Bad to the Bones (A Rappan Athuk campaign) (Inactive)

Game Master Eric Swanson

OK this is the discussion thread for the Rappan Athuk Bad to the Bones party.

All OOC discussions should be here.

Still here, still interested for sure. Thank you for the selection! Looks like we'll have quite the group if everyone shows up to play :D

Here and very interested! Thank you for choosing me.

Brok here.

Arlock reporting for duty. All hail the son of Baalzebul.

Vargrenz scowls as he makes his way into the ramshackle set of buildings that comprises the town.

Amazed anyone survives here. Building collapses probably take as many lives as monsters.

With that, he begins to look about and is rather surprised by the shear number of non-humans wandering about.

Hmmm, perhaps this is a place I can find similarly out of place people. A place to begin searching for how to return to the underdark.

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Hey all. Appreciate the selection. Lets have some fun tearing apart demons now.

@Eric Swanson - I do not know whether you know this, but you can start the Gameplay thread, I believe, and then immediately delete the post. Then all the players can dot the Gameplay Thread and IMMEDIATELY delete their dot. The result will be no "dots" clogging up the Gameplay thread, but the system will record us as having posted in the thread so that it shows up in our Campaign thread.

Keil here, ready and waiting.

Reporting in.

Ready for the game. Thank you for the invite.

Let's talk about what we bring to the table-

For now, Grey will mostly be tossing around Slumber hex and Diplomacy. Don't expect much more out of him for a few levels.

Given Malzii's choice of spirit, she's largely going to be support-focused, especially at lower levels, by making use of her Ancestor's Council spirit ability in conjunction with her spells. However, she's got some leeway there to work with Praetor, Raaz, and Chugs depending on what sorts of spells everyone wants to play with. As far as skills go, she's pretty good with Heal and Intimidate and decent with some knowledges as well as Perception and Spellcraft.

Her familiar (spider) can perhaps assist with scouting in certain areas if needed.

Vargrenz is you basic useless monk. Sure, he has a few minor tricks up his sleeve (invisibility and enlarge person) as spell like abilities. Mostly, he will be a front line combatant using his grapple to disable foes, enlarged when necessary.

At level 4 and 6 respectively, if we survive that long, he will be able to use both abilities additional times a day as Ki abilities.

He has decent stealth and perception, so he can scout as necessary if we do not have a main scout character.

My real question is whether anyone else has ever played a gray disciple, or a duergar for that matter.

Brok can shoot people with a crossbow, can find/disable traps, and has good stealth and perception.

Cool, we can send the goblin in to places unknown while the gray dwarf stays back and complains about the lack of discipline that goblins are known for.

OK, Glad everyone checked in!

"Let me introduce myself. I am Komm. I am not only the devil who is sending you on your missions, but I am also the avatar for the GM."

That would be me, Eric.

"So anyway, I will be giving you your marching orders...soon. As long as you accomplish your mission and do not compromise...well I'll explain more in the Gameplay thread."

OK, this is Eric again. I am working on adding some resources to the Campaign Info tab but it is a work in progress. I'll be adding more stuff as time goes on. A couple of things I do in my game to speed up combat, as that is the slowest part of PbP:

1) I will roll all Perception checks as well as the initiative rolls for the start of all combats. I will post my combat tracker like this:

Round 1: Player A, Player B, Monster, Player C, Player D

If your name is in bold, then you have 24 hours to post else I will bot you to the best of my ability. I expect there to be LOTS of combat in this game. I request you to include a spoiler called Tactics on your profile which will assist me in botting your character. Keep in mind I will ONLY bot characters DURING combat!

2) I will put maps On Google Drive and will also include a COMBAT MAP which players will be able to edit (I hope). I am having trouble finding player maps for the RA currently so I may need to do some digging here.

Anyway I should have the Gameplay thread up by tomorrow!

Brok is also slow (only 20' speed) but has a climb speed, so I expect i'll do a lot of climbing up out of reach and sniping at enemies.

Vargrenz looks down at the even shorter goblin.

Why shoot. Just grow and punch or grab the enemies.

Looks like we have three scouts. That's fantastic.

This game will be extremely dependent on the scout characters.

I'd like to suggest that rather than doing scouting the usual way, we just ask the GM to make the stealth/perception rolls for us and tell us how far we make it before something interesting happens.

Standard scouting:

"I move to the corner and look into the next hallway"

"You see two doors ahead of you."

"I move down the hall checking for traps, then check both doors for traps."

"You find no traps."

"I check to see if the doors are locked."

"Both are locked"

"I listen at the doors"

"You hear scratching sounds coming from the northern door."

"I signal the others to get ready and prepare to open the door."

Et Cetera, Ad Nauseum. This takes days and kills games.

GM Directed Scouting

You move down the hall and around the corner, eyes scanning every nook and cranny, reaching two doors. You do not believe there to be any traps in the area and both doors are locked. Listening at the doors, you hear scratching coming from the north. You signal the others to prepare to breach the door.

I have arranged you in a rough formation on the combat map. Please make adjustments how you'd like. Everyone please note any actions taken before the door breach.

Here's your initiative order: etc..

Much faster this way. It takes away some of our out-of-combat autonomy, but it makes for a game that actually moves forward at a reasonable pace.

Well, looks like I'm a bit late to the "what can you do" party. Chugs is mostly support, although I made sure to give him at least one or two damaging spells. Protective Ward and Grease will help a fair bit for now, and as he levels I'm going to give him more of the standard useful wizard spells. At level 6 I'm going to go into Bloatmage, so I'll be able to churn out a whole lot of spells per day.

Arlok is front line tank/damage dealer. The mighty godling can change a lot level to level and I will make choices based on how the game goes, but will stay a front liner.

