That sounds about right Kata. Also if you guys like to keep longer conversations going (i.e. Arkady and Kata need to talk about something that happened but not anyone else) feel free to continue those sort of conversations in spoilers, so that it doesn't get in the way but anyone can read it if they'd like.
I'd like to make a note about format in general. Just so we're all on the same page, though it seems most everyone is, I'd like to try and make sure.
"Speech should be bold with quotation marks around it."
Personal thoughts by the character should be in italics with or without quotations.
<Magical Communications (Via Message or Telepathy or such) go in Less than and Greater Than brackets.>
Fine by me, it's about what I've been doing anyway. I tend to use spoilers rarely (except for my profile) but will do so in long side conversations as Ryuko asked.
Works for me.
Ry,
Updated Kheldor more or less completely. I will add a normally prepared spell list, but Color Spray is generally going to be my extra spell for being an Illusionist.
Sounds good Kheldor, when you guys are set on your battle plans go ahead and tell me when you're sleeping, when you all wake, what you do with your free time between now and then, etc.
Arkady sleeps when the tactical discussion is over. He wakes early and spends some time praying for strength in the upcoming battle, and wisdom in the post-battle judging. Then he takes his horse for a quick ride if the weather is good, and returns for breakfast and to work on getting the ambush set up.
Haha, excellent post Arkady. Now go put in in character lol.
Well, this is shaping up to be an... interesting... combat.
Yes, hopefully we don't take each other out. I suspect though that Arkady will find Kata's hiding place on the catwalk when he goes to check on Marcus. I'll give my position on the grid if Ryuko has a particular way he wants it to go. I assume you want to start upper left, but numbers down or across?
Also, do you want initiative rolls from us, or will you do them for the everyone? Usually speeds things up a little to have you do them.
I usually do them for all. More importantly I don't worry too much about exact order. I block the enemies together so that people can all go and then I'll do the enemies together. I also tend to do mostly freeformed combats (i.e. not too much worry on positioning) unless the combat is extremely important/tactical. This one in particular is likely to be over in a turn or two so I'm not worrying much.
Other combat Notices: Combat will move forward as follows:
Each round will move forward at the end of either 24 hours or when 4/5 people have posted and I get to get on. When I do that I will run the absent or unmoved characters as I feel they should be. If you feel that I've done something your character wouldn't, feel free to tell me and offer a different action. We won't retcon, but in the future I will change to be closer to your character.
Also, In order to keep NPCs and PCs in their own blocks, I will occasionally have to move initiatives around. When I do this I will try to make it in PC favor, but I won't always be able to, so I apologize if I have to slow you down, it's to make combat easier.
Ryuko: Those all work fine for me.
The important point for Arkady is that Kata is hidden -- if the bandits can't see her if one of them unluckily (for us) sneezes and turns his head, the exact location isn't quite so important. And being on the catwalk has advantages over being on the ground. So no, he probably won't notice that much.
Also, do I need to post a statblock for my horse? Right now Gildas is just a regular light warhorse.
Not really needed. Helpful if you'd like but I doubt it'll matter much for awhile.
Speaking of which, what's everyone planning on doing with their characters? For instance, will Arkady be going Weapon or Mount with his divine bond? I know Marcus is going to multiclass, anyone else? Anyone building to a prestige class?
Pretty sure I'm going straight witch and that the next hexes will be Misfortune, Slumber, and Flight. She'll be staying way the heck out of melee.
Arkady is doing the Shining Knight archetype, which REQUIRES you to bond a mount. I'm thinking, given that he's a paladin of Erastil, that an elk would be appropriate as a mount (at least for the lower levels). He's planning to be paladin all the way.
Thinking about the Leadership feat, unless that's banned. (A knight might have a priest to advise him, a squire to train, a bard to sing his praises and herald him... Or I might meet an interesting person along the way. I'll understand, though, if you'd rather not have one of us take Leadership.)
I'm fine with leadership so long as a couple things are mentioned.
1: Your cohort is a person too, and will have his own thoughts, feelings and motivations. They will not be your automotons.
2: I will be introducing many, many characters, a character will not suddenly bond to you just because you got the feat, you must have a relationship of respect and trust first, and you'll have to take one of the characters that is introduced, though if you'd like one character specifically I'll attempt to work with you.
and 3: Heroes need to be heroes sometimes. Your cohorts will have areas they can't or won't go with you, and other things that may take up their time or attention. They also don't simply level up with your level, they'll gain xp as they work with you, and if they are not in danger they will not be gaining xp.
I'll probably sticking Wizard, as the only PrCs good for my concept are from 3.5.
