Looks like the blood mist is either a Haunt or some sort of undead creature (like a ghost) that requires Religion in some form to disable/exorcise permanently. Perhaps Cherry can give it a shot if we ever need to go up the Gauntlight again. I don't think we need to mess with it until then. If we do ever need to beat it into submission again, we'll hopefully be several levels stronger so that it's a doddle.
Which door should we try next? Kvit votes for the secret door and I must admit to some curiosity as to what is on the other side. What do the rest of you think?
Sam, you need a free hand to fire the bow, but you are otherwise only using one hand to hold it (thus the 1+ for Hands). So you don't have to drop the bow to do your flurry of unarmed attacks, which only require 1 free hand. You can happily alternate between bow and unarmed attacks as you see fit. The Hands section explains it better.
Kka on the other hand (ha ha) would have to drop the shortsword she's holding in one hand if she wanted to use the bow she's holding in her other hand. Fortunately though, she doesn't have to drop the bow to use her shortsword. I do it this way to give myself the option of a ranged attack at the start of an encounter if the target is too far away to engage in melee.
Sorry for begin away yesterday (which appears very busy) we had unexpected snow and there were may complications that it caused.
Since it's going to be important from now on (darkness underground and normal vision and such), I've attached a circle of light to Giyozara's token. This will help determine whether everyone can see or not (and whether my poor Morlocks get blinded or not).
I've now chosen a corner of Giyozara's token and made that the origin point. But that does mean light goes further in one direction than the other (Giyozara has 20 feet of vision to the south and 15 feet of vision to the north). Does that bother anyone? Also, rules question, should all the corners of Giyozara's squares count as the point of origin? I'm not sure.
Thanks for the links, Lough! I'm perfectly fine with treating it as an emanation, rather than a burst, if everyone agrees.
Yeah, the rules are not clear on the area of light. I had inquired about it recently for a different game in a couple forums with no luck.
Emanation makes the most sense and is the easiest to implement and keep track of.
Thanks for the links, Lough! I'm perfectly fine with treating it as an emanation, rather than a burst, if everyone agrees.
Not that it's come up all that often in other games I've played, but when it has, the GM has treated Light spells and torches as emanations, so I'm good with it that way. Kka has Low-Light Vision and Darkvision, so she doesn't care that much.
I just checked, and it appears that the Green morlock is not within a 20ft emanation of Cherry's current location. For her Light spell to blind the moorlock she will first have to move a little closer.
I could handle the emanation mode light, especially if it makes our DMs life easier.
That would help, thanks. I've made a second circle of light for you now.
Also, just to be clear: just because combat breaks out, that doesn't mean talking/diplomacy is out of the window. Most of their default attitudes are hostile, which usually results in combat, but pretty much anyone can be persuaded to talk.
Early tomorrow PST (UTC-8) I will be catching the first of several flights that will take me from San Diego back to Spain (UTC+1). All told I will be some 24 hours either in the air or stuck in airports... and that assumes that everything goes according to plan. If flights get cancelled/delayed/rescheduled etc., then it could take me 2 or more days to get back. I will not be completely incommunicado during this time and may well be able to post, but I thought I'd warn you so that if you do not hear from me you'll have some idea of what's going on. Once back in Spain my posting hours will change accordingly and my overlap time with North America will tend to be from early morning through mid-afternoon.
Could we slow down a tad? Seems like too many things are happening in one day to make a post.that makes sense.
Whoops, sorry! I got excited because people replied, but some people are more active than others. I'll slow down again. My apologies.
Whoops, sorry! I got excited because people replied, but some people are more active than others. I'll slow down again. My apologies.
Awww. It was almost like a TTRPG there for a bit :)
It's no problem. Just harder to RP back and forth and keep up sometimes.
Just checking, you didn't feint first, see the result, then backtracked, right? I know Kka is angry, but attacking without feinting seems... reckless.
(Don't want to accuse you of cheating, but it almost seems too good to be true.)
Let's see if I can reconstruct my thinking process here.
Initially, in her blind rage at the morlocks for killing Tanji, I had Kka recklessly slashing at the Pink morlock three times in a row. As a player I don't usually like doing this because the third strike rarely lands and it is usually better to do something else with that action. But it seemed in-character for Kka given her current state of mind so I went with it.