I agree that in pbp it makes sense for the DM to have a lot of control over the scouting actions.

Mostly, that seems to work best as part of the narrative.

We lay out our SOP and then Eric tells us what happens.

Raaz is mainly a buffer and backup for front line fighter using his reach weapon.

Not stealthy, but as he levels will bring summons and maybe undead to help boost the party.

One thing we'll have to worry about in a campaign with a healthy number of undead enemies combined with a non-good party is that we won't be able to fall back on channel energy to heal us / harm them.

We'll have to be careful as we start to make sure we don't outstrip the party's healing capacity.

Praetor Grey, I will follow your suggestions for the scouting and make the stealth/perception rolls for you. I will need your marching order, of course.

Brok, yes that will be a challenge. I would not get into the mindset you have to KILL everything you come across. You guys are here with a job to do and it is not to exterminate all the evil baddies you run across.

If I was LN or N I could pick up channel energy but that doesn't fit with Arlok's background. I will probably pick it up anyways but it will be to channel negative energy. Besides we want to be evil so Raaz's channel evil will heal us.

I will be a good scout as well, but now till level 3. Well I will have a good stealth skill but my perception will not be that good.

At first level no one has skill points to spare, but at 2nd or 3rd level it would be nice if everyone had at least some ability to stealth.

It is cheap and easy to pump stealth, and it doesn't look like we have any low Dex folks in heavy armor, so we might actually be able to ambush our way through the dungeon.

Yep I will be in no armor by level 3 probably and add strength to my Stealth instead of Dex so my stealth will be pretty good.

Being evil won't make channel negative energy heal you, it harms living creatures and heals undead.

The Fiendish Vessel archetype channel energy heals evil aligned beings.

OK guys the GAMEPLAY thread is now up!

...it doesn't look like we have any low Dex folks in heavy armor...

*waves*

Not heavy heavy armor but medium. Though I can trade down to light armor if we really want to do the all-stealth thing.

Kobolds get a size bonus to stealth, so even in medium armor you'll probably still be better at it than most of us.

We should just try to play smart and sneaky for a while. Any time you're in a situation where it would take the party's healers 2 to 3 days of casting to heal everyone up to full you have to pace yourself and play smart.

Oh one thing I forgot to mention here is Infernal is the preferred language so if you do not already speak it, then I would suggest learning it at some point.

If there's no real reason we would have learned it before, then we should wait and spend a skill point on it later?

Yes you can wait to spend the skill point on it. Common is the secondary language, but Draconic and Goblin are also spoken here.

Greetings all! Sorry to be a little late to the party but life happens :P
Keil is a standard rogue fetchling with the Trap Smith archetype. As his main skills are sneaking, peaking and disabling, I will be building him to be a trap-bot/ stealth-bot and would think he will be the main go to guy for most mechanical obstacles. However he won't shy away from assistance and it looks like there are a few who qualify! Also, with a few of us already leaning towards sneaking around, it could come in handy for setting up our own ambushes or even some guerrilla tactics.
What Keil is not good at is socializing. His low Charisma means someone else should do the talking for the group. In fact I intend to play him as being practically devoid of manners so I apologize if I unintentionally offend anyone in the PbP...it's all in good fun :)
Further, he won't be leaning on bluffs, feints or anything else Cha related but will be looking to flank for sneak attacks and building on his two weapon fighting skills.
See you on the game play!

Fully updated Profile completed. GM I made a few minor tweaks to the character, added gear, etc.

Arlok is an amusing fellow. This is going to be fun.

OK guys,

I am loving the RPing between you guys right now, so keep it up! I will get the Komm mission briefing post up tomorrow...I am just too wiped out right now.

Glad you like, I'm shooting for the loyal ruthless type. He is not a dumb as he seems but he was raised by his Ogre parents so his speech reflects more how they would talk and Giant would be his main language.

I wonder how feasible it would be for a ranger trapper and a trapsmith rogue to use traps effectively? Maybe with the help of a wizard.

Really good stuff so far guys. Arlok gives two thumbs up :)

Vargrenz finds all the big people puffing their chests out and pretending to be mighty to be rather amusing since he knows that dwarves are superior in all ways anyway.

I've been trying to find crafting rules for making traps but have not coming up with anything useful so far - least not something that we could make on site. Sure, it is easy enough to buy a trap and plant it somewhere, but where are the rules for concealing it? How do we know if we've done a good job? Brok, have you come across any resources for using/crafting traps?

Here are the general rules from the d20 site regarding designing traps.

Here are the general rules from the d20 site regarding designing traps.

Ninja'd...

There's a feat for learning ranger traps, and I think there's a 3rd party rogue talent for ranger traps listed on d20pfsrd.

Those are obviously very quick to set up / use. A full round action to slap down a trap is really fast for actually building something.

Craft Trapmaking / building traps is probably more about preparing the battlefield in advance.

The quick trapsmith rogue talent lets you build traps as a full round action, frugal trapsmith makes it cheaper (it does seem awful expensive), and cunning trigger lets you set them off remotely.

@ Arlok - is your character sheet correct? It lists a 23 CMD, but I only see a +6 Str and a +1 BAB. I know you have the Nature Whisper Revelation, but with an 11 Charisma, that does not affect your CMD from what I can see.

Figured I would ask before I start posting.

@ Arlok - is your character sheet correct? It lists a 23 CMD, but I only see a +6 Str and a +1 BAB. I know you have the Nature Whisper Revelation, but with an 11 Charisma, that does not affect your CMD from what I can see.

Figured I would ask before I start posting.

Vargrenz: according to this:

The godling may choose to have any of the ability’s calculations that are normally based on CHA modifiers instead be based on any ability modifier of the godling’s choice. (Once this choice is made, it cannot be changed).

He selected STR in this case. So his CMD is correct.