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 Recent Posts
Khismia doesn't have the authority to set terms, is the problem, any more than Heward has the authority to speak for Captain Percival. She's waiting for the runner to get back from the Princess. Until then, she's left to follow the last orders she received: don't let the Watch take over. She and Heward really have a lot in common, if only he saw her as a person under authority like himself. ;) EDIT: I actually thought Heward was making quite a bit of progress, playing good cop to Wizzo's bad cop, especially after Laya went out of her way to be eccentrically conciliatory. But I guess the Lawful in him just wouldn't let him not make common cause with the other man with a badge, even if he did just call Heward's whole team a freak show and let his men snigger at them in public. :)
Khismia gets to roll 2 dice to gather information and take the higher in the time it takes to perform one check. And instead of asking for her help, you're patting her on the head and telling her to get out of your way so your "experts" can do the job just because they have a badge. :) EDIT: Dueling Diplomacies.... She could have rolled better if she was really hoping to put the Watch in their place; Laya could still outroll her with a natural 20, but I'll hope she's outside examining the bodies with Calatin. Heward and Awgin could combine Aid Anothers for Wizzo (who has a surprising bonus -- where was that charm offensive outside?) and outdo her as well. I'll have to hope for a circumstance bonus for being on the Princess' turf and surrounded by her men. And of course, Khismia's DC is 5 lower. ;)
She has the third ed Magic Domain which allowed you to use wizard scrolls I believe Yep. From the SRD
Qhude is getting a sense of impending dread... ...and beware if you drop out of the game: Your PC will be liable to a particularly gruesome fate! So far I've seen literally torn in half by a random monster encounter, reanimated as an undead to be hacked to pieces by your former allies, blinded by a burning-hot poker putting your eyes out, driven insane to spend the rest of your days in a Ustalavan asylum, and possessed by a malign spirit to the point where you're confused about your own identity. And one of those was his own PC! :) EDIT: Oh, and I forgot the guy eaten by the gibbering mouther!
Therrre werrre crrries frrrom below to warrrn the carrrrion king, down is prrrobably wherrre ourrr prrrey is located... Gosh darn it, I am sick of this AP's blatant discrimination against races without darkvision! (And that can't fly or swim in lava....) I've never seen so many encounters where the terrain takes the bad guys' side. :P
I like time to train going back to 1st edition but looked at the levelling points for LOF and decided it wasnt worth even trying. Yeah, too many of them come down to "after fighting their way through his minions, the PCs should level up just before entering the BBEG's inner sanctum." (Actually, now that I think of it, the whole premise of Crypt of the Everflame is based on the PCs leveling up in-dungeon.) Personally, it seems odd to me for PCs to blow through a level in a matter of days. I prefer a slower progression that moves them toward "epic" over a full adventuring career, not less than a year. But published modules assume a quicker level-up process. Even the APs that take place over several years do so in quick bursts of encounters that level you up several times, interspersed with off-periods of months to years in which you don't progress at all.
Paizo APs just aren't written with the assumption there's going to be downtime available every time the PCs gain a level. Take Mythril's game, for instance: We leveled up while looking for Ameiko. If we took a week off to level, Ameiko would probably die, but if we didn't level, from what I hear about the BBEG in Burnt Offerings, we'd have a TPK. (Might anyway, considering how far below Wealth by Level we are. :P) It's much easier planning your own campaign and allowing for such things than trying to squeeze downtime and a safe location to train into a Paizo plotline. Kingmaker is sandboxy, so it's probably not that difficult, but the story-driven ones tend not to leave the PCs a lot of time to breathe. (Did we have downtime in LoF to level? I don't remember now; I know we had a year off at the end of the first book, but I don't remember having time to train during it. And, of course, Red Hand of Doom is a race against the clock the whole way.)
