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Early impression.
** spoiler omitted **
Don't forget that this is the first time the kids are playing, and I'm not providing a ton of guidance, so they're in an extended 'trial by fire'.
I wouldn't say I'm hard on them; I'd say I don't take it easy on them, I let them learn through experience, and they appreciate me for it. I doubt a bunch of 15-year-olds would enjoy learning that the GM was "taking it easy" on them due to their youth or lack of experience.
And yeah, Talky was hilarious. He was SOOOOOO excited to be bringing in a new character, and then went on with, "And I can't believe you did that to Templari..."
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Yeah, I felt the bearded devil was a very poor choice as well. Bralani azata OP, since they have both ranged attacks and the ability to heal the party. But he tried a bearded devil, it was pretty useless, and so he'll know better next time.
Learning all the capabilities of possible summon takes time with bestiary. At least they don't have to unlearn 3rd edition parts that were changed in Pathfinder...
They learned that taking the latest cool, "I do nd6 damage to everybody spell" really isn't a sound tactical strategy, and you need to select your spells based on what the party needs, not on what does the most damage.
I don't understand what are you saying... "select spells... not on what does the most damage."?! That makes no sense!
And yeah, Talky was hilarious. He was SOOOOOO excited to be bringing in a new character, and then went on with, "And I can't believe you did that to Templari..."
A bit sad, Templari had potential for further story, I think... On the other hand not playing paladin means not having to worry about not falling.
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They got lucky with finishing off the grappled necromancer. That 25% chance to pincushion the grappler (Bara) instead of the snack (necromancer) is really, really unpleasant when it crops up.
Be glad that they haven't come across the really nasty lots o' damage spells that are nearly impossible to thwart. boneshatter, battering blast and of course enervation itself can frag a whole lotta critters with ease as compared to the traditional evocation stand-off spells.
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They got lucky with finishing off the grappled necromancer. That 25% chance to pincushion the grappler (Bara) instead of the snack (necromancer) is really, really unpleasant when it crops up.
Be glad that they haven't come across the really nasty lots o' damage spells that are nearly impossible to thwart. boneshatter, battering blast and of course enervation itself can frag a whole lotta critters with ease as compared to the traditional evocation stand-off spells.
That rule was done away with in the 3.5 -> Pathfinder conversion. linky.
And of course Hooken has Precise Shot.
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Well, well, well. Won't my Giantslayer GM be disappointed. ;)
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Last night was pretty low-key. The kids wrapped up their level-ups, retraced their steps to get out of the dungeon, went to see the Muse (and pick up a new PC: Talky McTalktalk is back to barding it up with Narlock, female human bard 11), and then went to the Pathfinders to buy their requisite scroll of Raise Dead, sell Templari's gear, etc. etc. After a bit of discussion, they went back to the vault to wrap it up, killing the giant slug in the process.
A few items of note:
Yes. Bara is getting levels of bard, but only affecting Malek.
I'm sure there will be more hijinks next week, as I need to start the events a-happening!
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"You just learned that the world is ending! But no, our expectation is that you're going to ignore that and sit around crafting for 2 months..."
These are PCs we're talking about.
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Yes. Bara is getting levels of bard, but only affecting Malek.
So does anyone have an idea for a bard pun including the term "Frog-Sothoth?"
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Yes. Bara is getting levels of bard, but only affecting Malek.
So does anyone have an idea for a bard pun including the term "Frog-Sothoth?"
That works pretty well on it's own I'd say. :D
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And yet another low-key evening, marred by the requirement that I do some major metagaming. Seriously, what was the author thinking?
This is the recommended/required series of events.
So, given that the location of all possible campsites provided in Book 3 are in the northwest corner of Saventh-Yhi, and given that the PCs are in Vault B, I don't see how ANY group would do anything other than head straight for Vault H. It's on the way back to the Pathfinder camp, there's no reason to delay, and there's no indication that you need to put another faction's camp somewhere along that route in Book 3.
And at the very beginning of Vault H: "Make sure the PCs have been through both Events 5 and 6 before they reach this point."
Er... exsqueeze me? How, exactly, am I supposed to do that when the entire map is configured to force them to Vault H immediately after finishing Vault B?
