Male Human Wizard 5 Init +4 Saves : F: +2 ; R : + 1 , W : +4
I was reacting to Rurik guess about what attacked the Elk :)
Seeing that Ingrit has matters in hand , Damiano concentrate his interest to where the elk came from in case he was followed by its attacker [/ooc]
Male Human Wizard 5 Init +4 Saves : F: +2 ; R : + 1 , W : +4
I have a small tent for Ingrit since girls can not bunk with boys...
Of course , I will need help setting it up since I am a city boy and my survival skill is not good . By the way , I find it funny that the two who have tents are from the city : I guess country types like roughing it
Male Human Wizard 5 Init +4 Saves : F: +2 ; R : + 1 , W : +4
Once we are ready to depart , Damiano will use his arcane bond to cast a Floating Disk (100lbs / level , duration 1hour/level) and ask people to put Domitian on it
Male Human Wizard 5 Init +4 Saves : F: +2 ; R : + 1 , W : +4
Damiano looks at the fairy smirking
'"we just might"'? Forgive me . I did not understand that you were royalty . Otherwise using the plurar 'we' while you are all alone and helpless seems a really bad idea to me. It would be better for you to cooperate if you want a chance to go free. Otherwise we will have no choice but to kill you Since I begin with intimidation and finished with diplomacy, I will roll both
Intimidate 1d20 + 6 ⇒ (8) + 6 = 14
Diplomacy 1d20 + 9 ⇒ (1) + 9 = 10 apparently gods of the dice want it to die
Male Human Wizard 5 Init +4 Saves : F: +2 ; R : + 1 , W : +4
Damiano reopen his eyes he had closed for just a moment.
I am afraid Domitian will have to replace me as the very thought of stairs at this point are beyond me
Male Human Wizard 5 Init +4 Saves : F: +2 ; R : + 1 , W : +4
Damiano seems a little hurt by Eianar's words
I only assumed that the thefts were done by the brigands and could offer us a second way of tracking them to their lair . Now I am not knowledgeable in the ways of tracking people but I presume the bandits will be more on the alert from people tracking them from the ambush site and might even prepare a second ambush. The other tracks if possible might have allowed us to surprise them rather than the opposite . as to the reason I am here with you they are quite simple : books , economics and altruism
When Eainar speaks of the dead , he replies vehemently
We have no pharasmin priest with us . While I am all for laying the souls of the dead to rest, I think that robbing them is not the best way of doing so . If they have somethings we can not do without , we should indeed take it while offering reasons to them but otherwise ...
He pause a moment
Also they might have dependents still living. I think the best way would be to bring them back to Heldren for Yuln to identify them and for a more traditional burial. Now , it would take us some hours to do so and time might be crucial in rescuing Lady Malassene from vile durance. I vote we check them swiftly , assure any soul hovering nearby we will be back later to take care of them and then press on
Step 1 : Accept the surrender by saying : I accept , we will discuss terms after this battle
Step 2 : After the battle, speak with him. ' These are the terms : you are to go from here to the nearest town and there surrender to the authorities citing that you were (short description of the crime).
If this means the travel there could be dangerous, I will let you have some normal armor and weapons. If you do not accept , get up and we are fighting again. "
Options there : * have the prisoner join you .
* Free him in exchange of information if his crime is not that important
Another but harsher way (if by example you are attacking some evil creatures is to begin the fight by saying 'No quarter will be given'
I tend to think that characters when they acquire a new spell test it.
At least I think this is true for summons
As a character , I would not wait until I am in real combat to test how my spells work. I would test them first in a controlled environment.
With some summoned creatures like animals ,I can not really communicate so could have problems giving them specific orders but since I can actually speak with lantern Archons, I would not have the problem with them
It was indeed cheating . you applied player knowledge to your character
A good way to have done this would have been to
* research the information as a player
* Ask the DM which knowledge roll to make to know the weaknesses of an iron golem
* If the roll was successful, then the DM should have allowed you to use these tactics. If not, then your character would not have know this tactic .
I would allow it but the reputation of the paladin would suffer
Let him see that he is perceived as a pure mercenary next time he tries to extoll his god ...
A long time ago , my NG Wizard met Father Christmas...
