Dungeon Master S's "True Dragons of Absalom" (Inactive)

Game Master Chris Marsh

True Dragons of Absalom aka 'How Engashez Got Her Groove Hat Back' :P

A note: for the next several days (Thursday through Tuesday, sans Sunday) I will be working and so my posting will be largely limited to the evenings CST - so don't panic if you don't see any posts from me earlier in the day on those days :)

A teacher called out today, which means my office hours (good posting time) are being replaced with covering his classes since subs are in short supply. Apologies everyone. I'll try to get something up there today.

Map prep: I use Google slides for its ease on tablets, though I prefer Drawings as a GM. Getting the size is nice (no one likes a lot of zooming.) I'm a fan of putting "buff boxes" on the map to help players remember effects, as well as call outs and arrows to point out features. I also really recommend having a TEMPLATE SHEET for common things to be added to the map. In PFS/SFS I tend not to link to the templates above, as I find people mess with it a lot, but I do keep a link at the top for any APs I'm in.

Just dropping in to say that as Christmas approaches, I will have a few traditional family events that will make it unlikely for me to post on certain days. The first few events will be tomorrow (Friday), and Sunday, but Saturday may be a bit of a struggle too. Please bot me if necessary.

"Place yourselves on the map" is a phrase I've been using for almost 30 years. It's tricky. Immediately it puts players on alert - traps, monsters, or both are coming. In order to allay that, I often call for it when it doesn't matter. When you don't know if it matters or not, it tends to keep surprises intact...

So in the other run of this, I lifted the curtain on a plot fork that both groups have gone past. I also opened up a discussion on the question of GM - Player trust and social contracts.

It is nice to be able to follow along and read all Chris’s pro tips here, though I usually wait several days for a read through because I want to create my own gameplay posts without coasting off Chris’s excellent creations.

I will say that stealing from the best is a time revered technique in PBP. If you are wondering how to get through a scene it can be helpful to see how other GMs have handled it.

I am avoiding doing that here, ironically, because this is a GM Mentorship Game, and I know some players are reading along with both games. For those who do... I want them to see entirely different approaches.

Hmm

Thanks Hmm!

Ah the DUNGEON CRAWL The subject of many discussions, and few conclusions. First, full disclosure, I love them. I started playing D&D in the late 80s. The game was very different then, and one of the jobs assigned to a player was mapping. the player literally was expected to draw the map. The player covering the thief job had to balance progress with searching for traps, and every few minutes there was a wandering monster roll....

The game has changed a lot. The game in general has largely left that aspect behind, but it's still clearly there (The Shattered Star AP is a solid return to it.) But on PbP even the smoothest dungeon crawl can become a slog. Here are my first 3 pieces of advice on running them:

1. If it's going to be a long one (book 5 of Curse of the Crimson Throne is a MASSIVE dungeon crawl), then set up a "door protocol" and leave it up top as a "quickpost" so anyone can do it and you don't waste time waiting for everyone to roll.
2. Take note of anyone with Trap Spotter or a Perception check so high that taking 10 produces success most of the time.
3. Empty rooms shouldn't be skipped, but don't be shy about being clear when a room has given up all it can. That being said, if there's block of the same type of empty room, I'll just give it away in the name of game momentum.
4. Whoever opens the door in a post, takes responsibility for the map. So when a fireball trap goes off, the minis are actually in the place they are currently in.

Ah, climbing. It's a common part of scenarios, and has been from the beginning. The question is, do you tell players what the DC is? On the one hand, it breaks immersion to give the players a number. On the other hand, it's not actually fun to play "poker" with players as they try to determine whether or not they can climb something. In older editions it was actually easier, as there were vocab words to describe different surfaces, with clear percentage modifiers. In Pathfinder we can still do that. Take a look at the Climb skill. Most people likely haven't memorized the chart, but it does provide some solid descriptive text. Take a look at the last sentence in my post describing the ways out of the room, and then compare it with the Climb chart. Now we've communicated the DC 15 climb check without using numbers.

Sorry everyone, work slammed me. Should b egood to go later today. I'll get a post up ASAP.

No worries...

I apologize for the lack of posting lately, I just started a new job this week and am also in the midst of house hunting. Free time has been pretty much nonexistent.

No worries Turmoil, stuff comes up! Hang in there :)

I hope the house hunt goes well.

Real life comes first. Always.

