GM Ladile's League of Kick-Ass Dudes: A Pathfinder Society Campaign (Inactive)

Game Master Lady Ladile

Player: Larry Smith
Character: Lazarus Logos
Pathfinder Society Number: 67083-24
Faction: Dark Archive
Slow Track or Normal: Slow

This Chronicle #: 15
Starting XP: 14.5
Initial Prestige: 19
Initial Fame: 29
Prestige Spent on this Chronicle: None yet.
Starting Gold: 1049gp
Day Job Roll: NA
Gold Spent on this Chronicle: None yet.
Anything else you want me to note on your Chronicle: Nothing at this time.

GM, Can you flip the switch to share your slides with us? Need to plug Lazarus into the templated march orders. He'll generally be near the back of the bus.

Player: GM Red
Character: Brayden Valdrin
Pathfinder Society Number: 205498-17
Faction: Sovereign Court
Slow Track or Normal: Normal

This Chronicle #: 7
Starting XP: 7
Initial Prestige: 10
Initial Fame: 12
Prestige Spent on this Chronicle: 0
Starting Gold: 5675
Day Job Roll: Craft (Weapons): 1d20 + 4 ⇒ (5) + 4 = 9
Gold Spent on this Chronicle: 1000
Anything else you want me to note on your Chronicle: Nope!

Whoops, slides should be editable now. Sorry!

Hey folks, I wanted to check in and say that I'm sick/have been sick. While I'm definitely feeling better than I did, I still seem to have a lot of general malaise and mental fatigue happening + I work the next three nights in a row starting tonight (Saturday). Given the circumstances I'm just going to take the next few days off from PbP; I should be back in action by Tuesday evening at the latest.

Get well, mind and body.

Don`t worry about PFS. It will still be here when you are feeling better.

Posting this in a couple of different places, so apologies if you've already seen it.

If you'd like to join my table of #10-08 What Prestige is Worth (Tiers 7-11)?
The sign-up document is here.
Outpost 2 runs from March 11 to May 6.

Larry
aka
GM Lorenzo
aka Lazarus Logos

Hey guys,

I have had a death in my family so posting for me will be sporadic for a while. Please bot Yorad as needed.

I will let you know when I am back posting full time.

As mentioned over in StS, you have my deepest condolences Eric. Take all the time that you need and I'll bot Yorad as needed until you're able and up to returning.
______________

Feeling much better now and so I'm ready to kick things into gear again here. Thank you all for your patience!

Don't worry Yorad, Frankie will keep you safe... :)

Take your time. My condolences.

If that little encounter seemed odd, well, it's kinda meant to be :)

Ya, you really sometimes need to get a bit loose with the diplomacy rules if it just makes sense. A minute is a long time in combat to say any sort of parlay attempts are useless unless they last that long.

What? An encounter that doesn't have "morale: The enemies are suicidal and fight to the death for some reason"?

I know, right!?

It actually makes me really sad when I have those and the party or at least one or two characters try so dang hard to talk the bad guys out of fighting and I can't let it happen :(

Sometimes it makes sense for certain NPCs/creatures to fight to the death but your average humanoid goons that make up a lot of bad guy fodder? Most of those I can't see fighting to death unless you want to imagine some sort of a, "I'd rather they kill me than face the boss having failed" deal where they're more scared of their boss than the party.

And most nonlethal attackers take a -4 penalty, so "just knock them out for later" isn't a real option, either. I'm just glad Diplomacy is an option, here. 10 rounds is too long to make a Diplomacy check.

You can choose to assist either the goblins or the villagers. Each of you can attempt two skill checks; if you assist the goblins in clearing out brush and combustibles use Survival or an appropriate Profession (such as Architect or Farmer). If you assist the villagers in dousing the buildings, use either Acrobatics or Climb.

The GM called for two attempts to help the goblins and/or the villagers.

Oh, I fail at reading. Thanks for the reminder Lazarus!

Hey guys, real talk time. I know that my posting habits (or lack of) have been really erratic lately and out of character; it's something that I was already aware of in general but the fact that a few of you guys (my players across various games) have checked in with me privately via PM is just further proof of that.

This is frustrating for me because I can't point to any one thing as an explanation for why this is. I still feel excited when I think about the vast majority of my current games as both a GM and as a player. My terrible traitor brain continually whispers, 'Hey, you know <scenario> or <module>? You should totally GM that in the future!' But when I sit down to write, I just...can't concentrate. Sometimes I can't concentrate at all, other times I may be able to get through a few games before my brain pulls me in a different direction and I get distracted with something else.

I don't know if it's stress because I don't feel particularly stressed, but who knows? I don't know if it's lack of proper rest - my sleep schedule is *still* somewhat erratic, especially lately with having to pull random day shifts at work due to being short-staffed. I don't know if it is burnout, just manifested as inability to concentrate rather than feelings of apathy/dread/loathing. I really don't know. But what I do know is that it's affecting my ability to provide fun, quality games for my players and to be a fun, quality player myself. And that's not fair to you guys, to my GMs, and to my fellow players.

As much as part of me feels like it's admitting defeat - for I can actually be a pretty stubborn person under the right circumstances - this has been happening for long enough that I think I need to make some changes and seek outside assistance to reduce my game load as a GM and as a player and see if that will help the situation.

Now with all of the above having been said, this next part is for you guys in particular. I wasn't kidding when I made my previous post about how much I enjoy GMing for you guys and your various characters. As of right now, I don't have any plans to drop or otherwise 'end' League or the StS game because they are the two GM games I'm enjoying and/or looking forward to the most - but my posting for both may be erratic for a bit longer as I work to get the rest of my PbP business sorted out and taken care of. I hope that won't be a deal-breaker for anyone here but I definitely understand if it is.

