Kingdom Building for Beginners (Inactive)

Game Master robertness

@Vivian: The bandit you were facing is on a horse that decided not getting stabbed is good old fashioned horse sense (-1 pun). The bandit is letting the horse back away and is shooting Vivian with a longbow. Vivian could go to the house without giving the bandit an Attack of Opportunity, but he would be behind you with a bow.

I was wondering if Firemane could use a double move action to reach the bandit inside the house, if a single move action does not suffice, instead of a move action + a standard action to attack? Obviously, if a single move action is enough, he'd attack once reaching him, instead of double moving.

Firemane can get adjacent to the bandit in the house using two move actions. He can't get adjacent on a single move.

acrobatics roll: 1d20 + 6 ⇒ (13) + 6 = 19

call me Spider-Vivian...^^ (yes im a Marvel fan TOO..)

@Juwwem: I am not entirely familiar with the Oracle class. I know that the speaking in tongues thing is a class feature activated by combat (or something) but is your character aware of it when it's happening? Basically, do you still think you're speaking common?

I'm not entirely sure rule-wise. I'm roleplaying like he's aware "it has happened again" but he might not notice it right away. So sometimes he'll see that everyone is looking funny (too late!) but mostly he won't understand others which should make him realize what happened.

@robertness: gravel in a pot? really? how rude! ;)

YES!!!!!
A critical roll in Diplomacy!^^

@robertness: Is Rolo the last of them? Is combat over? If so, what bandits are still concious, which ones are bleeding out, and who seems in most dire need of help?

@group: I know Rolo has surrendered and that most of the bandits are down, but I recommend, if it isn't already obvious, that we start getting these guys bound up. I have some rope that I would prefer not to cut, but we can bind them all together to the wagon cart. Then we can get everyone's bleeding stopped and figure out what we are going to do with everyone.

Please don't tell me we are doing this... We're in the middle of the wilderness! There are no prisons, and there is no law enforcement around here. What are we going to do with bound bandits? I'm not keen AT ALL on the idea of having to somehow take care of prisoners. The logistics and the time lost are going to be a nightmare.

I'm all for executing the ones bleeding out, with the exception of their boss. And I don't think this is an especially evil act, given their inclinations towards Svet...

Well, I don't know how the rest of the party feels, but Gordom is not going to be too keen on executions.

Andarr, I don't know about robertness but I'm having the feeling you're heading for some alignment violations.
Yes prisoners are a pain but you can't just execute somebody like that (inclinations.. really?).

Anyway, it seems talking to the bandits might have been more of an option than most of our group thought.

So, since I'm pretty sure that Juwwem is not going to condone torture of the Bandits could we do a "good cop, bad cop" thing where the party member with the highest diplomacy and the character with the highest intimidate can assist each other or something?

I never intended to torture them... That's not the way Andar is. I just asked the rest of the group if they thought ahead to what it means to have bound bandits in the middle of nowhere without any kind of prison and/or law enforcement that can take them off our hands quickly.

I mean, I would not want to leave them at Oleg and Svet, even if that were an option. Just imagine what would happen if they were to break free.

And in the absence of law, given their crimes, execution is actually a very normal sentence. Hell, a swift death is more than Oleg or Svet could have expected at their hands, had we been defeated. I do not think that is evil in any way (but robertness has the final say, of course). Oh, and there are no more "alignment violations" by the way. Unless robertness has house rules about them (but I didn't see them anywhere).

Andar comes from a violent, war-like society. He is a good person, but in his culture there are only two punishments for crimes: exile or execution, so don't expect him to read bandits their Miranda rights ^^

Edit: Oh, and by the way, the fight is NOT over yet... I am still engaged in hand-to-hand with one of the bandits in the middle of the courtyard.

I think any further debate about the fate of the prisoners needs to be done in character. This is too great of an opportunity to role play and establish the moral viewpoints of our characters to waste it in ooc discussion.

Andarr, do you need help man? Do what you need to in order to get this guy taken care of.

Execute them all! Well Najara would probably not be too opposed to that depending on their crimes, but we'll see :)

Najara has a good diplomacy and even better intimidate bonus, and considering her background, she will most definitely want to conduct an interrogation of any prisoners. Some roughing up might be required.

What kind of legal leeway does our charter give us? I would interpret it as almost a full open door to take whatever measures we see fit against banditry.

Ummm...s%#~. No one else read the charter! Where are my pacifist gnomes! This isn't supposed to become a mass execution! I can't believe the charter really says that. Talk about a Lawful Neutral state...

Edit: Really? Paizo is going to censor my four letter words like I'm in a comic book?

