Dungeon Blaster´s Skulls and Shackles Campaign

Game Master Tim Bürgers

Quite the collection of rogues we have, oh boy. Thanks Tim, you too Eric.

Ah yes. Of course. It's Master Scourge and Mister Plugg. Damn stupid combination of names, if you ask me. If I am ever going to DM this module again, I give Mister Plugg just a wholly different name.

Antal, equipped

Ondir, equipped

Thanks for the sheets guys. It is enough to send me an update with every level-up.

By the way, my wife asked me why Antal does not speak like a pirate. So I thought it might not be obvious in my posts, but Antal deliberately speaks with eloquence in order to distinguish himself from the pirates he has worked with in the past.

My girlfriend sometimes tries to correct my English misstakes. Quite annoying. :-)

We're off to a grand start to combat... we'll have to see if Riff can do any better. Or just wait for the next round of combat to redeem ourselves. At this point the attack that would have likely hit misses because of miss chance and the attacks that likely won't hit passed their miss chance. This seems oddly familiar to a recent combat in another game.

Oh and don't forget if you do get hit by a rat, you'll need to roll fort against filth fever.

Yes we need ninja rats like a hole in the head.

We're just rusty.

Yes a truly fantastic %%^#$%&# start!

lol

The rats aren't doing any better. One hit out of five attacks and only two damage - a meager lot, if you ask me.

What's Grok's attitude to Riff?

Friendly, I believe. Didn't we record that somewhere?

Considering the grisly fight at the moment:

How lethal do you want to play?

My favorite way is "The dice are always right". If you get this critical hit from that scythe-wielding power-attacking ogre... well...

Dice are gods, but the DM has the ability to fudge when he thinks its a good idea.

I was aware of it, but our recorded might not know.

Eric if you please put Grok Friendly to Riff.

Tim, a critical hit is a critical hit. Pathfinder has done a good job with death, so I do not mind playing it how the dice roll.

I agree let the dice decide. But I tend to side on lethal.

I think this combat is funny. My god is pretty sure he can get me out of this, but I am pretty sure you are f^cked.

I agree, so what if I have to roll a new character. Generally a "dead" character gets shelved for the next time such a character is appropriate. Obviously I'm not going to play Ondir2, who's an exact copy of Ondir. I'll shift and adjust based on what wasn't working. So death is really just a way to refactor characters for me.

Combat's getting a bit wonky without any notation of when your action vs another person's is. I think Kithranna and Riffelan have shifted and swapped initiatives this last time since Kithranna responded to Riffelan's request to move over, even though in turn order his action should happen before hers. Maybe that would be a benefit to have less adherence to the initiative order, but it's just too hard to plan and track.

Calling out the round in your action would be good, also probably for me or the map/site would be to post the current Initiative order or have it included in each round somehow.

For example I'm trying to parse the combat: (assuming rats have 5 hp)
Round 1: Works out fine, everyone attacks and order is maintained.

Following initiative (Antal, Rats, Ondir, Kithranna, Riff)
Round 2:
Antal: moves to flank and scores a good hit (5 damage to rat 3)
Rats 1,2,4,5,6: atacks 4,5,6 hits Kith, Riff, and Ondir respectively (2,1,3 damage)
Rat 3: Attacks Ondir, misses, but since it's at 0 (disabled) it falls unconscious
Ondir: Hits rat 6 (thanks to flanking and justice) for 2 damage
Kithranna: Hits rat 4, dealing 8 damage knocking it unconscious (moves, in response to Riff)
Riffelan: miss, calls out for Kithranna to move. (makes acrobatic check to move.

Round 3:
Antal: Move, misses
Rats: 1,2,5,6 attack. 1 and 2 hit Antal, 5 hits Kithranna, 6 misses Ondir
Ondir: Attacks, misses - switch to healing
Kithranna: Attacks, hits rat 5, crit, massive damage. Moves over to help antal.
Riff: Moves? States attacking defensively but makes no roll?

And here's how round 2/3 plays out in the posts:

Round 2:
Antal: moves to flank and scores a good hit (5 damage to rat 3)
Rats 1,2,4,5,6: atacks 4,5,6 hits Kith, Riff, and Ondir respectively (2,1,3 damage)
Rat 3: Attacks Ondir, misses (stays alive)
Ondir: Hits rat 6 (thanks to flanking and justice) for 2 damage (but not the rat 3 that's still hanging onto life)
Kithranna: (apparently nothing)
Riffelan: miss, calls out for Kithranna to move. (makes acrobatic check to move.

