Hedda is definitely not smart enough to command an army. I would lean towards option C but I'm good with someone else commanding the army if they want to.
I also support option C, if only because it will keep things moving quickly :).
Rukzha is certainly not fitting as an army commander. I do think it would be really cool for character development if someone were to take up the mantle of commander though. If we are going to be the heroes of this war, having someone with us who's leading armies would be a very cool and fitting story element. It feels like it could be natural for Brevon, but I could also see Kelumarion showing Arrika into the role. It's said that the most reluctant leaders often make the best ones.
Is leadership on the table for this game? Are anyone planning on picking that? If so, it would make a lot of sense for that person to be commander.
If I knew this was coming up I would have advocated getting the charisma headband instead of the intelligence one :/. I also really regret not picking up scrolls of eagle splendor. I guess Arrika can use a mythic power point to cast it. It makes sense for our characters to use it, though it's a bit painful we didn't prepare better for this situation.
So my vote is:
Are you really sure you don't want to do this Brevon/Arrika(possibly being pushed into it by Kelumarion)? If not I'm fine with going with option c).
@Arrika/Elriel: I suggest that Arrika gets the Mythic reflex cloak, Elriel gets the +2 cloak and Rukzha gets the +1 cloak. Though I'm fine keeping things the way they are or if Elriel wants the mythic reflex cloak. It would be nice if we could settle this before we move on.
@Brevon/Arrika: I guess there are no protests to you getting the Ioun stones/wayfinders I mentioned. Remember to add the stats to your sheets.
Player Characters In Battles
In addition to the option of your PCs being commanders in your armies, the GM may have you fight smaller groups of enemies before or even during a battle in which your armies clash with the enemy. For example, your PCs might attack an evil necromancer and fight your way through his tower to confront him directly and defeat him while your army battles the undead horde outside the tower. Alternatively, your PCs could use potent spells (such as cloudkill, control water, or earthquake ) to alter battlefield conditions in your favor. These possibilities let you use your characters to directly affect the outcome of a battle without forcing you to sit out on an adventure opportunity by personally commanding an army.
If your PCs win the small-scale combat or dramatically affect the battlefield with magic, the GM could opt to increase your army's DV and OM by +4 for that battle, or penalize your armies by –4 if you lose. At the GM's discretion, your PCs' failure or victory might have other effects on your armies as well, such as temporarily granting an additional tactic, altering the hit points of one or more armies, or granting or negating a special ability.
I think it would be fun if we could affect the battle with AOE spells, or at least take up the fight against some of the more important enemies directly. Though I understand that would require extra effort on your part.
I'm fine with the +2 cloak.
I agree that commanding the army would fit with Brevon, but I'm concerned about the time involved in learning another set of rules. Allowing the GM to narrate the battles and letting us insert RP into them just seems the fastest and easiest route.
I'll update my stats with the ioun stone this evening.
So, if we aren't using the mass combat rules, what about my other suggestion? That our characters can still affect the outcome by doing key actions and/or providing buffs(like the aforementioned Eagle's Splendor) or AoE?
I finally got around to updating Rukzha's sheet.
OK, it appears we are going for option C.
@Rukzha: Your suggestion could work if the encounters were built in that way. The thing is that most of the time there will be no powerful enough enemy to justify a combat between you.
Alright, since we'll go with option C, whenever there is a mass battle, I'll describe the battle and the result, then I'll give you the opportunity to tell us what your PC did during the battle, be it lead the soldiers, kill a bunch of enemies in quick succession, healing wounded soldiers, and so on. If I can sneak an encounter in it I will, of course!
About leadership feat, you can take it, but you'd be the ones responsible for the RP of the cohort and followers, and I'd fully expect you to actually RP him/her/them in a way that they are not simply a bunch of atributes/bonuses... This AP already have a pretty large amount of NPCs for me to handle, and RPing multiple NPCs is not my forte.
Sorry for the long silence. These last couple days were REALLY busy.
Guys, is there something wrong or is it just the end of the year?
Nothing wrong on my part. Just busy with Christmas coming. I'll try to post something tonight...
Bad work days and worse sleep. I'll post in a few hours.
Sorry for missing my post yesterday... for some reason, Paizo wasn't allowing me to post anything, even send a PM! Every time I tried, I was redirected to the home page. Weird.
Will try to update today!
According to my calculations, it would take a mere 3 minutes for an earth elemental to glide under the earth looking for anything moving, considering that he would be running each round. The problem comes when he finds a bug, a worm, a rat, and any other sort of small animal or vermin, as well as a pebble moved by the wind. If it has to examine all these interferences, I believe it would take him much, much more time.
As far as I think it is a truly creative way of using this summon, I think it would take too much time and resources to properly use it.
As an example, if for each move action he notices just one trigger, he would increase his search time to almost 13 minutes! And for this we are assuming that are just around 130 bugs in the town, which is pretty absurd.
If you disagree with me, please let me know.
Pretty sure you can estimate the size of the creature moving, so bugs and birds wouldn't really interfere with things imho. I've never had anyone rule that insects interfere with the ability before.
Organizing things IC is kinda difficult, but one idea (that I'm sure Rukzha would be able to implement better given her intelligence), could be to have everyone following behind it and searching the places it points out. It doesn't really have to investigate itself. That's only really possible if we have a way to communicate with it. Though I imagine we can shout commands and the message cantrip also works.
Surprised you don't let this go under rule 0. The 13 minutes you mention sounds much more reasonable than 3 minutes than me. We aren't going to be able to do this at full effect regardless. It's 6 minutes per summon, so it should still be doable.
