BloodyViking's page

Hello!

I recently purchased by mailorder a box of Pathfinder Cardgame - Curse of the Crimson Throne expansion.

It turns out that the Adventure book is missing page 19 to and including page 30.

In addition there are 9 cards missing, while there are duplicates of 2 item cards.

The missing cards are:

Level 5 Story Banes:
Nihil the Ashbringer
Ukwar

Level 5 Monster Cards:
Ash Giant Zombie
Banshee
Baykok
Corpse Lotus
Dybbuk
Ember Ghoult
Fury Devil

I have counted and checked everything several times. Nothing is misplaced or "lost" by me. These cards were simply not included.

It is very cost ineffective of me to try and return the box to a foreign mail order company and i am therefore looking to get a replacement directly from you (Paizo). Can you help me out?

Norwegian here also. I recommend using www.adlibris.com/no in general for buying RPG items. Much much cheaper than both Outland and Spillsjefen.

As for this map pack it looks like its indeed Paizo shop exclusive. Havent found it in either Amazon shop or anywhere else.

So... I don't know if your GM did a bad job of conveying the context, or you just weren't going along with the proper spirit of things, but either way, using that particular tactic for that particular encounter really just completely ruins the story of that particular adventure.

I used the spoiler tag in the post since it contains a heavy flavor of information in regards to what/where of our adventures.

A GM who wants to run the summons is asking for a zogging lot of bookkeeping to do. It will balance itself out after a few sessions. =)

It seems he is doing it just to spite me. His argument was that it was too much "metagaming". I read the Summon spell description loud to him but he wouldnt hear any of it. So I just plain out told him he was cheating. I mean common, we are using tiles and pawns to symbolize monsters and getting a tactical overview. Metagaming? Every dang encounter is done by metagaming from start to finish.

He is definitely being an arse and I'll call him out on every single fault he does. Like yesterday when he was slaughtering our barbarian he was doing a full attack and greater cleave at the same time while giggling to himself and saying how nasty this badboy was. And I called him out on hit that -no- he could not do a fullattack AND a greater cleave at the same time.

Its all starting to be a bit anoying. This is supposed to be our weekly fun social gathering. It seems more and more to me that he is taking the sides of the monsters more than is interested in creating a fun storyline and good atmosphere.

Just as a little followup to my earlier posts we had another session today.

We got into a realy nasty fight where our barbarian got killed by another barbarian (same dungeon) and some skeletons (not the crumbly kind) in the second round of the fight.

Anyway, to help out our party I cast Summon V for a Bralani Azathi (I think that was the name). This time he refused to let me control the creature and refused to let me command it to do specific actions (like casting Blur on our fighter or moving into a good position to use Lightning Bolt on multiple creatures). So I'm kinda giving up on the whole Summon line as it is. I'll keep it in the back of my mind as a last resort if we can escape a bad situation, rest up and really use Summons to resolve the situation. But as it is it seems Im better off with more direct spells.

I got our barbarian back up after the fight with a Raise Dead scroll we found in the previous module. And he got full xp :-)

Anyway, party is now 2 lvl 10s and 2 lvl 9s so we are starting to get a bit more control.

I never really played Vampire as much of a combat game. My experience with WoD in general is that Werewolf was the more action style part of the WoD universe.

That said there were some very epic combats in Vampire. The problem with it was that when the characters and NPCs started becoming powerfull it all boiled down to "who won the initiative". Because once high skilled Celerity and such kicked in you could be ripped to pieces before you could do anything.

I would say my favorite modules for Vampire was the "Giovanni Chronicles". Those were absolutely outstanding and I rate them up there close to the quality of "The Enemy Within" campaign of 1st edition Warhammer.

Lots of great posts! Thanks all for contributing to the thread!

I would just like to point out that trying to roleplay a solution to every single obstacle in a session is next to impossible.

