GM Kiora's Wrath of the Righteous

Game Master Kiora Atua

I think we'll pass on the -20 check, unless a future version of us figures how to travel back in time and give us a +20 bonus to help offset it :p

And Hijinks would be good, if we get a day off maybe I'll turn the little ones into mini-Bugbears ;)

We can probably afford the -5, in all honesty, to keep a decent pace. Feel free to roll Ary's aid another or survival down the line (I don't want to hold us up!) and am heading out to RP soon. :o

So lets do Ehren with normal speed. Shame we can't strip him out of his Hide armor so he can move like a normal person ;p

So lets do Ehren with normal speed. Shame we can't strip him out of his Hide armor so he can move like a normal person ;p

It will take 1 minute, but I'm fine with having Ehren leaving his armor behind, assuming the bugbear Strength would be enough to let him carry everything else without being burdened. (If not he could just leave the combat nonessentials behind.) That way he could track at full speed.

I'll post something to that effect if our Kraken Summoner is all right with it. ;P

Sooooo... hah... yeah totally spaced watching those a-holes, regardless... No one reminded me in character to watch them, so I was taking it as metagaming to do so, thats why I never went back, sorry...

*goes and sits in the corner*

Sooooo... hah... yeah totally spaced watching those a-holes, regardless... No one reminded me in character to watch them, so I was taking it as metagaming to do so, thats why I never went back, sorry...

*goes and sits in the corner*

*hugs*

I like the plot twist ;)

Li'an Va'ardalia wrote:

So lets do Ehren with normal speed. Shame we can't strip him out of his Hide armor so he can move like a normal person ;p

It will take 1 minute, but I'm fine with having Ehren leaving his armor behind, assuming the bugbear Strength would be enough to let him carry everything else without being burdened. (If not he could just leave the combat nonessentials behind.) That way he could track at full speed.

I'll post something to that effect if our Kraken Summoner is all right with it. ;P

I actually did the math and I believe you'll be at 49/50 lb of light encumbrance as a bugbear. Huzzah!

Nevermind, Horgus' phat cash puts you at 51 lb. You could... leave the money behind?

Alright so, let's sum this up:

Hrut and Markus are staying behind. They will deal with the rat infestation.

Anevia will be manning the watch tower and keeping an eye out for shenanigans.

Li'an will borrow Anevia's bow and some of her arrows. (she has 7 bane arrows and 6 normal arrows)

Ary, Ehren, Li'an and Valaria are out a'hunting.

Valaria left her cash with Hrut.

Ehren will be a bugbear. I'm assuming you'll leave your platinum with someone? Hrut? Or you could run it through Horgus.

You will be opting to take a -5 penalty to move at normal speed.

Is there anything I've missed?

Seems like a good description. Li'an and Val can actively keep an eye out for anyone while Ary and Ehren focus on tracking.

And communications via message.

I think Ehren was plannin' on dropping trow too. Or at least ditching his hide :P

So ditching the platinum and taking on the bugbear form would be enough? Working on a post now, just want to make sure I'm leaving everything I need to.

I think Ehren was plannin' on dropping trow too. Or at least ditching his hide :P

He's only 1 lb over with his mad bugbear strength and masterwork backpack.

But I'm totally down for him runnin' through the city in the noodz if that's what y'all want to do.

Maybe I'll give him a circumstantial intimidate bonus for it ;D

Hide is still 20' no? I was thinking it was to avoid moving 20', not to avoid encumbrance problems.

Can we call the bonus "Runnin' wild?" :p

Hey, he's still wearing clothes. He's no more naked than any other caster! :P

Hide is still 20' no? I was thinking it was to avoid moving 20', not to avoid encumbrance problems.

Ooh okay, didn't know that :0

I always thought he was just goin' slow cause he's been at medium encumbrance this whole time

Yeah... I remember being kind of nervous about being at medium encumbrance towards the start, but then it occurred to me that it really isn't much worse than wearing medium armor to begin with.

