DM Mathpro's Jade Regent Campaign-Table 2

Game Master Almagafor

How about removing me please.

All set, getting used to some functionality that has been added since the last time I was on the boards.

I'm going to go off a limb here but I'm guessing Shalelu is no longer with us (she's still alive but she's not traveling with the group) correct?

You can go ahead and remove me as well.

Glad you have the campaign up and running again. Have fun!

I'm going to go off a limb here but I'm guessing Shalelu is no longer with us (she's still alive but she's not traveling with the group) correct?

Short answer: correct

Long answer: If an encounter gets too hairy or you need prodding then she's in the area, but I want to keep her a light touch for now.

Back from camping! Catching up and bringing my character up to 25 points!

Welcome back!

Hm, thanks for removing me, but I thought that would take this campaign off my list. It's pretty crowded and I wanted to clean things up a bit. Anyone know how I could remove it? Thanks

Hm, thanks for removing me, but I thought that would take this campaign off my list. It's pretty crowded and I wanted to clean things up a bit. Anyone know how I could remove it? Thanks

I don't. I looked around and didn't see anything obvious.

Hm, thanks for removing me, but I thought that would take this campaign off my list. It's pretty crowded and I wanted to clean things up a bit. Anyone know how I could remove it? Thanks

Is it among the campaigns you can hide? If it is then you can just hide it or hide all previous campaigns. Of course you have to do that on your main account.

That's the only answer I can come up with.

Back from camping! Catching up and bringing my character up to 25 points!

Welcome back!

How was the camping trip?

Leokian Trasandoral wrote:

Hm, thanks for removing me, but I thought that would take this campaign off my list. It's pretty crowded and I wanted to clean things up a bit. Anyone know how I could remove it? Thanks

Is it among the campaigns you can hide? If it is then you can just hide it or hide all previous campaigns. Of course you have to do that on your main account.

That's the only answer I can come up with.

It's still listed in my Current Campaigns. I see the option to hide games in the Previous Campaigns section but not in current. Thanks though.

You might have to go to Messageboards --> My Campaigns --> Then find all the threads for this game (Recruitment/Discussion/Gameplay) and click on each one to hide them.

Where did everyone go?

I hope I didn't scare everyone away.

I dunno, I'm just waiting to find out where we go next!

I'll prod things along this afternoon if there is no player action, get the party united.

I dunno, I'm just waiting to find out where we go next!

Me too. I've tried to walk away from where we're standing, but without a direction I can't write much.

Ah okay. I was just worried that I might have driven away everyone. Derric is meant to be the happy, ever cheerful person. I modeled his personality off of one of the pregenerated characters for the Jade Regent from Legendary Games.

And GM, that sourcebook doesn't have any spoilers or knowledge that I'm not supposed to see. Just wanted to let you know.

Ah okay. I was just worried that I might have driven away everyone. Derric is meant to be the happy, ever cheerful person. I modeled his personality off of one of the pregenerated characters for the Jade Regent from Legendary Games.

Nah. I'll probably look at you oddly from time to time for being so happy, but you won't drive me away.

Nah, I've responded as I can but I can only do so much when I'm tied up :3

At this point I'm waiting for us to go somewhere. I did say twice that we should keep moving.

Yeah I had my character moving as well, until he needed to shake off the weather a bit. Get it?

The sound of crickets chirping can be heard.

Just curious here gm but will we be using the relationship and caravan rules?

Relationship yes

caravan rules if you want to, as it's bookkeeping for you

I'm less than fond of the caravan rules.

They're pretty bad. It basically means one player rolls once per round to see if the caravan hits enemies, then the enemies roll to hit the caravan. Back and forth. That's it. And a lot of micromanagement of your supplies and space.

Ugh...

Some of the little subsystems in the various APs are cool but I don't really see why Paizo feels the need to shoehorn one in in nearly every AP they do these days...

Hm...Well I've never experienced the caravan rules, but apparently y'all have.

From what I can tell, your experiences...weren't good for lack of a better word.

Ugh...

Some of the little subsystems in the various APs are cool but I don't really see why Paizo feels the need to shoehorn one in in nearly every AP they do these days...

I think the reason why they're doing that is to make Pathfinder more unique in order to differentiate it from other table top roleplaying games. But even then, I don't think they need to do that to every time a new AP is about to roll out.

Some of them are fun, but others, like the caravan rules apparently, are not so fun.

Actually I haven't, but the description given by Leo doesn't sound very promising of entertainment :\

I took one look at them when I was GMing this AP (the game died at the end of book 2) and threw them out. I replaced it with more traditional encounters like having the party meet another Varisian caravan and swap stories or having the goblin pre-gens from We Be Goblins attack the caravan to get revenge. It worked better in my opinion.

Basically each new subsystem is a way to have more fiddly mechanics that can take some wordcount in the book. If a system "sticks" and players want more they can turn it into a full book (e.g. Kingmaker's domain management, or the mythic systems from Wrath of the Righteous).

APs are littered with the corpses of poorly-designed subsystems like the caravan system here or the camping system in Serpent's Skull, but it's basically a standard of each AP that it needs to have some kind of new system to learn - Runelords' sin system, Iron Gods' technology use flowchart (which is itself copied from the one in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which inspired that AP), etc.

I get the impression that many of these side-systems go through little or no playtesting. The Kingdom-building campaign system is notorious for having serious monetary exploits in it. The caravan system basically turns your encounters on the road into a series of rolls back and forth between the GM and the player once per round, with no ways for the players to actually make choices or contribute meaningfully. It has all the hallmarks of a system that was thrown in just to make a new system but never tested to see if it actually adds to the gameplay.

