The reason I ask is to save you a little work.Is there any way for individual players to move their own character, like say Roll20Unfortunately while Maptool is designed to be played live, it requires a direct connection with the client as I'm hosting. Even with the new version finally resolving the problems with Java Compatibility it just wasn't designed to be played ad-hoc on a forum like this. To be honest, it wouldn't even be feasible if it weren't for Lightshot enabling me to quickly crop and annotate everything clearly and then upload it in the same action. The most I can do is either interpret a vague command like 'I move towards enemy A while doing X, Y and Z' or literally as in 'Move me up 1, NE 1, up 1 and attack enemy A' whilst doing movement to make sure you move exactly how you want to.
Besides, I do not like Roll20 at all, it feels like using a Tandy computer to write campaigns and it has the gall to charge you a subscription to edit things offline (which I can do in Maptool for free). Pfft, Maptool 4 lyfe.
Nah I'm okay, getting Maptool to show your movement paths is actually quite easy, even with multiple characters, the only thing to do after is use Lightshot to use those neat little coloured arrows to show how the tokens interacted between my DM posts.
My only concern is making sure you're happy with the token movement and placements.
Says you. I'm still a Runt :P But I was hurt too
Hey guys. Sorry for my no attendance and such. I promise I will be more active from this point. Life has been busy.
Welcome back Karol, I missed your commentary and contrasting opinion to Dergosh. In case you haven't caught up, I've taken up the mantle of DM for this mission since Merc/Dergosh is busy.
Attention potential combatants!
Before you get into any more battles I want to mention a house-rule involving Combat manuevers with you. Since I am more interested in promoting exciting and interesting campaigns I want to loosen up the restrictions that tends to make battles a bit too mechanical. Therefore I will announced that Combat Moves lacking feats no longer trigger AoO for the attempt.
What this basically means is, when you use things like Trip, Push, Dirty-Trick or whatever without possessing the appropriate 'Improved <Trip/Push/Dirty-Trick>' won't give your opponent a free attack if you are successful, there still is a penalty of AoO if you fail the attempt, but at least it's 50/50 instead of 100%. I'm also tempting to extend this kind of treatment to Unarmed-Strike without it's Improved feat. Taking the Improved feats still has plenty of benefit by giving you a +2 for and against the move you used or someone uses on you, plus removing the 'AoO on failure' risk.
What this is supposed to do is let you as characters be more flexible in how you act and fight and not worrying too much about what actions are really allowed in the game. The golden rule is if it can be 'checked' with a CMB and you beat the target's CMD, it's probably possible to do it. Experiment with it the next time you're all in battle and we'll see how it goes.
Ya, dirty tricks online
Can I attack the one on the ledge from being on the ground?
And can I charge him?
If you're talking about SKUM B, you'd have to climb up onto the ledge first, but I imagine that rock you're hiding around would make a nice stepping stone on your way up.
My god that last GM post of mine was huge. Hope it made sense.
I'm not sure I understand the new house counter rules, but as a default assume Dergosh attacks any opponent threatening him with smash of his buzzing mace.
The new 'Opportunity' gimmick is to give both players and the NPCs more creative ways to deal with incoming attacks, and to do this you have to use up your round of 'attack of opportunity' as you normally would. It still needs some breaking-in but opportunities are usually reactive and almost always when it's not your turn.
Whereas AoO relies on opponents letting their guard down, opportunities in general are for when your guard is up. Which is why you can use them to deflect some of the damage dealt to you as an attack once. The only times where opportunities open up a chance to deal damage or tactical-advantages is when your opponent messes up. For example, when SKUM C missed Greez with their special attack, he was able to take advantage of the failure and provided he beat the opponent's roll, he'd take advantage.
In short, Opportunities are usually defensive when your opponent is successful, but can become counter-offensive when your opponent messes up. When you do use your opportunity you'll also have to perform a similar roll to beat their result.
One thing you may have noticed is that your attacks sometimes have knockback or push applied to them. This is mainly to step away from treating characters like chessboard pieces and make them feel like real people being hit by swords and giant fists. Sometimes this is applied passively as a plausible outcome for an action, but for more intentional side-effects (Combat Manuvers), checks can be performed to make sure it happens on-demand.
You do realize Tigerwolf has Evasion right?
So Garmack has his bow in hand and therefore can't make a melee AoO as the skum runs by him...can he attempt to make a trip attack instead?
@Tigerwolf: Hmm, you're right. I'll let the Subdual slide for now.
@Dergosh: Sure, you can use Garmack's opportunity to attempt a trip.
If Dergosh doesn't make the check to Garmack's trip the next post will involve the Skum getting away. Either way the battle is soon nearing it's conclusion.
Will get out a post this evening. However, even after the AoO, shouldn't the party have a round to attempt to take him down?
If tripped, yeah! Although if they get out of the battlefield they'll be considered fled. There are Kobold allies to attend to after all.
