[PFS2] 2-14 Lost in Flames (GM Watery Soup) (Inactive)

Game Master Watery Soup

Excellent point, Hopper. Given that ...

It's time for us to slot boons, yes? I only have 3 boons slotted, so I have room for a Hireling boon. It would seem that Lazarus would appreciate (and expect) a hireling to pilot a horse and cart for such a journey. I've never used Hirelings in PFS-2e. But with 50 reputation, he should be able to hire an Expert Hireling.

WaterySoup, let me know if that's okay. If so, he'll pay the going rate for a Cart (3gp), and a horse to pull it (would that be a pack horse vs. a riding horse)?

I considered getting him an actual covered Carriage to be pulled around in. But that is 100gp and requires 2 horses. Perhaps when he's on holiday, but he can't be spending all his mision earnings on transportation. After all, he needs some leftover for his brandy.

Once I get GM confirmation, I'll post in Gameplay.

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Enough about me ... Zabu suggested a path. Is that based on the strange camp to the east? They said it's along a river. Is there anyway to know where rivers are on that hex map? If not, if our goal is to head east, that's a fine plan.

I would vote that, once we hit the river, we follow it south for a stretch. Otherwise, I think that is an appropriate start based on what we know.

I'm good with Zabu's plan. We head east until we find the river and the camp. Once we deal with them, we can see if the plan needs updating.

Sounds good to me. Head east and then follow the first river we find.

I also think Zabu is a genius and that we should follow his plan and head east until we find the river and/or camp.

I don't know about Zabu. He seems mean... Mean, mean, mean! But dang if he doesn't have a great plan. I think we should follow his great plan. We can't possibly go wrong by following his great plan. I'm so happy.

Twyl eyes the strange little fellow with the sharp teeth rather warily. He'd seen him hanging around his mistress a little to often for comfort. He looked dangerous and Twyl wasn't at all sure he could be trusted in mixed company.

But when it came to plans. Maaaan! He was a prodigy. Twyl couldn't see a flaw in it. He'd follow that plan right off the edge of the world it was so good.

How many votes for the plan is that now?

Thurston, you no longer need to slot boons. They are all slotted.

Starting season 2, there are just fewer boons. So ... yeah. Expert Hireling is great.

Sorry, the Internet is pretty bad here and I'm having difficulty loading the slides so I can't see the proposed path. I will try again tomorrow.

No worries @GM - the route is going theough the top line of hexes from left to right.

/\/\/\/\/\ - like that :D (heading north-east, heading south-east, north-east, SE, NE, SE - until the end of map)

A reminder that everyone starts with 1 Hero Point. Any extras (glyphs, coins, etc.)?

@GM: If we're dealing with possible crit fails on some of those Survival and Forest Lores, we don't all have to try them, right?

Regarding rations, did the Society provide rations for the pack mules, or are they expected to forage on their own (grass etc, should be plentiful in a forest). Mainly asking to make sure we don't need to consider extra rations for our mounts.

Speaking of which, the good Doctor would need to feed Chauncey, his new halfling driver. For the record, he purchased 5 weeks of rations (4sp/week=2gp) while he was in town.

For foraging, there is no downside to crit failures - the penalty for crit failure is a circumstance bonus, and it doesn't stack with the circumstance bonus for foraging after traveling.

For reconnoiter, there is no penalty for crit failure at all. Only one team member needs to succeed.

You do not need to consider food for mounts or hirelings. I don't have a rulebook citation - that's just the way it was ruled in my game. Or, if you prefer a more in-game reason, the Society provided food for 40 days, not 240 person-days. But mostly, unless it's really important to someone, I'm trying to keep the accounting straightforward, and it's easiest if we just stick to PCs.

Thanks for the info on rations!

2 quick things:

When Lazarus first sees the claw marks and Zabu identifies them as Owlbear, the Investigator would like to take a minute to Pursue a Lead on the Owlbears. Since the description indicated we later made our way to the river crossing, I'm guessing he had plenty of time to do this. Is that okay?

Also, since we're expecting owlbears, is it reasonable to assume we had weapons drawn?

Yes to both.

Regarding Lazarus' Nature check:

1) If it was a success, is there any more information you can provide that we haven't gotten already?

2) If it was a crit success, Lazarus points out weaknesses to the team so that everyone receives a +1 circumstance bonus on their 1st attack roll this turn.

Regarding the screeches, the Frightened conditions don't stack, do they? We just take the worse of the two results?

