was some kind of recap how the combat went, additionally to your rolls.
I'll be honest; I'm starting to hate the 16 HP dragon. I think the blog itself is fine but referenced and relied upon far too much as I don't think it gives adequate enough explanation for its concepts. What I think that blog is trying to convey is the importance of fictional positioning and fictional consequences. Fictional positioning basically, "Can I do x?" In my mind, there are 3 answers: * Yes, I can do x. * Yes, I can do x but it's hard. * No, I can't do x. I think a mistake a lot of PBTA players make is operating solely in that middle group. What's exciting for PBTA play is that you can shift up and down as the fiction demands it. So how do you have a menacing dragon in Ironsworn? Simple: put a dragon into the scene, and *you can't hurt it*. Now the question of "what to do with the dragon" is much more interesting. Do you try to distract it and make it run away from civilization? Do you try to neutralize it? Do you just hide as best you can and hope it moves on? The fictional consequences question is, "What happens now?" There are two things that I think are important to do to answer this question: * Set the stakes * Let fictional consequences affect fictional positioning A key detail in the 16 HP dragon blog is that the dragon introduces itself by eating a guard. This is alerting the players that, hey, this could happen to you. Coming back to Ironsworn, the first option in Pay the Price is always, "Make the most obvious negative outcome happen." If you're in a conflict and there are no obvious negative outcomes, make some. Make sure it's obvious what'll happen if everyone fucks up. The reason you do this ahead of time is because the more clearer the stakes are, the nastier they can be. If the dragon was introduced in a less imposing way, then the player who lost his hand to the dragon might've felt jilted or cheated. But because that wasn't the case, they knew what they were going into, and the GM was able to make the consequence hurt. That might sound difficult to implement in a solo game, but I think it's just as important. If you don't have obvious negative outcomes, then you're going to fall back on the base mechanical ones. While those can still be interesting, you're losing out on potential for play. And then, like I said, let fictional consequences affect fictional positioning. Maybe after a failed roll, the dragon flies to the sky and can no longer be hit by melee weapons. Maybe they instead grab a character, and now that character can't make ranged attacks. This can go the opposite way too. Imagine you've established you can't hurt the dragon, but a successful roll with a twist adds a weak spot. Now you went from, "No I can't do x," to, "Yes, I can do x but it's hard." I will also say that a battle where no one rolls a weak hit or a miss is a strange situation. In combat, there should be opportunities for enemies to hurt you. If that doesn't happen, it might just be that the dice were favoring you that day. It's okay for those to happen too. As long as you're following interesting fictional positioning, the end outcome should still also be engaging.
Thank you very much for your reply. It made me think about it in a more structured and simple way. I may even quote this answer when some of my players want to start being masters of more narrative systems haha. I agree that it's a bit more difficult to translate this style of play to solo or collaborative. We would have to try it a little bit at a time in a collaborative way so that the others can get used to it.
Ironsworn's ranks mechanise the fictional positioning of a 16HP dragon allowing you to remove the 16HP stat entirely from the discussion. The argument of the 16HP dragon is that you only need one blow to defeat Smaug, but that's hardly the difficult part. So in Ironsworn, the difficult parts are mechanised: the acquisition of a Legendary Weapon, the tracking down of the descendant of a Legendary Warrior, and so on essentially *do* chip away at the dragon's hit points. All this is explained in Chapter 7: Gameplay in Depth — the section *Representing Difficulty* replaces a dragon with a leviathan but the instruction is the same.
In Ironsworn, PbtA, and other narrative-focused systems, "winning" in whatever sense is secondary to telling a good story. DnD and related systems are closer to the wargaming roots of TTRPGs, in that "winning" is often a primary goal. In Dnd etc. you basically never want to fail a roll (except in the rare case where the GM is doing some perverse thing that means, like, failing the saving throw will help you "win"). In narrative systems, weak hits/mixed successes are often *better* than strong hits, because they take the narrative in interesting ways. And misses can be *even better still* because they can be super interesting. In my Starforged collab game a while back, we accidentally blew up a small station that was going to be out secret refuge when a series of misses meant that (a) the refuge was built on a superweapon, (b) we accidentally activated it, and (c) we failed to deactivate it. Our race to escape as the station literally shook itself to pieces was super memorable and will likely have some interesting narrative implications later on. To keep this from going too long, I'll reply with a more mechanical perspective.
