Balthazar Picsou's page

Ouch! I didn't expect that.

That's one problem I have with deadly campaigns: they make me want to play super-defensively so that my PC will survive, and playing super-defensively isn't much fun (in my experience).

[..] ends the campaign two hours later [..]

How does that happen? (Maybe you explained already and I skimmed over it, in which case mea culpa.) Or is that just a way of saying that something big and nasty is on the loose and weaker creatures are in trouble?

I agree. I don't like grinding through characters, but my players have also said they don't want me to dumb down the bad guys or pull punches. For some reason, this has been a particularly grueling region for the players. I'm not sure why there aren't more PCs getting raised or reincarnated (when the bodies are recoverable) but, as we'll soon see, the rate of character deaths hasn't slowed down in recent weeks.

Playing in a meat grinder campaign wouldn't be my first choice for a good time, but if I were going to do it, I'd also commit to the idea. Makes sense to me.

How do the Nature's All spells work out? A lot of people say the Pathfinder version is shafted compared to Summon Monster.

Also what angle is the Alchemist working?

I have an elf alchemist who is quite similar to the posted one (with a few more Extra Discoveries). In her case, I thought I might use my magic bow as a backup for when I ran out of bombs, but in practice by the time I run out it's time to rest anyways.

From my experience, everyone loves infusions of Barkskin. They're almost at that magic level 12 for the +5 AC bonus. Well, it would be +5 to AC if they hadn't all invested in Amulets of Natural Armor...

I'm probably missing something very clever, but why does Thrix have Weapon Finesse and a weapon that doesn't benefit from Weapon Finesse? Is he missing the feat Dervish Dance or something?

What level is the new group starting at?

The Slumber and Cackle hexes are the only real outliers in terms of power, IMO. I don't like using the word "broken", though.

From a module point of view: Are these encounters a part of a previous area that didn't get cleared up? Or are they from another area? Or are they something you whipped up yourself?

My old favourites: Balthazar Picsou (level 6 half-elf wizard/pathfinder savant). He fell out of favour after some bad experiences with higher tier scenarios where our party was boned because we didn't have a very specific defense prepared in advance. I decided to focus on more jack-of-all-trades PCs instead.

Lily Moonrose (half-elf sorcerer 1/Animal domain cleric 3). I had a lot of fun contributing with healing, Extended Command spells, a magic missile wand, True Strike + whip shenanigans and an outrageous Perception modifier. She fell out of favour when the rules for animal companions changed (e.g. intelligent animal companions became less intelligent, Handle Animal became more important, Boon Companion was removed from the core assumption).

Current favourite: Kitty Galore (human lion shaman druid 2). So far she's doing pretty well with her pet mountain lion Mimi and her love of wrasslin'. I also learned my lesson from previous scenarios and gave her some ability in Sleight of Hand and Disable Device...just in case.

What spell did Eletor cast using Limited Wish? Control Winds?

With regards to areas I and M: As a player, I'm always uncomfortable with adventures that expect you to team up with a bad guy. It's not because I have any particular moral squeamishness (in- or out-of-character); rather, it's because the down side of trusting a bad guy is potentially catastrophic (the PCs get slaughtered while their guard is down) and the up side is usually nebulous at best.

I hope I didn't lose anyone with my weird talking-to-myself experiment.

The only problem I had was that it was hard for me to follow the story; I have a hard enough time keeping all of the dozens of PCs and NPCs straight, and it's even harder when their names are replaced by nicknames or insults.

By the way, I think you've answered this already but: how many times has there been 100% turnover of the party? Or to phrase it another way: how many "degrees of separation" are there between the current party and the original party?

Interesting. Does the module actually have suggested courses of actions for the PCs (e.g. "they might want to team up with X against Y"), or do they just set up the various factions and let the GM and PCs figure out the rest?

Hi everyone. I recently played my first PFS game and I'm hooked. My only problem is that I'm very underwhelmed by the class I initially chose: a teleportation specialized wizard. I ran out of spells about an hour into the session, and spent the rest of the night missing things with my light crossbow. The rest of the group pretty much carried me through.

That's why I went with an Evocation school wizard (so he could use the Force Dart ability and/or Rays of Frost instead of using a crossbow), notwithstanding the fact that he has Spell Focus (conjuration) and most of his attack spells are conjurations.

