Deepsight requires your race Macacity. Otherwise I would strongly consider it. I looked at Detect Expertise. As a spy/scout this could come in handy. Its a DC 15 will save though - most creatures at our level make that often. Go Unnoticed is less good for Imbukar who hopes to be invisible at the start of every encounter. Of course he could hide from someone who can see invisibility I guess.
Extra Cantrips is one I like and had not considered. Herolab won't let me take it though as his cantrips are actually spell like abilities. Oh well. Thanks for the ideas.
Hey Az
Follow that the Deepsight link. It doesn't say anything about Fetchling when I read it.cheers
Yeah it's from the APG and is non-race-specific. Would be very useful for Imbrukar. Unfortunately Ally doesn't get any feats as a familiar.
Congratulations on the 3000th post, Macavity!
Hoody hoo! Hey who knows, we might someday be up there with Aubrey's campaigns in terms of posting :)
Does anyone else get the image of Al Swearengen from Deadwood when imagining the Usurer. I picture him as a vile, dirty, black-hearted thug who still wants society around so he can feed off it.
Now look here, you mother*censor* *sensor*sucker, if you don't like living in my mother*sensor* town, why don't you go *sensor* your horse, and ride right out of my *sensor**sensor* town?
Have a nice *sensor*ing day, *sensor*hole.
:P
EDIT: Now that I think about it, if a network were to show Deadwood, they would have enough uncensored footage to show the opening credits, then about 45 minutes worth of commercials. They would have to edit out this entire thread....
Tut, tut, looks like rain...
Even though it looks like rain, I'll be camping with boy scouts this weekend and will be of line from mid day tomorrow through mid day Sunday.
Liquid sunshine!
Sorry I'm late guys, mean boss man make poo poo of long day. Sometimes I feel like a 3 year old here. Anyway, looks like I have a lot of posts to catch up on, which I'll be doing in the next couple of hours.
LM
Yea there are. It's days like yesterday that make me wonder why I ever became an accountant.
So, I just got my new personalized license plate:
*nerdsquee*
Sweet! I've always wanted to get personalized license plates, but I never have the extra money when it comes time for renewal. Mine would be MNTCOR
I just took care of Kallistiel, now that the movement issue is taken care of. I'll post the start of Round 3 in a minute.
I just wanted to dot and let everyone know that I should be able to send some posts tomorrow. Things should be getting back to normality within 24 hours. At least, that's what the ship told me anyway
LM
Well I'm glad to see you got the reference. Your reward is that, the next time you want to give someone a bear hug, it's going to turn into a terrasque. Try that on for size. :p
I'm not old, I'm simply well-aged for my youth.
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I knew that is what you were doing and agree that this encounter does not challenge an 8 person party. The solution though is not to split the party as that gives our DM two parties to deal with and one is plenty hard.
Better to increase the CR of the encounters. I am pretty sure that whoever designed them did so for a 4 to 6 person party.
First, I apologize to Azaraunt for not seeing his posts from page 65. I really did miss it and it didn't really click until I got home tonight and refreshed the thread that I leave open 24/7 on my laptop. I will reply to those two posts most likely in the morning, as I am half dead after doing cost/benefit analysis for the last 11 hours. :)
I will, however, give you some background on this encounter as well as my two cents on Ruul's case.
If I went strictly by the campaign book, Gurg would have come running in as soon as you walked into the Camp. By himself. One CR 10 hill giant barbarian (because you wouldn't expect a hill giant alchemist...)...against even 4 people. Not frickin likely to live long in any case. So I added to the encounter a bit, as a GM is wont to do. Thus, you add 4 "goblin bears," (each a CR 6) and 5 level 4 orc warriors (each a CR 2, mostly for cannon fodder). Also, given the book's reason for making Gurg, all of them (presumably his Gurg's mercs) are scared poopless of...something.
So instead of an encounter rating of 10, we're closer to 16 or so. My being out last weekend, I think, may have come to show a point, which Ruul has brought up. To be fair, I think that, having missed a few posts in the combat, I haven't helped the case much. But the fact is that, while we have had more people participate this time, there's not a lot left to this fight. For the record, yes I did bend the rules for bringing Gurg out of the pit, mostly for dramatic effect (he is after all is supposed to help move one of the plots along).