So tired. :|

Thank goodness Paizo was down so I didn't have 800 posts to read. :P Kinda unfortunate at the same time.

Why was 2k Discussion posts not celebrated!?

You got the 2000th post, Kioralady! :o

Hard to believe we've got 4500 posts between discussion and gameplay. It's pretty crazy :)

By the way, I'll be travelling starting early tomorrow morning and coming back Tuesday afternoonish. I should still be able to post, but it'll be less frequently (probably only late in the evening and early morning) as I'll have family stuff to take care of during the day.

Have fun! (assuming it's a trip for pleasure of course)

Reminding y'all that todays my f2f thing and we'll probably be starting in a few hours - they want to have a long session to make up for missing last week sooo :D

I'll try and get a pair of posts up in a second but we'll see. I still need to set some stuff up so.

Hrut it's your turn! I'll organize the first round of combat once you post to make up for my f%!% up.

I'm glad you're having a longer session. How did the thing-we-shouldn't-speak-of go?

I've never actually 'fired' a player, so to speak. I don't really have the heart to. In fact, I've kind of been problematic because I've fought to keep people I knew were bad for our sessions in our sessions so they wouldn't be left out. I now realize I was holding their happiness (and my pride) above the other four people who really didn't care for them being there. Bad choices. :(

Well, because I didn't fumble my sense motive haha

The player didn't actually like playing tabletop. (They thought they would, but when they actually sat down to play, they found it way too much math and reading and crunchiness - they'd probably like a less complicated system than 3.5 though)

But they were sticking it out because they were worried they wouldn't ever get to hang out with some of the other, more engaged, more into RPGing people at the table otherwise.

But their apathy about the game was dragging sessions down. In particular, once I had slotted out a 6 hour session - we ended up only playing 1.5 hours because that player showed up late, left early, and mostly paid attention to their phone and made combat take ages during. Also, when they got mythic, they refused to level up their own character and look at the options, just going "whatever, I don't really care, just pick something good."

So I went to their house, sat down and talked about it and they basically confirmed what I had been thinking (the above stuff) - I agreed to help organize non-tabletop times every now and then for them, and they didn't really mind getting booted from the campaign. They said they didn't want to speak up for fear of offending me, since I put a lot of effort into organizing/running/hosting etc. And I was all, well, I do put a lot of work into it - and for that reason I only want to play with people who really, really want to - hence this discussion.

So all is good :)

I'm glad it went well. The person in question for me eventually just quit of their own volition, freeing my from my white-knighting, and freeing the other players of their sullen sulkiness all the time. So it kind of worked out.

:) I'm glad you're still working to be inclusive, too. :)

Yeah, it's great that you were able to settle it with a mature discussion. :)

When it came to problem players, my old face-to-face group had a bad habit of just sucking it up and waiting for things to fall apart on their own. We lost two people over the course of the year or two we played for. That was a lot of drama that I sure as hell didn't sign on for.

Glad to hear it went well.

We've had a couple instances of players being disruptive, but they tend not to get invited again, or just stop showing up on their own. A couple times party members ended up killing off the player to take care of the problem :P

Actually one of our friends who would play off and on again (good friend, bad player), inevitably chose something that would be a pain in the ass, his favorites being an Assassin and a lAwfully Obnoxious Paladin. The last two instances I remember, our mage gave him a ring which he was tricked into believing would protect him from poison, and then he subsequently died to poison when the mage got him to open something with contact poison on it. His paladin ended up charmed by my bard, which pretty much solved the obnoxious part and made him want to stop playing.

That same mage also terminated one of our other trouble makers by "accidentally" getting confused and using an animate dead scroll to bring him back, claiming he thought it worked the same as raise dead.

@Li'an - Haha, that's really funny.

My players murderhobo all night long, but their characters jive well together so its all good. They're fond of making characters that are family members (like half of the RotRL cast were children of a very promiscuous elf wizard) or 'blood brothers' or otherwise already extremely loyal to one another. I think if their characters die two of the players plan on a husband/wife orc warrior duo.