EDIT: If I had it to do over again, I might go with the Earth school from the APG instead; the Acid Cloud ability is pretty nifty (for a level 1 "pew-pew laser" kind of ability).

In the journal, the story is about the PCs but there are moments where maybe the players aren't saying much or doing more than rolling attacks and taking move actions. I don't want to write about how T-Bone silently stood in one spot and swung his sword 30 times before moving to another spot because that's dull. Those moments give me a chance to flesh out the monsters or describe other stuff that's going on around the PCs.

I assumed that was the case, but every once in a while it just seems funny: "The NPCs did this, this, this, this, this, this and this. Oh yeah, and there were some PCs there, too." ;-)

I don't think it I've done it too much, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure descriptions of the players and their actions make up the majority of the journal.

I'm not criticizing; if you can keep writing a journal after so long, more power to you! But one thing that might be cool is to have a brief list of the primary NPCs for the session, similar to the list of PCs that you have in each post.

It's interesting whenever I see a journal entry that's 95% NPCs talking and doing stuff and 5% PCs talking and doing stuff.* I hope it's not like that at your gaming table! (No offense to your GMing abilities, of course.)

* All percentages made up.

Hey, I noticed that your ex-dwarf kept a lot of his racial traits in the writeup. Is that the way you work it, or an oversight? I've never been too keen (or clear) on how reincarnation in this respect. But the 3.5 games I've been in where it came up always treated it like your character had always been his new race.

As a GM, my ruling is that you keep any "nurture" abilities but you lose any "nature" abilities, so to speak. It looks like that might be what VZ does as well. (I'm not sure if I'd rule that Stonecunning is an innate dwarf ability or not.)

jivviim rothé

Good to see a mention of rothés. :-)

Maybe this was addressed already, but when Arya went from being an aasimar to a halfling, did you make her get rid of all her Medium-sized equipment? Or did you just handwave that it all changed sizes along with her?

I once had a PC with Gloves of the Starry Sky; they're pretty sweet. Did you just drop those in there? (They're from the Magic Item Compendium, IIRC.)

Is Nicky's player dropping out or is he going to roll up a new PC?

Don't forget the "new shinies" factor. Pathfinder has a lot of exotic spellcasting options such as oracle, witch, summoner, magus. You lost a lot of wizards in particularly to the magus because they had a swordfighting itch to scratch.

I think there may be something to that. My first PFS character was a wizard and I used to see quite a few other wizards, but that was before the APG came out.

I'm pretty sure he's not beefing up the opponents. From what I've heard, the World's Largest Dungeon is very grindy; aren't you supposed to divide all experience by 2 or something like that?

I think the general idea is that you're supposed to clear out an area (which takes quite a long time just because of the sheer number of monsters they packed in there) and then use it as a base for forays into the next area, and repeat ad nauseam. Whereas in this game, it sounds like they're not doing the guerrilla hit-and-run thing as much, which is probably less tedious but is probably more dangerous too.

Just my two cents.

In the description of the Conjuration school, it says: "The creature or object must appear within the spell's range, but it does not have to remain within the range."

Hopefully not everyone will die at this point in the game...

I saw, but it was blobby enough to be either a pear or a fish, IMO. :-)

[..] pear-muncher [..]

By gum, that is a pear on his horn. I always thought it was a fish!

Here's some more wood for the fire maybe...

I got to thinking about the Drag and Reposition maneuvers. Both only allow you to move a target one category larger than you, whereas Grapple lets you move a target of any size category (albeit with at least one more check.) Grapple also lets you move the target alot further. They all allow similar actions in different ways but, for whatever reason, Drag and Reposition have a size clause. If a GM or player can come up with a colorful explanation for how a ratfolk tied up a cloud giant, couldn't they also claim the ratfolk used some sort of aikido move to Drag or Reposition the giant? What's the diff?

I certainly agree that choosing one maneuver to be immune to size differences is very strange. I suspect they just left the size limitation out by accident and then tried to spin it as intentional in hindsight. But I'm a cynic like that. :-)

These things are cool, but are they grappling?

Could be. The visual effects of various actions are for the GM and the players to work out among them selves.

I also seem to recall reading something somewhere about other ways size affects grappling. Maybe it was a 3.5 rule? At the very least, I think there should be something about pinning, moving and tying up foes that are much larger. While I can see a goblin grabbing an ancient dragon's foot in order to bite his ankle, it's a bit harder to imagine a single goblin pulling the dragon across a cave, pinning him and tying him up.