Round 3:
Rats: 1,2,5,6 attack. 1 and 2 hit Antal, 5 hits Kithranna, 6 misses Ondir
Rat 3: Attacks Antal, misses and dies
Rat 4: Attacks Kithranna, hits deals 2 damage
Antal: Move, misses
Ondir: Attacks, misses - switch to healing
Kithranna: Hits rat 4, dealing 8 damage (it's still hanging onto life)
Kithranna: (again?) Attacks, hits rat 5, crit, massive damage. Moves over to help Antal with rats 1 and 2.
Riff: Moves? States attacking defensively but makes no roll?

See how odd it's playing out compared to what initiative maps to?
This is our first combat of the game and I think we are all new to the PBP model, so this is just a criticism so we can improve on how we're playing.

So should we wait until it is everyones turn? That would of course be more clearly arranged, but it would slow down posting and could prevent individual players/me from fulfilling the one-post-per-day-agreement.

I guess, everyone of you is a very reliable poster, so we could take the slow variant for future combat.

Slow is fine, but I think if we note something like

{OOC}Round #
Initiative ##
HP at turn{/OOC}

replacing curly braces with square brackets we should do fine. It's a bit of meta data, but it would allow us to post our actions when available.

Now there's one major boon to posting in order: I actually had to shift and adjust because Lewis posted (and Antal goes before Ondir) as I'm working on my post. I hit preview and see Antal do something that I should really play off of but wasn't intending to do based on the way things were at the start of the round. I think that would be more a reason to post in initiative order than just trying to track things so we don't skip or shift someone's actions.

Also, not as big a boon, there's a good boon with the attacks of opportunity as it would make things more clear for when someone is in dire need of healing or not quite yet when a healer's turn is up. It would avoid he posts that are done in spoilers.

Eric's right I forgot to throw my dagger as I had intended in round three to be able to fight defense. It says nothing about ranged versus melee in Fighting Defense as a Standard. Will fix this.

Posting slow is going to grind it to something close to a dead stop. I see the bennefit of it though.

Posting your round title as below,

{OOC}Round #
Initiative ##
HP at turn{/OOC}

still is a good idea. If you want healed please do so. I am not going to track other characters HP from post to post.

lol, "meta data", You can't see my character bleeding, my bleeding is done in secret.

I think you are overestimating how much it will slow down by. We are at 1-2 rounds a day. Posting in init order will slow it down to 1 round every day or two. Of course that depends on people being able to post.

One tactic I've heard of is to arrange a common time when we can be online to post more frequently. obviously we can't do that all the time. But it can be a good way to get a handful of rounds done and in order over a few hours.

For me I don't mind either way. I am thinking of declared actions so we can post round x's actions then Tim will post last with a summary of how the events played out. We would probably need to do a primary/secondary and maybe tertiary action if complicated. But it might be faster.

It is a little chaotic but again i think it is because it is our first combat.

And I agree with Eric (Did I just say that) For combat finding a common time so we can do a bunch of posts at once for a combat, would be the most efficient and that is how it was done the last game I played in.

So be it. :-)

Let's post this header from now on and stay in ini-order.

Cool, no problem.

Tim, should we wait for your post for the initiative for the monsters?

Hey guys,

I'm sick at the moment. That means, that I will post less frequently in the coming days.

Hope you don't mind...

Tim,

Hope you get better soon. If you wanted I could run the rest of this battle to keep things moving. I doubt it will last much longer.

-Lewis

I would very much appreciate this help, Lewis. As some of you have already noticed, the rats are just bestiary-dire rats and behave just like normal rats would do:

They feel cornered and therefore fight to the death, the usually attack the last character who damaged them and so on...

I guess, I will be better in a few days to run the next day, which will push the story a tiny bit forward...

The last rat will probably die if Kithranna hits, Ondir finally finished off the rat he was fighting. Then combat will be over and Ondir will no longer get his fast healing. That's pretty much what's kept him up. We can spend some time actually talking between our characters until you're feeling better.

Alright, so I am back from vacation and you guys just finished the combat so wherever Tim wants to reintroduce me back into the campaign will work.