Don't get me wrong... We'll continue this in character. It's just a matter of feasibility. There is nothing to do in the middle of nowhere with prisoners.
- Can't let them go for sure.
- Can't leave them at the trading post.
- There are no patrols, no prisons. Just our moral compass and some common sense. No one is going to drop by in a week or so and get rid of them for you.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt we are in the immediate vicinity of a city that has facilities to house prisoners. And to get them there, we'd need to leave Oleg's, and risk one of the bandits escaping during the trip, or an ambush by their eventual companions... And besides, although the Swordlords claim jurisdiction, the truth is, they don't have it.

PS: Would be sweet if people answered a bit faster and we could get this moving. As for the fight, I ought to be ok, but I would not mind if you took a few shots at the bandit Gordom :p

i'd like to play good thief /bad cop with Najara, sounds natural..

let's end the fight first, then we'll have to talk about the bandit's fate

Well, to translate my response in the last post, the charter pretty much says just to kill the bandits. To quote from the post in the recruitment forum:

The carrier of this charter should also strive against banditry and other unlawful behavior to be encountered. The punishment for unrepentant banditry remains, as always, execution by sword or rope.

So it seems pretty clear what we've been commissioned to do. I just don't know if I'm that comfortable with it.

@Andarr, I know where you're coming from, but for the most part everyone has been posting at least once a day which is all Robertness asked for. As far as taking out the bandit you're currently dealing with, I'd rather not. I don't mind so much when my picture is essentially every other post in the discussion forum, but I don't want to dominate the game play thread any more than I feel like I already do. As a college student I understand that I probably have more opportunity to be near a computer than the rest of our clan. I don't want to make the others feel like they are missing too much just because of my own impatience to get things moving.

Discussing what to do in character will take too long if we don't agree, I'm afraid. But we have some questions that need answering, that's for sure. Rolo gave up fighting pretty easily (ok maybe 20 vs 1 in rolls isn't that easy) so let's see what the women can find out ok?

isn't role playing the name of the game? It may take more than a few posts, I agree, and maybe a few PM, but it's not always a roll of dice...
that's only my point of view, of course. Vivian would like to have a chat with Rolo, even if her player (me!) is eager to know the next thing to do...

Sorry, I haven't been around much the last couple days. The hot water heater in my apartment needs repair and it takes the electricity down with it from time-to-time.

You have one "up" bandit to deal with. Najara has the opportunity to take care of the fleeing horses. Rolo's in the process of surrendering.

You are whatever passes for justice out here. Roleplay it in the game thread when needed. IMHO, the Rules As Written for good and evil define the taking of innocent life as an evil act, but are silent on taking non-innocent life. You witnessed the bandits threaten to torture and rape Svetlana, and possibly Najara. They aren't innocent in my book. Can you get them to repent? What risks are you willing to take to make that happen? Play it out in thread. ;)

Seriously, as GM, I won't screw you over for trying to treat prisoners humanely. I also won't come down on you like a ton of bricks if you decide expedience requires frontier justice. However, your character concepts point to potential conflicts within the party. The conflicts are likely to work themselves out because the character concepts, and your common sense as players in a cooperative game, provide the latitude for working out the conflicts.

So, back to the action. Andarr is still fighting a desperate bandit!

Hopefully Firemane just mauls Rolo and removes potential dilemma from us. Andarr isn't there to direct him and his last command translated from kitty-cat-speak was roughly "kill, kill!"

We still have Happs to question which is I think all we really need.

How far are we considering to be "Through the gate"?

I don't want to drag the one running bandit part of the encounter out very long, so I'll deal with it abstractly. You all have three rounds to deal with him or he gets away into the forest undergrowth. He's far enough beyond the wall that Gordom could shoot him from his current position. Andarr and Shix can pursue on foot. Najara could intervene, but if she intervenes this turn the horses get away.

what I wanted to know was if he was "Running tackle" distance away. If I could move to his square and initiate a grapple in a single round.

Yes, you can move to tackle him. You'll have to leap over the palisade which will require an Acrobatics check, DC10.

I'll wait till everyone still fighting has posted.

So najara is calming the horses and the only bandit still fighting is in my grapple, right?

Great tackle!

Now I'm wondering when combat-stress will lessen enough for Juwwem to be able to communicate normally again... I'll have a look on the rest of the forum.

edit: I couldn't find any hard ruling on this, only: "up to your GM".

I think the combat stress has worn down enough that Juwwem can speak normally. Juwwem and Vivian can start trying to interrogate Rolo if you want.

Okay, I'm not sure how to put this into the gameplay forum without it messing with the continuity. Basically, Gordom wants to stop Andaar from simply executing the bandit and try to keep him alive. I'm pretty sure the end result will be the same, but let's see:

Heal check:1d20 + 5 ⇒ (17) + 5 = 22

Alright, that should be enough to stop the bleeding, in which case he is simply in the same position as every other bandit we've incapacitated assuming Najara has successfully reigned in the horses. If not, I'll go to help her using my Wild Empathy as needed. Then we are at the same point that Andaar took us to.