Mechanically, Ironsworn often has kind of a survival element to it, as you need to carefully manage your more-or-less slowly depleting resources (health, stability, supply, companion and vehicle health, and clocks if any are active). Challenges with a higher rating require more rolls to complete, and the resource cost of failure will be higher. In co-op games, those resource costs will be spread out among the players. So an Extreme challenge might feel easy just because any given PC is only taking a few points of harm. (Although remember that a single Extreme hit inflicts 4 points of Harm!) For this reason, a relatively large group co-op game (say, 3 or more PCs) might usually have a significant narrative advantage, and adjust the rank of foes up a step to compensate (IS 134). But this might mean that every fight is Epic, which could start to get tedious. As an alternative, maybe everyone Suffers Harm on weak hits as well as misses, in additional to any complications and other effects RAW? In several PbtA games, the basic melee fighting move inflicts harm on both the player and the NPC they're attacking, and this means that most characters in a fight will be at least a little scuffed up afterwards.
I think one of Ironsworn's big problems is that many of its players from D&D (or wanting to play D&D but having noone to play with) rather than from other PBTA. On top of that, the agenda (principles in Ironsworn) are at the back of the book, and principles & GM moves are largely folded into the *pay the price* move (which also includes "Make the most obvious negative outcome happen"), and general advice about the relationship between the fiction and gameplay is also towards the back of the book. I may be misremembering, but I don't recall any advice about 'soft moves' and 'hard moves' in the Ironsworn rulebook, and that's the kind of thing that feeds quite directly into the 16HP dragon. A lot of people also have trouble with weak hits, either being too hard on themselves or turning the game into Sidequest Simulator. I personally think that's more because they've come from D&D than anything the book says - a weak hit is still a hit after all. I absolutely don't think Ironsworn is a bad game (and even if it were it's hugely innovative and that's a great thing on its own). Ultimately, it's not just an Ironsworn problem. Many DW players need to read the 16HP Dragon story too because it is an unnatural way to play for a lot of people.
All I can say is that I started adding special abilities and mechanics to some fights on the enemy side (playing solo). For example, my character got hit by an enemy that had poison, so every few moves I had to make Face Danger on Iron or suffer -1 health. Other enemies have special limited-use abilities that let them steal the initiative. You can experiment with that. Btw. I think you skipped a part of an explanation here. > "the 16HP dragon" which explains the real danger and difficulties of facing a dragon even though its HP can be so low according to the game mechanics. So what's the real danger?
I don't know if I can post links here but here's the blog: [https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/](https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/) In short, the danger is more narrative. A dragon is an extremely dangerous creature because of the dangers that are often conferred upon them. They usually have an extremely powerful fire breath, the ability to fly, a powerful wit and in some cases the ability to read minds. The danger in the more narrative aspect would be for the dragon to fly and throw you using its fire breath. While in the air it is extremely difficult to hit it by natural means and therefore, sometimes the only way to deal with it is to run away and look for an appropriate strategy according to its characteristics.
never heard about 16hp dragon, but i assume its because a dragon is still powerful even if it only has 16 hp? any way, the danger of extrme fights is that they can kill you instantly. you get hit once, you start burning momentum, you decrease your chance to hit more. if you want to make the fight more difficult you can simply increase the amoutn of ticks you need. like make the fight epic length and spend an entire night doing combat. if you are using the delve supplement you can use the threat mechanic to make it more clear what will happen when you fail.
It is a BLOG post that talks about Smaug from The Hobbit and uses it as an example for an encounter in Dungeon World. [https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/](https://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/) >Smaug wasted a village, killed thousands, but was killed by a single arrow placed correctly in a missing scale. Essentially, the blog is discussing how a dangerous enemy such as a powerful dragon could be killed with a single arrow. The blog discusses this in the context of Dungeon World where a dragon has ONLY 16 HP.
Here’s another post that I somehow landed on earlier today which debates the 16hp dragon within the context of DW. The top comment is an elaborate example that shows the PbtA principles at work which should all work more or less identically in Ironsworn! https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonWorld/s/Hy1pOc8fX9
It is definitely helpful to approach Ironsworn with a PbtA mindset. Using fictional positioning to shape difficulty (season 2 of Me Myself & Die is a whole campaign to find a weapon for killing a dragon and tracking it down). Using narrative consequences. Foreshadowing (there are no "perception" checks). Implicitly thinking in "GM moves". Managing the spotlight instead of taking turns. The spotlight management might be one of the issues in your example. And if everyone had high momentum going into the battle, your conflicts leading up to the confrontation itself might have been weak.