It's a nice idea, but it depends on having breaks at opportune moments of the story. It's a lot easier to implement if you level up at plot-determined times than if you stick to XP-for-beating-encounters. The only Paizo AP I've DMed makes it impossible, though, as the party is working against the clock for most of Second Darkness. For instance, all but the first two wandering-monster encounters in book 3 take place during one desperate battle that explicitly docks the PCs if they take time to sleep, let alone take ten days off to train, but they're still expected to level up twice.
And it got handwaved a lot more, too. Honestly, that's the whole point of the mystical-magical spell component pouch: because it got ridiculous to be on level 16 of the Great Megadungeon of Infinite Random Rooms and have to trek all the way back outside every day or two to pick mistletoe and catch a live firefly. There were more stringent training rules to level up too, iirc, and my group always ignored those, too. Most of the old 2e campaigns I was in involved leaving civilization at level one and coming back at level something-teen, if ever, because the DM didn't want to deal with running NPCs or the consequences of the party having some form of back-up or safety zone. Hence, everything got handwaved: spell components, rations, water, especially encumbrance, as there was nowhere to liquidate treasure or bank coins but no one was willing to leave them behind, either. So everyone was running around with 6 weapons and 5 shields and 2 or 3 sets of armor and thousands of coins all in their "backpack" somehow, in the hopes that eventually we'd make it back to somewhere where it had any value. Which we never did, because the DM was just making stuff up as he went along and had no real end-game in mind so the campaigns never ended. We just got bored with them and eventually quit. :)
Really, the spell component pouch violates the suspension of disbelief more than anything else in the game. For the cost of 5 gp and at the weight of 2 lbs, it supposedly contains infinite amounts of wool (a Material component, not a Focus, so it's used up every time daze is cast), infinite fireflies (Material component of light, which gets cast over and over several times a day), a piece of copper wire, a brass key, a clear prism, a miniature cloak, a infinite amount of butter, a piece of cured leather, infinite amounts of horse hair, a tiny bag and small candle, and infinite pieces of string and bits of wood. And that's just for my first-level conjuror's spellbook! Higher level mages have a lot more tiny bits of trash than that in there! And yet, despite the fact that the pouch is not extradimensional or magical in any way, you can immediately discern the difference between the infinite pinches of dirt and the infinite amounts of fine sand and pull out the right thing as a free action, when pulling one thing out of a bag that only has one thing in it is a move action! You can't even explain it as being magic, because it's mundane. They really should have made it a magical item like a mini-handy haversack that's only good to cast spells with, except then low-level mages couldn't afford it. Or just stop with the ridiculous little doll-house accessories required as material components and foci. :P
"Did she take charm lessons from Auriel?" he groans inwardly. Hey, Auriel has a +11 to Bluff and would have been a lot more convincing! And a +7 to Diplomacy. All those interpersonal skills that everyone finds so useless in combat. ;) The irony is that, when she was actually in the game, she was completely overshadowed at what she was built to be good at by Markiv and his tricked-out age categories. :P Nazard:
I'm already seeing a problem here. As far as I know, Khismia's orders are not to let the Watch take the bodies, and she's certainly not going to take the initiative to assume she can use her own judgment rather than follow orders. She doesn't need to be a part of these negotiations; they need to talk to the Princess so the Princess can tell her what to do.
Well, they've got masterwork everything else. Why not a masterwork spell component pouch? If you use it as an improvised weapon to hit someone with, it adds a +1 enhancement bonus to the attack roll, and the armor check penalty for carrying it is lessened by one! Plus, you get a +2 circumstance bonus to Spellcraft checks!
