Heh, I have a feeling these things won’t last long up against Maka and Fins ranged assault.
As an aside if one of them took damage and isn’t using magic to fly than it need a DC 10 fly check to not lose 10ft of altitude. However most things that have a good fly speed or better will have at least a +9 to that skill making failure impossible. If one does drop to 5ft off the ground well.... that puts them in charging range. :-)
High fly skill, but thanks for the heads up.
Okay people, the challenge before us is clear: Make friends with this Winter Wolf.
Oh ooc this is a terrible idea. IC it seems fun.
Tez is morally and tactically opposed to just letting her as a member of the winter guard just leave. Worst case in his mind we deal with her once we’ve got our hands on the hut. He’s not opposed to dealing non-lethal damage or healing her after defeating her. But the risk of her exposing our mission or joining up to help slaughter the people who helped get us this far would leave a bad taste in his beak.
Oh yeah there's a good chance this will all go horribly wrong. But there is a small chance we'll make friends with an intelligent 400lb wolf that has ice breath. The Winter Wolves like Baba Yaga right?
I could come up with a convincing enough lie as to why winter guard soldiers aren’t being used. Something like.... “This mission is important and lady Nazhena doesn’t trust the winter guard not to have iron guard defectors and spies in its midst. Thus she hired stilyagi mercenaries who are loyal to gold and not ideals. No such magic exists it was a convient lie to justify giving the job to us.”
But I don’t want to step on any toes as Fin seems pretty dead set on letting her go and not having her with us. I am pro-bring the wolf along, but I’ll defer to Q’s judgment as she has a fixed herself as the leader and shot caller.
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No worries, Tez, no toes stepped on here...that was just my first inclination, I can roll with this...I think the GM already shot me down there any way, so looks like she's hanging around...the RP from this should be fun...but if we were going to befriend a winter wolf, it should've been Greta... ;)
Unfortunately Greta is placed at an odd spot for gaining her as a companion. Stealth mission with a timer, a city under martial law, and odds are that the party is wearing one of her fellow winter wolves. Doesn't make it easy to deviate from the main question and make a new friend.
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My guess is that Bragda is not going to want to spread it around that she's been hiding in her little house like a coward for several days running. And I'm not too worried about her tipping off anyone. I think the city probably is chaotic enough right now with the pet dragon getting killed and the Iron Guard running in the streets killing everyone that our little mission is not going to raise eyebrows, at least until we're long gone.
These winter wolves sure are emotionally needy creatures.
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These winter wolves sure are emotionally needy creatures.
And they apparently see Quasit as ‘medicine’ for their emotional needs as well...I think half the winter wolves we’ve talked to have propositioned her. Too bad that wolf pelt had a short time limit; Quasit might’ve had the entire Winter Guard eating out of her hand otherwise...
Unfortunately Greta is placed at an odd spot for gaining her as a companion. Stealth mission with a timer, a city under martial law, and odds are that the party is wearing one of her fellow winter wolves. Doesn't make it easy to deviate from the main question and make a new friend.
Oh, I agree...I just mentioned her jokingly since Greta kinda made a pass at Fin...of course that was after Quasit had already spurned her advances...
OMG, was I gone a week without noticing? It'll take me a bit to catch up.
Hey! Why am I suddenly drinking? Selena doesn't drink alcohol. ( Nevermind being young, she is a noble and that means a distinct difference between a bit of wine with dinner and drinking to be merrily drunk or even buzzed, and also a spellcaster for whom drinking is even more problematic as a clear mind is significantly more important than even a warrior-philosopher would want to maintain.)
I'm not sure how to rp this. I take it this some sort of magic effect, but as Selena wouldn't normally be tempted by drink, and I personally have never been tempted, it is far outside my understanding.
My god, I hate Iphone.
It is outside how I ever imagined compulsion magic and I am uncertain what this would be like from the victim's perspective.
No compulsion to drink or otherwise act against typical inclinations. I put up some RP text to help clarify. Essentially Bulvi and Selena are responding as if the women are friends / allies. I don't peg Selena as the dancing type right away, but it seemed a little jarring to have her sit on a log.
Lol. Okay, simple charm I can work with.
Of course, considering all the fun we've had between myself and Quasit, would it even be noticeable? :p
Noticing enchantments I think the base value there is fore someone you don't know OR it remarks on the very limited power of the enchantment.