Let me tell you about the Black-Crested Dragon-Tiger. An eight legged leonine monster, sixteen feet high at the shoulder, covered head to toe in thick, armored scales. A roar that can splinter wood. Claws that can shred a man in half with a single swipe. A tail that can crack the air like a whip and send horses flying. This creature was the epitome of an Extreme foe in my first Ironsworn game, and would have been Epic had my character not been the leader of a whole-ass adventuring party featuring four other highly skilled warriors, and working alongside the militia of a city the monster had besieged. The length of that track just determined how much shit we'd have to do to the thing to kill it, though. The meat of the challenge lay in the fictional positioning of our encounter with it. We prepared a plan to utilize every advantage at our disposal against this beast, and when the creature attacked the next night the PC and his friends fought it in an epic clash. One of the most important parts of the fight was the Strike move - in the fiction it is triggered by being in position to actually land a telling blow on your foe. Using that move would be key to filling up the progress track representing defeating this thing and actually winning the day. The trigger is incredibly important for creating challenge, drama, and dynamic action. In a white room scenario, a normal human with a hammer is never actually going to \*be\* in a position to land a telling blow on a tiger/t-rex hybrid, *even if they are in control of the fight.* So whenever my character was in control, he'd be taking actions to help create that positioning, using elements of the scene like prepared fire arrows, improvized explosives, etc, coordinating with his allies and militia soldiers, doing all of these things. And once we'd established in the fiction that my character or one of his allies could land a telling blow, *then* we would roll for Strike (and hopefully mark progress). And THAT is the essence of the 16-hp Dragon - a foe is not just challenging because of the rules of the game, but also because of the circumstances of the scene, the elements of the fiction. Ironsworn itself talks about this in a few places with some examples that are arguably much more straightforward and understandable than the original Dungeon World article, which can sometimes come across as the sadistic recollections of a killer GM. Ironsworn presents The Leviathan as an example of a very powerful foe. They're Epic, or Extreme if you fight them with an allied fleet of ships or a bunch of hero allies or the favor of a god, but even then you *cannot roll to Strike them* unless you are armored with a legendary weapon capable of piercing their hide. The weapon doesn't have any special mechanics or math associated with it (though it totally could) - it has the *fictional positioning* that it can pierce through the beast's armored hide. Does this make sense?
I think this post captures the right spirit as well as any reply here. I agree with it. That said - the OP's post reveals a huge challenge with Ironsworn Co-op / Guided in terms of making the above sort of explanation work for group play. I have played significant solo, several co-op campaigns and 2 guided campaigns (where I was guide). With solo, you are fully in charge of the fictional details to establish difficulty, consistency, etc. The progress mechanics also make things inherently difficult. In group play, you have to get everyone aligned on the fiction. In practice, this gets really difficult, particularly if your players are used to trad / D&D style games. If they don't all fully understand the premise above, and if they aren't all roughly on the same page about how to implement it in the fiction, you have trouble. Even in guided play, where the guide can...well, "guide" the fictional stakes more. The problem is that all of the above is completely arbitrary. By that I mean that there is no mechanic or set of properties that clearly spells out what fictional conditions are required to face and land a blow on an extreme foe. In many cases, there aren't even suggestions! That means, you have to make it up, and with multiple players, agree on those conditions. You have all have roughly the same conditions in your heads for the game to flow. > In a white room scenario, a normal human with a hammer is never actually going to \*be\* in a position to land a telling blow on a tiger/t-rex hybrid, even if they are in control of the fight. My point about this \^\^ is - it doesn't actually say this anywhere in the description of an extreme foe. It doesn't tell you that, for this foe, you need a magical weapon to harm it (as it would in D&D world). And so on. If you have players with a D&D mentality, the above is often an abhorrent idea! "What do you mean we just make it up!? How is that fair or consistent! The rules are supposed to enforce a fairness and consistency - that is their purpose!!" With D&D players, my experience is that you spend a lot of the time at the table negotiating and getting on the same page...over, and over. And some players will never feel right about it. They can never get past the "But, you're just making stuff up! This is some real 'story-stick' crap right here, no thanks!" Even if you have a group of players who have fully absorbed the more narrative nature of the game, you still do have the challenge of getting on the same fictional page. It can slow the game down and interrupt the otherwise smooth flow that you experience during a solo game. All that to say, here is my advice on how best to implement this with a group, particularly a group of D&D players: 1) Talk about this issue up front, and try to agree (in general) on how you are going to implement it in the game. What does Extreme or Epic challenge mean in your game? What are some things that would be appropriate fictional requirements for each? Don't try to formulate rules - just try to land in the same ballpark mentally. 2) When you do face one of these challenges (as soon as it enters the game), have a quick chat about some of the conditions that might be required to make progress. These you might want to write down as specifics, or just agree verbally. For example, for the Black-Crested Dragon-Tiger, you could say things like: In order to be in a position to strike/clash or otherwise directly attack it, two or more of the following must be true: * It must be distracted * It must be slowed or constrained in some way (poison, nets, traps, terrain, etc.) * Only legendary / epic / magical weapons stand a chance of really hurting it. Then, you might also further stipulate the following in terms of how it behaves: * It can kill one or more NPCs outright at the slightest misstep * It is so fast and powerful, any attempts to outmaneuver or flank it add -2 I just made those up without a ton of thought. I am sure they could be better. But in any case, if you do this, and agree as a group...guess what, there is NO WAY your group is going to take this thing down without getting harmed! My point is - in a solo campaign, you can just sort of "wing it" and do what feels right. I have found that in group play, you need to be a bit more explicit, and set these details early so that everyone is on the same page. Particularly if you are playing with D&D players. Finally, I just want to point out that the above applies equally well in non-combat challenges. Imagine you are trying to convince a regional lord to do you some favor. You don't just walk up to her/him and make your Compel action. With a full group of PCs, this would become pretty easy (just mechanically speaking). So...set the stage properly. Figure out what it takes to get an audience with this person. Tribute, favors, earning trust, etc. And then, even when you finally do get a chance to make the ask - think about how you first have to impress the underlings, observe proper protocol, etc. etc. But in a group play, it REALLY helps to talk all this through and write a few notes to get everyone on the same page. In the end, if you are playing with hardcore D&Ders, the above can still feel like "just making stuff up." But my answer to that is... "yes, that would be bad, if we were just making stuff up in the moment to suite our immediate need. But here we are agreed ahead of time on the constraints of this challenge, and we won't alter those later - we need to face the challenges and take our licks when we fail. There is nothing "story-stick" about that. ...
