Zay is rightly asking about whether they can apply some spell buffs before combat begins in the current watchtower situation. This particular instance is slightly complicated by the fact that after a long windup, I rushed us through the mundane parts of climbing the tower and going through the first room.
That made it easier to say that Zay could apply his buffs if my rushing had deprived him of the opportunity to apply the spells. If I make that the standard, though, then it comes down to whether a player remembers to apply their spell buffs ahead of time. Players are sometimes very distracted by real life.
So probably whether your character would have used the spells in question before an encounter comes up without knowing about it beforehand should be the standard.
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Since I'm chatting here, I'll take the opportunity to explain my philosophy on monster knowledge checks. In Pathfinder Society and perhaps elsewhere, I've seen a widespread (but not universal) convention of giving players questions based on how many +5 successes they got on their skill check. I don't have any real complaints if other GMs do that, but I don't find any support for it in the rules. I also think that overall it is a disadvantage for players. Far too often they ask a question that they think is of importance to their character (like DR) but isn't of actual relevance to the fight at hand (maybe it doesn't have DR but does have regeneration).
What I try to do is imagine what a sage might tell someone if they asked about a monster. When asked about a ghoul, for instance, he might say “the first thing you need to know is that they can freeze a man in his tracks”, describing the paralysis. A second success would probably tell them something about ghoul fever. This whole method does leave it up to the GM to decide what the theoretical sage would say first, but I find it more closely hews to what the rules suggest should be done than the questions method.
In general, a creature's base type will be available without any knowledge check at all. I assume that people trained as adventurers know an Ooze from a Plant even if untrained. knowledge checks are more complicated when a creature is hiding its nature from the outside world. Using an at-hand example, I wouldn't tell anyone that a faceless stalker that is pretending to be a human should be identified with Dungeoneering. I'd tell them that they should use Local to identify the human or, more likely, that they shouldn't bother because they know what humans are. Only once it dropped its disguise could you use Dungeoneering. This particular creature was identified as an aberration because it revealed some of its true nature and was obviously not a table.
Metagame values such as hit dice are not typically available from knowledge checks no matter what success is achieved.
In in-person games, I ask people not to roll knowledge until their turn. Then they can roll & let people know what they find out, hopefully in a summarized version that someone might shout out to their allies in a rush. I'm not really sure how best to implement that in a pbp game. Probably I should put knowledge spoilers up when initiative is rolled, although I imagine I'll sometimes get lazy and miss that.
I'm also not sure how best to handle templates on monsters, especially when the template is Planes-based on a Magical Beast creature for instance (half-fiend manticore maybe). The CR going up due to the template is straightforward, but how much do you know about half-fiends based on the magical beast Arcana check?
5+ DC are very commonly encountered things like skeletons & goblins
10+ DC are almost everything else
15+ DC are quite rare to encounter. Things that aren't unique but are kind of close to that, or maybe hail from VERY far away. Leng monsters in this campaign might apply, for instance, but not Hounds of Tindalos.
* if a creature has class levels, CR resulting from those levels wouldn't apply to the Knowledge check DC, but you also wouldn't learn anything about it that results from its class levels
Creatures that the party has encountered several times, like faceless stalkers in this game, are obviously known entities.
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I definitely agree with your method of doing the knowledge checks in terms of 'what would a sage suggest as the most important fact on this creature,' it's organic and makes sense to me and is generally also my philosophy.
Regarding things like 'total number of hit dice', my personal take is that HD IS knowledge some characters would have access to, in world, in a non-meta sense-- I mean, a wizard who has studied to be able to cast a sleep spell, or color spray, that can affect weaker creatures (when 'weaker' is a function of ONLY hit dice, in that case) presumably would know on some level that a dragon is probably too powerful to try and make it work, and it would be better reserved for foes like goblins, etc. They understand that their spell functions better on small, weak foes than on epic threats, in the same vein that they understand that you don't use fire spells on an efreet, etc. Since both of those understandings are based on 'rules knowledge' it seems somewhat arbitrary to me to say that one of them is using "meta knowledge" because it involves the hit dice portion of a monster's stat line, as opposed to the resistance portion of a monster's stat line. HD is one of the markers in the game of a creature's overall power level and strength relative to the party, just like CR, which can translate in world to "Oh god, this monster is something you've only ever heard tales of! They lay waste to cities and eat seasoned warriors for breakfast!"
