Grakza's page

I'm officially dropping as well. I am too used to a faster pace, and have been unable to adjust and maintain interest.

Grakza says to Ivy, "If Khonnir found that robot on his first expedition, it may help us track his second expedition." Of Val, she asks, "What happened right before it activated? Were you in the room? Were there any unexpected sights or sounds?"

And Grakza thinks it's sexist to say all green women look alike.

"Are you sure you're okay, Val? What happened to make the robot malfunction? Were you working on it?"

Grakza nods at Ivy's question, "Yes, particularly any notes Khonnir might have."

Grakza's face tinges purple as blood rushes to it, and the melted left side seems to move slightly. She stares at Silvertail for a while, then looks down at her feet. "I-I'm sorry for your loss. I didn't know."

Still looking at the floor, she walks down the hallway to check on Val.

Somebody separate Silvertail and Grakza before they start trying to kill each other. XD

So true. Half her character is built around her love of technology.

Grakza stares at Gud a second, then starts yelling at Silvertail. "The only menace here is your quick judgment. You attacked it before I had a chance to try anything." Best disarm them before going to the chirurgeon, or they might kill his patients for trying to get out of bed!"

Grakza shoves Gud against the wall, "That is not a toy," then wheels on Ivy and Silvertail, "and definitely not something to be destroyed out of hand!"

She bends over the remains and begins examining them. "Do you have any idea what you just ruined?!"

Skill check to salvage parts, maybe Craft (mechanical)?

My vote would be for just continuing as is. A roll back isn't going to change the end result.

"Khonnir is going to kill me for not saving his house and his robot," Grakza says, "but . . "

The half-orc straps on a shield and slowly swings her greataxe back and forth in the other hand, trying to keep the robot at bay. "Stay behind me. I'll take its attacks."

If we're in combat, who is up to act? And have the walls been torn down? I'm not sure whether I missed something about them not being there, or whether other players missed them being there.

Grakza has no problem endangering herself to try and save the robot, if she knows it possible. Assuming that isn't possible, then yes, it's time to see whose is bigger.

So, I have little idea what's going on right now.

I asked whether it's possible to fix the robot, but still don't know because the response wasn't actually an answer. Several others have attacked the robot--despite the walls in the way--and initiative has been rolled, but we don't seem to actually be in combat.

What's the situation?

"Somebody protect Val," Grakza shouts at her companions, "I'll fix the robot." I hope.

Grakza follows on Gud's heels as he moves through the doorways, shouting, "Val! It's Grakza!"

Do I know whether that building is Khonnir's/Val's home? Can a skill check be made to learn anything about the source of the scream, i.e. fearful humanoid vs. scary monster?

This isn't good. If Dolga won't even answer the question, Val must be doing really bad.

At the sound of a scream, Grakza rushes toward the building, pausing only to draw a greataxe.

Can we come back to Dolga later? I had lots of questions for her, I just figured that the most important thing to Grakza would be Val's well being, since I took Local Ties and Khonnir is supposed to be a friend.

Edit: The map is view only; can't add a token.

If this is what passes for a tribe in the city, I need to find Khonnir and a cure even more.

Grakza frowns at Gud's insult. Please, Gorum, let me die in battle if this is to be my new tribe.

Grakza immediately asks, "How is Val holding up?"

Grakza stares back at Gud a moment, then frowns slightly and crosses to the other side of the room. I may be a freak, but you don't get to stare at me!

Left/Right: 1d2 ⇒ 1

Grakza walks straight toward Dolga and starts to speak, but instantly stops in her tracks and goes quiet. I'm that deformed now! Dolga doesn't even recognize me!

After a few seconds, she slips behind everyone else and leans heavily against the wall.

"Master Bouldercrush, is it?" Grakza asks, "How did--do you know Khonnir?"

When Dommer offers to help, Grakza's shoulders lower a bit and she cracks her neck. "If Khonnir's in the caves, a dwarf could make the difference."

The corners of Grakza's mouth turn up slightly, just for an instant, then she turns to her left and looks away from Gud. "We have to find him, Ivy! I have to."

