Palace of the Vampire Queen (Inactive)

Game Master Terquem

no, just a big stone slab

Halloween shenanigans and the site being off line a few times when I was trying to check in have put me way behind in updates. I'll be trying to get small updates done tonight.

Sorry.

Just got home from the vet. Had to say goodbye to a dear companion kitty today. I'm a wreck and may or may not post later. Tomorrow morning I leave on a 4 day retreat, so my posting may be spotty if at all during those four days. Please bot me as necessary... sorry and thanks.

No worries, take care of yourself, and be careful

GM, I'm kinda confused why I was the only one who went into the room during the surprise round. I thought the whole point of what we were trying to do was coordinate our actions. Hal wasn't trying to surprise his allies. We were all waiting at the door, Mixz went in, Hal waited to give Mixz a few moments and to let everyone else get ready, and then moved in.

What can we do to avoid this in the future?

Mixz went in and got into position, was waiting for her init basically and for flank, You took your action, and then it went... hasn't been Mixz's next init yet... or at least if it was, that wasn't made clear in gameplay. not sure about everyone else. Even if she gets flank, not sure she can get precision dmg on a golem anyway, but she didn't know that when she snuck in.

The surprise round allowed you to move, or take an action. Why Chuffer or Miagnik didn't speak up to declare what they were going to do before you ran in, I have no control over. Thursday and Friday Mixz and Hall declared what their plans were, I waited until Sunday to hear from the others, who did not post. I suppose, in hindsight, I could have asked them directly what they were going to do in conjunction with your action and Mixz's action, and I did not. However, it did seem clear that you both were going to enter the room, so them not taking any actions is on them, I feel.

Additionally, on Sunday, I stated that you had gained surprise by charging in. This, I believe gave the others one last opportunity to step up and do something before the initiative counting for round 1 began, which I didn't post until Tuesday.

I know the game is slow. I have, more than once encouraged players to use this thread for talking to each other or asking direct questions abut what is happening.

I can do better, I know, I'll try.

When moving into a room with coordination, I'll try to organize things better as well.

Came down with a bad cold, maybe the flu, I'm not sure, on Thursday, feeling better now. Sorry for the delay I hope to work all game updates today.

Yeah, the same thing almost happened to me on Thursday too. Managed to never really let it get me fully but it was still not a fun weekend.

Same here. Still not feeling great.

'Tis the season.

you all take care of yourselves, and get feeling better soon.

sorry if I'm slow posting the last few days and the next few as well... We are suffering from high winds and surrounded by fires in all directions. Constant power outages from the winds and service outages from both power problems and the fires are playing hell with my connection. I will post as I can, but please bot me if necessary.. thanks.

Thanks for the update, and please, be safe.

Oof, oh no! Man I just can't get over how bad this year has been with all of the fires spreading around everywhere. Doomed Hero and I both moonlight as alarm dispatch agents so we've been a little more aware of how far reaching and destructive the fires can be. Stay safe!

In less terrifying news, with his magic basically not working against this thing, Miagnik can only think of lubing Hallister up for his wrestling match against the bone golem.

He'll fall back on a few other tricks soon. I love how much mileage I've been getting out of the flasks of oil I purchased, down side is I'm starting to run out of those now too.

Try to get updated tomorrow. It's that time of year with a lot of people busy with getting ready for the holidays, so no pressure.

Not sure how this encounter is going to work out, but well push on

Every encounter is a potential downfall of an adventurer. Golems are just a particularly nasty variety for an ill prepared group.

They're hard under the best of circumstances, and we are incredibly underpowered for our level. If something drastic doesn't happen this next round it will be time for a tactical retreat.

I may be losing my mind, but I want to point out that this game could either end with Hallister's capture, or go on to be something entirely different

A character rescue.

The fact that the dwarves here are being held in cages should give Miagnik, Chuffer, and Mixz the thought that they villain here would not automatically kill Hallister, and if they abandon him, to save them selves, they could gather help and try to rescue him.

Or at a later time Hall could escape, and try to get out of the dungeon on his own...a lot of things can happen

I would be fine with that. It's a good story hook.

I can dig it.

Character rescue? That's awesome!
Sorry if I got a bit dramatic with Miagnik's last post. I've become so used to characters getting killed that I'd forgotten that things like being captured could come into play instead.

As soon as we can wrap this up, we can get something rolling for the new year.