(This is, for the record, just my take-- I'm speaking in the vein of a friendly discussion between people who like playing Pathfinder-- not in the vein of a 'player trying to convince the GM to change their mind'. As the GM, whatever preferences you have is indeed what happens!)
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Regarding Zay, and buffs, the main thing is that I have several hour-or-more lasting buffs (mage armor and extended barkskin as the two primary ones) that I'd probably have running on myself if we're in a "field situation." Things like going into an abandoned structure/cave/underwater would be trigger points for those long term buffs (ideally). It's a huge gap in my AC if I've got those or not, so it makes a difference as to whether I'm going to attempt to act as a front-liner or a spellcaster for a given combat.
If I'm understanding you right for this particular fight.... I'll operate right now under the assumption that I have those (though we still need a dice roll to confirm that Tatienne could get off the casting of mage armor, sorry to be a nitpicker, just don't want to be taking advantage when I shouldn't. If it speeds things up, here's potential rolls:
So, a successful activation before we entered the tower. Again, not trying to step on Taty's toes, just trying to keep us moving. I'll assume that I did NOT, however, get off the shift before combat erupted. Going to go make actual IC post now.
I agree with Zay, for the most part. I like your system, for the most part, but I think some general idea of that is helpful (though the DC also kind of tells us that). I'm not going to make a heck of a lot of Knowledge checks, but Aurelian is always going to be looking for whether something is susceptible to his swordsmanship -- does it seem like he can get precision damage and criticals. I feel like some of those are going to be obvious (with constructs, oozes, etc.), while others may be less so.
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I think Zay's discussion of buffs also makes sense. We may not cast first thing in the morning, so are unprepared if there's an ambush, but if we enter an adventuring site, that might be a different situation. To me, I think where you'd be fair in saying we didn't buff if we didn't say so is if we come up to a lake. The fact that you're telling us about it might indicate to us as players that there's something unusual about it, but our players wouldn't feel that. Now, if it's a bloody lake, I think that would give our characters reason to be suspicious/cautious, but not otherwise. If that makes sense.
Just posted in Gameplay about weapons sticking to the enemy. I'm posting here as well because I'm generally not sure how that would interact with all the Freedom of Movement going around right now.
I generally think of Freedom of Movement as affecting the bearer and their weapons, but that's probably because of the fighting underwater clauses. We generally don't otherwise worry about the movement of weapons being hindered. The text of the spell doesn't say anything about it that I saw when I looked yesterday.
Any thoughts?
(This discussion doesn't impact Aurelian's currently-needed saves, as those happened before Freedom of Movement went down by posting order and by initiative order (Zay's 2nd round).
I think FoM would have to effect equipment, because otherwise your clothing, could just be grappled, stickied, etc. It also seems to me that the default in PF is that effects effecting a person also effect their gear unless stated otherwise. From my recollection at least the instances when the exception are called out tend to be when gear is mentioned as not being useable under the circumstances of that effect.
Yeah, I would probably agree with Tatienne.
Sounds good to me too. Just had to think through a corner case. I won't go quite as far as saying that the default is 'gear affected too'. I wouldn't expect Stoneskin to make someone's sword hard to sunder, for instance. But it applies well enough here.
Aurelian, I'd like to check some details on your Intimidate checks vs this critter.
I forgot to even check the Intimidate on the first round, which could have saved you from the critter's second round attack if it had been shaken. Unfortunately, the round 1 Intimidate failed so nothing changes there.
You applied a -1 to the round 1 Intimidate and I'm not sure of its source. It wouldn't have changed the result.