I say jump in and post whenever you see an opening.

Jep, just jump in. It's a ship after all.

I think we are ready to head back up.

I can't imagine that it takes to long to skin rats, so yes I think we are.

Ok, I am in a rush to get to work right now but I will post when I get home sometime today

I've updated the site a bit, I might still tweak it a bit but it should be fairly well organized right now. Let me know if anything is missing or need to be changed.

I don't recall any plan involving our rum rations.

Riffelan (Female Slyph Bard (Sea Singer) 1) Fri, Oct 5, 2012, 10:24 PM

Post #283 in "Dungeon Blaster´s Skulls and Shackles Campaign" Add to:

+ ]Shrugging. That sounds as much like honor as I have ever heard from a halfling.

To the Abyss, nar I have no intention what so ever of killing the craven b*stard. Though I will mark him in a way that is bound to shake him down to his rotten soul.

We have an agreement Antal.

If your desire is to perform such this eve, give me your rum rations. I will add these to the nightly wine I have been providing and entertain them. Once drunk I will sing them into such a fervor that they will sleep like babes. I will also need some strong backs to fetch a barrel of water. Though if we could but wait till the morrow for such skullduggering I could prepare better, and it would give us more rum to work with, and two barrels would serve better than one.

Plop, scrape, slash, sploosh, another rat is skinned.

Kith's hands are rough like a warrior, but he cleans an animal like a butcher.

So we can just wait for tomorrow.

I will more than likely unable to post for a four or five days here.

HAHA! Kevin I swear I read your attack as you rolling a zero instead of a an attack bonus of zero. I thought, only Kevin could roll a zero on a d20.

Did you want to give us the experience from the Dire Rat fight?

And I thought

Does anyone remember "Blaster" from Mad Max II? :-)

was a required prereq for all fantasy enthusiasts.

Is a delirious halfling an improvised weapon? Lewis, I like how you're playing Antal's fever.

I knew Kevin's rolling was going to break the laws of the universe at some point, but if he rolls a zero isn't that going to cause a divide by zero error?

Ah, thanks for the reminder. Yes, the Rats are 135 XP each. Makes a sum of about 800 XP, which means 160 for each of you.

Back, woot!

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of my favorites. I have watched it over several hundred times. I am sure that it is very annoying to watch it with me cause I know all the lines, and say them while I am viewing it.

fyi, Its Max 3, there is Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and then Beyond Thunderdome. I am convinced that Blaster is the same special needs character that was in the first movie right before his wife and son were killed, and that is why he hesistated when he was going to kill Blaster. That more so that blaster was very obviously simple minded.

You may note that I put an Aunty in a IC phrase before. That was a node to the moive. I have also referanced a favorite Playstation game. Can you guess which one?

Does a Mad Max-PS-Game even exist?

One of my favorite movies is (dare you to laugh!) "The Last Unicorn". Indeed, this movie is one of the reasons that I play RPGs since 1992.

I will have to check that out. I had to ask my wife, I was getting The Last Unicorn confused with an animated movie called Wizards.

I don't know about any video games based on Mad Max but I heard there was another movie in some various form of production.

Yup, but without Mel Gibson it won't be the same. Conan without Schwarzenegger was a good movie, but it lacked the trashy coolness only Schwarzenegger provides.

Man, do we get off-topic here! :-)

Totally off topic.

In the new movie they had Conan do a very unConan thing. When he had to use a trick, with the burning/exploding oil to excape the villan. Conan never escapes like that. If you are into the literature you will find that he is beaten near to death often, and that its his friends that come to his aid, then he wins out in the end. This is supported in the flicks, heck even in the televison series.

I didn't like the moive, but it did hold my attention, and over all it was better than no Conan moive. All the action, acting, and visualation was there, it was a simple matter that the writing/story arc wasn't very Cimmerian and to me fell flat.

So I will happly support ANY new adaptation to Conan or for that matter Mad Max. Look at the Batman movies, for years and years we had pretty stinky flicks, but we watched them and love them in a way, now these last three were perfect.

Super Fan boy away!

FYI it was a combination of the Beastmaster, Conan, and Dark Crystal moives that got me into this fantasy role playing thing eons ago.

Only the first ten minutes or so of the new Conan were any good. So much promise with that little kid. blah

No topic is off topic for the discussion thread, IMO.