But don't we get the AoO as a result of the skum running past us? And since he just took a move action isn't our turn to act in the round after the AoO is resolved?
Exactly!
But the thing is I'm waiting for you to roll for Opportunity here, I'm not blocking you as much as waiting for you to take advantage of the dropped guard.
I think you've exhausted all the information the LPK can offer, it's about time you did some more exploring to make some progress. You guys have access to 10 Ka-bombs as bonus equipment so you may spread them out amongst yourselves; remember that the giants can't ignite the bombs but they're free to carry or throw bombs, ignited or not. Bombs have a two round timer that explodes at the end of the second round and have an explosive radius of 10x10ft.
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Good idea Majuba, I was hoping we'd get back to exploring again!
By the way, what does everybody think of the pacing so far? I've tried to do updates on a daily basis when I can, the continuous days make it tricky to stay energetic these days.
As far as Stealth checks go, I'm thinking of making it a bit more passive. People often roll for stealth just 'to be sure' but then when there's no enemies within ear-shot, the roll gets wasted or even worse, you get a good roll the first time and a worse one when it needed to count.
So I'm ruling that stealth checks are performed as and when there is a chance of being spotted or heard. While this does mean blowing a check would put you closer to the enemies who may hear you but also minimises 'just in case' checks. Not to mention it'll help folks focus more about how their character attempts stealth rather than worrying about the description matching their roll. After all, no stealthy creature ever expects to fail.
With that said, the times I will usually call upon a stealth check are usually when you take paths or actions that would be considered risky. Such as walking behind someone too close, trying to unlock doors or open doors within ear-shot. There may be circumstance bonuses involves with using partial or total cover, the material of the ground, the way a character moves (Majuba's crawling is a good example).
Odak a suggestion.
In my friday gaming group we have a house rule that might work. We call it passive stealth and perception, or taking 5.
it means that unless stated otherwise, a player being generally careful has his/her skill plus 5 constant in stealth and perception. It saved continuous rolling.
Thanks for the info chillblame, I tend to run similar rules on Perception and stealth myself. I mentioned it matter-of-fact here to make sure everybody's clear on what rules I'm monitoring so there's minimal confusion.
Considering that all the giants have a constant -4 to their stealth checks due to their size, they're more prone to triggering stealth checks than TIGERWOLF, KAROL and DERGOSH (the last one I'm not too sure). I'll have to devise a consistent difficulty scale based on distance...
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I think the base stealth DC for unaware NPCs should be 15, every five feet away you are the DC is reduced by 1. So by being 25ft away the DC for stealth is 10. Going by the passive nature of take-5, any creatures moving too close to exceed the DC must roll to avoid being spotted. Additionally performing noisy actions increases the DC which may trigger a roll. I suppose light-levels might have some impact if they don't have darkvision. You would never succeed in avoiding detection at someone looking in your direction without taking cover.
More perceptive enemies may have higher base DCs, alert NPCs will have have higher DCs (if they're expecting trouble), and sometimes NPCs will auto-spot players because the plot demands it; I will be sparing with that last one in case it's probable to do some positioning beforehand.
Tigerwolf's one advantage is she will possibly spot them before they spot her in the dark giving her time to dart into cover.
I also apologise in the delay in posting, I'm actually working out enemy rank templates so I can set up the inevitable boss fight. Because I usually create enemies on the fly, the way I keep enemy difficulty consistant and identifiable is to use an old system that was used in the late City of Heroes.
Enemies come in five ranks, bottom tier consists of:
• Minions "MINs" (Lowest rank, basic attacks but usually greater numbers)
• Lieutenants "LTs" (Think of these like enhanced minions, extra abilities and slightly stronger)
• Bosses "Commanders/Bs" (Strongest of the lower tier, most likely the strongest version of reoccurring enemy types, literal squad leaders or giant versions of anything)
then the upper tier consists of;
• Elite Bosses "EBs" (Usually named, usually the main enemy individual in a given story, or simply a powerful foe or monster)
• Arch-villain/Hero/Monster (Highest rank of the top tier, harder version of EBs that requires a good team or an Epic individual to defeat.)
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With that said, I need to set up the necessary pieces to construct the scenerio so feel free to play a bit. We're close to the final conclusion now.
Okay, finished the templates and they scale more or less how I want them to be. Ranks have the following scales, where 1.0x is about equal power with a single PC:
• (M)inion (0.3x)
• (L)ieu(T)enant (0.5x)
• (B)oss/Commander (0.75x)
• (E)lite (B)oss (1x)
• (A)rch(V)illain (1.35x)
When you see the tokens of enemies they should have a letter associated with it, the bracketed letters in those ranks refers to this. Boss-Rank and above have access to greater abilities found in the lower ranks, be careful. Strong enemies also have powerful Immediate-actions to help them deal with large groups of PCs, don't be surprised if you get targeted by some ability or have to redo an action if a Boss uses an Immediate action which drastically alters the flow of the combat.