I had to go out-of-game and just TELL the players that they couldn't do Vault H right now. Really not a fun thing. Bad AP writer! No biscuit!
Anyhoo, since it's obvious I needed to accelerate things a LOT so the group could start exploring vaults like they wanted to, on their way back to the Pathfinder camp they encountered two Sargavan refugees fleeing the destruction of the Sargavan camp by the newly-arrived Aspis Consortium. They reported that the Sargavans mysteriously opened the gates of their fortification for the attacking Aspis troops and were mowed down mercilessly. The survivors were last seen being chained up and marched towards the new Aspis encampment in the southeast.
At that point they were ambushed by six Aspis Consortium legionnaires, who killed the woman they were talking to with six well-placed heavy crossbow shots (six hits, including two crits). The party, not to be dissuaded from burning money as quickly as humanly possible, used a scroll of Breath of Life to bring her back (amazingly, Athelya rolled just high enough to bring her above negative CON hit points).
The fight was a walkover for the party. Bara didn't participate at first, but when one of the Aspis Consortium fell, she ate him, gear and all, so Malek had to spend a moment telling his waifu, "No, no! No eat until we get their gear!"
By the end, two Aspis were unconscious, one through the infamous Total Fail fumble card that knocks you instantly unconscious. He was swinging at Hooken, who was dropping an enemy a round, making it all the funnier. Hooken just added another notch to his barely-held-together-with-duct-tape belt. Another had surrendered (he was prone and in the process of being eaten by Heron, so he couldn't exactly run away). Three were dead, with one of the three eaten.
They stripped the two corpses and let Bara eat them. Bara was happy. They questioned the survivors and learned:
Yes. Zakiyya is back.
The look on the kids' faces was priceless.
NobodysHome is a happy, happy guy!
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So in short, the silliness is by the module writers instead of the kids this time. ;)
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Is there any real reason to not do Vault H before events 5 and 6? (I have no idea what events are those, my knowledge of this AP is primarily based on your thread and a random snippets heard here and there)
Could be a solution to blunders like that is switching the location of vaults? Exchange contents of vault H with another vault that does not need events 5 and 6 to be completed... If there are fitting vaults on the list, of course.
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Is there any real reason to not do Vault H before events 5 and 6? (I have no idea what events are those, my knowledge of this AP is primarily based on your thread and a random snippets heard here and there)
Could be a solution to blunders like that is switching the location of vaults? Exchange contents of vault H with another vault that does not need events 5 and 6 to be completed... If there are fitting vaults on the list, of course.
It's a CR 13-14 vault, so I *could* let them explore it, if I just wanted to kill a bunch more PCs.
Yeah, moving them all around would have been the way to go, but I was woefully underprepared last night (welcome to the school year) so I planned on running the vaults from the book, and hitting, "They cannot do this vault yet" was quite a surprise after Book 3's, "Let 'em go wherever they want" approach.
My bad as a GM for not reading the entire book first.
But I'm still going to call out the author for putting the final vault in the obvious "first" location...
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Is there any real reason to not do Vault H before events 5 and 6? (I have no idea what events are those, my knowledge of this AP is primarily based on your thread and a random snippets heard here and there)
Could be a solution to blunders like that is switching the location of vaults? Exchange contents of vault H with another vault that does not need events 5 and 6 to be completed... If there are fitting vaults on the list, of course.
It's a CR 13-14 vault, so I *could* let them explore it, if I just wanted to kill a bunch more PCs.
Yeah, moving them all around would have been the way to go, but I was woefully underprepared last night (welcome to the school year) so I planned on running the vaults from the book, and hitting, "They cannot do this vault yet" was quite a surprise after Book 3's, "Let 'em go wherever they want" approach.
My bad as a GM for not reading the entire book first.
But I'm still going to call out the author for putting the final vault in the obvious "first" location...
You are running afoul of the ever-infamous "Middle of Serpent's Skull" problem, where the AP starts to hit you with its second dose of tonal whiplash, akin to parts 1 and 2 (but at least parts 1 and 2 were firmly separated by vastly different locations and themes, unlike three and four.