If it was truly a dc 25 to notice Selena is enchanted, that could only be from not knowing her, or if her behavior is relatively normal. In this case, if she acted normal but as though she is friends with these friends.
Selena suddenly ignoring everything else and drinking/dancing etc would be far outside character and wouldn't really need a knowledge of magic to know she was enchanted in some way, not for someone who knows her anyway, a stranger might think it is normal for her.
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Selena suddenly ignoring everything else and drinking/dancing etc would be far outside character and wouldn't really need a knowledge of magic to know she was enchanted in some way, not for someone who knows her anyway, a stranger might think it is normal for her.
This was pretty much my rationale for having Quasit try to grab her and drag her away.
Thought it was appropriate; Tez has literally known her for a day and a few days for the rest of the party. His interactions with her have been limited at best and 90% of that time was in a separate body. If there was a chart like there is for disguise self or stealth with modifiers I might have used them, but I used the rules as they were there to support the role play.
And having suspicions is different from flat out knowing. Hitting the 25 DC confirms it for Tez enough to sound the alarm as a fact with a high degree of certainty as opposed to a deduction via odd behavior. He might have acted similarly sans a roll, but there was no harm in rolling and him being confident he knows what is happening could change his behavior slightly.
Hi all. Had some family things come up yesterday into this morning. Had planned to catch up before having the day off today. Alas, none of that worked out. I'll catch up as soon as I can.
Hope everything is going okay.
Hope things are ok. You have my best wishes. You’ve been a consistent posting machine for as long as you’ve been running this game. I was even telling Maka today I was worried something might have happened to you after not seeing a post in 24hrs especially with the pandemic and all.
No problem at all and take whatever time you need. Real life things are far more important than a game of make believe on the internet.
All good. Family had plans and of course there is always something unexpected. Thankfully it's not health related. Appreciate the concern. Got the laptop set up so catching up tonight.
Tez, there is no pandemic, just a bunch of fearmongering. this new strain is actually not as bad, symptom-wise, as regular flu can be. It certainly isn't any more dangerous than regular flu by any measure.
China is pushing it as such, and given reports, the suspicion I agree with most at the moment is that China is treating this as a pandemic in order to deal with political opposition to the government under the guise of sequestering infected people and those "responsible" for releasing/mishandling the virus.
In total, the CDC estimates that up to 42.9 million people got sick during the 2018-2019 flu season, 647,000 people were hospitalized and 61,200 died. That's fairly on par with a typical season,
[global counts]
Coronavirus Cases:
145,634
view by country
Deaths:
5,436
"Dangerous" my butt, especially since the China numbers are unreliable.
I find the crazy rush on hoarding supplies to be the more dangerous situation, making it difficult to acquire needed supplies, especially for people like me without a home to keep a sizable stockpile in (thus relying on buying small amounts often).
Tez, there is no pandemic, just a bunch of fearmongering.
The world health organization literally declared it a pandemic 2 days ago. I was using the appropriate term.
I wasn't necessarily referring to anything drastic or specific to the pandemic, you can get into a car accident just as easily as you could a month ago. If you're in education, healthcare, and a number of other industries and occupations your going to be or already are affected due to the situation as is. Not to mention the social distancing in Seattle, NYC, and LA.
For example I'm affected, employment wise. I work at a clinic that does pharmaceutical product testing. We do a lot of lab work in-house, but we rely on some outside contractors (Labcore/Quest) to test some samples and they may have their hands full. We also bring people in for in-house trials and a lot of them travel to here for testing which is now a problem. On top of that pharmaceutical companies that contract with us get gun-shy about a month long trial worth 6 figures and all associated trials that can get tanked by a single employee or subject testing positive.
Not to mention the issues with the travel ban or working in plenty of other fields that might be negatively impacted by the general panic.
Yea, but A) is it worthy of being called a pandemic, and B) society's response is a seperate if related issue which in this case is worse then the virus itself.
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Coronavirus is a pandemic. It is also more dangerous than the flu. But don't take it from me, take it from the molecular biologists and the epidemiologists who are really freaked out right now.
Influenza is an endemic virus. It's already abroad in the population, and new strains periodically appear that we have varying levels of immunity to. This is a brand new virus which we have no immunity to and there is neither a vaccine nor a cure. 15-20% of people who contract the virus become sick enough that they need to be hospitalized, and around 1% of people die, especially the elderly and/or those with underlying health conditions. That rate of lethality is really bad. And the estimates for eventual exposure around the world range from 20% to 60%.