Note how I didn't roll a Perception check opposed to the Stealth roll. This is tricky business. In a home game I roll the dice behind the screen in this case, just to keep the players honest. The scenario, however, explicitly points out that the mastiffs here use scent and are aware of the characters. This gets sticky. As the GM in an official PFS game, I must run as written. Players, rather rightly, might feel robbed if their carefully built character fails a stealth roll unilaterally. You have to know your players. If you're worried that they'll complain, roll an unmodified d20 in a spoiler and call it a day.

[dice=Will]1d20 + 3

Lovely...missed by 1...would've rather missed by 10...guess I'm running for three rounds...might put me out of the sewers...

Fleeing sucks. It's not fun. Somehow it's less fun than a hold person, though it's functionally similar. Thankfully, it doesn't quite work the way many people run it.

"Frightened: Characters who are frightened are shaken, and in addition they flee from the source of their fear as quickly as they can. They can choose the paths of their flight. Other than that stipulation, once they are out of sight (or hearing) of the source of their fear, they can act as they want. If the duration of their fear continues, however, characters can be forced to flee if the source of their fear presents itself again. Characters unable to flee can fight (though they are still shaken)."

So, I am completely fine ruling that you flee until you're clear, then you do what you want so you don't come back. So here, flee around the corner, and be stuck there instead of running for 3 rounds and running back for another 3.

Ah, gotcha! I thought we were Panicked. :)

You are, but if I'm not mistaken, but a reasonable case can be made that it doesn't undo the bolded part. I would also never fault someone for ruling the other way.

For me, running isn't fun. So I don't mind cowering around the corner instead.

Just to get the greater fear condition in here,

Shaken < Frightened < Panicked

Shaken: characters don't flee.
Frightened: characters flee from the SOURCE of their fear, choosing their direction.
Panicked: characters flee from ANY DANGER in a RANDOM direction.

When I need to impose a condition on the players, I usually use a Spoiler tag so anyone can read it, it helps me as a reminder and to avoid confusion, because every now and then what I describe and what the condition means, don't add up.

Yeah, there's enough play that I try to make it frustrating, not fun crushing.

In reality, I knew the houndd surviving a retreat per its tactics was simply not going to happen. The AoO and subsequent turn for Hats would have done it in. I could have easily called the combat, but life got in the way yesterday, and I just couldn't dedicate the time to it. In general I'll call a combat if:

1. The outcome is a foregone conclusion.
2. It can be achieved with the minimal expending of resources by the party.
3. There's no conditional on the outcome (meaning the reporting changes if the party takes a foe alive versus dead.)

I just did something similar in one of my games. I felt a little wrong calling the combat early, but there was very little point in dragging the combat out one more round when it was such a foregone conclusion. Now I don't feel so bad. Thanks. :)

I'm mostly AFK today as I'm at a symposium, and presenting from my laptop. Communication. Whenever I think I'm going to be at a rate of <1 Post/Day I speak up when I can. I think it's important to do so because orphaned games are FAR FAR more common now than ever before. If ever you end up trying to pull off an AP from start to finish, I recommend something else too: Slack, Discord, Google Group.

Thanks for the notice!

I can sorta echo the suggestion about having secondary means of communication for longer games. There are a couple of people I game with on the forums that I'm also FB friends with and/or have on Google Hangouts should we need to contact each other outside the forums for some reason. Sometimes it's just to chat, otherwise times someone might ping me really quick for clarification on a combat post - handy for cases where I might have my phone handy but typing a quick post wouldn't be as feasible.

Of course it's all dependent on each person's comfort level; I've met several people who are very private about anything that doesn't relate to the game itself and I can also understand how some women might not feel comfortable giving out too much RL information/contact information about themselves.

This look inside my thoughts contains spoilers for the current scene:

Moving the discussion from Gameplay to here since we've got the rest of the weekend to sort it out. Basically everyone can read the spoiler Engashez posted, which is a secret message to the group that these guys are up to something. Now that everyone is aware of that, we can proceed however you guys want to - suss out a plan, immediately go on the offensive, whatever works :)

I'm planning on going Support for this combat, although my spells are not oriented towards that =P

But we can get an even stronger Hats xD

I haven't got any tricks up my sleeve, unless I can somehow start sneaking around in the tunnels to get behind them, I'm leaning towards immediate offensive. But maybe if we can figure out a way to bunch the trespassers up slightly, we can give Athrax a really nice opening attack. Not sure how we can pull that off though, even if Fazgyn puts on his most innocent/concerned voice and says, "Excuse me, but you really should be holding hands down here. Why it's so dark and confusing, someone might get lost without their sewer buddy!"