Despite all our efforts to be diplomatic , Father Christmas attacks us . We try and try to stop the fight but no success.
So, as not to die, we had to kill a Father Christmas who acted CE.
The DM had the gall after that to tell us that our characters were hated by all children everywhere ...
What I do is the following :
* PCs speak
* Giving on what they have said, I decide the DC.
* They have a malus/bonus depending on how they Role played ( I tend to be genereous there )
They automatically succeed if in a no stress situation , the DC is 10 or in a stress situation the DC is 20 (unless this is a special roll covered like changing the attitude of an NPC permanently)
So there is several possibilities
* Case 1 : The player : 'Balrus make a Intimidate Roll ' . There is not specifics menaces so high DC and no RP so no Bonus
* Case 2 : The player : 'Balrus comes into the shop , looks at the windows , and comment on how fragile they are while holding his mace ...' There is a real menace to DC is medium but no real RP . So DC medium and bonus
* Case 3 : The player 'Balrus comes into the shop and hails the shopkeeper 'Hello , you are Smith, aren't you ? I just saw your bootiful (chuckle) wife and daughters passing in the street . You should take care someone does not take advantage of them' Player then chuckle evilly followed by the others players . Great menace , Good RP , Other players are assissting Roll is often waved off ... The merchant will complain to the next policeman once the PCs are not there anymore but that's intimmidation for you
Make your players know you are using this method and they should at least make a effort .
Moral quandries should be presented to Paladins throughout a campaign, or what's the point?
The point is that paladins are the target for this a little too much
Many DMs do not trouble to tempt monks , druids , clerics or barbarians but show them a paladin and nearly each adventure present a chance for the paladin to fall.
I am not saying there should not moral quandaries from time to time but moderation in all is a virtue
* The notion that paladins are immune to fear has always seemed wrong to me .
Someone who can not feel fear is inhumane . If a paladin can not feel fear , how can he understand or even forgive the commoner who acts under pressure.
I prefer to interpret it as 'fell fear but the player can choose whether or not to act upon it and no rules effect apply
It is after all more heroic to feel fear and resist it
* Also society is based on little lies. When a woman asks the paladin 'do you think me pretty?' is the paladin supposed to reply 'No miss, you are in fact ugly as mud'. In such a stupid example , the paladin does nothing dishonoreable with a little white lie like 'you have your charms'. the main point is not that a paladin can not lie , it's that he can not lie dishonouredly .
There is also the Shade path but I am not sure this would work for a good character
I once had a CN wizard who was not evil , met a shade and did embark on a long research to become a shade .
She would have had problems in bright illumination but still the bonus were better than the malus
Ah ! The same old discussion about RP vs Roll Dice in social situation!
As A GM , I consider there is three choices
* The player is eloquent , I listen to his speech , give bonus for salient points and then ask him to roll
* The player is wary/shy/not accustomed to RP his character but still describre what he does. Same treatment as before with bonus for salient points
* The player just roll the dice without any effort on his part. Big malus (-4 to -5 ) .
A salient point can be anything from using knowledge gained with Sense Motive/ gather information to pure chance ( the character swears by the divinity favored by the cible )
The first choice and second choice give the same results . there is no reason to penalize a player who, in himself, lack charisma.
There is still a dice roll. Otherwise, the 6 Charisma Dwarf with no skill but played by a forceful person will always succeed when the 20 charisma paladin who has taken the effort to put his points in diplomacy but who is played by a shy person will always fail ( I saw this in a game once ot twice ...)
I think THE big problem with this AP is the lack of consequences if the heroes fail .
Spoiler:
This also existed in some of the other AP but was less evident
ROR: Karzoug come back : Evil triumph
CoCT: Karzavon begins to come back : Evil triumph
Second Darkness: Dark elves obliterate elves and potentially are posed bring back the age of Darkness : Evil triumph
Legacy of Fire : A whole country is devastated before the BBG moves on : Evil triumph
COT : Your hometown falls to Mammon and then is destroyed by Cheliax : Evil triumph
KingMaker : You fail to bring good and civilization to the wilderness . OK this is not a fight against Evil but your efforts are still for doing the Good Thing
Serpent'S skulls : you prevent Ydersius' coming back. this is one of the bad ones since you do not know of this for a long long time
Carrion Crown : the whispering way achieve its objectives :
Jade Regent : A whole kingdom falls to the Oni
Skull and Shackles: No heroic there but you are not supposed to play good guys but rather scoundrel and even so you stop Cheliax from growing more powerful
Shattered Star : Not only there is no bad consequences if you fail early but your efforts only have for consequence to bring back a perverted version of Xin. After which you defeat him and nothing happens ...