They're also really fond of picking some weird, obscure language (like Aklo) and using it to speak amongst themselves and prevent eavesdropping. Usually when theyre up to no good :p

My husband is playing LG right now and everyone else is CG (+1 LN) - they're having some arguments about that but it's not actually bothering the players, just IC stuff. Its actually spurred some nice morality arguments - my players rarely roleplay so I am enjoying it.

In any case I was still really stressed out all day leading up to "the talk" because I was worried I was misinterpreting apathy in a player who was just overwhelmed by the complicatedness of the game. His total lack of enthusiasm for gaining mythic pretty much pushed me into action though - I mean how could you not be excited about that? (He also fell asleep during the ascension haha)

But I read it correctly. Hurrah :O

Just out of curiosity, how are you planning to address that since it happened right after ascension? Is it the mythic power going to end up being too much, making his character swell up and explode?

Joking aside, that timing does seem a bit unfortunate. Not that PCs are ever "expendable," but ascension feels to me like the point where it becomes set in stone that the characters are truly destined for greatness. Obviously things are already being built up to that for us (and covered by our backstories even), but narratively, leaving after ascension and not just before feels odd. Like, if Ehren died or had to leave before reaching that point, it'd be a tragic moment, but in a way it would just mean that he was not Chosen.

Like many things in Pathfinder, writing PCs out of the story is an art form, I guess. :P

His character was a CN human with amnesia that the heroes found wandering around lost through the ruins of Kenabres shortly after surfacing.

The amnesia part was a transparent way to join the campaign and not learn anything about the campaign setting - just learn stuff as he goes. I was going to eventually reveal to the player that he was actually an android from nearby Numeria who had just "reset" and gained a new soul recently, as androids do, that was taken in by cultists to see if they could use it as a weapon.

His character was amoral and self-serving - very survival oriented (which makes sense because he just kind of woke up in a postapocalyptic hell, so to speak). His eventual goal was to learn who he was before, and the player planned to have his character transition to CG or maybe NG through the influence of the more heroic players - through their actions he'd gain a conscience.

Anyway he never got to that point so i think I'm going to have him just slip off in the night, deciding that in the best interest of his survival, he should try and get as far away from the Worldwound as possible.

The player never actually leveled his character up into mythic, so I'm going to say the character likewise never actually attained any mythic tiers.

He might show up later in the campaign if I can think of a good use for him. A villain, a captive, a sudden savior - lots of options.

Writing people into a game is always my biggest objection to people switching characters. My players have this big tendency to get bored of characters and ask to change, and I always put the burden of coming up with justifications for leaving and entering, as well as the reasons why the other PCs would like them, on them.

That sucks, Markus.

I don't allow my players to switch characters. *shrug* I'm laid back about retraining, as long as they explain their reasoning to me, and they don't abuse it (they haven't so far). I'm fine with someone pitching the most holiest of paladins, deciding they don't like paladins, and swapping to a cleric or inquisitor or warpriest, for example. I wouldn't be okay with them swapping to a rogue.

But also my players die a lot. :p

No deaths in WoTR so far though. I'm shocked. They're learning! ;3

I actually take it a little easy on my players most of the time - I turn up the difficulty only in parts where I think it would be convenient for people to die - building relationships between the PCs and NPCs is too important for me to throw PCs away willy-nilly.

I did have 11 deaths over the course of Carrion Crown (3 each during two BBEG battles, of course). Also my Kingmaker game ended in a TPK, but that was 100% their fault.

I've run APs and modules as written - I could softball things and just not tell them this is true- they wouldn't know the difference hah! But they've explicitly asked me to run things the way stuff was meant to be ran, so I respect it.

RotRL in particular had a lot of save or suck things going on, and some really, really rough bosses.

