Dispater's Devils by GM SnowHeart (a Hell's Vengeance AP)

Game Master SnowHeart

Get well soon!

Every time my throat tickles—“Is that you, ‘Rona’?!?”

^ Yeah, me too. I hope you feel better soon, Snowheart.

Get better soon!

Every time my throat tickles—“Is that you, ‘Rona’?!?”

It's maddening.

"Muscle aches? Probably didn't sleep well, but maaaaaybe... I better check Google."

"I sneezed a few times more than normal. Probably allergies, but maaaaaaybe. I better check Google."

"Hmm. I'm tired. I better see if I can still smell the garlic."

Just 'cause we seem to be on a different page. This gate's being closed to all passage, right?

The notice says that only officially officious passage is allowed out of the other two gates - so I think we're just supposed to seal/bar the whole thing as best we can and take the keys. Did I misread something?

I’ll quote what I think the most relevant part of the notice is. Past that... I’ll leave it to y’all to interpret.

Longacre’s western gate, known as the Castle Gate, is closed until further notice. All travel into and out of Longacre must employ the north or south gates and be officially sanctioned.

Gah, reading comprehension issues...

I feel like my reading comprehension is going downhill as I get older. I’m reading too fast. It’s like, in high school, I was 95th+ percentile for reading comprehension. Now, as a lawyer and father, I’m lucky if I understand anything longer than two paragraphs.

Anyway...

Ha--I used to love to read before law school and read in my free time frequently.

Reading 100 pages a day of legal textbooks will cure that in a hurry!

Reading 100 pages a day of legal textbooks will cure that in a hurry!

AUGH! PTSD! The fine print and tight spacing in those books... Law school also cures good eyesight.

I’m a lawyer who practice Veterans’ disability law. Each case file I review is hundreds of documents, each ranging from a few to a few hundred pages. So much reading...luckily law school teaches the power of skimming.

What are your areas?

Family law here, along with some estate planning, adoptions, occasionally contracts, and lots of Qualified Domestic Relations Orders.

Did civil defense for awhile, then focused on employment law. Got sick of it. Now I consult for the federal government on eDiscovery. Some agencies are about 15 years behind on the technology, using stuff like Adobe to do redactions. It's crazy. Not where I saw myself when I graduated from law school, but money is very good and a LOT less stress.

Did a little bit of family law at the firm after law school. Was fascinating and kind of fun but sad what a train wreck some peoples lives were.

Dabbled in family law myself. I wouldn’t go back...it is indeed “kind of fun but sad.” Mostly I just found it to be exhausting. Bless you for managing to make it a career.

“ Got sick of it.” I feel that on a spiritual level. I enjoy veterans law because it is non-adversarial. So much less stress.

Kind of cool to have so many lawyers here. But now I really can’t mess the rules up...

Yeah, I would definitely consider a different specialty, only I'm in a firm with my family and the kind of work we have is here in spades.

I think I've resigned myself to sticking with it until I can afford to do something else.

But family law is definitely a drain. Often I want to push my client off a cliff or jump off myself. But luckily it's only 3-4 clients at a time that have this effect on me. The rest are fine. ;P

Hehe, that's a lot of lawyers in this game. Probably a joke to be mined there somewhere...

What is family law? Divorces, wills, etc.?

I feel like my reading comprehension is going downhill as I get older. I’m reading too fast. It’s like, in high school, I was 95th+ percentile for reading comprehension. Now, as a lawyer and father, I’m lucky if I understand anything longer than two paragraphs.

Anyway...

I hear you all on reading. I'm no lawyer, but I run the Special Collections & University Archives for a library at a mid-sized university, and even though I hear "I'd love to be a librarian - I love to read!" a lot, all I ever read anymore is technical writing, theory about information, and case studies about archives. And add that the publish or perish tenure track, and that's what I write too.

Gaming is a welcome creative departure!

Well I can redress the balance, I did a Visual Arts degree.For context, that's like an bachelor of arts but with a much more select field of unemployment

^ Visual arts, very cool! Artists are generally pretty nice folks.

And generally seem happier than lawyers. ;)

I've got a lot of calls today but should have time to get an update up. Combats with this many people take a while to post and format.

Love your little debuff icons Snow!

Lol! Awesome. Another GM is doing them in a game I'm playing in and I thought they were pretty helpful so thought I'd give it a try.

GM, I rolled Brogol's will save in the gameplay and failed the save. Do you want to retcon/roll Brogol's actions?