Here are some of my thoughts

First I would like to close this game completely. I don't want any new players being overwhelmed by the sheer number of back log posts and leave them thinking they need to be informed with everything that happened in this thread

Hallister is welcomed to create a new character that will participate in the rescue adventure, or not

The recruitment thread will have a lot of information, and be strictly limited to Dwarven characters, and this might make it a poor requirement

I would like to suggest, and ask humbly, that the players involved in this game be active in the new game recruitment thread

class levels will be generated randomly, with the roll of a d4+1, and I will try to get only three new, and hopefully dedicated players.

Do any of you have any suggestions?

A Hero, lost in the dark, shall be found

recruitment is up

My only suggestion is that we address the gear deficiency in this game. We are 5th level, but we are equipped like we are somewhere between 2nd and 3rd level, and routinely facing monsters that are higher than our own CR.

I think I brought it up when we were 4th level and warned that we didn't really have any way of dealing with the damage reduction, defensive abilities and spells that we were going to start running into. Now we are seeing what that looks like.

I'm all for a challenging game, but it is very frustrating to feel like you can't do much of anything against the creatures you run into.

My big suggestion to help deal with the problems caused by a low-magic setting is to use the Automatic Bonus Progression rules, which replace the usual bonuses to attack, ac, saves and stats from items.

Well, sure, but you see the problem I'm having is that I need to really look at how the characters are balanced in this setting. Certain things went awry with certain allowances I made for certain character classes and abilities, resulting in characters being impossible for low level monsters to hurt, and forcing me to use tougher monsters, which didn't work out when the same characters, who were almost impossible to hit in combat, could not hit the monsters they were up against.

It seemed to me, that over all I did a terrible job of managing this game.

Let's just look at Snake Style - an average roll of 10, gives Hall a AC of 22, a good roll of 15 gives him an AC of 27

Now, what are my choices, monsters who attack more than once a round with a +7 to hit, need to roll better than 15 on their average first roll, and better than 11 on their second attack to hit him, or a monster with a single attack of +12, needing a roll of 10+ to hit on averages, and a 15+ if Hall rolls well

I mean I could go on and on, but basically my problem has been with Hall all along, allowing him to be a monk was out of my original game concept, and adding the swashbuckler just made it more complicated

High character concepts and low magic items created a difficult game for me to manage. Putting magic items into Hallister's hands would have made it far worse.

And let's not forget that the last magic items I placed in the game, were flat out ignored.

Also, the premise that characters in Pathfinder games need magic items as they advance in levels is lost on me. I always try to run my games so that a character, with its basic class level and abilities is facing appropriate challenges, and a magic item will simply give them an advantage.

My opinion is that over the years the Christmas tree effect has pushed game play to accept that characters must have magic items simply because the GM has the burden of making it a challenge and the CR of most monsters are not matched for optimized characters.This leads to Gms introducing tougher monsters which are balanced for a small set of optimized character abilities, but are overpowered in areas where the optimized character is weak, and this is where the player demands a Magic Item to offset that weakness. Anyway, that's all I'm going to say

I'm really not good at running Pathfinder games which are outside the core rules. I have not studied the many, many rules there are in Pathfinder to have a good chance of running a good game for players who know the rules far better than I do.

I'm much, much better at running 5e games.

Sorry I put such a kink in your plans. I didn't realize I was causing a problem. I'd always planned on Hal being as untouchable as possible. It's the only defense a non-spellcaster has against the undead. Ghouls paralyze by touch, and it just gets worse and worse as they get more powerful. I wanted to play a character who could stand in the middle of a horde and not get touched. I can see how that would be a problem from a GMing perspective.

I used to have a problem with "soft tank" style characters in games too until it was pointed out to me that those characters tend not to be heavy damage dealers. What they really do is gum up the works in combat by being zone controllers, and they aren't any better at it than spells like Web or Black Tentacles.

I never wanted it to become an arms race, which is why Hal is way underpowered for his level. A dwarf monk swashbuckler with an axe is just about the least synergized build I've ever played.

If I had to go back and re-build Hal, he'd be a Warpriest. Of all the classes, it fits him best. t just didn't exist when we started this game. If you want me to rebuild him I'd be happy to (not that it will matter for a while.)

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

See that is where I think things are skewed, Hall works in this game, but only when there are other Damage Dealers in the mix, and we lost those, forcing hall to try to be two things, a wall, and a ballista, and he was great at one, but lousy at the other.

