Elizabeth Blackson's page

Also having this problem. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Are the Alchemist/Investigator' s Alchemy items, extracts, mutagens, and bombs, considered 'alchemical items' for the purposes of the Underground Chemist' s 'Chemical Weapons' ability?

First, I hope this doesn't illicit a 'thread necro!' cry.

Okay, so I built a half-orc rogue with 'Toothy'.

It gets REALLY confusing when looking at how a natural attack interacts with some of the Rogue abilities, and non-natural weapons.

Is the natural bite attack considered a concealed weapon? Assume someone who has never seen her use the bite attack before. For instance, using it with the Rogue Talent 'Underhanded'. My argument for why I think this should be the case is that 'Toothy' is not a standard ability for half-orcs. So, not exactly expected.

Let's say you have a bow in hand, and someone moves through your normal threat area, can you make attacks of opportunity with the bite? Is it considered a secondary attack, incurring a penalty?

Is it considered always armed, as in, no need to 'draw' it? This is my assumption.

Any assistance is appreciated.

I don't know if there's any adjustment to rules necessary. Just understand that your economy needs to produce enough to support your consumption. Consumption will be low, since you're not covering all that land area. You'll just have to set a few BP aside every month to pay.

When the city 'comes to port', it can sell necessary items to pay for the consumables it needs with saved up bp. You might say that a granary or some other storehouse type structure was needed to store x points of consumables, so it could only go for so long between stops.

EDIT: I did some math on what it would take as far as aquaponics to support the food needs of a given population, and if you had two 4x4 city-grid aquaponics buildings (meaning, they took up 8 of your 36 blocks per city district), they could, in the real world, produce enough food, at least by mass, to feed the population of 9000 (the sum of all people in a city district). I haven't worked out a reasonable cost for such a thing, and you'd still need to pay for any consumption caused from Edicts. My guess would be to compare them price-wise with Arenas, Cathedrals, and Waterfronts, which all affect Consumption. So, they wouldn't be cheap.

It seems odd, understanding the kingdom building rules, to think a kingdom has built this road, and no one uses it. So, yeah, I'm guessing Oleg's gets a fair share of through-traffic, as well as trappers, hunters, etc.

I'd imagine Restov putting together another agreement like Oleg has, for a civilian to man Ft. Serenko for travelers as well.

AND I think another spot between Ft. Serenko and Oleg's also seems reasonable. maybe even 'likely'.

A group moving at 30' per turn could do overland travel between these points if they pushed it a little. Someone on horseback could make it between them in one day no problem.

Ignoring Stability and Loyalty, working strictly on Economy, with Rulers and the Spymaster focused on Economy unless Unrest started to rise, (and NOT buying the Castle first-off), I grew my test kingdom to size 16 in 30 months.

I should note that while I had no focus on Stability/Loyalty, I inevitably bought buildings that brought Stability up to a point where rolls were made about 50% of the time.

I tried to make cities that were reasonable.

The First city: Mill, Pier, Apiery, Butcher, Brothel, Shop, 2 houses, Smith, Witch Hut, Fletcher, Tanner, Dump.

The Second city, just starting: Mill, Brothel, House, Witch Hut.

This all puts me just a few months away from size 21, where Ruler's abilities would start affecting a second category (probably Stability in this case). Income is about 8 or 9 average, and magic items have been producing another 5 or so on average.

This is light years ahead of my first 3 test runs, and I had LONG strings of bad event rolls (4 plagues, and insanely frequent Monster/Bandit attacks).

So... there ya go...

That would work for 2 of the 3 runs I did, but in the third, had my Stability not been that high, 3 Noble Feuds in 1 year would have torn the country apart with Unrest. As it was, I was only able to stabilize by instating a Royal Assassin (something I didn't want in a NG Kingdom).

I know the odds of those three Feud rolls coming up in one year were unlikely, but that's how it went.

I'll maybe do a few runs focusing on economy, and see if I can't get faster growth.

I did consider that the castle wasn't the best bang-for-buck, but it seems like the intended opening move. I'll try opening with less expensive stuff.

do you need fluff ways or crunch ways?

I'm not sure of your exact meaning. The end result needs to be people with high modifiers in leadership positions in the kingdom, which is crunch. Whether it's done via crunch or fluff, or in-game flavor, or whatever doesn't matter. It's just less stress 'selling' the notion to the GM if I can say 'I cast "Read Stat Block"'. LOL

In any case, whatever skill is tested needs to be untrained if that's the route I go. I don't care about skill mods, which can be affected by level, training, skill focus, etc. I just want Ability mods.

EDIT: Also, I should note that not being able to use Diplomacy skill in certain jobs of leadership is ... odd....

So, we will eventually need to have NPCs helping us run our Kingdom. I would personally like a meritocracy, and put the most able people into the open positions.

That means testing their relevant abilities.

Testing someone's Strength is very simple: Give them heavy things to lift.

It turns out that if you're a Wizard, testing someone's INT is as simple as casting 'Detect Thoughts'.

I'm a bit hard-pressed to come up with decent ways to test someone's Wisdom or Charisma accurately.

I suppose having people attempt untrained skill checks linked to the relevant Ability might work, and have a best-of-twenty-attempts type score, to decrease the random success/failure factor.

Anyone come up with a good solution?