Coronavirus spreads easily and has an incubation period of around 5 days, so one person can spread it to a lot of other people before they even know they're infected. By the time you've got the fever and cough, you've been Typhoid Mary for days.
It's hard to know how many people in America are actually infected because of the unavailability of testing in a lot of places (which is appalling in a rich country like America), but from what little we know, the infection rate does not look good. Our infection rate looks a lot like Italy, and 60 million people are quarantined over there right now.
Look, we all hope this flames out in a few months with a few tens of thousands dead worldwide. That's the best case scenario. Worst case might be more than 100 million.
When you are hearing forecasts of a hurricane heading your way and you see the dark clouds out over the water, it makes sense to take precautions. You can hold out your hand and note that it isn't raining right now, or say that you've been through hurricanes before with no problem, or speculate that the storm might miss your house. And you might even be right. But it's still a hurricane and you really would be wiser to take it seriously.
I work in health care, so I talked about this a lot this week with the people I take care of, as well as people who know a lot more about infectious diseases than me. I'm almost certain to be exposed at some point. I really hope this isn't as bad as I'm expecting its going to be.
My mother does research as an obsession, it's her thing, never trust single sources, look to actual scientific reports rather than media, etc.
Currently, this new virus is new which obviously makes it easy and quick to spread, but also milder symptoms than normal flu in general.
(Certainly a problem, but some sources imply that China started this as a way to deal with certain political opponents and several others are taking advantage of it to fearmonger in an effort to crash the global economy. Both seem crazy at first, but it actually fits China's MO to remove anyone against the main political party in a way that makes them seem like bad guys, and given the extremes so many have gone to remove Trump, that a group of people in power crashing the economy to blame Trump and remove him seems much much more plausible now than it would have seemed even during Obama's run as president.)
I'm fine with taking precautions, but what I'm not fine with is when a simple rainshower is coming and people act like it's an apocalypse.
Heck, there have been brawls in some stores over buying food.
Or really ridiculous, I delivered pizza to one lady who spoke through her door to put the pizza down on the porch so she could grab it after I left. Which is overkill to begin with, and yet ridiculous in this case because she is trusting people who are much less clean than me actually touching her food and making it while I merely touch the box.
Heck, I'd even be fine treating this as a practice run on how to stop an actually very dangerous plague from spreading globally, but the way people are acting is less about being careful and practical and more just a bunch of fear and panic that is causing more issues than the virus itself.
And I have a problem with this because I'm homeless. If they shut down non-essential stores, where do I park? What happens if they start a curfew? Especially given that I work nights on one job and usually get off work after any likely curfews. Heck they already have a semi-curfew in some places I deliver to just from crime that gives me problems just delivering to people.
I have a vested interest in people not being crazy about this.
A challenging time for many of us it seems. So much more that I could say, but after typing and deleting I think several times over I'll just leave this last bit.
If you could use another listening ear feel free to PM me.
I am not terribly interested in having an in depth conversation on current events, but my original intention of wishing everyone well in whatever difficulties they might be having in things that stem from usual chaos of life, the effect of what has been called a pandemic; whether it be the economic difficulties, social panic that results of it, or it's health impact.
I hope things pan out for every one of you all in general. I shall inform you if anything on my work end creates a disruption for me game wise.
Great game so far Lareg I believe we are getting to the endgame of book two. Looking forward to seeing what book 3 holds. :)
-Also nobody Pm me your problems. Feel free to send all those to Lareg. I've got plenty of my own. I have been told he is a great listener.
Yes, so close to wrapping up book two. Been reading through book three. Talked to a buddy of mine that has played through the AP so getting some ideas of what lies ahead.
Just a heads up all. For those of you who mentioned you also work in healthcare I'm sure this isn't a surprise. My work situation may change at any time so posting may suddenly change in the weeks ahead. I'll provide updates as I can in evening hours.
Be safe.
No problem, stay safe yourself.
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Before I post, I'm trying to see if anyone in our party speaks Elven so I could mention the white witch to a friend (and consequently what to do with the winter wolf) without alerting Bragda...
Checking profiles, I didn't see anyone that did...but I didn't see any languages listed at all in Selena's profile. I'm guessing she does not but wanted to check first. Selena, do you happen to speak Elven? Or GM do you happen to know? I can try something else but wanted to make sure this wasn't an option first...