The first problem is the player vs character correlation. While the character might be supersmart/superwise, that doesnt help much if the player is a semiretarded 70 IQ drooler (lets use me as an example). Then there is a big issue not only in trying to find good strategies, but also in conversational roleplaying. I simply dont have the mental goods to solve problems that I should be able to in session. I always like to say that it is hard to know something that you dont know that you dont know.

The second problem is the game master and limited knowledge of rules and information. Now, there -are- some GM savants that seem to know EVERYTHING. And thats great! But there are also GMs that lack much game knowledge. So when a character tries to research a strategy or some information to help out a situation, the GM simply doesnt have knowledge to relay back to the player. You might use your divination spells to seek answers, but that doesnt mean the GM has any meaningful information to give you back.

So to combine these into a real situation, I would say researching information through the internet is definitely a good thing. BUT my error is to not engage the GM after I have come across the information. My judgement call was that the information that blew the lid on the encounter was the Lanter Archon as a summoned creature, was simply knowledge my character should already posess (but I as a player simply had no clue about).

For future situations I will research on the internet also. However, I will take the relevant information to the GM and ask for skill checks where relevant and how to infuse the knowledge into the game.

BloodyViking wrote:

The problem here is the chain of thought and finding out how to deal with the situation.

Not really - what I was saying is that, after you did your online research, all you had to do to make your activities fully on the "up and up" was to filter your findings through the rules of the game - roll a few knowledge checks or gather information checks around people that could have the knowledge you are seeking, and proceed on just as you actually did.

That is basically the entire point of knowledge skills - to translate what a player can find out with a little looking around into what their character read in a book or heard from some reputable source.

Yes, that is pretty much what I was trying to tell the GM but he wouldnt listen to it. He was just extremely offended that I had found a strategy to defeat the monster. I had the skills, I had the resources (being the leader of the nation and of a city with 10-12k individuals). We also had some institutions in the city where I could probably have gotten advice. We have a cathedral in the city also. So I definitely had the resources available to get the knowledge. The GM just decided that it wasnt relevant since I had already found the knowledge on the forums. I even told him I found the Lantern Archon to be extremely powerful and if he wanted to rule something on using them then it was ok. Instead he was just angry and persistent that we should only get half xp.

Looking back at it it was all kind of surreal and ridiculous that a 50 year old should get all bent about this.

Just gonna throw in a big thank you to everyone contributing in the thread so far. I apreciate the feedback both positive and negative. It's all food for thought :-)

(From what OP said, the GM is an adversary, not a referee. Do you really think 'in game research' would have led to anything other than "Muahahaha!!! I won't tell, I am winning!!!)

It definitely felt like we were attempting to kill his pet cat or something :-)

Good research on the Summon Monster regarding alignment. I didnt know those particulars so it would seem my character wouldnt have been able to summon those creatures then.

As for skills, my character has Knowledge Planes (+8), Knowledge Arcana (+7) and maxed Spellcraft (+15).

While I wouldn't describe this situation as cheating, I would say that a few steps to translate out-of-character research into in-character knowledge were missed.

You should have had your cleric roll appropriate knowledge skills (or collect information from other characters that had) to learn the important things - such as that lantern archons have that sort of attack, that you can summon lantern archons with a particular spell, and that the creature you saw was probably vulnerable to the tactic you researched out of character.

That's all it takes to translate what you know into information your character can act upon without it being able to be considered cheating.

The problem here is the chain of thought and finding out how to deal with the situation. I had no prior knowledge about Lantern Archons. The GM had no prior knowledge about the Lantern Archons. I could have engaged in a sequence of research back in the capitol. However, I did not know what to look for. The GM did not know what to tell me in relation to the solution we ended up with. He could have told me more specifics about the Golems abilities from the Monster Manual. But not what could be used to bypass them.

I was completely up front with my research. My character had visited the capitol twice in the last few days through teleport which COULD have given me the opportunity to research the solution. The GM did not pick up on my offer to do skill-based research to solidify my aproach within the acutal game. His reaction was pretty much just to be offended that I had the audacity to read on forums to find strategies.