Is this change okay?

I believe I jumped to the same point in time. If at this point people are still fighting/fighting again, Juwwem will talk jibberish instead. :D

@Gordom: Didn't mean to imply the bandit was dead in my earlier post.

You guys post too fast! I read everything. Took an hour to write something up. And then there were a bunch more replies to account for. o_O

@robertness: No, it wasn't you. I think that each of us has started doing a little bit of DMing in our own posts just to move the game along quicker. Unfortunately this sometimes skips over other people's opportunity to jump in, as Najara seems to be complaining about above me. Sorry Najara.

Additionally, what bandits are conscious/unconscious/dead?

To recap, three bandits are alive:

Happs is unconscious but stabilized.
Rolo is conscious and surrendered in the house with Juwwem and Vivian.
Gordom has stabilized the bandit he grappled.

Three bandits are dead.

To complicate matters (it's my way as a DM) you have a little wiggle room in the charter. Execution is the prescribed punishment for "unrepentant" bandits. How do you get a bandit to repent (and keep repentant)? That's for you to determine.

@group: Is this 'redemption' idea worth exploring? I think it might be too difficult to really gauge the sincerity of any attempts at redemption. Also, granting them our trust enough to do this would put them in a position to betray us. Probably not the best of ideas. I think we should probably just try and get as much information as we can without getting to extreme (i.e. torture). So things we might want to ask about:
where is your camp?
how many of you are there?
is it hidden in any way and if so how do we find it?
are there any traps/relevant defences we need to know about?

Sorry! Didn't mean to sound like I was complaining. You guys are great. and excellent RP'ers. Just want in on an important conversation before it runs away :)

As far as the bandits are concerned from a meta-game perspective, I really don't want to babysit three bad guys (plus more in the future?) and be constantly worried about them. One guy would be okay though. So I proposed that we measure repentance as how much good and useful information they give us. Then we allow the most repetant bandit live. Hopefully this ends up being Happs because he seemed the least evil maybe?

Of course I just saw Hunger Games this weekend, so maybe we should just make them fight to the death for our amusement :)

I'm not sure I would call Haps the least evil, although I'm with you on the babysitting thing. From a character perspective though, I'm not sure I like the idea of "Whoever gives us the most information goes free". Kind of the wrong motivation for reformation.

Snitches can't exactly go back to the pack if released.

But I wasn't proposing to immediately free the most helpful bandit, just keep him alive for now. We can probably handle one long term prisoner to hand over to authorities later. And we may need more info later about the region in general or other bandit groups. He could end up being a convienent source of exposition. Then if over time he is cooperative, behaves, and is genuinely repentive, we could judge his setence repaid and release him.

We can measure if they're "unrepentant" by a simple Sense Motive check, right?

Happs probably deserves a quick death (talk first of course), he showed being an actual bandit. I'm not sure about the rest, maybe they were just following orders because they had no other option, forced to join the bandits etc etc. Let's find out how they ended up with Happs before chopping off their heads.

I propose we stick with the previously suggested interrogation method: Najara and Vivian should have the skills to pull it off.

@Najara: I might go see that movie on friday, should I go?

OOC will post this afternoon, plenty of work IRL this morning

sorry for the lack of posts, been moving.

I don't know. I feel like sense motive is more of a "are you currently trying to deceive me" sort of thing. I think using it as a "Have you just completely changed your whole life value system" would be a pretty darn high DC if it was even possible. A bandit might earnestly believe that he would rather repent than have you cut his head off, but as soon as the threat of you cutting his head off is gone go right back to the lifestyle he already knows.
It is entirely up to Robertness, I just feel like allowing that sort of thing to be dictated by the roll of a die by a first level character is a little much.

Sense Motive is too immediate term to figure out if somebody has really repented. If converting bandits is something you wish to pursue, I'd suggest the old Russian adage - Trust, but verify. Assuming you could get enough man power to observe the convicts.

Oh I was rather thinking about finding out where they came from to see if they're "repentable". You're both totall right on Sense Motive not being the rigth "tool" for finding out if someone has switched sides (permanently).

I'm really starting to enjoy this thing btw, we'll be a real team soon ;)

@robertness: What are the chances that a knowledge(nature) check would be at all appropriate for determining if there is anything unusual about the pendant? I'm thinking close to 0, but it never hurts to ask.

So, I'm really liking this group as well. However, we need to all get to the same point in the game play thread because it's great that everyone is getting things taken care of, but it's time for time to resume flowing forwards (instead of forward and back simultaneously).

@Andaar: Hey! Way to totally steal my idea and my necklace.

Ninja'd by a druid