Well in that case.....
Prone or not, I do believe that's gonna punch me just fine.
Total Defense and Prone is a +8 AC vs Ranged attacks. Guardian would have a really hard time hitting Talas right now.
He'd just wait till he stood up.
It's great "Don't get up! You know I don't miss with these things."
Yeah, that prone bonus goes away as soon as I stand, ha. Which is why Talas is continuing to take it easy until he sees something occur that convinces him it would be worth the risk of moving. He knows he'd have to weather at least three attacks from Garridan before he'd have a chance to swing in melee with him himself, and he knows from experience that Garridan hits hard; he's pretty sure getting himself boomeranged unconscious won't do his team any favors.
Oh I'm sure if it continues to be quite so one-sided the folks in the sidelines are going to keep throwing new obstacles in our way. But maybe not, hard to say for sure.
Well it's good to know who the MVP of this entire situation is, I almost feel useless with Ariela around.
It reminds me of playing Counter-Strike. Mission: Rescue the hostages. Ways to win; Carefully or quickly sneak around to rescue the hostages, neutralize the enemy team.
Sorry about the delay, folks. My sister's wedding was this weekend, and it kinda took over my life.
Question: Is masterwork available at this point? 'cause if so, I think it's fair to assume we all grab masterwork everything.
You'll be getting Masterwork Armor of your choice, and one masterwork weapon (or shield). You can also grab as many normal weapons as you want.
Whrf. Sorry I was absent for a bit there, folks, just opened a play this last weekend and it pretty much killed me. I should be more or less conscious again now.
Is Vance still with us?
As far as I know. She's an RL friend of mine who's been busy lately. I'll remind her.
Having trouble editing the map, but my action is just readying my shield and moving forward 30.
Moved you.
Sorry it took so long. Between my car being in the shop, work, and school starting things have been hectic.
Ugh, what a week.
Sigh.
I'm very sorry about the lack of updates. I've been swamped, and letting Teral's absence give me an excuse to let things slow down.
I'm moving things forward now.
We seem to be dead in the water here.
I'm happy to post, but I was waiting for at least someone else first in the initiative before me to go first-- I know in PBP it's kind of catch-as-catch-can, but I figured that in the rough middle of the initiative order... and as I'm playing a class where positioning matters... I'd let someone else go first, etc.
This is a unique situation. Usually I'm a big fan of block initiative. I should have had initiative by teams. I won't be making that mistake again. :)
Yeah the whole posting by initiative for this makes it usually not even worth checking unless there's 2 or three new posts most of the time, once you know where you fall in the order.
Ok, I'm nipping this in the bud. Posting in exact initiative order, combined with the business that always happens this time of year is murdering this campaign.
We're going to move on.
Hell week for my haunted house starts today. We open Friday.
So, I'll be absent a great deal this week. I'll get a description of the overall course up, and details about the first challenge as soon as I'm able. I'll aim for tonight or Sunday night.
The haunted house I help with every year is kicking into high gear. My posting time will be extremely limited until monday. Please bot me as necessary.
Uhhmmmm...that's a new one.
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So... we can bot the GM? Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!!!
...that's what I get for trying to quickly copy/paste between games. Sigh.
I figured as much. Still funny though.
LOL. I thought it was funny!
The Haunted House I help put on is finally over. I can go back to having a life again.
Lets get this thing moving.
I'm guessing it's going to take folks a while to get used to this game actually moving.
I know I've had a rather crazy week with my injured back and the past few days at work have just been nuts. For instance, tonight we had a stabbing within the last two hours of shift. I've got a trunk full of evidence to process tomorrow and a big long report to write while working on a Saturday night... at minimum staffing... I will hopefully get back on track here Sunday or Monday.
Long gaps and slowdowns tend to lead to pretty severe attrition in a PBP
Ah ha ha! Oh poor Garridan, he might be taking a dive in the water now too.
I expected to be able to get an update in tonight, and real life decided to rear it's ugly head.
I'm going to crash. I'll update after I sleep.
Wow, thanks for all the word of encouragement you guys!
Basically what I was going to have Eythil do was just crawl as a full round action every round to not fall in the water again. But since I'm being helped along directly, Talas using a drag combat maneuver check would actually be faster. Eythil wouldn't struggle and allow himself to be pulled to the wall.
Hope everyone had a fun holiday. The party is up for Round 8.
Congratulations guys we just hit the 9 month anniversary of Training Day 1
Well, at least we haven't ended the game yet. I've seen plenty stop within 3 weeks of starting.