It's not like we are breaking the game by being able to search through town quickly, this is basically the equivalent of a sidequest and an opportunity to show off the cool tricks we can do.
Ok, you make some good points Rukzha. If Arrika is ok, with two uses of the ability you'd be allowed to scout the whole town.
I'm out of time to do a proper post, but I'm good with it.
Toothy im assuming we were able to give Proper burial to the victims? If so I'm ready to march on.
I'll be traveling starting tomorrow and away until about the 28th. I'll only have access to internet on my phone so my posts will probably be short and sparse. Please bot Hedda as needed.
For those into it, Merry Christmas! And for those not into it, I hope the day's still merry. :)
Happy holidays folks! Wishing everyone the best, most enjoyable season possible!
Merry Christmas and a wonderful end of the year for everyone!
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas everyone!
I'm not sure I pasted this rule before, it's in a kinda out of the way rulebook:
Characters who do not get a full night's sleep may suffer the effects of fatigue. If a PC does not get at least 6 hours of sleep, she must make a DC 15 Fortitude save or be fatigued and take a –1 penalty on all other checks and saving throws against sleep effects. A second night without sleep requires another DC 15 Fortitude save. A failed save results in the character becoming exhausted and the penalties increasing to –2. A third failed save on the next night increases the penalties to –3.
Note that Arrika does not need to sleep to regain her spells.
I don't think it matters for any of us currently in the party, except for Elriel beyond 60 ft, but it would matter for the elves. Low light vision is described as:
Characters with low-light vision have eyes that are so sensitive to light that they can see twice as far as normal in dim light. Low-light vision is color vision. A spellcaster with low-light vision can read a scroll as long as even the tiniest candle flame is next to him as a source of light.
Characters with low-light vision can see outdoors on a moonlit night as well as they can during the day.
So assuming the moon is out the elves would be able to see as well.
Ser There any result of my scans? Doors any of them register as good or evil?
Ser There any result of my scans? Doors any of them register as good or evil?
Sorry, missed this part of your post. Kamilo and a couple others register as good, others don't, but none of them register as evil. In rules terms, you got all that are paladins. The others, which are probably fighters or cavaliers, aren't high level enough to be detected.
Great. That means no-one have turned evil by what happened, or if they have, they've found some means of concealing it. Registering good is even better that's harder to dupe. Not sure how much Rukzha knows about concealing and duping though.
Argh, I should have done more work on fleshing out my spelllist, but at least I got wild arcana. What time of the day is it?
Just waiting a little more for Rukzha... I hope everything is ok.
I've added an 'Overland Locations' link with the map of your journey (sorry for the delay, I thought I had already linked that). I know this part was pretty railroaded, but it is almost done.
By the way, full disclosure - my IRL group is playing Wrath of the Righteous and has officially caught up to this campaign (we got to Drezen last week). I'm very good at not letting out-of-character knowledge affect how I play, but Toothy, if you'd rather bring in someone unspoiled I completely understand. :)
I've added an 'Overland Locations' link with the map of your journey (sorry for the delay, I thought I had already linked that). I know this part was pretty railroaded, but it is almost done.
Yay! I've seen that sometimes the APs impose mandatory story elements that are hard to smoothly fit into normal play, and just require some kind of narrative. This one was rather long, but it does give us a good snapshot of the way the demons taint the land they inhabit. It also gives the game a unique "military" flair that I wasn't really expecting, so that's worth something, too.
Have you heard from Rukzha? I hope everything is alright with him.
It comes across as a little less railroaded when players are more involved with the mass combat scenarios, too - without players being the ones to roll dice, it does feel more like just endless exposition. But I also completely understand that it'd take forever to get through if we were doing the rolls ourselves; these are the sacrifices we have to make for PbP!
I'm hoping Rukzha's ok, too. Disappearance is rarely good. :/
Yup, it was indeed a sacrifice. I've read a couple GM's and player's opinion about this part and it is almost a general opinion that it isn't a great part, mostly because it is generally only one player rolling the dice and the others watching. Another point is that it was never a challenging fight, right? Unless the rolls were completely unlucky.
Retrospectively, I wonder if I could have split your army in five distinctive units, thus presenting each of you with a porting of it...
About Rukzha, no news so far. He has disappeared from these boards and is not posting in any of his games. It is indeed never a good sign but stuff happens everytime.
Guys, I'm really sorry to say this but I believe I'll need to take a prolonged vacation from PBP. I'm currently passing through something that I've not yet been able to figure out, but I'm feeling incredibly anxious and a bit panicked. I feel like my live is slipping through my fingers, and I desperately need to grasp it once more, or else I might go entirely crazy and perhaps make some decisions that I'll for sure regret in the future.
I'm not still sure if PBP hampering me or not, but I've been feeling that in many occasions, I'm posting more because of my commitment to all of you, and less because of my own enjoyment. I still believe this is an amazing hobby and I hope to find the root of my problem and come back to you. You are all awesome and it really pains me to leave you in the dark for now. I hope you understand.
I believe I need not to say that, once I started playing with you, I had all the intentions to continue to the end... however, many times stuff don't happen as we wish. I honestly don't know how much time I'll be gone, so I comprehend if you want to look for another GM. Actually I hope you do so, because if I'm not able to return, it would be a shame for all the effort and enjoyment we have together (at least I had).
The worst thing of this decision, is the feeling that I'm letting you down, something that I can't stand. I hope you understand.
Once more, thank you for all the amazing time you've proportioned me.
Not letting us down at all - you've got to take care of yourself first. Do what you need to do, and if you decide to return, know that I'd love to game with you again!