We could always conquer and/or loot the town, and set ourselves up with a nice territory of our own. This game could wind up being one of combat and political intrigue as we, the unlawful rulers, try to establish our rule. Thoughts?
Alternately, we could seek out a wealthier/better-defended town, as this one is apparently being menaced by a glorified beetle.
Hahaha, evil party adventure?
On one hand though, this town doesn't have that much money if they're only offering 300 gold, so maybe not. This brings up other ideas:
1) Defeat Forejaws and take over his lair as a base of operations?
2) Find a more wealthy town and take over?
3) Kidnap people from town acting as Forejaws?
Heh. We'll see what happens.
I've been developing my character some and I just don't think he is really into ruling any sort of anything. Nor does he particularly want to kill innocents, it just happens to be that his joy comes from combat games he makes up for himself to play and making art out things both dead and inorganic. Or, at least, this is clear to the party by this point.
Also, we should be nice to JC. He is our DM, after all... :)
I just finished up a 4e campaign where my CE cannibal ogre barbarian was the voice of reason/semi-good until Jackson's character showed up halfway in. I guess it should be no surprise Quinn (and maybe Velinari) will have to fall into that. I'll go with the flow, but I would like to see where this Forejaws stuff takes us.
Hey everyone, to avoid derailing JC's game, and because the concept is so very very amusing, I have decided to run an evil kingmaker game. Give me a couple of days to plan things and to make tweaks as necessary to the modules.
I will get an ooc thread up and running once I think of a good name for the campaign.
I'm in as well, and have a decent idea for a character concept that would be linked to someone else in the party. If anyone's interested, let me know and I can message you the vague idea that I had in mind. I, too, have not done any kind of campaign like that, so I'm excited to see how it will turn out!
So, overall I think I made that combat too easy. Though Four-Jaws had pretty crazy burst against Gromtheb, the rest of you rocket-tagged down the other threats before the encounter could really take shape. Duglan had a couple of lucky crits, and Ser Harris... well, I expected that.
The way I had planned to have it go is that the ankhegs would pop up, grapple a few of you, and drag you back down. Then we'd have a massively split party, with a few of you independently exploring the underground tunnel network (which was quite extensive) and encountering ankhegs in crowded quarters, trying to find your way back to the surface, while the others battle ankhegs on the surface or try to decide whether or not to jump down (or rappel down) after your separated comrades. But y'all are to CMDfull for that, I suppose.
Anyway, let me know what you thought about the difficulty and the basic mechanics of how it was run.
I thought we might have short-circuited something, and I'm sure that the fungus could have played a larger role in that plan, right?
Regarding CMD and grappling, it worked fine against the squishier party members (Quinn most notably). Four-jaws really did a number on Gromtheb, but Duglan annihilated him before he could really follow up on that. You also had a couple of nat 1s with grapples. You made an error when one of the little ankhegs tried to grab Duglan, as a natural 20 on a grapple roll (or anything else that uses CMB) always succeeds, just like a regular attack roll.
Difficulty was a little low. It would have been tougher had we had to do the party split. This may have been due to Duglan's massive damage output and Harris being... well, Harris.
It seemed pretty swingy to me. Without the rockets tagging things, Grom probably would have gone down. To be fair, though, not everyone really had to use the big guns. Also, what would have stopped the dragged-down teammates from being killed before we got to them? Basically it's hard to get a close fight without a partial party kill at least, especially if/when the party splits up.
So not relevant to this game, but I'm wondering what you guys would think of, in the future, selecting an official party leader ahead of time and manipulating backstories to give that person real authority to make decisions for the group. That would avoid these long decision-making processes where two people or more go back and forth and then either it's called for a vote or someone decides and everyone follows or doesn't.
Would it speed things along? Or would it make the other players feel disagencied?
Is disagencied even a word?
"Denied agency" would be the grammatically correct way to say that. That sort of thing depends on the characters and the circumstances of their allegiance.
Characters in a military setting would totally wind up being supposed to follow their commanding officer (example being Caleth in JZ's game), whereas a loose group of characters may well run like a democracy or even split up.