GM Shady's The Dragon's Demand

Game Master shady18

Have moved Den and Draken - sweet little map. Good skillz GM Shady. As a complete technophobe I am in awe of anyone that can do this even after 322 hours play time in your case.

Cheers

P.S. Can you do something about Den's dice roller next. Getting too many ones for my liking!

I have piped in on the discussion on ROll20.

Have moved Den and Draken - sweet little map. Good skillz GM Shady.

It's the map from the module, shorn of its markings. Another GM sent me it, I can't claim the credit ...

Posted on the forum, moved my token, all in Roll20.

The maps got a very heroquesty feel to it, its nice.

Not saying there are necessarily any traps here, but it would be worth deciding marching order for 5 foot (one person wide) and 10 foot (two person wide) corridors for reason of a) any potential traps and b) any potential monsters. As you can see most of the corridors thus far in this particular map are 10 feet wide.

Note also when in a corridor I treat the "queue" as hampered movement so if things are backed up it becomes slower to get to the front and make a move.

Arnon, healer and unarmored, should go in the middle.

Den and Draken can operate from the rear if you like?

Looks like Den chose armor with his money and Arnon chose the longbow. One day we will both have the other.

Cheers

So: the two half-orcs, then us three squishies, then Den and Draken?

Roet agrees with this message. :)

Is it dark in here, GMS? Just thinking about how we are lighting the way - possibly dancing lights? Dunno.

It's dark and I'm assuming you're using torches.

Oh I didn't realise... *heading to gameplay*

Pipernortin is more of a 'refresh his cast of dancing lights every minute, despite how annoying that may be' sort of fellow. On reading back through, I realized I forgot to mention this repeated casting after mentioning it the one time--you can pretty much assume he'll keep the lights going from here out until someone tells him to cut it out. If it becomes relevant, I can roll a d10 at the start of every combat to see how long he has left on the latest cast.

He usually keeps them floating randomly about his person, shaped and colored like fireflies rather than the creepy will-o-wisps the spheres usually look like.

(How did we all forget about the lights, anyway?)

We were all enjoying the gaming too much to notice. But when I saw the two with darkvision at the front it reminded me. Then I noticed that Den has no torches and hasn't learnt light. Ehem.

I can handle you one of my torches. I always buy the kit hehe.

Thanks. Good to know. Den will take one for now and hope he doesn't need it today.

Cheers

If Pip and I alternate dancing lights we should have at least 5 minutes left on any casting at any point. It'll be like a disco!

Sorry for the low post rate so far.. Garekk is fine being up front. Between his darkvision and his raging, it would probably be the best spot for him!

A brief word from our sponsors - I'm running a recruitment here for a PFS Core campaign, around PFS season 0/1. The campaign takes you all the way through level 12, but being PFS its in a small and digestible bites.

If you're interested PM me (I'd prefer not to kick off a discussion here) and, depending on whether you have further questions, I'll reserve you a slot (because I like you).

Too bad I don't do PFS...

I would love to, but between school, work, and the two games I am GM'ing, I am a bit full at the moment. If you need someone later on or have any questions about PFS, let me know. That's mainly all I run.

I keep meaning to try PFS, but it's just never come up. The local game shops near me never ran any games and I didn't know enough about it to try and start it up myself.

PFS really is pretty much the same as it is here. The biggest differences are that outside of available everywhere common items, you can only buy items based on your fame score (accumulated automatically as you play scenarios)/ chronicle sheets, and the in game rules are a bit more strict as far as races, equipment, spells, etc. On the other hand, GM's are not supposed to change anything about the scenario in any way and must play it as written.

Thank you, GM Shady, and I appreciate the compliment. But I'm in four games and that is enough.

Cheers

The idea/attraction of this exercise is to play a lot of quick scenarios as a campaign (per this post). Also, four games, enough? Pah. :-)

Sounds like a great idea.

This weekend is a DIY weekend and probably into next week. RL trumps gaming!

Hope you have a good weekend, everyone.

Cheers

I kind of assumed prestidigitation couldn't be used that way, but I'm always up for interesting ways out of sticky situations, so I thought I'd ask. A

BTW to extend Arnon's point I should have included the DR in the response to Kn(arcana) so I'm kind of glad your colour spray just worked.

Yeah, color spray is just too awesome. I'm just a little sad it invalidated my simultaneous post ;.;

As for the imp...

The sensible thing to do here is probably to go all Caesar on it while it can't respond to our attacks. But, Pip's too good aligned to do that even to a jerk of an imp. He'd probably vote for tying it up and then trying to figure out the most 'humane' way to get rid of it.

Which is a terrible idea. Evil little bastards.

@GM Shady--It has only just occurred to me that the daggers Pip's been lugging around are medium sized. Would he be able to use one of them as a small shortsword instead of a medium dagger? If no one else wants it, it would at least cut down on the weight Pipernortin's carrying around (and look really cool).

@Pip - I'm afraid they're medium; you could use them but at -2 penalty.

Gentle reminder: Per earlier posts, you shouldn't assume you can just do something - it might fall through so that you fail to complete an action. You attempt an action, it may not complete. Avogadro picks up the imp and attempts to take him to the nearest cell, which is actually a walk away in another part of the dungeon. But he can't get the imp out of the door - why did you think it's been stuck in this room all that time?

The post has Avogadro assumptively taking the imp from the room, down the corridor, shutting the door then saying something to someone who might have followed him - too many assumptions in the series of actions.

Sorry boss... :(

Ha, just sayin' ...