I updated my post; took me a long time to write it and I missed your save in the interim. Go ahead and take that save -- looks like 10 is a fail -- so roll percentile on confusion chart and... good luck. >:-)

Sorry about this, Brogol (and Cimri!). Looks like a failed save. I do have selective channeling in my feats at level 3. I will try to keep allies out of this in the future.

If Cimri were my PC, I'd be a little cross, but she's not so I'm laughing. That said, hopefully Brogol shakes out okay, and definitely do try to avoid hitting PCs with this in the future. Eris is a bit more chaotic than I would usually allow in an evil campaign but I really like the feel of the character and the humor she's bringing. Hopefully Cimri doesn't roll the same and die this round (I kind of like her).

Yeah, I'll definitely try to avoid hurting allies in the future. I think Brogol moved after I'd done it, and maybe I was a little too excited to try it. Selective Channeling incoming.

I'm also planning to have Dear Ol' Dad be my foil to keep me from going off rails and stay with the party line. I'll be good--promise! ;P

Also, I don't think I hit Cimri this round (if so, let me adjust my movement please). Also, it's a one-round effect, so they all snap out of it unless I hit them again.

Sorry, Brogol's player failed his save and is now also confused. Which of the below possibilities is happening?

Possibility #1

Round 1: Eris channels, Brogol fails save, takes 1 damage.

I need to roll and see what action Brogol takes this round. This may or may not have an impact on whether the guard is tripped.

Round 2: Eris channels, Brogol takes 3 damage and needs to roll a save, and if he fails, roll on the confusion chart.

Or:

Possibility #2

Round 1: Eris channels, Brogol takes 1 damage, trip attack stands as is

Round 2: Eris channels, Brogol takes 3 damage, Brogol fails save, needs to roll on the confusion chart.

Thanks, and sorry for needing the clarification...

No need to apologize. Very fair question as the trip attempt probably would have been dependent on this, but we’ll just say it happened. Part of the problem here is I’m resolving actions in blocks rather than strictly initiative order; usually that’s not a problem but it is here because it’s having a detrimental effect on the party. What I think is going on is this:

Round 1: Brogol’s trip attempt worked. Period. But he failed his save, and takes 1 damage

Round 2: Having failed his save, Brogol rolls on the confusion chart and acts accordingly. At the end of his turn, he makes another save against the second channel.

Round 3: If Brogol failed his second save, he rolls on the confusion chart and acts accordingly. If he succeeded on his save, he acts normally.

Edit/PS: If on his confusion result for the first channel, Brogol gets “act normally” and decides to get the away from the crazy chick, we can say he escapes the effect of the second channel and doesn’t need to make the second saving throw.

First, I'm very sorry Brogol. I'm feeling worse and worse about including any PCs in that first channel. Measure twice, cut once. I didn't look carefully enough.

But second round, there should be NO PCs in the second channel! I really really want to get away from any PCs. If you're still in the channel, I'll move one square up. I need to get myself a template and figure out exactly how a 30' channel works. Please let me retcon him out of this one. /yikes!

Some Good Template Go-Tos

Oh, thanks Raziya! That's definitely what I need!

I'll save that and avoid making the party want to kill me. This group actually would!

Again, apologies to my teammates.

GM, OK, sounds good.

Eris, no worries. Looking at your PC's placement, I do think that Brogol is safe from channel #2. I'll retcon if need be.

Those templates look great!

Thanks, Brogol. I'll behave in the future. :)

The templates will be very helpful to verify what I'm doing. I do have other tricks. I'm wishing I'd picked Selective Channel right from level 1.

Part of the very handy 'New GMs Toolkit' from the Flaxseed Lodge (online PFS)

GM, you had mentioned it might be okay to make changes to builds prior to level two.

After this combat, would you be opposed to me switching out Spell Focus (I’ve never cast a spell with it yet) for Selective Channeling?

Seeing the radius of channel with a template down shows how hard that would be to use, and I’d rather not wait until level 3 or further aggravate party members.

Yup! Totally fine with that. Familiar with the challenge; I had a neutral cleric who started out as a “bad touch” cleric with the poison variant channel. Was going to be useless if I couldn’t get selective channel real quick. Still turns into a challenge as then as your Charisma score becomes important but... yes, totally fine.

Same for everyone else. I’m comfortable with adjustments to your characters during first level while you get used to them and settle into the party. Just let me know what you’re doing.

Sounds good. I won't use it this combat, but after this battle I'll switch it out.

I really like the option to make changes until level 2. Sometimes, you don't really know how something is going to play until you see it in combat.

Much appreciated, and my apologies for hurting allies!

Absolutely hammered at work today. Aiming to have an update up tonight.