Take your time, Ladile. I'd rather be patient and wait until your soul's recharged.

Let's resume when you're ready. If that means we wait, that's okay. If it means we monitor the campaign thread for a GM post, and adapt to a slower pace, then that's okay, too.

Quality over quantity every time.

I second Lazarus here. Take care of yourself first Ladile. We will be waiting for you.

I'll be sure to keep Frankie on a tight leash while you're away (not good for everyone else hahaha!). But no rush here on my end. Rest up.

Please take your time and recharge those GM batteries. We'll be here for you when you return.

No worries!

I'm with everyone else here. Breaks are totally fine, and you shouldn't post if you're not feeling it. I go through this same thing all the time, and it's why you'll see frequent but short delays in most of my games. If I don't feel I can write something interesting and fun, I pass on posting for that day. I'd expect everyone else would do the same. This is a creative hobby after all, and you wouldn't pick up a guitar or paint a picture if you weren't feeling inspired at the time, would you? Take care!

Thank you guys for being so understanding. Even if I'm not making GM posts I'll try my best to keep you guys updated here on the status of things and when you can hopefully expect new GM posts.

Current status is that I've (hopefully) gotten someone to finish off my table for RetroCon and I'm currently looking into finding replacement GMs both for my Slave Master's Mirror game that had only just started and for my upcoming OutPost table. And in what is probably the best timing I've ever seen, the GM that went MIA from my Shattered Star game has returned and expressed interest in taking back the reigns on that game if all of the players are amenable to it. So all of that right there takes a lot of pressure off. I'm also looking at dropping one or two player games as well so that will also help.

I don't want to just totally drop everything - just take a little time off to refresh and also reduce what's on my plate. So thank you all for being happy to give me the time to do all that :)

Checking in! Over the last week+ I've primarily let myself just focus on the games that I'm participating in as a player and I think I'm slowly getting my energy and creativity back. I've restarted my Night March game and I think I'm about ready to restart this one. Give me until the end of this string of night shifts (I'm currently on 2 of 4) and then I'll see what I can do about getting things rolling again for League!

If staggering the restart of my GM games seems like it's working out well then I'll look at getting Shore to Sea going again next :)

Aaaand we're back! Thank you for your patience! I know some of you are busy with various RL things on top of OutPost and so I have no problems with taking a relaxed pace for a bit while we get started again.

And... back from Italy...

I don't think any of you have used up a ton of your spells/abilities for the day but let me know if you guys want to take a rest before heading into the forest or if you want to set out now and take a rest later on.

And I know that the logistics of camping out in a forest that's currently burning in places is...odd...but the scenario is a bit vague in this regard except for what Dragbog has already told you about travel time to get back to his village.

It's a friendly RPG fire that conveniently burns in a wide perimeter to avoid the party as they sleep. :)

Frankie will dance those embers into submission!

Jan just needs an hour to cast his spell.

I'll be on radio silence most of tomorrow, attending a retreat. I'll try to post tomorrow evening.

My dad died today.
Please give me a day or two to get my head on straight
Thanks.

My condolences Lazarus. I know how you feel man so take all the time you need.

Real sorry Larry. Thoughts to you and your family man.

I'm really sorry to hear about this. Please take the time you need.

I'm very sorry, Larry. Take all the time you need and we'll see you when you feel up to returning.

I *will* move things along probably by tomorrow at some point but sometimes I like to stop and smell the character interactions :)

It's a little early but I finally got my work schedule for the month and wanted to note the following now:

I'll be out of town at a convention April 13th & 14th. Given the nature of conventions I likely won't be checking in or posting at all except for maybe quick notes in Discussion if necessary.

I'll also be out of town April 22nd - April 24th. For this I will have my chromebook and should be able to check in and make some posts in the evenings before bed.

That is all :)

I'm back. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Welcome back, Larry. Take your time getting caught up on things here; you've not missed a great deal :)

I moved Lazarus forward a bit as he would have moved earlier. I can do that on a subsequent turn, if the GM wills it.

That's fine and if Laz would have done something else on his first turn instead of using his Bless wand then we can retcon that as well, no problem.

Hey folks! Just wanted to update you on a couple of things:

Although we've still got some things to do yet here in the Finadar Forest I'm going to go ahead and start doing some prep work on our next scenario. Of the available options my tentative plan, assuming everyone is on board, is to do #7-02 Six Seconds to Midnight, #9-09 Beyond the Halflight Path, and then #4-23 Rivalry's End in that order. That's another level's worth of scenarios we can definitely do; after that we can look at the feasibility of doing Season 10 stuff or if we'll need to make other playing arrangements.

For those of you who have played Halflight Path (as it is an evergreen) and had a middling to poor experience - I promise I'll do my best to make this time around a better experience! That said, I'll eventually need to know which 'story path' you played last time so I don't end up repeating it.

The other point of business is that if everyone is amiable to it, I'll get us restarted on Shore to Sea on Wednesday, April 10th. Starting Wednesday I'll have 7 (!!!) days off from work so the timing would work out beautifully to restart at that time.

Booyah! Sounds awesome.

As far as Halflight path, hrm I did it once recently and I'll check which path it was...

**EDIT: I can't find anywhere that actually states a title of the path we took but I can tell you we were looking for lost humans and fought kobolds... if that helps?

Sounds good to me.. I can see if I can find while path I went down.

We went down the Sparklegrim Passage.

Looking forward to it! I haven't played any of those scenarios.

Sounds good to me.. I can see if I can find while path I went down.

We went down the Sparklegrim Passage.

That name sounded familiar so I looked back a bit closer and indeed that is the same one I did as Vanarog. I also double checked that Chad wasn't in the game with me because I tend to forget such things!