Grakza waits until evening, then keeps close to the houses, making it hard to see the left side of her face. She waves to a few familiar faces, but avoids eye contact when she can. Khonnir will know what to do. He has to.

When she finds the reward notice at her friend's house instead of her friend, Grakza stares at the paper for a long time. Later, she finds herself holding the crumpled reward notice in one hand and listening to Ivy and some stranger talk, but doesn't remember anything since she walked into Torch.

"Ivy? What happened?" Grakza asks, "What happened to Khonnir?"

We are planning on a Monday start, right? Any finishing touches we need to work on before people disappear for the weekend?

Grakza lives in the general area and has visited Torch a lot. Is anybody else a local?

Silvertail and Dommer won't really be in melee, right?

Is every pretty comfortable with positioning to avoid soft cover for ranged characters?

Not a problem over here. I can even focus on the longspear, to help you avoid melee penalties.

Dommer if you want to stay with nature Ivy has a free trait still so I can pick up local or planes. That might be better for the group over all.

If that happens, and you can pick up planes, local fits my character much better than religion.

With three casters of different types, UMD might be unnecessary. One of us should be able to activate anything we find, certainly any scroll.

Maybe Grakza could get religion instead of local since it's a divine caster type of thing?

I can make religion work instead of local. Don't let the class fool you though, I am definitely not a charisma build. 13 Charisma, -4 on Charisma-based checks, and a further -2 in some situations.

I picked up Knowledge (local), Sense Motive and Survival; and dropped Spellcraft. That leaves Knowledge (planes, religion) as our only glaring gaps.

I fear Gud is not into skills. He is more a "beat them" kind of character. His "duplicated" skills are skills that work even better when duplicated, if you ask me.

LOL

I wouldn't be too worried about the skills we're missing.

Even things like Knowledge (local, planes, religion)?

I will switch to sense motive as it will be as good as my spellcraft but will have better growth as I'm more likely it invest in wisdom.

Were you planning to do any magical crafting? We haven't talked about it yet, but with three spellcasters in the party, we could potentially do a lot of crafting.

I can switch from geography to history but that would make a lot less sense and would be much worse.

If you want geography for role-playing reasons, that's completely separate. But mechanically, I will already have it covered. And unless somebody else wants to take Technologist and cover the technology skills, I'm locked into geography.

Filled it out. Druids don't have a lot of class skills. I can move some stuff around though there are not a lot of optimal options.

What about using traits to add class skills? That's how I got Disable Device and Linguistics.

Thank you for filling out the spreadsheet so quickly, everyone! Here are the results:

Duplicated Skills

In addition to the skills in the sheet, Silvertail also has Artistry (Criticism) trained, so she can tell any of you who craft or perform things how bad you are at it.

LOL

Just be warned, I may fight back with quotes from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism.

Here is a spreadsheet for coordinating our skills. If everyone can please enter their character's skills there, we can make sure that we aren't missing anything important or doubling up on something unimportant.

Edit: I totally forgot about background skills, and am currently training four of them, so I can pick up two additional skills to fill in some gaps.

BACKSTORY Though Grakza's tribe feared and hated technology as a symbol of the oppressive Technic League, she had long been fascinated by it. Knowing their feelings, she hid hers until what she thought was the right moment. Then, she told her clan that her gadget would guarantee victory against their rival tribe, but when the time came, it only sprayed her face with glowing liquid.
When Grakza's promised aid didn't appear, her tribe lost more warriors than it could afford, in a battle that it had only waged because of those promises; promises that they believed because Grakza had been favored by the gods ever since childhood.

When several children fell down a ravine while exploring forbidden areas, only Grakza escaped without any broken bones. When Chief Chulok lectured them and Shaman Semik cast a spell to scare them into obedience, only Grakza resisted his magic. When the shaman cast bones to see how he could rein her in, only he ended up wearing any reins.

Semik thought that taking Grakza as his apprentice would teach her discipline, and she did learn a lot from him, it just wasn't always what he meant to teach her. When he made her live away from the clan for weeks at a time to teach her self-reliance, she visited nearby villages instead--and learned about technology.