Lastly, looks like Lazarus is surrounded and possibly being attacked. There's a Lazarus spoiler, but it's not clear whether he was hit, whether he took damage, etc. Can you clarify when you get a chance?

In case it isn't clear which way Jayma was sending the Hydraulic Push against the Red Owlbear, I have placed an arrow indicating the direction of the wave in question.

Lazarus's check was a success but not crit success. The spoilers were their attacks - I don't have a whole lot more, these are pretty simple creatures. Forgive me, I forgot there was an investigator so I gave the special attacks to Zabu and Hopper for their Nature checks earlier.

Frightened does not stack, so correct, take the worse result only.

Teja -- You meant to do more than just Stealth right? Maybe your post got cut off?

In the first round, you spent an action tying your horse, but the GM said we didn't really need to worry about keeping track of our mounts (as far as actions). And he also said that once we saw the owlbears tracks, we would have weapons drawn. So I don't think you need to spend actions drawing them now. Maybe at least one was drawn?

I'm sure our GM would allow you at least 1 action if you wish to attack in the current round. Worth a shot since you're already in melee, right?

Sorry, been a busy weekend. Stealth (moving through forest to base-base contact with owlbear).

I missed that we didn't need to secure our horses or draw weapons, so I could have drawn a weapon last round and got an attack in this round. If the DM is happy with me having a weapon in hand/or not losing an action tying up Penelope then I'm happy to try and cut that owlbear.

Nice try, Teja.

Oof ... damage dice are killing us. Other than Jayma, for this round, the rest of us rolled 1s or 2s on 9 out of 12 total damage dice! Yikes! I know some didn't hit anyway, but those are some unfortunate rolls.

Figured I'd take the discussion here...

To make sure we all understand this hexploration map, can our benevolent GM give us any guidance? Would we know if it's important to cover every hex (Jayma's plan) or if it's sufficient to follow the river and make educated guesses along the way (Zabu's plan)?

If we're not sure, I guess we should plan for every hex so we don't miss plot advancements or treasure bundles.

Figured I'd take the discussion here...

Dang it! Sorry about that. I should have double-checked which thread I was on before posting what was clearly an OOC to gameplay. I hate it when that happens.

I was kind of assuming we were supposed to do the whole map. It has 40 hexes to explore, which "coincidently" is the number of days' provisions we were given. I'd hate to miss anything and have to tell Gorm that we didn't actually explore all the area we were given to explore.

I will only say this: I'm pretty benevolent, and wouldn't let you commit to any irreversible error without some sort of warning.

I'm not giving any warning. :)

Which route you take matters, but you're not in any danger above the baseline danger right now.

I think we were told to find the camp and it was somewhere in this area near the river. I suggest we start with the river and if we fail to find the rituals then ... expand our search.

We could do the 5th element here, and put some elements on the symbols: water, fire, etc. But what should we throw at the Pyramid? And also if I recall the movie it activated the thing and not disabled it :D

Haha. Excellent. I was thinking the same thing. Figured the pyramid represented 'earth'. We could try initiating a repeat performance, if anyone missed the first viewing. :)

Zabu Daggertooth multipass.

Away for a few days, back after the weekend. Please bot me as required.

I think I know the answer but since I've never run into greater difficult terrain before -

If I stride twice with 25' of movement, is that two 25's or 1 50?

If it's two 25's then I can only move 2 squares (5 + 10 = 15 leaving only 10 which is not enough for another square twice.)

If it's one 50 then I can move 3 squares (5 + 10 + 5 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 45 with 5 feet leftover.)

Background: Whenever I've been the player, it's always been ruled that each movement is separate action. I Stride, end Stride, then Stride. At the far extreme, there's a PFS scenario where a standard creature can get their speed halved on greater difficult terrain, meaning they can't move.

I think that ruling was mountain oysters, and in the GMG, GMs are specifically given the discretion to combine movements (I believe the example given was allowing a Stride and Leap to constitute 2 actions no matter where the Leap was within the Stride) so long as it was one fluid motion (e.g., Stride and Climb couldn't be combined). As the GM, I choose to allow Stride and Stride to be combined, unless someone can point me to a rule or ruling where this is specifically forbidden. Just understand other GMs clearly feel differently about it.

In the Grid Movement rules it says that: You track your total diagonal movement across all your movement during your turn, but reset your count at the end of your turn.