No worries. I'm sure we'll be the anvil when you get back.

Is Raziya the only one that heals with negative energy?

Karik, you or your Eidolon don't, by chance, do you?

I'm trying to figure out if, even with Selective Channeling, I'll be able to channel without causing a lot of harm to the group. I can currently only exclude two from the channel with my charisma. Including Eidolons, I need to be able to exclude SIX.

I suppose that I could leave Raziya in the effect and actually heal her (though that would leave her still needing to make a Will save or be confused). If we had a couple of people that would heal instead of harm, and that could shrug off the Will save, it might still be okay.

I'm just wanting to see if this would even be worth it, or if I'll just need to forget about channeling (barring some unusual times I'm that far away from everyone).

Ingrid does to, and she can change her spells into inflict

Alright--that helps.

I suppose the follow-up question would be whether Ingrid and Raziya would be upset if I included them in the channel. Their Will saves will be increasing faster than the channel DC.

Don't Dhampir have a racial option to heal with negative energy? That would put us at three that heal, so then I could exclude and include the others, potentially.

Yes I heal from negative energy. Though my will saves will not be great. (saves are the summonerers weakness)

Vaelor does not though. She needs positive energy to heal

No worries. I’m aiming to kill y’all in the next scene.

J/k

Maybe.

We’ll see.

Okay, I’m still working on making Selective Channeling work with this group.

Variant channeling also includes this language:

“ Creatures that would normally ignore the effect of a particular channel (such as undead with respect to a positive energy channel used to heal) ignore the variant effect of that channel.”

Would this make any of our negative energy healing characters exempt from the Madness effect? I’m trying to figure out what this means.

Anyone else want to weigh in on whether this Madness channeling negative energy could work or won’t work with this group? It seems like healing a number of you while making the enemy confused at the same time could be cool, but I also ran into some problems last combat.

Well... we won't heal from it, but yeah, all us negative-energy attuned folk won't be hurt, at least.

Channels are used to either hurt or heal, but just one at a time. So Eris can channel negative to heal

Yup, even with negative energy, can only do a harm or heal each round, which typically would be “heal undead” or “harm the do-gooders”.

On a related note, I think with variant channeling doing half damage, I’d just roll a d3... since it’s digital, we actually have that option. :-)

Good thought on the d3--I'll do that from now on.

So, if I understand the rules correctly, because there are three allies in the group (Raziya, Ingrid, and Karik) that "would normally ignore the effect of a particular channel" they would also ignore the madness from the variant channeling?

In other words, with Selective Channeling, I could avoid hurting those that are usually affected by positive energy (Brogol, Vivia, and Eidolon)?

Does this work like I'm thinking, then? Or do I need a 22 Charisma to pull this off?

I had to re-read and re-write this several times. It's kind of confusing... Open to other thoughts/interpretations but the way I see it is this and sounds like we may have gotten a few things wrong. Here's a quote from the pfsrd, and I'm striking out language that seems irrelevant to Eris, and adding "footnote" numbers at the end of each sentence (i.e., the numbered notation relates to the preceding sentence).

A variant channeling either modifies positive channeled energy when used to heal or modifies negative energy when used to harm. When using positive energy to heal, affected creatures gain only half the normal amount of healing but also receive a specific beneficial effect.(1) When channeling negative energy to harm, affected creatures take only half the normal damage but take an additional penalty or harmful effect; a successful saving throw negates the additional penalty or effect but does not reduce the damage any further.(2) Creatures that would normally ignore the effect of a particular channel (such as undead with respect to a positive energy channel used to heal) ignore the variant effect of that channel.(3)

(1) Because Eris is using negative energy, the variant channeling only modifies the channel ability when she uses it to harm others. So, when she "heals", it is still at full power (e.g., 1d6, not a 1d3).

(2) This is the part that's relevant to us. Eris will only deal half-damage when "harming". Instead of 1d6 damage, she does 1d3, plus the variant madness. A successful save negates the madness but does not further reduce the damage (it remains 1d3).

(3) If a creature is normally healed by negative energy, then the "harm" channel has no effect on them. It would be like a normal cleric channeling negative energy surrounded by undead -- it has zero effect.

If Raziya, Ingrid and Karik are not harmed by negative energy, then they are immune to the harm and Eris would not need to exclude them with selective channel.

Yeah, this is my interpretation, too.

If this is the rule, then while I'm able to selectively remove three from the channel, I'd just need to find a way to keep one out, instead of most of the group. That seems a lot more do-able.

Everyone alright? No gameplay posts from Karik, Ingrid, or Raziya since Monday.