I then previewed the results and noticed the crit. Given the mechanical results of attacks on the previous two morlocks, and including the extra information supplied by the GM (eg. barely drops after her second attack), I determined that they had an AC <= 14/16 (Lough's hit/possibly flat-footed by blindness) and 20 (maaaybe 21) hit points.
The 18 hit points generated by the first crit (combined with the 2 it had already taken) told me that Kka had almost certainly killed the blue morlock with her first strike. In this situation, the remaining two strikes would usually be redirected by the GM to the remaining morlock. But given that Kka's situation had changed after the first Strike, I felt it was acceptably in-character to have her rage subside sufficiently from killing the first morlock to have her act less recklessly towards the remaining one. So I got rid of the third Strike and slipped in the Feint to try and improve the odds of the second Strike hitting. I admit that this was partly driven by my dislike of third strikes.
So did I change my original sequence of actions based on the results of previous actions? Yes, but I felt it was okay because it is what I would have done had we been playing in person and rolling dice at a table. Whether this is considered cheating in a Paizo-based PbP environment is an interesting question with different answers depending on who you ask. In this case, I don't see a problem with what I did, but if you do, then I will refrain from doing so in the future.
Ah okay, then it's okay. I was mainly worried you'd change the nat 20 on a feint to an attack. Changing the rest because you think the enemy is down is okay. Because I can't give immediate feedback on your actions going to waste, a bit of meta knowledge is okay, I think.
Sorry for doubting you, I normally assume everyone plays fairly. But your rolls lined up too well to question it, IMHO.
Sorry for doubting you, I normally assume everyone plays fairly. But your rolls lined up too well to question it, IMHO.
Don't worry about it. Looking back over my post with a disinterested eye I too can see where it might have looked a bit funny. The ironic part is that when the nat-20 came up, I initially kicked myself for not having Feinted instead of Striking, thus catching the morlock flat-footed on all the following attacks.
Speaking generally, the RP aspect is the most important part of RPGing for me. The dice rolls and rules to me are merely there to provide us a way to translate out PCs' choices into actions within a shared environment and see how they come out. So first and foremost I put myself into the mind and environment of my PC to figure out how they would react in a given situation, and then how they react to changes in that situation. This temporary transformation into a different person is the bit I love about RPGs. It's like having some control over a favorite character in a book you're reading rather than leaving it to the author alone.
Translating those natural PC reactions into actual game mechanic actions is an interesting exercise, but of lesser importance to me. I can RP the outcome either way. Another irony though is that I've found it far more entertaining to RP failure than success, but fortunately for Kka (if not for me), she's been a very lucky tengu of late.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hope everyone is safe with the sky dropping out of the east coast of the US.
We got a lot of ice here, but kept the lights on.
I've tried posting twice in the gameplay thread and it's not showing up, so I'm not sure if it's working or not.
I see one post. Sometimes you need to refresh once or twice before Paizo displays your post.
I've tried posting twice in the gameplay thread and it's not showing up, so I'm not sure if it's working or not.
Your post looks good to me, but I've run into the same problem many times, so you're not alone. I sometimes end up posting multiple times as well when something like this comes up and then have to clean things up once the problem becomes apparent.
I don't think it is necessarily a Paizo problem so much as a web browser feature/problem. I believe the problem is that the browser page refresh after a posting shows a cached version of the page from just before the post. If my post isn't showing up after I submit it, I try clicking the Preview button on the now empty post field to force a refresh, and it usually makes my post appear at that point and all is well again.
Thanks, and thanks for the preview suggestion, I'll try that next time.
Done. I tucked you in the corner where you should be safe.
Long week... I'm behind in all my games.
How far through the book are we? Seems like we've slowed down a lot recently.
There's four levels of this dungeon in this book. You're about a third through this level, I'd say. The slowdown is mostly due to RP, I think. The last few rooms have very much been investigating and reacting to others, rather than kicking in the next door and killing everything that moves.
By the way, I love the RP in the party! Last week's been interesting, even though I didn't post. The story of this level didn't wow me at first, but I love how Kka picked it up. :)
I know that I'm enjoying myself with the RP, but perhaps a little more active self-defense is called for.
I take it that we're going to work our way back to boat cave to try to get the drake's attention somehow. The map doesn't show much, but that one square opening with (presumably too deep to wade) water on the other side will make it difficult to concentrate our attacks if the creature wedges itself there, or in the shore square one to the north of it. Perhaps our best approach is to take the three boats out onto the water and fight the drake in a more open area where we won't be stepping on each other.