And let's not forget that the last magic items I placed in the game, were flat out ignored.

I'm not sure this is a fair statement to make. I was under the impression that our casters were working on identifying them.

A large part of this game has been the pressure of feeling that we need to beat the clock of the Vampire Queen's ritual. It's a hell of a motivator to keep things moving, but the drawback is that things like identifying items have to wait until we finally stop to rest. So unidentified magic items get packed up for later.

In PBP games, "later" can be weeks or months.

How many times have we stopped to rest since we entered this tomb? Three?
How many times in 5 1/2 years have we had a chance to stop somewhere friendly and resupply? I can only think of two.

Don't get me wrong, I love the "under pressure, out of time, low on supplies" feeling of gameplay. Miagnik can tell you that I ran a game that kept the party in those same circumstances for years. What I learned from running that game is that it works for about the first 4 levels, and then after that the mechanics of the game change so fundamentally that the characters need to be allowed to change too. Enemies right off the page come with flight, energy resistance, damage reduction, invisibility, attribute damage, debilitating touch attacks and other abilities that will completely wreck an unprepared party.

That's where the combination of "low magic, low-tech setting" and "no time to stop to rest" combine to create a problem for players and GM alike. The game assumes that by 5th level the players can handle that stuff.

I honestly completely agree with you that the "magic item mart" feel of Pathfinder is a design flaw. The problem is that it's a design flaw and you can't ignore it or change it without compensating for it in some other way. The system itself relies on the party having magic items to function, and without them, well, the system breaks down. That's what the Automatic Bonus Progression rules are intended to help with. They aren't a perfect fix, but they help.

See that is where I think things are skewed, Hall works in this game, but only when there are other Damage Dealers in the mix, and we lost those, forcing hall to try to be two things, a wall, and a ballista, and he was great at one, but lousy at the other.

Yep, that's my assessment as well. Nicely put.

This other game will, I hope, be very different, The player characters can decide for themselves how much of a hurry they need to be in to rescue Hallister, and for the time being we will stop talking about a looming ritual (which I now see works great in table games, but is not really good for my type of slow PbP gaming).

I'm trying to decide if I want to make a character for the rescue mission game or not. I have a lot invested in Hal after 5 years.

It would feel strange to me to make a new character that I knew I would be retiring as soon as Hal was rescued. I also can't see Hal just sitting politely and waiting in jail.

I have an interesting idea, but I'll need your to help me make it work.

Given that Hal has his whole "death-priest monk" thing going on, what if Hal was able to meditate and send his own soul on a "spirit quest."

My thought was, I could play Moralane as a Ranger (which I think is what she is right now), but replace the Animal Companion class feature with a Phantom (as per the spiritualist class).

That phantom would be Hal's disembodied spirit. He'd basically be using his emotional connection with Moralane to create a tethering point for his soul and pitching in for his own rescue.

Thoughts?

I like it, I like it a lot. Needs work, but yeah I like it

My two cents, for what it's worth:

My impression of pathfinder is that the system is designed to produce high powered PC's, especially if you follow the Wealth By Level tables. My brother is running a F2F game and recently realized that the party was not all at the WBL for their characters, and decided to allow that to happen through various in-game circumstances. The power of that party got exponentially better.

I'll agree that it wasn't working to have Hal trying to fill two roles. I'll also say that I didn't do a great job optimizing Chuffer. I probably burned through my spells way too quickly, hence why when we were fighting that bone golem I was just flying around it, trying to distract it.

As far as game systems go, 5e is designed more for low-magic settings and fluidity of rules. Pathfinder, not so much, if going RAW, and monsters get abilities and such that almost need to be balanced out by the players getting magic items. Hal said it better than I did.

I'm really not good at running Pathfinder games which are outside the core rules. I have not studied the many, many rules there are in Pathfinder to have a good chance of running a good game for players who know the rules far better than I do.

I'm much, much better at running 5e games.

Why not run this as a 5e game? I'd be down for it, and maybe everyone else would be too. If that's where you're most comfortable, you should play from that position of strength.

And let's not forget that the last magic items I placed in the game, were flat out ignored.