In my opinion, I can see the case both for and against Ruul. I can in fact, handle 2 or more simultaneous threads. I'm very good at multi-tasking and, while I wouldn't be as fast in my responses (I'm not a fast typist), I could do it. I think I proved this to some extent with Lucky's tavern. The downside is what Azaraunt mentioned earlier: I'll start banging away to one post, miss another, and just move on from there. It's not intentional, but I have done it, particularly in combat, when our posts are running fast and furious.
As I told Ruul previously, if he can convince others (in character) to run a second group, whether in the Camp or out in the Desolation (or both in the Desolation; in the Camp, I still plan to run 1 thread for the Camp and 1 for the tavern), then I'll create the extra thread. If not, then I'll just need to add-on to the encounters. You guys can handle a terrasque, right? :)
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First, there is no need for an apology LM. I know it was not intentional and I have done the same thing a couple of times in both this and other games. Its a function of the PBP mechanism really. I too am fine with fast climbing giants. And its technically not even bending the rule to fast climb at half speed with the right bump to the DC - so the giant could get out, or at least to the top in a round with a move 30 and 2 climb checks.
As to the pit, and the tentacles - note that my wizard is a battlefield control wizard. He buffs some (because Haste is sooo good), but he is built to make the terrain unfriendly to the enemy. He has walls, fogs, pits, sleet storms, glitterdusts, etc. He is not all that blasty and if left alone would have a hard time killing most anything. But with a 25 Int and spell focus he is gonna be pretty good at his focus and things are gonna fall in pits and get entangled.
I am still not for it, but if we split up we need to do so tactically. We have two arcane casters so they should split up. We have two divine casters, two scout types, and two dexy finesse fighters too. So if we go 4 and 4 there are some logical choices on how to split. Divine seems to be the weakest link if we split as Ruul is more melee focused than casty.
I do want to point out that, potentially, you have 2 extra characters to use in an away party: Simon the scout, and Digory. Granted, Digory's CON sucks ass atm, and he is not exactly trustworthy (which was my intention, anyway), but you do have them if you wanted to add some added flavor to each group. I'll need to post Simon's stats, but it is doable.
I want to add that, if we do split, we are taking a lot of risks in my opinion - deadly ones.I fully agree. It's an unnecessary risk. From an in-character point of view it makes total sense to just stick together and steamroll over everything.
But this is also a game that should be fun and although the RP has been a blast, combat however has not been. It feels slow, confusing, and largely unsatisfying. I think it's worth taking a risk to improve this.
I'm also willing to take ideas on how to improve combat. I'm still used to playing on tabletop, as I have shown. I agree that the combat should be better, but I'll admit that I am a bit out of my element on that score. I am also used to seeing everything in my head, and as my wife keeps reminding me, nobody can read my mind (it's a little creepy and full of cobwebs anyway...and pictures of certain 'supermodels,' we'll just leave it at that...).
I'll be the first to admit to the rather common problem of scaling encounters. My offline groups are min/maxxers and I am always trying to find that balance between a challenging encounter and TPK (which I would love to do some days...). I am honestly not used to a group that doesn't try to play my campaigns like a run through WoW at top speed. You guys are quite refreshing to me, and I find myself having to make different adjustments to handle that.
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I play RPGs to have fun, so if other people aren't having fun, that's an issue for me, and one that I want to help correct.
If LM splits the party, I would be happy to go with either group. I'm sure there would be plenty to do both in the Desolation & at Camp (werewolves, anyone?). In-character, Numair would prefer to adventure with Elen, Ally, Ruul, & Lavinia, but he would be amenable to most other group splits, including the one Ruul proposed.
As for balancing encounters for the entire party (especially an 8-person party), that's a tricky beast, and I totally sympathize with LM on that. When I GM, adding additional combats is my preferred way to balance encounters for a larger party, but battlefield control wizard can really ... control the encounters and make them much easier. Scaling up a single monster to challenge a whole party is when you get into player-death scenarios really easily.