However, that disobedience only demonstrated her luck and divine favor yet again. When a new disease crippled the tribe and several communities one season, Grakza's travels enabled her to bring medicine from Torch--the first place to find a cure--to her clan and the other villages.

After that, she developed relationships with many residents of the stable communities, and especially with Khonnir Baine, a wizard in Torch. He not only nurtured her interest in technology, he often taught her little things that he had learned since her last visit. So, when a technological mishap left her with some sort of wasting disease that was eating her skin, she naturally sought out her friend, Khonnir. Unfortunately for both of them, he was missing. Especially since Grakza's failure had gotten her clansmen killed and herself banished. The human wizard was now the closest thing to family she had left.

I'm thinking of a Leshy natures fang druid controller archer.

I'd love to see a druid in the party, so much more teamwork potential between casters with a arcane, divine, and nature magic!

As long as my barbarian gets healing, he can deal with the frontline...

I think you'll like the way I play divine casters :-)

Silvertail won't be terrible at damage long-term, though early she'll be bad, but she is going for more of a disabling/support kind of spell list. Damage is kind of her back-up for when her other spells don't seem like they'd be effective.

Grakza will be okay at damage short-term, but crappy long-term. My spell list will be all support and condition removal. I'm not planning on a single spell or ability that targets enemies.

Looks like one of my questions got missed:

"A Whetstone allows you to sharpen a blade," but that feels a little vague; which weapon groups would be included? Light blades and heavy blades seem fairly obvious, but what about axes or polearms with a bladed tip? Axes need to be sharpened just like knives do, and several polearms have "blade" in their description.

So, what's your GM ruling?

And a new one:

Does using Disable Device to disarm a trap require me to find it with Perception, or could somebody else point it out to me?

If the GM approves the ratfolk idea above, I hope you guys can cover the damage side - because the character sucks balls in combat!

It might be close, with Almonihah also doing a low damage, non-caster. Only one way to find out, though :-)

And remember, I already have the technology gadgets completely covered. Though if you want to cover all six of them, so that I don't need the Technologist feat at all, I'd be happy to rebuild my skills.

It never ceases to amuse me how two people can play the same rules and have completely opposite experiences. :D

So true.

Several winters ago, our local VOs went to the bar to organize the GM schedule for an upcoming convention. On the way out, one of them bragged a little bit about his new crit-build. Tons of people love critical hits, and I may be the only person who hates them. I said so, and . . .

It was around 11pm when everybody else left, after midnight when the two of us did. That means we spent over an hour standing in the parking lot on a winter night, debating fighters built for crits. At one point, he actually put his laptop on the trunk of his car and we created a spreadsheet to compare our choices.

And that is far from the only such story I have.

Combat maneuvers are ridiculously expensive to be decent at for how rarely they're actually practical (they basically only work on enemy humanoids and similar foes, as bonuses from size, having multiple legs, etc. make them fairly impractical to try on most monstrous foes).

Oddly, when I used to describe Pathfinder to 3.5e players, my pitch went something like this, "The two most significant changes are differentiating the classes and re-balancing some of the rules. For example, the sorcerer is more different from a wizard now, and combat maneuvers have been nerfed."

Who is for the Feat tax rules? Who is against?

I wasn’t thinking when I said I was for them. I’d rather play without, but if everyone’s characters are all ready built with them we can keep them so everyone doesn’t have to rebuild anything.

At a quick glance, it is not something I would be for. They seem more like a power-up than a fix.

Combat Expertise already has a solid replacement in dirty fighting, and that's the only prerequisite feat that significantly bothers me.

Anyone else have character concepts?

I'm finishing up equipment now, then will start on backstory and personality.

Knowledge (Arcana) is used to identify constructs. Without Technologist, however, certain technology-based constructs might not be identifiable.

I thought that too, but the player's guide says Knowledge (engineering).

Should have it ready tomorrow; going through final tweaks due to the feat tax rules and whatnot.

What exactly are feat tax rules? I don't think it will affect this character, but still curious for the future.