My players also like to kick doors down and run around dungeons trumpets blazing, so that the whole damn dungeon shows up to fight them at once. Which is a bad idea in a lot of RotRL :p

It's been a while since I've been involved in a TPK, as GM or otherwise.

One of my Carrion Crown players actually died to a Cure Light Wounds, as the druid didn't stop to consider that he was a Dhampir, despite knowing he was. We were all laughing about it for a while afterwards. That's been the only death in that campaign so far.

I can't remember any terribly memorable TPKs from our groups, but we did totally flub the end of Temple of the Elemental Evil, letting the big bad free into the world. Our group sat there for a few minutes going "Uhhh... Did we just do what I think we just did?" After we'd decided that we *had* in fact doomed the world, we ran back to town, thanked them for their hospitality, excused ourselves and ran away. We weren't the most heroic heroes ;)

I think eventually we went on an adventure to get some artifacts to go back and fix our mistake, but only after a lot of coaxing, cajoling, and promises of rewards from the appropriate people.

My group TPKd at the end of RotRL because.. well... in RotRL you get a magic doodad that you're supposed to use to fight the BBEG (you spend a great deal of time getting that magic doodad - for us almost 3 months of sessions) and... they forgot about it during the actual fight and died.

I maintain the gameworld for all of the craziness theyve done, so in my f2f WotR right now all of Varisia is just ruined XD

The players intend to move back and boot out the BBEG from Varisia once theyre done with the Worldwound. I'll give the BBEG some mythic tiers, and if they TPK again I'll laff.

The closest I've ever come to a TPK happened about 3 weeks ago. The DM kept flubbing encounters pretty badly. Like... level 1 rogue and level 5 wizard against 4 level 1 characters. My character in particular had a bad time when I got surrounded by CR1 Fire elementals. :|

He basically had an NPC come in and wreck the fight. I'm not sure whether I'm even interested in continuing; I don't really care for the players. :(

This was -after- an encounter with a person with at least 50 HP, and immediately followed by a fight with two experts and another rogue. :|

Ugh Ary. That's pretty rough.

I had that once in a game, except that we started at higher level and the DM made a point of killing us all and having the NPC come in, drive off the bad guy and resurrect us all. It pretty much killed off any motivation to continue for the group.

It's one thing to give the characters a hopeless fight to impress upon them the gravity of their situation, but curb-stomping the group isn't any fun. He custom-tailored mobs to our characters as well, which again can be neat, but when every mob we encounter takes advantage of grappling rules to destroy my unoptimized Angel-with-a-Greatsword Eidolon, it's extremely demotivating.

In his defense though it was the first time he'd DM'd and he's definitely a rules lawyer/min-maxer. As someone who once was the group rules lawyer, I know it's hard to avoid falling into that mode of thinking when DMing as well :p

It's actually an AP called Zeitgeist... and the guy's apparently ran it 4 times and has never had a problem before. So I don't know. :|

Ooh, the steampunk one. I tried to get into one of those once, but it fell apart after recruitment because the GM poofed :\

My GM poofed and we got a new GM... it wasn't going well before the first GM left. :(

The players are the sort of players that just jump in once a week to say what their actions are and ignore it otherwise (including what's going on). Ugh. :(

Blah, that's no fun.

Doubly so after playing in this campaign! Kinda sets a high bar for everything else to compete against no? ;)

It's always a pain when a new GM chokes at the end of recruitment. I had applied to a Carrion Crown game and got selected. As you might guess, the game never started. I was fortunate to have applied with a character that was in a previous failed CC game, but the others put a lot of work into creating some new for the game's specifications. It's frustrating to put all that work into your character, to be told that you made it in, only for things to go kaput before they even begin. :/

Yeah, a bit. The pacing and the people kind of blow the others aside from 1-2 out of the water. So I'm left just feeling that the other campaigns are just empty as much as I hate to say that. It's... honestly rather depressing. It's made worse by the fact that a lot of them have been legitimately disappointing recently. :(

I don't want to complain and whine... but I just feel whiny today. :(

I'm fine with being selected and it never getting off the ground; that's about the same as not getting selected for me. I just hate when I add another campaign to my list and another alias... :(

That sucks :(

I'm pretty new to pbp so I haven't really experienced any horror stories. My other pbp, an Andoran homebrew, is going slower but the players post 1/day - which is the requirement.