Is it fair? Well, One boss vs. six PCs isn't fair, that's the price you pay.
> Stall notice Lv1 <
I'm still waiting for folks to decide what they want to do in-game, also maybe consider healing up since a few of you have injuries. The most I can do myself is idle-acting for Odak.
I was not aware that anyone was injured. If they are The Doctor will perform some of the good voodoo and heal up anyone.
That's alright Majuba, just take a quick look at the MAPS. Every player (even the enemies) have a health gauge that I keep track of in Maptool, if an ally bar isn't full it means they took damage. (At the moment, only KAROL and GREEZ have taken damage)
Also like I mentioned earlier, out of combat your wand heals to the maximum possible result per charge. This wholly depends on the die you normally roll, if it's d6+5 then you heal 9 per charge. Adjust for the actual strength of your wand and be sure to let us know how many charges you use per person.
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I'm pretty sure I healed Karol after the first battle we had outside and he never made the change. Either way, if possible the Doctor would have healed Greez and Karol to full HP after this last combat. So I will mark 2 more charges used.
Also unless anyone has a better solution the Doctor will initiate his brillant plan of attack
Alrighty, will mark both as fully healed in the interim. I also didn't realise that the wand that you were using was a fast healing effect instead of cure wounds, that is if you are using the Wand of Infernal Healing.
Weekends tend to be slow for posting because everyone is going out and doing things. That being said Ill post a plan soon since I finally am on a computer. My phone has horrible signal so it eats posts.
No problems, I should take that into account that not everybody can do this daily but I make sure that I'm updating daily.
Okay folks, for this battle I'm going to be testing a house-rule regarding armour and natural-armour but on ODAK only. All the other characters are still using normal rules so don't worry about it for the moment.
I should explain that the change involves converting armour AC into DR instead, since it is functionally identical in how it reacts with physical and non-physical damage only it's designed for reducing damage instead of making it harder to hit, which is something agility and defensive characters should be known for.
Reasons for the change is two-fold. One I wanted armour to better simulate protection by cushioning blows instead of turning it into a random negation mechanic, better simulating protection vs. evasion. The other one is ODAK himself, even without race or class the full-plate/tower shield combo has given ODAK such a high AC value that virtually nothing but magic or overpowered attack rolls could ever put a dent in his health pool, it's not even a war of attrition; he's simply unbeatable.
Still, ODAK has 11 armour so that's still 11/- DR, rules state that an attack which is reduced to less than 1 lethal is converted into 1 non-lethal damage, but that's still tiny in comparison to ODAK himself. I could do with some opinions on this. I was thinking maybe when the damage is reduced to non-lethal levels the same amount of damage is reduced with the remaining DR, only for non-lethal damage to a minimum of one. So ODAK getting hit with 7 damage out of 11 means that he'll take all the non-lethal damage, then 7 - 5 non-lethal damage for a total of 2 non-lethal damage. This calculation ends up pretty stupid in the end, should've checked my work.
> Similar published article on armour as damage reduction, similar but exactly the same <
The other thread lost their GM. Shall we discuss who will take it over?
The other thread lost their GM. Shall we discuss who will take it over?
Wait, the other group lost their GM, wasn't Karol running that? Seems like people are dropping like flies now.
Whoever it is, it has to be the one who is actively playing in that mission. Like with Karol it wasn't intuitive nor fair for him to have to run one mission while PCing in another. And we're cool about having our PCs in the same campaign we're running.
We should talk to them before they make it inactive then.
Sounds like the sensible way forward although, which thread do we do that in, the original thread that spawned our missions? It might be good to catch up on things. I remembered two Hobgoblins, the Ogress, Half-Orc Cleric and Draxia.
I started with their Discussion thread.
Apologies #TeamBrute, I'm sort of trying to handle things with the other group's GM (Karol) taking a leave of absence. As far as I'm aware they have about five players remaining (Runt/Draxia/Anol/Tirgrim/Mogwag). Add that to our current team (Tigerwolf/Odak/Greez/Majuba/Dergosh) and we have ten players remaining in the campaign. While I'm obviously maintaining our mission, their team hasn't had the benefit of Dergosh's mission notes in order to continue which can cause complications.
I haven't heard from Dergosh in over a week, but he did say he had some shift changes, I'll assume he's just busy for now. As far as I'm aware, Me and Tigerwolf are still GM-capable except now we'll have to decide who is the new campaign author (responsible for world design and ultimately the intentions of the human faction).
> ODAK pats MAJUBA gently on the top of his head, "Good Maju"
I'm still here guys. I just don't have time to game master any more, due to some work issues. I can still run karol. If someone takes over the other thread it is with my blessing, and I will helpif asked.
We will need your notes or at least your plans for what is going on in it. We can't run it without those. We can wing it but that is if you don't have notes.