So if all your Strides in a turn count as one long movement when it comes to counting diagonals, it seems only reasonable that the difficult terrain calculation also apply to all your Strides in a turn as a whole.

BTW, a few posts up, it says Teja's puppeteer is out of town through the end of the weekend, and that Teja should be botted till then.

I believe we're waiting on Teja now.

If I might make a recommendation: perhaps have her delay until there's something for Teja to act upon. If not, have her use Stealth now to get her closer to the action.

I will bot Teja when Dr. Lazarus's actions are finalized. Unless there's an outcry, I won't delay - I think a combination of Seeking and Pointing Out will be more valuable since her Perception is good (relative to the group except Dr. Lazarus, hehe).

Now, where have I recently learned about Hydraulic Push and Grab? :D

Ha ha. I didn't know that bit of research would come in so handy, or so often.

BTW, your current damage count for the Red Otter (-11hp) doesn't seem to include the damage from Jayma's Hydraulic Push. Unless it does... and we're in a whole lot more trouble than I thought.

Ok, made the drawing of 30ft cone - which ends up being too short :( On my phone, I must have miscalculated squares :(

Sorry to press the point, GM Watery Soup, but I am still confused by the Red Otter's current damage total. Barring the last few unprocessed posts, the red otter appears to have taken the following damage:

Hopper: 11 +2d4 persistent
Jayma: 16 +5 ft of knock-back
Zabu: 8
Persistent Damage: 6 (recovery check made)

Which to me adds up to 41 hp of damage. Yet, the round counter has the red otter at:

Red Otter (-17 hp, grabber)

With nothing in the GM posts to suggest any resistances or anything that could explain the discrepancy. Jayma's targeting of her spells is based on how badly beaten up the creatures she's facing appear to be, so getting an accurate damage count is somewhat important to figuring out what she's going to do.

@Jayma - I think WaterySoup did not add Jayma's and Zabu's damage. As 17 is 11 (from the bomb) and 6 from persistent damage. So let us see what he writes. It might change the situation a bit if 41 damage takes the otter down.

Either way, I think we need to prepare differently for the upcoming days since we have no proper healer... And a lvl 3 barbarian, who usually are not famous for the safe, range plays ;)

I'll have to do an audit (later - I'm out of time right now), but it's very possible that I forgot to add some damage to the tracker.

You would be able to tell the otter does not have any resistances to any of the damage you've done so far (it may not have resistances at all, but you don't know that), so all the damage should add up face value. -17 feels low, -41 feels right, and -41 does not drop it.

Audit:

Hopper vs Red -11, -2d4 persistent <-- seems to have been included
Jayma vs Red -16, push 5' <-- damage omitted, but icon moved

Friday's post should have reflected Red -27 hp, 2d4 persistent poison, no grab; Blue undamaged

Fumbus vs Blue -2 <-- damage omitted
Fumbus vs Blue 0 (crit fail)

Sunday's post should have reflected Red -27 hp, 2d4 persistent poison, no grab; Blue -2

Lazarus
Zabu vs Blue -8 <-- damage omitted
Red -6 persistent, made flat check <-- included

Monday's post should have reflected Red -33 hp, no persistent, no grab; Blue -10

Jayma vs Blue -14
Fumbus vs Red -2
Fumbus vs Red -2
Hopper vs Blue -30, 3 persistent fire

Today's post (not yet composed) should reflect Red -37 hp, no persistent, no grab; Blue -54 hp, 3 persistent fire.

And a realization came to me, we have no healer. And I don't mean, no cleric. But no one with any heal spells. Ok, the next day I will change the type of potions that Hopper creates.

I wasn't sure whether to make a comment on this at the beginning of the scenario, and you guys ended up defeating the owlbears so quickly that I wasn't sure whether you all thought it was okay ... or nobody realized it.

On one hand, you don't really need a dedicated healer in 2E, and I've been part of a party that just had my alchemist's Battle Medicine as the sole in-combat healing. It was fine.

On the other hand, it is something to be aware of, and you guys may want to have a discussion about it after this fight.

You guys are doing fine, if you decide against making any changes, I'm not going to kibitz. :)

The Mad Hoppper wrote:

And a realization came to me, we have no healer. And I don't mean, no cleric. But no one with any heal spells. Ok, the next day I will change the type of potions that Hopper creates.

I wasn't sure whether to make a comment on this at the beginning of the scenario, and you guys ended up defeating the owlbears so quickly that I wasn't sure whether you all thought it was okay ... or nobody realized it.