Re: Leadership, this is a Kingmaker game, so some form of that is built into the game.
Hey Ry,
Maybe you should port the "romance" rules from Jade Regent over? Or a variation thereof?
Ryoko: I'm fine with all of that. (I do something similar when I'm GMing.) I've got quite a few levels to build relationships before I take the feat.
I was wondering about the Romance rules too. Seems like those would work really well with Kingmaker.
Already ahead of y'all there. Glad to see we're on the same page :)
And Kheldor you can shoot me any PrC that interests you and I'll look over it. I'm aware tht pathfinder has an annoying dearth of them.
I'm reasonably ok with such things, now that I know about it. I've had a busy weekend, first chance to post since yesterday afternoon. I'll make sure that a set of actions will be posted in advance as needed.
As to PrC's I suspect that due to difficulties in balancing Pathfinder is moving to archtypes instead. Good PrC's are rare even in d20. Anton will go pure cleric unless something comes up. I want to what happens for a while before I think on feats and such. This farce of a battle tells Anton nothing good...
Betting there will be battles much more to Anton's liking before long...just don't go after those trolls too soon ;-)
Oh,I sure there will be, he just needs to vent a bit. It's hard for him to retreat or back down but he also knows to choose your battles wisely and while not bright, he is quite wise. If his temper doesn't get him first of course.
I was laughing at myself as this fight ended. I really was.
Yeah, probably the most lopsided fight I've ever been in. Kata is super bright, but frail and the idea of an extended person-to-person fight would probably concern her greatly right now. She'd rather never see steel drawn at all. In time, she'll probably learn that the tactics need to give Anton what he needs. But she'll definitely be pushing for tactical battles.
On the topic of Gorum, Kata would not have tons of knowledge given how little time she spent in the courts. House Medvyed's lands are much more given to Erastil and even Lamashtu than Gorum or Abadar. Arkady has noted that his brothers were definitely Gorum types (and that might not be a good thing given his relationship with them). To the extent that she even follows a religion at all, it would be the Eldest, particularly the Lantern King whom she and her mother have had a strange relationship with.
Short, sweet, and with no casualties on our side. Arkady's preferred kind of fight. No waste. (Not that he would countenance dishonor, such as a false offer of parley, but there's nothing dishonorable in his eyes about sparing one's own troops or fighting effectively. If you don't want to be treated like bandits, don't act like bandits.)
I noticed that nobody seemed to have ranks in Knowledge(religion). :) I expect that we'll be having some discussions about our faiths as this goes on.
My general impression of Brevoy is that it would be hard to avoid knowing at least the basics about Erastil (lots of villagers), Pharasma (just generally all the midwives and gravediggers), and Gorum (much of the nobility avidly worships him) -- maybe Abadar and a couple of others as well are widely known, though Abadar more in the cities than the countryside. But it's quite believable that someone wouldn't know very much more than the basics, and Kata's backstory has her being quite isolated growing up IIRC.
As far as Gorum goes, Arkady's view is limited here -- he's tending to take the CG side of Gorum here (the desire to enjoy battle, to fight a worthy foe in a combat that's ultimately a test of one's own mettle) and not the CE side (the complete nihilistic lust for bloodshed). His family background wasn't great, but his father wasn't a monster either (I'm not nearly so sure what he would have seen looking at Petrov or Bollen with his new detect evil ability). Anton is rather more extreme than he's used to seeing -- my impression is that very devout Gorumites usually are too busy fighting to take a position as a noble's chaplain and battle-priest. ;)
(By the way, is this the sort of thing I should leave unspoken here and only bring out in gameplay? Not sure where people are on knowing stuff that their characters haven't had a chance to learn in-game.)
Personally, I find this kind of discussion useful. It helps us separate player from character. I think it helps us to learn where the others are coming from, even if we ultimately play it out in character. Also, while I do prefer to play out a lot of that learning experience in character. Most of us (except Anton) have been together for a while on our journey so we'll have some experience with one another (though not in a stressful circumstance like combat or deciding what to do with bandits).
While I'm fine with the tactics, I do want to urge caution in ending up with these kind of fights in future. It can lead to the non-arcanists feeling left out ;) As long as we don't fall into the 15 minute working day syndrome, all will be good :)
Now, to execute them all. Muwahahaha!
Of course, if more people made their saving throws, the arcanists would be the ones feeling left ;)
Something tells me this type of fight, where we desire survivors will be few and far between, if ever again.
Besides, the bandits are clearly at fault here, for falling into Arkady's masterful trap lol ....oh gods, now I don't think I can ever read a post by him without thinking of the Xmen villian Arcade, gah!!