I think it's a cool idea, personally!

I can't fault your logic one bit. Certainly one has to be a bit generous with how fascination works, lest it be useless.

By the way, you probably know this, but as written Rainbow Pattern and other spells that fascinate are pretty useless. Fascination is automatically broken whenever anyone draws a weapon, casts a spell, points a ranged weapon, etc.

That's the one with the "I do this for Taldor!" faction mission, right? Definitely the most memorable and hilariously bad faction mission ever.

Surely you mean "nobly patriotic" instead of "hilariously bad". I imagine your poor knowledge of the sweet, pure Taldan language is to blame.

I'm ashamed to admit that I skip over the Lord Antagonis sections of this journal. Stripping out the editorial comments to figure out what's going on is too much like work. :-)

Does the original dungeon have multiple entrances into it, or was that something you added?

What level are the PCs?

Level 8ish, I'm guessing. He mentioned they were level 7 when they fought the dragon.

I wasn't really asking if the PCs had a map of the dungeon, I meant to ask if the players have a map of the dungeon. Although from the sound of your answer, it sounds like the answer is "no".

Awesome miniatures -- as usual!

How are you handling maps in your game? Obviously you have tactical maps for the miniatures, etc. But what about dungeon level maps? Is it up to the PCs to create their own, or do you have one predrawn that you reveal piece by piece? Or does nobody really worry about it?

After years of resisting 4th edition I found 1 and only 1 thing in all the propaganda that I liked. Small dungeons. The idea of Undermountain or Keep on the Borderlands or Temple of Elemental Evil style dungeons sounds like tremendous fun . . . in practice however they go on and on and on and on.

I tend to agree, but that could also be because I do most of my playing in play-by-post games -- if it goes on and on in a face-to-face game, it takes 10 times longer in a play-by-post!

So what's the out-of-character explanation for what happened to Roch's wizard spellcasting? Or is that a secret?

I have to admit that I'd probably find this game too frustrating. I'm not a big fan of splitting up or having a "revolving door" party. But it's fun to read! :-)

I think there are some good tips available in Velcro Zipper's very detailed campaign journal:

Velcro Zipper presents AEG's - The World's Largest Dungeon!

For instance, I think he made some of the monster tribes more amenable to co-operating with the PCs, which removes some of the "us vs. everything else" problem.

By the way, what was the green death?

A tendriculos, although I don't know if it was templated or advanced or something. See the cool picture of the custom miniature above!

Oh right...it didn't occur to me at first that a half-dragon would be immune to paralysis or that a plant creature would be immune to gibbering!

The only changes I've made to any of the monsters come from Pathfinder-izing them. I can use most of the monsters from the text as they're written in the Pathfinder Bestiary, but some get special attention. Monsters with class-levels, templates or advanced hit dice all need a little updating.

What about the black dragon? I know that dragons underwent a significant re-jiggering in terms of CR and power level (e.g. a young black dragon is CR 7 and 8 HD in PFRPG vs. CR 5 and 10 HD in 3.5). Did you keep the original CR or the original age category?

I agree, it's very interesting. I can't vouch for it's helpfulness, since I doubt I'll ever run WLD.

On a side note, where'd you get the miniature for "Madness"? Is it supposed to be a D&D gibbering mouther or just some random monster?

I'm curious: how much of the plot are you following straight from the module, and how much are you creating yourself?

Just curious -- are you using the standard Reincarnate table, or a custom one? I'm wondering because of the references to coming back as a cow or a bird or whatever.

Holy crow! 56 PCs, two years, and still going strong!

I salute you, sir.

Joseph Caubo wrote:

//They are actually the 2nd lowest PA earners at my tables. Taldans are the lowest.

Taldans are bad at PA gains in the games I play in too.

...stupid Sleight of Hand/Disable Device skill checks...grumble, grumble...

You are also welcome to attend the barbecue.

I am sure you will love the sizzle.

Oh, have they discovered cuisine out in the provinces by now? How delightful!

Judging from the behaviour of the Chelaxians I've met, I assumed that when one is hungry in Cheliax, one would be reduced to taking a bite out raw stench kow or woolly mammoth or what have you.