I've played combat-smash in fast forward campaigns before, and if I wanted that style of gameplay, I'd go play a video game. I play RPGs for the RP and the combat. Without taking the time to RP, we're just rolling dice and trying not to die!
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Oh and for missing posts, one thing I find really useful as a PbP player is a round summary by the GM. In the post when you announce the next round, it would be useful to have a summary of everything that happened in the current round.
In compiling the list of all the actions, you would go back to the last round-announcement post, and tabulate forward. That way, all actions get accounted for.
OK I'll keep that in mind. We should be back to straight RP now that Elen has knocked out the last bear.
I'm back. 100+ posts in and out of game.
I've skimmed them so don't quiz me. We won the battle. They were indeed scared crazy. It sounds like those Calm Emotions and Tentacles spells effectively ended the encounter. I prefer fighting smart than strong. OH and the Usurer made a surprise Baleful Polymorph contribution.
I think the Round summary post would improve things. I've it in other games, and it is very helpful.
I too like the RP and really enjoy this game. I also am concerned if others are not having fun. I was OK with splitting the party before, but I think everyone needs to choose themselves, even if party balance would suffer. Role-play before roll-play. IMHO
cheers
LM
Can you post a transition from combat to noncom? It would help Macavity come out of stasis.
thanks!
LM
Can you post a transition from combat to noncom? It would help Macavity come out of stasis.
thanks!
I'll see what I can do. I'm playing catchup myself, after being dragged, against my will mind you, to SXSW over the weekend. I was won over on the promise of all the Newcastle or Guinness I could endure.
Here is the plot synopsis for those of you who have never been to SXSW. It used to be a really cool indie music festival in Austin. Nowadays...imagine if you will, GenCon and ComicCon had sex with a hooker named Hollywood, spat out a kid, and then force-fed it Adam Sandler movies, and not even the good ones. That is now SXSW. There are indie bands who still go there, but good luck finding them, especially since it is apparently illegal to park inside Austin city limits during the two-week long slog. I live only an hour away from this (45 minutes if I'm driving and the wife is not with us), and I think I ended up parking in front of my house to get to this clusterduck. I got to hear one band, whose name I don't think I can pronounce, let alone spell, do a 90 minute session of Doors covers. Oh boy.
Oh yea, did I mention the beer? No Guinness, no Newcastle, not even a decent micro-brew, at least not one that I found. It was miles and miles of rice beer (Budweiser), pee water (Coors), and other things best not left mentioned. The food, I will admit, was good, but it was a half-hour line to get to any restaurant or food truck, to get an $8 taco or other item.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. Cops...Not just them in general, but something specific. Apparently, some thick-skull got it into his head that on and off ramps should be blocked off (I'd say at random, but you never know) in order to 'improve the flow of traffic.' If by that it translates into 'turn I-35 into a 12-mile long parking lot for several hours,' by all means, mission accomplished. It took me less time to catch the Doors concert then it did to drive home.
I'm sorry Macavity, did you say something? :P
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Well, I have learned that I could drink beer with you LM. :) I am a brown ale fan myself. And my neighbor and good friend has a daughter living in Austin. He is always trying to get me to travel along with him for a visit. So its conceivable that we could have that beer someday.
This is a reminder that will be traveling for the next 13 days. Headed to the airport in a few minutes. I'll check in when I have internet but I do not know how often that will be. Please bot me as needed to not slow the game. Thanks!
Hope you have fun out in Turkey. I'll keep a cold beer in the fridge for ya. :)
I feel the need to share this one...
My RL group, as we speak, are rolling up characters for a RotRL campaign, and one of them asks me for the carrying capacity for an STR 14. Another guy says out loud, Dude, how that hell do you have just a 14 Strength?
I have to admit, I went grognard on him...You know, I remember a time when people in my group would pray for a 14 in any stat! I think I'm getting old, and I think I reading glasses...Who are you people???
LOL from the Red Green Lodge...