Arkady isn't nearly smart enough to be Arcade. Or smart-alecky enough, either.
I'm using the description of Gorum as given in Faiths of Balance. Now Anton is no theologian, as has been pointed out, he does not have religon as a skill yet, but he knows what he knows from being raised in the faith since birth, it's intuitive. Anton's going to attempt to make his fellows understand what he really wants which is different from what is said about him.
The battle went as it did because of every bandit failing his save and the fact the horses have more hit dice than low level humans. That won't always happen.
And Gorum is never all about nihilism, even if you are evil there must be a point to the battle besides bloodlust or it's a sin. The point can be beat you down and take all your stuff but it's a point. Otherwise he'd just be another evil god. Note I'm not happy with the write-up for Gorum in FoB it's very one note and I think it could have been better written.
I'm really enjoying this inter-group conflict. I've always had an issue with groups that fell instantly into everything being hunky-dory. People fight, and adventurers generally have more to fight about. Just saying I love this kinda thing, so don't feel that it's an issue.
Oh, I'll agree that Gorum isn't about nihilism (that's Rovagug); Arkady has seen people who ostensibly worship Gorum and are all about the bloodlust (think, oh, Gregor Clegane from Game of Thrones... or Happs as we've seen him so far, though the competence difference is huge), and that's the sort of thing he's thinking about as the bad side of Gorum.
As long as we don't actually draw blades on each other, Arkady will be content to argue.
On the detect evil thing: Arkady expects to get _something_ useful, but I don't -- some of the bandits (like Happs) might be sufficiently bad to register, but most probably won't. It's the sort of thing Arkady would try, though, mostly as an experiment ("how useful is this ability in the courtroom, as opposed to sniffing out, say, disguised werewolves?")
Crap... I forgot to get that on the IC bit. No read from any of them on Detect Evil.
A Note on Detect Evil: It says in your paladin ability that you use it as the spell which means mumbo jumbo, hand movements and all. It is not an invisible evil-dar, and it may very well be taken the wrong way or offend people if you use it. I doubt you care with the bandits, but I figured I would mention.
Ha, all part of the forming, storming, norming and performing, right? I agree, some conflict makes it more realistic and more fun.
Busy day at work today so sorry not to post earlier.
Good to know how you're running it. Definitely don't care with the bandits, might and would in some other situations.
Actually Ry, you're wrong on this one. A Paladin's Detect Evil is a Spell-Like Ability, which have none of those components.
Personally, I like to add a cool visual from the eyes, which I think was actually in a description of that ability from somewhere, but that's just how I do it.
Spell-like abilities don't require components, etc. (so I can still detect evil when holding my lance with both hands), but I've got no problem with them being (relatively) visible.
Hmmm... not sure where I got that then... ah well.
I do like for it to be visible however. It keeps us from having the Geiger Paladins.
you missed that pesky, sneaky little SP??
Good thing we had Marcus mention the others and give Arkady some ideas. :)
:)
If Arkady were a bit more experienced, or more perceptive, he'd probably be trying harder to think of a way to dig deeper into the last two bandits' stories (or lack-of-story). As it is, I think his noble training is standing up against the paladin's code (and Erastil is more Lawful Cranky than Redemptive Good anyway -- though he does admit anyone can redeem themselves, they have to make some effort at it. A paladin of Saranrae, or someone with legal training, would probably be trying harder to investigate an apparently open-and-shut legal case where the accused aren't bothering to say anything in their defence. Perhaps this is a mite unfair to the speechless guy...)
Working this out as I go, folks. I figure anyone playing a paladin has signed up to think about good and evil, justice and injustice, etc., etc., and ought to be making his best effort at it -- but Arkady is still very much an inexperienced larval paladin without keen suspicious instincts and it shows.
I agree that's a reasonable way to play it. I'm playing Anton as more intuitive as his 16 Wis would indicate. Also he wasn't raised in the country, he was born and raised in the Temple of Gorum in New Stetven the capital. Interesting that his zealous Mother taught him how to survive in the viper's den of the court first over indoctrination in the faith. Working it out the same, to keep things moving I made assumptions about what you would do, if different we can change it a bit.
Actually that was perfect, though Arkady probably would have stopped at one channel -- stop the bleeding, but let him bear the pain and see how he handles it while he heals naturally, unless there's an emergency.
To be clear:
Executing Happs (How?)
Varisian dies to Combat (Fair or simply with a dagger?)
Mute lives
Devlin pledged to Arkady
And Morose guy Executed (Again how?)