I've moved my token back to the boat cave. I noticed that we left poor Sneakers back in that first hallway; I hope he isn't feeling too lonely :)
Thanks! I did forget about the poor guy, but he was a chicken that ran away from the fight rooms ago!
I've moved both tokens up with Kka
I definitely don't think we need to go the diplomacy route with the drake. I'm okay with trying to squeeze info out of the potentially more knowledgeable mobs before the self-defense is activated.
I put you in front of Kvit on the shore where hopefully the drake will be within range of your spells. Not sure you need to be in one of the boats unless you insist. Not sure how we would handle that anyway, unless the boats take up 2 squares or something. I left the space at the shore for Sam so that she can shoot without taking your heads off.
Since Cherry is small, she may be able to stand in the partial shore square in front of Sam, otherwise next to Kvit may be the best place to get line-of-sight.
Are we looking at taking 3 boats out now? If so, we could slide the two boats we have forward one square and slip a third in sideways behind them. Once we have everyone onboard ([Kka/Cherry], [Lough/Giyozara], and [Kvit/Sam]), we can push slowly out into the water one square at a time until the drake shows up (assuming it ever does). How does that sound?
I was just prepping in case we did have to chase after you guys or something. Though your plan sounds fine,
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Just FYI, my wife's due date is February 6th, so it could be any day now. When it happens I will likely be afk for 24-48hrs, potentially longer if things don't go to plan. So if I disappear, that's why.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Good luck to you and your wife, Kvit!
I'll initiate combat in about 12 hours, so if you want to reposition yourself, do so now. Sorry for the slow going, wanted to make sure everyone's where they wanted to be.
Wow! Congrats Kvit! Hope it's the 5th... so your new arrival and I will have something in common... ;)
Sam: Shoot arrow, offer to parley, shoot another arrow.
LOL. Looks like Sam went to the same school of Diplomacy as Kka, except that Kka apparently missed the second lesson.
I was trying to pull the drake close so the rogue could stab it with flanking, but I guess not.
It was an excellent idea. Not just because it would give Kka and Lough flanking, but because it would bring it within line-of-sight of Sam and Kvit. Against a higher-level creature like the drake, I expect it to fail more often than succeed, but when it works it is a thing of beauty.
As you saw, Kka's Surprise Attack ability means that she catches opponents flat-footed on the first round if her initiative is higher than theirs. It is after the first round (or if her initiative roll is crap), that she's looking for other ways to flat-foot her opponents. Flanking is the easiest way to accomplish this, since most other methods require extra actions and successful skill rolls.
If the drake lasts into round 2, and assuming Kka isn't sinking to the bottom of the lake unconscious by then, give the old Gravitational Pull a shot.
[edit]
In retrospect, it would have been best had I delayed Kka until after Giyozara's turn to see if the Gravitational Pull worked. Kka would have gotten her monster hits in either way, but Lough, Kvit, and Sam would definitely have been in a better position to attack the drake themselves.
But Kka herself did not know what Giyozara was going to do and she's not the most patient of people, especially when she's laser focused on her prey. Looking at the map though, there was still a lot of potential benefits for Lough, Kvit and Sam (less so for Cherry :) to be gotten from a successful Gravitational Pull to the square you selected.
Sam: Shoot arrow, offer to parley, shoot another arrow.
LOL. Looks like Sam went to the same school of Diplomacy as Kka, except that Kka apparently missed the second lesson.
Actually I was just passing on what Lough wanted to say...
Tomorrow (Saturday) morning (Central European Time: UTC+1) I will be leaving Spain and driving to Italy where I will be living for the next several months. If all goes according to plan, the trip should take about 3 days, with me getting there sometime on Monday evening. I will not be totally incommunicado during this time and will try to post at least once a day. But if you find that I am not as responsive as usual, you will at least know why.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Think of all the time we'll have to diplomacy our way through this adventure. We'll be kings without lifting a finger/sword. Won't you be disappointed when you check in again.
Wow! Congrats Kvit! Hope it's the 5th... so your new arrival and I will have something in common... ;)
Guess what!?
New daughter born just this morning on the 5th
Happy birthday Sam and baby!
Congratulations! How exciting!
And Happy Birthday to Sam too.
Happy birthdays!
Congrats to all of you!
Kka: Wow, from America (I presume) to Spain to Italy. Sounds like you have an exciting life. :)