I have no hard feelings towards the GM. He is an old friend Ive known for over 25 years now and is generaly a good guy. But sometimes he seems to take it personal and that he wants to "teach us a lesson" it seems.

I should also put in a sidenote here and say that we are also playing Rappan Athuk over Mumble/d20Pro with some other friends living in other parts of the country. In this campaign we started as lvl 3 characters and are having a horrible time. Last week he killed my rogue/wizard with a CR12 Bone Crawler who jumped my character and proceeded to execute 12 attacks. My character had 23 hp and he was dead by the 3rd hit. This did indeed motivate me quite a bit to do the research because I dont particularly enjoy my characters dying.

"I don't think it's cheating on the face of it, but now you know the DM thinks of it like that, I don't think you should do it again in his game.

Although i dont find such things particularly troubling, i think its worth acknowledging that learning how your character works in a general sense is quite a different thing from specifically searching the Internet for a solution to one particular scenario."

Yes, I'm not in the habbit of doing this kind of thing. This was done in frustration about seemingly becoming stuck in two ways. The psychology of the two fighters who was almost killed and didnt feel like they had any chance. And that we seem to never come by much loot to speak of. Now, we havent completed the dungeon yet as we stopped after killing some skeleton archers/warriors, so I dont know if we are going to dip into any honeypot of gold/treasure. But one who does not seek, will not find.

My main "fault" as far as I can tell is the fact that I specificaly looked for strategies towards Iron Golems. Basicaly because I felt my character was completely impotent against it in the first fight. If I had worded it differently or not been so honest about it I would probably have gotten away with it. But I prefer honesty, come hell or high water.

1. I cant see that there is a requisite to be the exact same alignment as the creature you summon. My cleric is Chaotic Good btw.

http://paizo.com/prd/spells/summonMonster.html

As far as I can tell my cleric should be able to summon Lantern Archons.

2. I agree, but the problem here is within understanding you character, the spells and their usefulness. I dont see any way to sidestep this becoming a metagaming aproach. I need to understand what is within my characters ability and how to play it to the best of the party. As there are time restraints to how much time we can spend on such activities I decided that it would be too much to take up a 30-60 minute discussion in this regard as it would not be seen as a constructive talk for the rest of the party (even though beneficial for them). So I took a shortcut. As you say I could simply have used divination spells. But the problem here is also the limit of the GMs knowledge. He would -never- in a million years have pointed out what ended up being the solution. He had already divulged that the Golem had magic immunity and damage reduction.

3. It was a suit of armor in the image of Gorum, we were told it was an Iron Golem. It was blocking access to 1 set of doors on the opposite end of the room. At the stage we decided to attack it we had already explored the rest of the dungeon finding that those doors were the only ones we had not checked out. Our GM points out, at every session, all the time, that this is a sandbox adventure path. We can fall face first into anything regardless of our own level. The party aproach has been to deal with what we can handle or run away when we find out we cant handle it. But if we keep running away, where does it stop? Where is the fun?

4. Official Paizo product as far as I can tell.

5. Well, he is cocky and seldom pulls a punch. If you die you die, is his aproach.

It was indeed cheating . you applied player knowledge to your character

A good way to have done this would have been to
* research the information as a player
* Ask the DM which knowledge roll to make to know the weaknesses of an iron golem
* If the roll was successful, then the DM should have allowed you to use these tactics. If not, then your character would not have know this tactic .

Well he did tell us on that prior session that

1. Damage reduction "Muahahaha" to quote him. The fighter and barbarian was doing their best.
2. Magical immunity "Muahahaha"

Ok, so I just wish to share an experience from our Pathfinder Kingmaker session yesterday.

So what is everyones opinion on this? Personaly I dont feel like I did anything particularly bad. I merely found out how to use one of my spells effectively. Im not used to being called a cheater, but I must admittedly say I found it incredibly laughable of the GM to come off the way he did. Sure, there was metagaming in my aproach. But to me there is a general issue in people not knowing how to use spells/feats effectively. Isnt it in everyones interest that people learn the potential of their class?

Let me hear your opinions on this, please.