I think a big part of the problem is a lot of the players post at like 2am my time (west coast people) so combat moves very slowly.

They also aren't keen on pre-rolling the way you guys are, for some reason. Especially odd since I haven't really pulled any mid-combat "Millorn appears!" shenanigans yet

Well... for me, you got lucky. I'm terribly impatient! As a direct result, I do my best to make sure I'm not going to be the one being waited on. There've still been I think... two times? That we waited a significant amount of time on me. :(

It helps that I'm just a little ranger, though. So my actions amount to 'hit it with a stick' most of the time. :)

I'm lucky to have all of you <3

My Andoran campaign was moving smoothly until they hit their first dungeon. Now they're having decision making issues revolving around the fact that they don't have set plan as to who scouts, and they angst over which door to pick (took like three days for them to pick between three mostly identical doors)

You guys haven't hit a real dungeon yet - you glided through the Lair of the Vile and Vicious and took it out in two encounters - so we'll see how that goes ;)

I expect it to go better though just because you already have a modus operandi as to marching order, scouting, etc. We'll just see if your door picking skills are on par :p

Pfft, I'm not sure if you're lucky about Fen'wen. She's getting all of your favorites. Those should be your favorites. :0

Also, yeah. Just looking at the map, the way we did things really took out most of the decision agony.

I think that just trusting our scouts to make choices for us will be a great way to go, with the caveat that they occasionally listen to us when we're talking sense. :P

I'm fine with being selected and it never getting off the ground; that's about the same as not getting selected for me. I just hate when I add another campaign to my list and another alias... :(

I donno, I'm not sure how it is with y'all, but for me it's a huge investment to get together a character. Planning the build isn't so bad once I have an idea, but I really have to spend a lot of time inside that character's mind to get some kind of idea who they are for writing the story. Getting not selected stinks, but getting selected and started means I spend more time in the character's head trying to figure out how they interact with the other people.

Back on less terrible topics: As far as the favorites go, I think they're pretty evenly distributed, and Kiora gets plenty of them herself ;p

I also like that the group seems to have settled into a really good MO. We had a bit of a learning experience with the flies on the way in to the temple area, and we've pulled a couple of seat-of-the-pants bluff maneuvers that really shouldn't have worked except that Desna <3 Valaria (I'm pretty sure it's carved in a tree somewhere in Kenabres). Otherwise, though, I think the group really hit its stride right away. Hopefully we'll keep it up :)

Pretty much that. Any given character takes me probably an entire afternoon (or day off) or more to create the crunch and fluff and marry it. Having the rug ripped out from under them adds to it... and having the the permanent blotch on my campaigns tab that makes me sad everytime I see it slowly grow... :(

Re: Confession: Welcome back!

Also, Desna supports Valaria's attempts to travel and avoid combat. She laughs wholeheartedly at her combat abilities :p (I say this, due to the sheer number of posts about Desna not being with her, or asking her to please help :p)

Ary's still got a lot of growing to do... if she ever gets over this Howler problem. :|

You have to keep asking for help. If you start taking Desna for granted you get eaten by a Howler ;)

Don't worry, we'll get you over your fear of Howlers. Probably just need to get you healed up to full and have Ehren sit there casting guidance on you nonstop until you stop freaking out about them!

Oh my gosh, I never would have known that it was you.

That game's actually still going, albeit more slowly (mostly because of me). Interestingly I asked Valaria's player to join (and she said yes) (I also asked Ary and KioraGM but they said no).

Ary's player struggles with the concept of being evil. :S

I can't even play Renegade on Mass Effect.