I would hate to be in your place.
Do no forget you get to know the alignment AND divinity of the raiser
If I were you , I would point your DM to this thread .
I once had a character doing everything to protect his home and way of life.
People useful to the village : Sacrosanct
Anyone else : Fair game
Happily the campaign was to defend our village so there was no problem.
Once a known jerk tried to join . He only knew most of us were playing evil characters so created a CE demon worshipper
We asked him in game what would be his reactions toward peasants
He replied they were only there for our pleasure
We killed his character. He did not came back
Just to say : Detecting evil would FAIL even on the wererat!
This spell is level dependant . Low level adversaries do not anymore react to it
Which is good because too much much people base their reactions on this spell : 'Us Good ! Them Evil ! Us bash ! '
And Pendagast, if I am not wrong, even in war, executing vanquished enemies is against Geneva Conventions. I do not know american military law but in france this could lead to a court martial. Of course, in reality, this sort of crime is rarely prosecuted but still ...
CN, bah your stuff is mine, what's not mine will be mine if I have anything to say about it. Killing would depend on the level of resistance I got, getting what was already mine.
I will have to disagree with this. Anyone always reacting like this would be CE in my book.
My CN characters would alternate between
* " I like these girls . Why should we fight them ? "
* " They hurt me ! CHARGE ! "
* " Why are we here ? Can we not just go to the inn . Maybe the problem will go away ... "
What I also like is the fact that even if diplomacy fail with the girls, it does not mean they won't let the PCs pass through their 'home' .
Being apparently not completely stupid, they would much prefer to have a deal :
"You want to pass through our turf ? Ok but when you'll come back , you'll have to pay a tax "
Even if the characters go back on their word , when do you prefer to fight ? If you attack the PCs when they first arrive , you have basically no way to retreat since they are blocking the exit , they are in top form and do not have any real loot
If you 'have to' attack them when they come back , they might be hurt and out of spells and if things go wrong you can run away ...
In general, Paizo tend to gloss over such situations and leave it to the DMs on how to use it .
Spoiler:
There is two cases of infiltration the bad guys I can think of now
In 'Second Darkness' the characters are sent as underlings to a demon worshipping civilization . In one other scenario they are supposed to be new followers of the cult like church of Razmiran.
If I remember rightly, in the first case , Paizo do not describe what ceremonies the PCs would have to attend . In the second case , there is no real brainwashing done and the Pcs are soon trusted to be alone .
In real life , gangs and crime organization usually ask their new members to do something illegal under supervision in order to have an handle on them (for your information , my players would never have accepted the premise of the scenario especially with female characters)
Paizo keep the fantasy clean because the game is supposed to be fun to play. If you want to make the game gritter, it is easy to do .I must say I understand their point of view
Loyalist : Alignment Change :
Ameiko is NG. And while young, she is not an adolescent anymore .
For her to go from NG to LE would mean a profound change to her view of the world .
While I would not say it was impossible , I would absolutely refuse to see such thing reduced to a dice roll. I would ask the players involved to RolePlay the way they intend to make her change from NG to N , From N to LN or NE and finally from LN to LE . Any player which would just tell me 'I got +25 in diplomacy and I rolled 43 would be out of his mind if he thought this would work without any description . And personally I would have no idea of how such a thing could be done.
I had some of my own PC change alignment during their lives and it was a long process at each time .
Hustonj : I aggree but I tend to think that to someone like Ameiko, the fact that one should be free to pray to who he wants should not be illegal. Also Patchfinder has not the mindset of a medieval setting.
Otherwise 99% of the population would not know how to read/write and women would be considered a lesser part of the population .