On one hand, you don't really need a dedicated healer in 2E, and I've been part of a party that just had my alchemist's Battle Medicine as the sole in-combat healing. It was fine.

On the other hand, it is something to be aware of, and you guys may want to have a discussion about it after this fight.

You guys are doing fine, if you decide against making any changes, I'm not going to kibitz. :)

I can't be fated.

I didn't notice that either... otherwise I could have easily just brought a different pregen.

I can't immediately find the answer to this - a L2 Hydraulic Push crit does 8d6 (3d6 doubled, then plus 2d6) damage and not 10d6 (3d6 plus 2d6, then doubled)? The text says Heightened adds 2d6 to "the" damage (not the damages) so I would normally assume that's +2d6 to the base damage and +4d6 to the crit.

From reading the text, it doesn't follow the normal rules of doubling damage on a Crit. It's just saying that the damage goes up to 6d6 (which happens to be double the success level) and each Heightening adds 2d6 to the damage in general.

So 8d6 = 6d6 for the crit plus 2d6 for the Heightening.

That does seem to be RAW, but I'm questioning RAI.

If that's the way the spell works, the crit damage doesn't scale well. At L3, it's 7d6 damage on a success (still very good), and 10d6 on a crit (average). At L4, it's 9d6 on a success (still very good), and 12d6 on a crit (probably bordering on mediocre). You still do get the 10' push, which is universally great, so maybe it is intended.

Just making sure this hasn't been errataed or clarified.

I think that RAW matches RAI. It is generally understood that Hydraulic Push isn't that great a damage dealer to begin with, and starts getting steadily worse relatively-speaking after spellcaster level 4 or 5, with Fireball taking over as the big damage dealer. A lot of that is due to HP's decreasing returns from crit damage. When she goes up a level, Jayma will probably switch her Level 1 signature spell from Hydraulic Push to Magic Missile and pick up Fireball as her Level 3 signature spell. A level or two later and Hydraulic Push essentially becomes useless... except for the Push part, which is situationally quite strong at times (like with grabby creatures). This is a feature that doesn't improve with heightening. It is a good Level 1 spell to have for those uncommon times that you need to push creatures around at a distance.

If you look closely at Jayma's rolls in her last post you'd have noticed that if she'd cast an auto-heightened Telekinetic Projectile cantrip, she'd have done the same 30 hp of damage as HP. But as she wanted the Push part of HP to get Hopper free, she burned a slot to get it. At even higher levels, Telekinetic Projectile becomes better faster that HP.

At Jayma's level right now, Hydraulic Push is probably as good as it will ever be, so expect her to continue using it throughout this adventure; especially since fire-based blasting in this forest appears to be frowned upon.

Yeah, the Hydraulic Push scaling is iffy to me. But man, is Jayma not hitting each and every one of those? (with two Crits on this table alone?). I think I've cast that spell-like 3 times in total and missed each and every one of those.

Wow, we seem to be lacking a bit on the front of focusing one enemy down ;) We dealt almost the same amount of dmg to both otters

Jayma's damage would have been overkill on the Blue Otter, so she picked the Red Otter to make it all count. Also, she wanted to get Hopper free of at least one of the critters holding him, so that he wouldn't need to use an extra action to do so himself. Based on my experience with other +13 attack critters for our PC level, my guesstimate is that the otters have <= about 75 hp (by comparison, the owlbears with +14 attacks had <=70 hp), so it shouldn't take much more to finish them off.

The leeches at +10 attack probably have an hp count in the 30s, maybe as high as 40. My firsthand knowledge of leeches (ugh!) is that they don't do so well on land, but are great in the water. So if we can get everyone out of the water and away from the edge of the river to someplace they can't reach us, then maybe we can finish them off at range. On second thoughts, perhaps we should just leave Zabu in the water to act as juicy bait and keep the leeches where we can see them :)

Yeah, the Hydraulic Push scaling is iffy to me. But man, is Jayma not hitting each and every one of those? (with two Crits on this table alone?). I think I've cast that spell-like 3 times in total and missed each and every one of those.

Jayma is getting some lucky rolls, but that tends to even out in the long run, so I wouldn't bet my life on that continuing. But regardless of the rolls she gets, Jayma always tries to make the most efficient use of the resources available to her.

Just to be clear, we are waiting for the GM right?

Yes. I'm on my phone so it's not easy to make a GM post. Will update later today.