This creature is Large size, which should be applying a -4 penalty to your Intimidates. It looks like you haven't been counting that on your rolls, which is fine. If I'm wrong about that, let me know.
Also, the Intimidate DC is going up by 5 each time you attempt it. The checks are very cheap for Aurelian though, so why not try?
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I was just checking the rules, and it looks like your swift/immediate action usage refreshes at the end of your turn. So it's safe to use swift actions without impacting your ability to use an immediate action, but if you do use an immediate action on not-your-turn, you can't swift action on your turn following.
I don't think you've done that wrong here. I'm mostly posting it to remind myself of how it works.
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Is there a reason Aurelian didn't try an iterative attack on his turn?
I ... have no idea why that -1 is there in Round 1. It's not in my macro. It just seems to have crept in there. Aurelian Fache is generous, and did not want to scare the table?
You are correct I was not factoring in the foe's size to my Intimidate checks. I can mark that into the macro, since you're right that it's easier if I handle. I will admit I had no clue that the DC went up for continued checks. As you said, there's no real reason not to do it ... except the issue with immediate actions. If I riposte (or use dodging panache), I wouldn't be able to attempt to demoralize in the following round. I'll definitely try to keep that in mind. I'd been treating the demoralize as basically a free action, since I didn't have anything to do with my swift actions, but there's definitely a good chance I might have used it up before my turn began.
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I assumed I wouldn't have an iterative attack because the weapon was stuck, though I didn't look up the mimic to see the specifics of it.
Oh, you have Freedom of Movement going. No stickiness for Aurelian! (for 70 minutes)
I tend to assume that everyone knows the 'bloodied' terminology from D&D 4th edition now, and I use it frequently while GMing. Just in case someone isn't familiar though:
Bloodied means nothing more or less than that an enemy is below half HP. This had many varied effects in 4th edition but here it just serves as a way for the party to tell how close they are to defeating an enemy. In practice, it means I have a clean way of answering the 'how close is it?' question that comes up frequently at tables without giving up lots of information that the party shouldn't have.
So 'bloodied' even if the creature obviously has no blood.
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How is probably a good time to talk about spell durations and such. I've always handled those in an ad-hoc sort of way but especially for minute/level duration spells it probably matters quite a bit how much time passes between combats & such. Here's my current thinking (noting that I could be persuaded otherwise):
When in a situation where tracking the duration of spells is important, the party can be in one of four modes when a combat ends:
* casual pacing – the party feels free to take their time & is unlikely to mind running their spell durations down. They'll sort things out after a combat, do a decent (but not super thorough) job of searching reasonably sized rooms and have plenty of time to cast recovery spells. A standard time for casual pacing battle recovery would be five minutes.
- secret room features (secret doors & traps, most treasure that requires Perception checks) can be searched for without the party calling it out specifically
- no need to track number of rounds used healing unless it is really abnormal or the spells have long casting times
- will usually cost the party five minutes for the combat and recovery time & travel to the next nearby dungeon chamber combined
* hurried pacing – the party is still taking time to recover after a fight, but isn't searching the room very well at all & is mostly catching their breath before proceeding further. If a single caster needs to cast more than ten spells (CLW wands maybe) then the party will likely be pushed into a slower pacing, although not necessarily into casual.
- secret room features will need to be called out to be checked without relevant features (trap spotter & its ilk)
- will usually cost the party two minutes for the combat, recovery time & travel to the next nearby dungeon chamber
* rushed pacing – the party is moving fast enough to attempt to preserve rounds/level spells and is basically running to the next door after. We'd probably have to stay in some form of initiative for this to work.
- no extra time cost, but all actions need to be declared in initiative format
* unusual pacing – this covers really big rooms to search, specific amounts of time called out in the adventure description for actions taken, longer than normal travel times between rooms. This category will have to involve a call for each situation individually.
If the party is attempting to sneak around, the casual & hurried pacing times will probably increase somewhat.