Pathfinder has more a feel of modern sensibilities appliqued to a renaissance/magical technological level
One possible solution which might explode if your players do not like being pushed too much in a corner
Spoiler:
If I remember rightly Suishen is the intelligent item which gave all of the PCs the right to belong to clan Ameiko . Next time they bicker about spoils of war have Suishen remove them from clan ameiko as they proved unworthy of it...
After that , the only way for any of them to regain their place in the clan is to wield Shuishen for one week time during which it will judge if they act towards their teammates as clan brothers or not
Bring the captain out. He should be amused by the situation and ask your Pcs if this is a mutiny
whatever the reply, have him beat your PCs bloody anyway .
Once they regain consciousness , have them keelhauled as punition.
When they survive, have Harrigan compliment them on their initiative and explain he was wondering when someone would kill Scourge.
" Now that tyou have been punished, you will have the rewards they asked for aka the place of Mr Scourge. Of course, you should crack down on your erstwhile comrades now that you showed them how to be promoted ..."
This way , the attacks on the Man's promise continue as normal and Harrigan give the ship to the PCs as normal . You could even do a reverse mutiny where the PCs are the ones attacked by Scourge surviving cronies ...
Frankly , the NPCs are not that much help in the adventures as written.
One possible twist for an evil DM would be to arrange for evil PCs for Ameiko to be possessed by the ghost of an erstwhile evil emperor whose goal is to rule Minkai again .
It is doable without changing too much.
Now what your PC might forget is that when a ghost achieve his/her ambition, she, in fact, dissipate leaving the original Ameiko in charge ...
Last derailment from my part :
* Play a LG character and be hired by dwarves to clear caverns infested from kobolds
* Discover that the kobolds are the original people living in these caverns , that the dwarves tried to establish a mine there without knowing of the kobolds' presence ant that when they discovered the kobolds , tried to eradicate them and had their behinds kicked
* Explain to the dwarves that you are going to see the kobolds in order to achieve a diplomatic solution and convince your party that this is the right thing to do .
* Discover at this point that the DM had just planned for a 'Kobold Evil ! You Good ! Go kill ! " adventure ... DM fled ...
Just to reply to the initial post on some ways to establish your character as Prince Charming .
One possible definition is to play him as one prince adventuring to find his princess so he will be checking if the females he encounter are the one
* First , he is a prince so ask your DM in front of the players if he has to take a level of aristocrat (this is the kind of question that tend to mark our group )
* When he encounter someone female , ask if the character is wearing a wedding ring . If yes , treat her then as either a sister if she display feminine characteristics . If not , ask some more questions of the DM about her poise and comportement. do not hesitate to ask her entourage ( gather info ) about her parents and education .
* In order to establish the character as not a chauvinistic bigot , treat any female combatant as another of the boys .
* If the female is not married , wear robes and is maybe more shy than the usual run of character, be supportive and insist on asking her first for advice and decisions. If you can without putting the group in danger , make it clear that your priority in combat is to put yourself between her and any danger.
Aral will just raise his voice :
How dare you to impugn the protection of the lady's graveyard ? Only , by being interred in consecrated soil , can one be insured of a calm repose . Or would you want the professor's soul to be prevented of his reward and come back to take his revenge upon you and those you hold dear !
and then he thinks to himself : " There , that should do it . remain them they are on Pharasma's domain here , menace them a little if they stray from the path "
After the second adventure , the mayor of Magnimar knows he has just be targeted by cultists who were killing people gy graving stars in their chests
so when a young man is discovered dead after a fracas in the slums wearing a smaller version of this symbol , the mayor order an enquiry
It's soon discovered that this young man arrived in town just a week before from the hamlet of turtleback ferry to find welth and glry in magnimar (typical bumpkin) and that 'speak with dead' doesn't work with him .
so the mayor send the very people who saved his life to Turtleback ferry to investigate. When they arrive , they'll be able to discover that the peasants are a bit anxious , it'a been a week since they didn't have any news from the fort . Ir was for me more realistic given the descriptions given to have had the actual attacks only one week before rather than the month it took the characters to get here
If your group is like mine , they will investigate what happens in the fort .
Don't forget to describe , it is always raining ...
Hope this helps