Basically each new subsystem is a way to have more fiddly mechanics that can take some wordcount in the book. If a system "sticks" and players want more they can turn it into a full book (e.g. Kingmaker's domain management, or the mythic systems from Wrath of the Righteous).

APs are littered with the corpses of poorly-designed subsystems like the caravan system here or the camping system in Serpent's Skull, but it's basically a standard of each AP that it needs to have some kind of new system to learn - Runelords' sin system, Iron Gods' technology use flowchart (which is itself copied from the one in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which inspired that AP), etc.

I get the impression that many of these side-systems go through little or no playtesting. The Kingdom-building campaign system is notorious for having serious monetary exploits in it. The caravan system basically turns your encounters on the road into a series of rolls back and forth between the GM and the player once per round, with no ways for the players to actually make choices or contribute meaningfully. It has all the hallmarks of a system that was thrown in just to make a new system but never tested to see if it actually adds to the gameplay.

That's true. Some of the subset rules are a bit broken actually now that I think about it. The mythic rules being the ones a lot of people were most vocal about being broken. A lot of people had problems having parties just plow right through enemies with ease making the gm increase the difficulty of encounters and monsters which often backfired and would lead to TPK a lot. If I remember correctly James Jacobs even came out and said that he and the other developers now wish that they had done some more play testing on the mythic rules.

But yeah a lot of these systems don't look like they had a lot of play testing. Although the relationship rules seem to have some merit actually. From what I can tell the relationship rules make it more rewarding to establishing relations with NPCs in addition to creating additional challenges to overcome by making players work for said rewards.

I'm torn on the relationship system. On one hand it encourages you to actually invest in the various characters that you interact with in a meaningful way, rather than treating them simply as tag-along character sheets. On the other hand it does so in a very Dragon Age-esque way, by letting you earn points by giving them gifts, which is a very pernicious way to mechanize personal relationships ("insert gifts, receive sex"). Ultimately I think a DM needs to be sensible and recognize that interpersonal relationships are built on a foundation of more than just bringing people quest items.

As much as I love the idea of mythic in theory, in practice I put it right about here in terms of general ridiculousness. (Slightly NSFW.)

Wrath of the Righteous is still a cool AP either way though and one that I'd love to play via PbP one day :3

Regarding relationship stuff, I'm in a PbP Mummy's Mask with a lot of emphasis on inter-party RP as well as building friendships and more with NPCs. It's pretty basic but rather than using 'insert gifts, receive sex/cuddles/whatever' the PC just makes a Charisma check to advance the relationship, though pretty much everyone puts some RP with the roll as well. Charisma instead of Diplomacy so that characters that aren't diplomancers (aka bards, sorcerers, or any other Cha-based class) have a fair chance of rolling well even with a tanked Charisma score.

Frankly, I find that the mythic system is excellent in theory, but needs some more support and some errata to rebalance some of the over the top elements. There have been some very cool mythic ideas released in some recent books.

That's true. It needs some major rebalancing but overall it looks exciting and tries to bring back some of what made D&D's epic level handbook cool.

Btw, Kiko is there any reason why you switched your mystery from lunar to intrigue? Just curious.

How far away from us is the goblin?

How far away from us is the goblin?

You can be no closer than 35ft, closer than that and you're in the village.

Will Rishana recognize/remember anyone from the party or vice versa? :)

Yes, at worst everyone knows each other from around town

Okay; I scanned everyone's sheet/background again and it looks like based on campaign traits she'd know Leo the best since he's best buds with Sandru, who is basically an adoptive older brother.

She might be a little more familiar with Jayna too, since she's an outdoorsman like Shalelu. Everyone else she's probably at least familiar with :)

Okay; I scanned everyone's sheet/background again and it looks like based on campaign traits she'd know Leo the best since he's best buds with Sandru, who is basically an adoptive older brother.

She might be a little more familiar with Jayna too, since she's an outdoorsman like Shalelu. Everyone else she's probably at least familiar with :)

Sounds perfect

Hey, I'm working a second job this week and possibly next, it's PRN until we can get an office moved and set up for business. So, I'll be trying to post daily around 7 pm, but if not I wanted you to know why. I'll have a gameplay post up in 1 hour if anyone wants to get any actions in before then.

Thanks for the notice DM! I work PRN too so I feel your pain with wonky and unpredictable work schedules.

Take your time gm. I got to go mow my yard for a bit.

So it's cool.

And here I was thinking we were going to have a huge battle. Lucky us. :)

I still thinking the goblins will double cross us and we'll have to kill them but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

This was about as far as my previous attempt at JR with Rishana went and I will say that so far it's working out very differently than the first game was :3

This was about as far as my previous attempt at JR with Rishana went and I will say that so far it's working out very differently than the first game was :3

Oh?

I'm guessing it was a battle like the dwarves escaping Goblin Town in the first Hobbit movie?

I legitimately didn't expect them to be reasonable. They must be really terrified of these skeletons.

I'm pretty sure they aren't scared of us so it must be the skeletons.

It was definitely a fight, but the GM pulled the plug in the middle of it so we never found out anything else about what was going on. Of course I also have no idea in either case how much of the AP is/was altered, if any. That's the fun thing about APs - the same setup can lead to wildly different stories :)

I suspect they'll double cross us. If they do they'll have a big problem with Kiko though, especially Runt.