Our current situation in the watchtower probably calls for casual pacing just because there's no obvious next room to go to.
The five-minute & two-minutes times above can probably be reduced by one minute for situations where there isn't a combat to recovery from.
Any thoughts?
GM, I think this seems like a good system for figuring out short and long-term durations, which are always a bit tricky. I like it!
Not trying to formalize it too hard, but if I don't even make a guideline I'll end up just making it up as I go every time and being hugely inconsistent.
Sounds fine to me.
The current watchtower area is more or less complete. Feel free to continue looking at things if something caught your interest. Otherwise, you might want to return to camp & plan out your next moves.
Catching up now.
Those spell durations seem fine.
One thing I'd note however is while I'm normally totally fine with party takedown of foes, Aurelian's panache goes up 1 if he reduces the critter to 0. I don't know if you want to simply say that happens in those situations (sounds like it may not matter here), if that's easier than tracking which did the actual killing blow. Could also make it a 50/50 proposition in such circumstances?
Noted. Description side, Aurelian did get the finishing blow on that critter going by posting order which is...probably right for this format?
Otherwise I'd have to resolve oosts in initiative order & things could get even messier than normal for pbp.
Hi everyone. Not wearing my GM hat for this one, so I'll post it on Sarine.
Another game I'm in as a player is in need of another player after we lost some over the winter. The game is a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game (4th edition, the most recent one). It's been running for over a year now and we've completed a longer scenario, two shorter ones & the very rough equivalent of one AP book.
Adventure Series: The Enemy Within
Book 1 just completed: Shadows Over Bogenhafen
Book 2 starting now: Death on the Reik
WFRP 4th edition has a very different feel from Pathfinder/D&D and like any roleplaying system has its quirks. I'm posting here instead of general recruitment because we're hoping to get someone who can be reliable for the long haul. I know Aurelian & Zay can be and I'm trusting Tatienne & Kassiani for that already.
Let me know if you have questions or if you'd be interested!
I don't think I have the bandwidth to learn a new system at the moment. Thank you for the thinking of me/us, Sarine!
Same here. I'm struggling to just keep up with my current games...
No problem if you don't want to/too busy. I just wanted to ask!
Echoing the 'nice to be thought of but no new system for me at this time' sentiment :)
I'm saddled with figuring out Pulp Call of Cthulhu already right now. Thanks though!
Zay asked how long your watchtower exploration took, which is a good question. That brings up the whole issue of time & travel distances, so I had to figure that whole thing out.
I made my best effort to estimate the distances along a probable path of travel. The total distance I'm getting from the base camp/watchtower area to the faceless temple is 4.65 miles (I'm using pixel math to get the distances rather than my fingernails, which is where the precision of the numbers is coming from).
I assumed trackless jungle (quarter travel speed) for most of the travel distance, with a short segment near the base camp (about a mile of the total distance) using trackless desert travel (half travel speed) instead. That gives us a total travel time from the base camp to the faceless temple of roughly 5.5 hours.
Briefly, I'll note that those figures make the narrative we have for the previous day (2 Lamashan 4717) starting at Hullhold kind of ludicrous. I'll choose to ignore that though.
For our present purposes, that travel time means that it would be impossible to have an 8-hour day routine of:
* travel to faceless temple from base camp
* adventuring
* travel back to base camp to sleep
Even if we borrowed some time from the non-adventuring part of the day, that would be 11 hours of travel. So plan on staying somewhere closer to the temple at the end of this adventuring day.
Sounds good!
And I certainly appreciate your desire to figure it out as precisely as possible, but I'm always okay with 'the GM makes a snap guess based on available notions' when it's the simplest.
Yeah. I'm happy to just buy whatever you tell us. Obviously if you enjoy those calculations, by all means go ahead, but don't feel you need to be that precise if it's too much for you!
I likely won't put that kind of effort into things routinely. It was more important this time, since I didn't even know for sure that one day of travel would get you to the faceless temple. Also the now-revealed travel complication.