As a personal real-life experience: at a party, I was standing in a circle of people. Into the circle was introduced a bottle of nasty liquor of some kind. The first person tasted it: "Ugg, this stuff is aweful. Here, try it." and they passed it onto the next person... who tried it, and passed it on. And so on. Every single person tasting it, until it got to me. I passed. Successful Wis check. :)

What kind of buildings are you producing in your tests?

I started each with a half-cost castle (something else i know is coming from our GM). Then different things from there, but almost always low-cost (4 to 6 bp) stuff, trying to keep Economy, Loyalty, and Stability bonuses at about equal levels. These get to about 4 less than Control cost by the time I'm at 36 months and 7 hexes in size.

Thanks for the info, all.

I ran each of the tests until they looked like they could be stable and get to size 10. At about size 7, I could get a Caster's Tower, which seemed to start a fair acceleration of growth. I just got the 'Book of River Nations', and the Witch Hut could make this start a little earlier.

Sorry to wander away from army stuff...

I've run three tests on the Kingdom Building system. Each time, starting with 50bp (I know that's where we'll start). Unless I've got my rulers set with about +3 straight down the line, I get incredibly slow growth. Someone was saying how big a Kingdom was supposed to be after 36 months, and I couldn't get reasonably successful kingdoms over size 7 or so.

As I'm a player, the only thing I can think is that there must be some pretty massive in-game influxes of resources or something. If this is the case, if someone could just say 'yeah, you get outside boosts', that'd be great. I don't want to know from where.

I'm also more than a little put off by the notion that negative consumption (from excess farmland production) doesn't help the economy, since food is so valued in the River Kingdoms. Yeah, I could create house-rules, but I'm not the GM here, and I'd rather run by the book.

Is it safe to assume that even nations with a Good Alignment can have Royal Assassins?

I ran a few years of trail kingdom development, managed to get 4 Noble Feuds, which threw in all kinds of unrest issues and nearly wrecked the kingdom (and DID bring the economy to a crawl for about a year). The only thing that put it down was the slow, steady decrease in unrest from a Royal Assassin.

A general way to place those two settlements would be to cut the distance between Restov and Oleg's into four segments. Moving from Restov westward, at the completion of the first quarter, that's about where Nivitka's Crossing is. At about the half-way point, (where the Kiravoy River joins the Shrike River) is where Fort Serenko is located. If you don't want to look at hex maps, this should give a general location of each.

Our GM DID miss these stops. Hmm...

As I'm a player, not a GM, I appreciate that.

It's about 90 miles from Restov to Oleg's Trading Post.

(This assumes 12 miles per hex is side to side, not point to point).

How long it takes to travel that distance will depend on your charaters' movement speed, such as whether they have heavy armors or are mounted on horses, etc.

Our group, mounted on light horses, did it in about 3 days.

M P 433... Thank you for noting what I thought was obvious. Setting math aside, it's just awesome for a player's very first attack as the character to be a crit... while wielding a great ax.

PJ: Our group tends to be on the gory side for descriptions. This attack on Haps was a slice at waist level that cut him in two. Upper half fell, lower half remained mounted.

We had some fun RPing moments up until the attack. The Cleric and my character (wizard) knew each other, and we finagled the Charter before we actually had the Rogue and Fighter. Those two characters are both half orcs. They're brothers (in game), and both have the Bandit Campaign trait. Available fighting men are scarce in the River kingdoms, so we had our doubts about the pair, fearing we might be scraping the bottom of the barrel with them. For the Rogue's part, he asked what >I< was bringing to the group, so I cast Color Spray on him... and he saved. He was not impressed. When it came to combat, though, all the Bandits I hit with Color Spray failed, and dropped. So, now, I think we ALL feel better about the group as a whole.

Soooo..... the intent of a crit is to force it toward the mid-range? Sorry, but I find that pointless.

HOWEVER... the official, RAW number rolled is 11,6,7 (just got the player to rol the other 2 d12s). The player didn't do his Str mod right (2-handed weapon should have given 4 pts extra damage, not 3, for a 17 Str).

So, the official number would be (11+4)+(6+4)+(7+4) = 36
STILL the best first hit I've ever seen.

PLEASE don't post to this thread with anything more concerning RAW criticals rolling extra dice instead of flat multiplication. It's needless addition that grinds games to the this-sucks-lets-go-watch-TV-land.

And, just so you know... making others sit and wait while you needlessly roll extra dice is a total buzzkill.

But, checking RAW, you are correct. Which is really stupid. Not you, the rule.

So, we just started the Kingmaker adventure. I'm a player, playing a 1/2 elf wizard. The group includes a 1/2 elf cleric, a 1/2 orc rogue, and a 1/2 orc fighter.

We arrived at Oleg's and faced off against Haps and three thugs. The fight begins with our Rogue hitting Haps with an arrow,

Thugs attack: Whiff, Whiff, and 2 points on our fighter.

Then our fighter steps in against Haps...

He rolls nat 20, followed by 17. He's carrying a great axe. He does (11+3)x3 = 42 points damage!

I've been playing D&D since about 1983, and that is the BEST first attack I've ever seen from any character.

The fight ends with me doing Color Spray on 2 of the thugs, and the Cleric finishing the third thug.

One round of combat.

We're all staring in awe (and slight horror) at the fighter's handywork afterward.