Sheesh. That does seem a bit absurd.
Traveling tonight and tomorrow. I'll have an update up on Monday.
We seem to be stalled. Guardian and Ariella, you two are both up in round 12.
The Disable Device table is pretty clear. Disarm a trap is 2d4 rounds.
This trap is pretty simple and I reward creativity in most cases. Plugging the hole with something else is all it would take, so normally I'd allow it to be a full round action to do something like pull out a handkerchief and stuff it down the hole. In this case it's not quite as simple because Talas doesn't have any gear with him. So while the trap itself is simple, the situation is pretty complex, being that you are disarming a trap underwater without tools. That's not a 6 second situation.
I'm open to any argument to the contrary or creative faster solution.
Well several thoughts come to mind.
First; we were never told to try and collect these orbs, maybe they're just a distraction or maybe a potential opportunity we create for ourselves by collecting them, replacing one for another seems the most logical path.
Second; if Talas doesn't mind losing his shirt then he's got a makeshift plug by wrapping it around the base of the orb and doing a quick grab and cover.
Third; don't bother disabling the trap and just let it go off. Position yourself in a way that you are not going to be hit with the cloudy vapors, wrap your shirt around the orb and kick off from the bottom away from the hole using the shirt as a makeshift net for the orb and swim away.
Anything else I could think of requires other tools or more time than it would take to try and disarm it.
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As I said in my OOC note I'm not arguing that it should be less time. I'm saying I had a different OOC idea of what time it was and in light of it being that long, I'm not willing to spend further time on it at this point.
It's also not that I can't think of creative descriptions for how to describe working on a trap. It's that our characters were given a specific goal to accomplish and at this point in time Talas is not convinced ICly that his screwing around with the orbs is directly accomplishing that goal. So, he doesn't think it's worth further investment in.
In an OOC sense, we have now been on this obstacle course for five months. For fourteen rounds of in-game play. That's, what, about 3 rounds per month? I don't really feel like spending the next two months doing nothing but describing trying to take apart a trap? That's not really my idea of a fun exciting game. I'd prefer to at least be doing something that directly and obviously impacts/helps my fellow PCs in the game then spend my next six posts narrating 'Talas stuffs his shirt into a hole.'
That's fair. This game has moved very slowly. A large part of that is my own fault. I can only move as fast as life and my own motivation allow. Fall and winter tend to be extremely busy for me. I've been trying to rebuild the momentum that was lost over the last few months. I feel I've been having mixed success there.
The other thing I think is slowing the game down is the nature of PbP dungeon crawls (which is basically what the obstacle course is). I think I nderestimated how difficult this course would be when I designed it.
Pulling your shirt off and stuffing it in the hole is a great solution, and sounds like roughly a full round action to me. I'll allow it if you want to go with that.
Honestly a part of it too is that after an exciting introduction that kept us all riveted, through to a conversation/discussion that had the group's fates hanging in the balance with impactful decisions, this stage, after this long, just seems pointless.
I get that it's supposed to be them putting us through our paces, seeing what we're capable of, but considering how long it's taken, I'm almost dreading day two through whatever of training until we actually go on missions.
When you lead with a certain level of excitement, while there are slowdowns to build momentum to the crest, going through the training at this point started out pretty good but now just feels mundane. Even as I type this I feel like I'm being unnecessarily harsh, but I know you value honest feedback.
It feels like this would be one of those training montage moments that get us to the rest of the story.
It's an issue I have with the system itself. There's a huge difference between my ability to create a narrative during scenes that require a lot of mechanics and scenes that don't. The early part of the game was (largely) mechanics-free. I was trying to get through things as fast as possible to get on to the meat of the story (which was intended to be this stuff).
Most of my PbP games involve a lot of experimentation with how to make the format work. I like to explore tropes I find problematic and see if I can find ways to still use them. I had a lot of success when I tried having the party run around with higher level characters without having the party feel overshadowed. I think success was mixed when I tried to simulate a sporting event. This series of skill-challenges is clearly not working as well.
I'm thinking the round by round structure is the biggest issue. Perhaps a partial-montage?
I'm thinking that if the players give me a character goal, I can make a bunch of rolls and just describe what happens until the next challenge is revealed, how long that takes to get to, and where the players are when that happens. Then we repeat that after the players give me new character goals in response to the new challenge.
What does everyone think?
Hmm, that's actually a very appealing way to try and get through "training" sequences in a much more palpable manner.
I'm up for some narrative experimentation here.