Honestly, my real life group has always handwaved any kind of spell-casting materials, and I naively assumed that cleric spells all had a Divine Focus. Most do, but now that I'm actually paying attention, there are some significant few that require Material or Focus components in addition to a holy symbol. Most germanely, she shouldn't have been able to cast shield of faith in the battle against the Freeman Brotherhood without a parchment with a holy text written on it. (Really? Most low-level clerics cast shield of faith at least daily, and it's a Material component, not a Focus, so it gets consumed. That's a lot of parchments with holy texts to be carrying around, even if they're the size of fortune-cookie fortunes.) Assuming we don't all get killed or sacrificed to demons or sold into slavery here, any chance she could assemble a do-it-yourself spell component pouch out of spare materials around the caravan, at least for shield of faith purposes? Just a little sack of dirt and hand-written fortune cookie slips about Shimye-Magalla? ;)
1 in 20 chance of the first thing, then 1 in 20 chances for each of the following, but since you need them all to work out perfectly, you multiply the odds instead of adding, so 1 in 20x20x20x20 is 1 in 160,000. 1 in 20 for each of the two 1's on the attack rolls, but aren't the 4's on damage 1 in 8 for Tevyn's roll and 1 in 6 for Malan's? Should lower the odds a little, right?
Think of it this way: If one of the DM's bad guys were targeting your PC with an effect that you thought was against the rules, wouldn't you want him to take the time to look it up and get it right instead of just hand-waving it? As stated by others, once a spell or attack has been used a time or two, you'll all know how it works and won't have to look it up anymore. It's just a learning curve.
I thought robots were almost always neutral...huh.What game alignment would you say Cosmo from customer service would be?Chaotic Mustached. He is no longer a construct. Now he is an imp. :)
@Qhude Readying an Action: You can ready a standard action, a move action, a swift action, or a free action. To do so, specify the action you will take and the conditions under which you will take it. Then, anytime before your next action, you may take the readied action in response to that condition. The action occurs just before the action that triggers it. If the triggered action is part of another character's activities, you interrupt the other character. Assuming he is still capable of doing so, he continues his actions once you complete your readied action. Your initiative result changes. For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately ahead of the character whose action triggered your readied action. I am the Queen of Ready. The only benefit of Ready over Delay is that you get to interrupt the action, but your initiative still changes. (Unless, of course, your Ready condition doesn't trigger before your next turn; then you get a new chance to act on your original initiative.)
If you want it somewhere easily accessible, I prefer putting HP, etc., in the body of each post, like in Mythril's game, so it's more easily trackable from round to round. Using the race/class boxes changes it for all your posts all the time; there's no way to go back and double-check if you remembered to add in that last channel or hit because you have no record of what your hp were before. Plus, it takes at least three clicks to update (click to profile, click to edit, click to submit), as opposed to none if you put it in the body of the post. Plus, I just went through and updating all my characters last weekend so their gender, race, and class are filled in uniformly and it looks all nice and neat on my alias page. :P
And yet, due to the vagaries of the iniative roll, Jakob will, in fact, be the absolute last to react. :)
Seems a bit odd to take a prestige penalty on Knowledge (local) checks. By that logic, someone who has been in a district enough to be negatively recognized by the locals actually knows less about the area than he does a district he's never been in. Why should MSI know less about Stafford Millis' neighborhood then they did before they ever went there, just because Millis and his friends hate them?
+1 to Anguish. There have already been a few people receiving broken minis in their cases, and I had several that had popped out of the plastic but hadn't rattled around long enough to be broken yet. Less packaging means less protection means more broken minis. There's certainly a lot less excess plastic used than in the Encounters cases. :)
I thought you had to buy the updates.I do my character sheets by hand. I sometimes use online generators (not subscription based, though) for some of the math, but that's it for tools.Just for clarity's sake, Hero Lab is not subscription-based. To me, "subscription-based" means you pay a monthly fee for access, like DDI or some online games. Hero Lab pricing is "content-based," meaning you buy the content in each book (or set of books) past Core separately but then never have to pay for it again. I use too many house rules for it to work, anyway. That's why I do things by hand. Regardless, it doesn't sound like a product that would be useful to you. I just wanted to clarify because people have been confused by its pricing structure in the past, thinking they have to pay for a new license yearly to continue using it, for example, which would be "subscription-based." :)
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