So, because school has gotten to be such a consistent pain in my ass, I will be once again paring down my games as some of my groups finish current scenarios. Hopefully I can get my post rate in here back up in the very near future. Until then, please bear with me.. or bot me as needed. Thank you for the will save, GM. I will endeavor to post more often.

Note - on Sunday I am going on another trip and next week will be in Pacific Time. Quite a busy week but should be on-line at least once a day, hopefully.

Hi, I'm now back from my travels and hopefully staying put this coming week. Sorry that the posting velocity has dropped slightly.

One thing I wanted to mention - the spoiler incident with Den and handling it. This isn't, by the way, a telling off as such, but I want to be clear on how to handle such situations.

At the time we were in a timer as I didn't know whether you'd pull the lever, and if you did I needed to know who was standing where. Pre-reading the spoiler rendered that effectively moot.

Possible courses of action at that point included:
- running the check retrospectively. That's what happened, partly as I didn't have time to think about it but it doesn't really work. Den's comment implied we would have retcon'd it from the records if the roll had failed. Well, I don't agree with retcons (and you shouldn't assume you can get away with them), so permitting the retrospective roll (even if successful) in the first place wasn't correct on my part, in my view.
- there is also an XP bonus on the room. Dragon's Demand has fairly high level bosses so grants a lot of story bonuses on the way up so when you get to them you're good and ready. So I then have the choice of a) not granting the XP (which may mean you don't quite follow the arc and indeed may not be ready when the time comes) or else specifically withholding it from (in this case) Den, which is going to result in a fair bit of extra bookkeeping if these things continue to happen.

In retrospect I should probably have had the trap trigger in some non-lethal but inconvenient way, taking down Den and Pip, who were stuck there at the time (subject to normal issues like reflex saves). The story consequence would have been that Den noticed the trap but not in time to do anything about it. So, just to let you know, that's the kind of way I'll deal with these issues going forward.

The reason I'm posting this now is, quite apart from having had a little chance to think about it, I can set down the expectation going forward without it looking like I'm just being vindictive (and don't worry, no punishment will be retrospectively applied, Den).

Easiest solution: don't read the spoiler if it doesn't apply to you, and don't assume outcomes for those things you don't control.

Thanks for letting us know. I can understand why reading that spoiler was a blunder because I've run games on the boards and had one or two players who couldn't resist taking a look at spoilers they shouldn't.

Its not the way I usually do things and I'm not known for it so when something like this happens I don't expect a retcon but there was very little I could do in the situation other than hold my hands up and admit to my mistake.

I'll take the easiest solution in the future.

Cheers
FW

@Den: no problem. Actually this is a very active group, which is great, so I am having to figure out more on the fly here than is normally the case, but it's all good in the end. The difficulty is in effecting these rulings without detracting from people's enjoyment, so (and this applies to everyone) please let me know if I'm being too heavy handed.

One other thing, during recruitment there was one person who had played this before up to this point, somehow fallen into the trap and then the GM had had the floor re-cover him over, giving the player the impression that his character had effectively been buried alive without any recourse, and was now dead.

I don't think that was the GM intention (I went and read through the thread) but it shows how careful you need to be - the player quit and the GM continued to bot him (since the character was actually still alive, it turned out) through the rest of the scenario.

@GM Shady - As players, it is our duty to make the GM's life as hectic as possible :)

In all seriousness, I just talked to another one of my groups about accidental spoiler readage. I feel like most people who play (pbps or otherwise) are pretty good about them. There's always that temptation to read the spoiler text, but even then I think most people manage to separate character and player knowledge fairly well. It has only come up once in that particular game and was, much like this case, an oops. I also tend to keep a GM Info spoiler tab for my convenience while I'm running games, so if players really care that much, that can totally cheat and find out what they're fighting and how much health it's got.

...But if they do that, then that just means I can make the next fight tougher, since they'll be so prepared!

Regarding retcons and the like, I hope adding in a /before/ tag to some of Pip's actions is alright. I ended up busier than expected this week and missed a chance to post Pip's response to Talia. But he would never pass up a perfectly good chance for storytelling. I tried to avoid doing anything that would change anything, other than perhaps a little more dialogue between characters and NPCs happening off stage.

@Pip: By and large I don't mind you guys trying to figure out timing issues between you but if I've moved things on - as here - it's too late, otherwise once again chaos ensues. So I'd prefer we didn't get into the habit of it (now we've brought it up).

In this case Arnon gives his version of events, for some reason Pip doesn't get a word in, Arnon's version is less than inspiring (normally I'd play with small amounts of XP for RP, but with PbP, and similarly to the earlier situation, I'm left with using small negative/positive story effects). The outcome should be that Pip gets frustrated with either himself, for missing the chance, or with Arnon, for fluffing it.

Had you got in before Talia flounced off, you could have added colour etc and the reaction might well have been different. I'll always try to respond to the set of posts since my last one, rather than to each one in turn.

If the posting pace is too rapid (I think we have 3 continents and probably 4-5 time-zones in play here) let me know and I'll hold back so people have the chance to respond.

I'll move you back into the basement tomorrow evening. I'll run any appropriate checks for you and take 10 if it guarantees a pass.

Fair enough!

Though I'll have you know, you've make Pip weep a river of tiny gnome tears. (Which, of course, brings us to the duty of every GM.)
:)

I've got an interview for a new job tomorrow so I'm a little distracted at the moment.

Good luck

Good luck French!

Thanks Aaron.

In case I miss posting for Draken, he is at the rear with Den anyway so he will stay there for now.

I am sorry for the absence of late.. my wife was in a car wreck this weekend and spent a couple of days in the hospital. I apologize for the lack of notification.