I'm working away from a computer today and will be back tonight/tomorrow.
If you guys are done in this room, I just need to know where you want to go next. We keep getting blocked on that but I don't want to decide for you. It might bd good for the group to put forward a plan like exploring everything in a given hallway or something similar.
I've had you guys moving with a hurried pacing. If you want to slow down to casual, let me know.
...did the map rotate? *squints* Last I saw of it, we were moving on to the room that we are now standing in front of (C), after having cleared A and B (I was assuming B was the clockworks room), though now I recognize that maybe we didn't clear B as it has no visible doors. But it was the only room I could understand us getting to from room A. I may have misunderstood something.
If C is clockworks room, then let's go to D next, and Zay's listening check (which wasn't great anyway) could just apply there.
Party: are we fine with just sort of assuming we move on to the next closest door? Like after clearing D, we could just proceed in sequence down that top-of-the-map hallway?
It does look like it rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
I agree with your plan. Let's his D, then assuming we don't see any other doors, hit all the double doors going from left to right.
Yes, that plan sounds good to me as well!
I got the rolls made for a post and then got called away for something pressing. Never managed to get back to write the post. I'll get one up either tonight or tomorrow.
I'm flexible on where we go and how quickly. I figure Kass is still getting oriented and is happy to follow those who know a bit more about what's going on at this point.
Yeah, I rotated the map. I should have had it on this orientation to begin with. East is now up.
Room B is the storeroom with the secret door.
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I'm away from my things for the rest of the day. I'll move us along late tonight or tomorrow. As soon as I can get to it.
Sorry to keep you all waiting. Work has been busy and I lost the weekend due to my unpleasant reaction to my first covid-19 shot. It wasn't horrible, but between a prolonged headache and the fatigue it caused it was enough to keep me in bed watching TV.
Glad you got the shot, Kassiani!
I'm headed to a cabin in northern california for the week. Should have wifi but posting may not occur every day. Please bot as needed.
So one thing to keep in mind; I only have a 12 Strength. I don't think that's going to be enough to haul Tati away. Like I said, I can feed her a potion, but we're in a bit of trouble in this corner.
Fun encounter design to get us all separated...
Yeah, when I first read over the encounter I didn't quite get how the spacing would work out & so forth.
I will point out that the party does have hero points with which to dodge deaths if they need them. This would be a less than ideal encounter to need them for, but that is what safety nets are like.
Yup. They’re of no use if we don’t use them.
Yeah, this one's super rough for our party composition since our big 'hard hitter' is Aurelian and the precision nerfs him :( I might be able to get Taty out, can't promise anything, but it is what I'm OOCly trying to work towards. So much depends on the dice, of course.
(Aurelian, you wanna verbally tell us IC that Taty is down? ;) technically, Zay and Kass have no line of sight there. :P)
I'm thinking of throwing down an obscuring mist. It isn't great for us either but if we're trying to flee it potentially helps us avoid those enemy reach AOOs.
Agreed that this is a tough fight with our party makeup, and even harder since we're all separated from each other.
I don't think y'all should stick around, honestly - I don't think Taty would want y'all to die trying to save her bacon (though she'd be appreciative of the effort).
We'll at least make an effort. :)
Just an FYI, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to post the rest of the month. I'll definitely be out of pocket this coming Monday-Thursday, and may be a bit more sporadic for the next couple of weeks until after PaizoCon, for various reasons.
Have fun at the con!
Is Aurelian's an doing a parry? I guesshe might need to save panache, but I thought I'd check.
That may be the most clutch use of summons of all time, Zay!
:D :D Thanks! Fingers crossed it works, haha.
It looks like it has been true for a while but I realized today that I finally got campaign ownership. Yay! I'll look forward into making the front page & such more cozy for myself.
If there is anything you'd like to see there, let me know. I'll very likely remove the content rules. I don't disagree with them really, but no one seems inclined to go off the rails.