I'm leaning towards immediate offensive.

Agree, as I don't see many other options...if we go straight at 'em, might gain surprise or at least keep 'em from getting in good position...

Let's go at them. It sounds like a plan.

Hey guys, I've got work all day tomorrow and then I'll be heading out to see The Last Jedi with friends and family once I get home. If I've got any slow moments during work I'll try to sneak in a post but otherwise I'll catch up with the game either late tomorrow night or Tuesday :)

So this is the part where a human DM is irreplaceable. Being fair, balancing the planning of the players with the "run as written" of the scenario, as well as the goal of having fun. The choices are myriad in how to take it from here, so I try to give each stakeholder its due...

Prose in combat is important, but I often think it's overdone. When the combat includes THIS many foes, I often switch to readability over immersion. It's a personal preference, but one that I think really makes sense in PbP. I know many people who prefer to pur all the dice under spoilers, but I prefer the game aspect of NOT doing it.
I would never fault someone for doing it either way.

Posting my holiday schedule:

I'll be posting at full speed from today until Friday afternoon. After that I'll be completely MIA from December 22-26.

I'll return on the 27th, albeit with a slightly slower pace, likely only once or twice each day until January 2nd, at which point I'll be back full speed for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for letting us know!

Yes, thank you for the notice! I'll be fairly busy myself on the 24th and 25th as well as the 30th but otherwise I'll just be maneuvering around my work schedule as per normal.

So the scene after this one is perfect for a window of time when we're not posting at normal speed. With luck and some extra effort we should get there before tomorrow!

Have a great holiday, Dungeon Master S! Thank you for leting me steal your amazing trap prep! With all my illness this past week, it has been hard to catch up to you, but we now finally have both groups of kobolds in the same place again!

Hugs
Hmm

My pleasure!

Sorry for the silence, hard to get posts done after work when they schedule a person late one day and then buttcrack of dawn the next >.<

At work again today but I will get my post done before the day is through!

Anthrax has a +14 to trap making. So he can take ten on all but the alarm trap with no chance of failure.

I don't have any poison for making a poison arrow trap. I was thinking of doing a pit trap, and a jabbing spear trap.

What do you all think?

Skyrahk has one alarm spell ready, but can't otherwise help with traps, except aid another.

As far as what do I think, following Athrax's lead sounds good to me =P

Hmm...looking at the map, we've got lots of narrow corridors where bad guys are going to be forced to move single-file so I think we should definitely set up at least a couple of Swinging Axe and Jabbing Spear traps. The bigger, more open areas are where we'll want bigger things like the Pit Traps.

Engashez's trap-crafting skills are pitiful so she can't contribute much either besides Aid Anothers to help the rest of you. If we want to try making an Alarm trap, she can cast Grease and Hideous Laughter as possible contenders; she's also got a scroll of Grease as well.

I think you're being a bit hard on Skyrahk there, Khaoz. You can construct as many Swinging Axe as you want, and I like Engashez's idea for placement: A hallway full of swinging axes is a classic. :)

Fazgyn can create any of the traps by taking 10 and has some poison for Dart traps. I was thinking that a couple would be nice shooting across the entrance, then a Jabbing Spear trap for the single file areas. If we have 6 phases (I'm a bit confused, GM, you said five but gave us six) I could also place a Pit Trap at one of the ends to the single-file areas to complement Athrax's.

As an added bonus, if anyone fancies rolling craft their craft checks, Fazgun can give up to two PCs an automatic +2 to their rolls. This doesn't work if you take 10. Alternatively, I can instead reduce the time it takes to create one of my own traps by 1 phase.

Merry Christmas guys! :)

I think you're being a bit hard on Skyrahk there, Khaoz.

Apparently I was, either I overlooked the Craft Skill or I was looking at another character... I have to admit I was a bit sleep-deprived last week.

But yes, maybe a pit trap in the entrance so we can herd them along a death-path sounds good =)

^I can get behind that plan!

I picked up a stomach bug over Christmas, so I'm going to be out for another day or two. Feel free to bot me while I'm snuggled up in bed. ;)

So...a bit confused 'bout this upcoming phase...do each of us craft different traps? So there could potentially be up to 36 different traps?