I originally got sylvan, but fey understand that one so a guard might as well since fey are "common" around here. Otherwise I speak common, skald, and draconic. It's listed in my Descriptives tab at the bottom.
As I'm always refining my sheet layouts, where did you look first for my languages?
I hate iphones.
Mine are in my profile (Common, Tengu, Skald, Goblin, Slyvan, Draconic, Giant). I picked from the languages that are most spoken in whitethrone and Irresin I spent a few ranks in linguistics since Tez is just legitimately an out of work bureaucrat. Tengu get 2 languages for every rank in linguistics so next time I have a spare rank to spend I shall consider getting Elven and Vudrani from Maka and Fin.
Generally speaking it might be a good idea for all of us to learn an uncommon language to communicate in the presence of enemies. I think Vudrani is probably uncommon enough that if we all picked it would be unlikely anyone else would be able to understand us.
I apologize for initiating combat with the wolf, but once she mentioned the bringing the garrison I struggled to find a reason to not have Tez attempt to stop her. I hope nobody is too salty about that OOC.
I figure it could make for some juicy RP. Tez is lawful to a fault so disobeying who he's designated in command and has vowed to follow the orders of, Quasit, is going to mess with his head a bit.
Hopefully with a little luck she's rolling 2 saves not to be Daze or Stunned for a round. A little more luck if misfortune sticks it'll be 4 saves. Going non-lethal here for obvious reasons.
Yeah let's knock her out and tie her up.
Tez, I think your definition of lawful is faulty. Perhaps you should think of it as Orderly instead. If you've ever seen Mr and Mrs Smith, mrs smith is lawful, mr smith is chaotic. You can easily see how their styles compete, she is always about the plan and having everything done in a particular way and when things turn out to be outside what she plans for then she wants to fall back and plan again around the new information, but mr smith is the opposite, he doesn't like fancy plans and when unexpected obstacles occur he just improvises and seems to prefer improvising.
What do you think is faulty about it?
My character is very lawful to the point that he hates breaking promises and vows. He promised and vowed to follow Quasit's orders as the leader of the group in the deal he made to join and skirted around her indirect commands.
He's going to feel bad and guilty about that. I'm not seeing where I'm being faulty here in my interpretation.
I get it that a lot of people get hung up on the semantics of the word 'lawful'. But, I don't think I am getting hung up or confused here. Your hot take seems to be arguing against a misconception I don’t have, so I’m confused as to why it’s being brung up.
Chalk it up to being tired and not getting much rest and thus chattering on about stuff. Happens when you have no friends to chatter at.
That said, I stand by my comment. You are basically saying that "because X, therefore Y." I believe that is incorrect in this case. I believe that "being very lawful" does not inherently equal "hates breaking vows," though it might be stereotypical. To me that's like saying "it's a car, so obviously it has 4 doors." Stereotypical, but having 4 doors is not inherent to being a car, and has nothing to do with what makes a car a car, even if it is stereotypical of cars.
Though, I might have focused too much on lawful=laws the first time around, but as I said, I was tired ,and that is commonly a core focus.
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Might I suggest considering phrasing when expressing curiosity about other individual's character motivations.
I find this sort of discussion really gets people thinking in neat ways about characters, but that phrasing comes off a lot like 'I don't agree with the way you play your character.'
Try something like, 'I'm curious how you connected your charater choices to being lawful at that moment?'
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How many of you work in healthcare? I don't. I work in software. Starting last Thursday we were sent home and are required to work from home till April 12th. Pretty crazy, IMHO.
At first I thought this was all just a big media storm and hype job but seeing companies sacrifice REAL $$$$, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars, I can't keep believing that they are doing it just because they "don't like Trump" or "any publicity is good publicity". Or even that they are swayed by the media.
I'm not here to argue about whether this is a real issue or not.
In fact, I hope that in the end we will all look back and see that it was just a big huge over-reaction. That would be the best case scenario. But I'm not taking chances. I have an over-90 year old grandmother who is of very fragile health. If she catches it, her chance of survival is very low. I have an immune-system compromised 29 year old daughter who would have a low chance of survival if she caught it. And she is a single mom with a 7 year old son. I don't want the worst to happen to them.
For now, I'm just going to do my best to make wise decisions and see what happens.