This is my bad, because I have completely forgotten what they were. I did just check, and realized at least one of the things was a scroll of fear, but there was secondary magic on it, and me not being too sure on how things would work, didn't want to risk setting off crazy unknown magic.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure I'm the best to play a magic using character. Never really have, and that's one of the reasons why I jumped at the chance to play one, because i figure it would be worth the experience. I'm willing to give it another go, and the smaller focus on rescuing Hal would be good, and would help keep me from not being overwhelmed by the overarching plot

I've never played 5E. I don't have the books and I'd rather not try to learn a new system in a PbP format. I've tried it before. I found it frustrating.

General thoughts:
I will say that I joined this game back when we had a larger group and things were a lot more balanced seeming. I feel that Terquem has done an admirable job holding a larger than average group together as long as he has. Looking back, it looked like we always had enough numbers to overcome most encounters without relying on any one person to be a tank.

Choosing to be a Goblin sorcerer seemed like a fun, unique option and I have not regretted it at all. Despite how poorly optimized I am from a player aspect, I feel that my choices came naturally in-game. Admittedly, I did sort of expect us to level up a bit faster than we have, but in in-game time it actually makes sense.

New Game:
As for the new game, 5th edition isn't really my cup of tea. I've been in a few short running games and while I don't mind it, I can't say I'd ever readily seek that particular system out on my own. If that's really how we'd want to continue for at least that part of the game I'll do it.

As for character driven plots, like Hallister, I've really come to enjoy playing as Miagnik. I can't imagine he would just sit back and let someone else try and rescue Hallister.

Maybe I misunderstood what you were talking about?
Would it be this particular section of the story being halted as these characters retreated and tried to figure things out, while a different group of adventurers... (let's call them group 2) shows up in the intervening time, while group 1 (us, currently) are plotting for a way to get by the bone golem? Or would it be this game closes permanently and the new one would be our continuation?

In simple terms, group 1 (us) retreats. Suffering defeat/loss of a character. Meanwhile group 2 (new group, possibly sent by Stephanie/Mae) shows up and rushes the palace? Possibly freeing Hallister in the intervening time. A fresh group who would know somewhat about what to expect.

Plan?
Ooh, I think I like this plan a lot! This way we could have 2 groups tackling the Palace of the Vampire Queen. They could alternate days even. One group who's wrapped up in the mystery and trying to solve the riddle and then there's the new group who doesn't really know about it but are there to help deal with overwhelming challenges. The two groups could effectively alternate days, as long as they survive.

Is there an interesting mystery/plot point going on? Group 1. Is there a tough challenge waiting for them in a room? Retreat and look for a different way, if none can be found, go get group 2.

What do you guys think?

Those are good ideas Miagnik, and thanks for the input

And thank you all for your patience and kindness

What I had in mind was shutting down this thread, but not this adventure.

Miagnik, Chuffer, and Mixz(?) retreat to a nearby town ( most likely the one with the treasure chest filled with gold coins) and hire 3 or 4 adventurers to help them rescue Hallister, deciding on their own how much of the previous plot to reveal that they are comfortable with.

If the new characters get hooked they stay on and continue in the original mission

With attrition being what I have experienced we would lose half of any new players in the first month, reducing the party to hopefully 5 or 6 going for word against the bosses of the dungeon

Hmm, that's not a bad idea. Don't think I've ever been in a game where I've tried to ever hire anyone before. That ought to be an interesting thing to try.

Sounds good to me.

I'm going to reach out to Mixz today

I'll post a message in the game thread, and hope we can get through a good closing of this game which takes the characters back out of the dungeon and headed toward some nearby town (I'll make sure details about the surrounding area are clear in my posts)

Then if you are all willing and still interested you might join us in the new recruitment thread with ideas, and some back and forth discussions about how we launch the next chapter.

And to be clear

The new game will be a Pathfinder game

My plan was to update games yesterday, but yesterday we had a fire at the facility where I am a system engineer. A Pyrophoric event in the sorting trough. I was assigned to the Emergency Response Organization and assigned to the Emergency Operations Center. I wasn't released from work until 9:20 pm (my day started at 3:45 am)

I'm a little tired and shook up, but I think I can get updates done today

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy New Year Terquem!

Happy New Year. :)

This adventure has come to an end

If you want to post questions about what will happen next, please migrate over to the new game

A Hero, Lost in the Dark…

A Discussion thread will open there soon

I know Mixz was caught up in the California fire situation, and I do hope he or she is alright and will be back soon.

Oh man, what an ending!