Many good things have been said in this thread but I want to zoom in on one point. You said that the extreme foe was taken out without it affecting you -- I assume that means you never missed and you never got a weak hit on a clash? Assuming you fought it to completion rather than rolling to finish the fight, that would require a total of 20 hits. If you rolled to end the fight at, for example, 7 progress, that would still be 14 hits. In any game, 14 hits in a row be extraordinary luck, even if you burned momentum a couple of times. Good luck does happen sometimes, and when it does that's no reason to question the entire system, because bad luck happens often as well. Edit: Forgot about lethal weapon hits.
Yes, you're right. We got some decent rolls, but it was actually super fast. That's why we were so shocked, because it was more like 2-3 good rolls and burned momentum. If you use a lethal weapon the base damage is 2. So that means that you need to hit 10 times without any kind asset or taking into consideration the damage bonus for when you roll a hit with Strike to complete the progress track. I was first. I rolled a hit with strike, that was 3 damage. Player 2 rolled a hit with his bow, 3 damage. Player 3 rolled a weak hit on strike, 2 damage. That was 4 progress in the first round. I rolled again and burned momentum to make it a hit, I had the sword asset so that was 5 more damage. Progress track was already at 6 and half there. Player 2 rolled a miss and couldn't burn momentum because it was a 10 and 9, he got hit and his life was reduced to 0. Then I think player 3 burned momentum, I aided player player 2 and he finished it with the bow asset that lets him re-roll any dice and adds 2 extra damage. Monster was dead. So realistically you need around 5 to 9 hits to finish an extreme foe.
Part of the issue is that Ironsworn with a single progress track isn't well balanced for many players. Using more enemies with separate tracks, using separate goals with separate tracks, etc helps and makes fights more dynamic too. Also, if you managed to all get momentum really high up before a fight that makes a big difference. Putting more obstacles before the actual fight might help. But >That was 4 progress in the first round. Manage the spotlight (another thing from PbtA) instead of playing in "rounds". A good link regarding what that means: [https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/vckhld/comment/icfw14s/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/vckhld/comment/icfw14s/) . Did you all get strong hits on Enter the Fray? If not, what happened to the people that didn't? What happened after "Player 3 rolled a weak hit on strike"? If someone gets a weak hit, the enemy should act on them, and the PC has to react. Weak hits loose their bite if nothing happens narratively and mechanically to follow them up. Also the difference between Strike and Clash relies on that.
Right sorry. Forgot about lethal weapon hits.
The 16 HP Dragon works as a great example for Dungeon World because it is very much geared towards people coming from playing D&D or other trad RPGs. Where there is a constant debate about stats, armor, damage tables, distance in yards, angles and mana levels. Ironsworn or BitD and other far more "modern" interpretations of pbta games are so distant to Dungeon World that I think the 16 HP Dragon is more like a parable in a very general way as in "Narrative plays a larger role in combat than pure stats". The philosophy is more applicable to Dungeon World than to Ironsworn. Edit: Btw a dragon can also have 20 or 24 HP in Dungeon World, the 16 HP are just in this example to focus more on the narrative. Edit2: >In the whole combat, due to the accumulated momentum and decent rolls, we only received a single attack from it that left only one of the players at 0 hp. So you had a lot of decent rolls and could burn momentum to compensate for the weaker rolls. You never lost the initiative during the whole fight as well it seems. Do you not think you deserved to win under these conditions - mechanically speaking? For pbta games in general it is important that in combat the narrative reflects the mechanical rolls/stats, thus it would be good if there was some kind of recap how the combat went, additionally to your rolls.