(Hint: parts 5/6 do something similar, but not as intense, because it's all leading up to a pretty straight-forward "thing" known as a basic end-goal pretty early on in five, as I recall - though don't take my word on that, as it's been a little while, now.)
Anyway, I'd ask that you show book four a little mercy. Unfortunately, the writer of book four had a super-crunch deadline. It seems the "primary" writer of book three kind of... stopped writing, about halfway through (there could be any number of legitimate reasons for this, but we are not informed of them), and so, with no one else to turn to, the book four folks were tapped to "fill in" book three while still making book four (literally because there was no one else to do it).
Hence not much scripted content in three, and three and four kind of feeling like two halves of the same entry in an AP (sort of), but with fundamentally different tones. Three was started by one writer but finished by four's writer who now had half the normal deadline to finish one and a half APs in.
I had a similar problem to you, when I ran it as well. Whoops.
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Interesting backstory.
Honestly, I really *enjoyed* running 3. It was the kids who got bored with it. Apparently wide-open sandboxes are not kid-friendly. I don't mind that 4 is more of a railroad; it's just that if I'm going to be the conductor someone needs to label the tracks for me... AND put up warning signs as to where the party ought not to go.
Ah, well. There was a lot of player friction last night, so I'm letting them run Event 4 (assault on Avi's camp), which puts them back into the swing of the book, then I'm taking a "down week" so I can whip the rest of the book into a coherent order.
Should be... entertaining?
EDIT: And a lot of the friction was because Impus Minor was helping Deady McDeadDead make YET ANOTHER toon. As I e-mailed the group, Irwin can do a perfectly-respectable 18d6+13 a round, if he's being run correctly. Yet since Deady is unaware of flanking and doesn't see the benefit of full-round attacks, Irwin does... 1d6+1 per round and feels useless. And I keep telling the two of them (Impus and Deady) that they need to stop generating new characters, and understand the rules of the character Deady's running. They don't listen. Apparently character generation is more fun. *SIGH*)
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HOLY CARP. DANG IT, IRWIN.
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HOLY CARP. DANG IT, IRWIN.
It's OK. I was off by a little. Since the party is always Hasted and Narlock is playing, make that 28d6+25. Just a teensy difference there...
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ಠ
I love generating characters - it's a ton of fun!
But you've also got to have some fidelity to the story you're telling, and being part of a group of players means giving something your best effort - which also means being humble enough to learn how to do stuff from other people!
IRWIN! SHOW GRANDPAPPY GOZREH SOME RESPECT! USE THAT TECHNOLOGICAL STINKY THUNDER STICK AND MAKE HIM PROUD!
... wait.
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11th level generating 90-100 damage/round ... uh, yeah, that's pretty darned good.
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11th level generating 90-100 damage/round ... uh, yeah, that's pretty darned good.
Well, that's assuming the bad guys continue to have armor classes in the teens.
It's 1d6 (weapon) + 5d6 (sneak attack) + 1d6 (sonic from the bard) per hit. He's dual-wielding, so that's 3 hits per round, 4 when Hasted.
Then Piranha Strike adds +4 with the main hand, +2 with the off hand for +14. His strength bonus is only +1, but that's still +4 more for +18. Add the bard's +3 per hit and we're at +30.
Thus, 28d6+30 assuming all four strikes hit. With flanking and a bard giving him +5 to hit and most of the enemies having armor classes of 19 or under, that's not a ridiculous assumption...
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11th level generating 90-100 damage/round ... uh, yeah, that's pretty darned good.Well, that's assuming the bad guys continue to have armor classes in the teens.
It's 1d6 (weapon) + 5d6 (sneak attack) + 1d6 (sonic from the bard) per hit. He's dual-wielding, so that's 3 hits per round, 4 when Hasted.
Then Piranha Strike adds +4 with the main hand, +2 with the off hand for +14. His strength bonus is only +1, but that's still +4 more for +18. Add the bard's +3 per hit and we're at +30.
Thus, 28d6+30 assuming all four strikes hit. With flanking and a bard giving him +5 to hit and most of the enemies having armor classes of 19 or under, that's not a ridiculous assumption...
Slather a greater invisibility on him and it's good night sleep tight don't let the maggots bite for a great many foes.
Decently supported sneak attack characters are nasty business. Glad to see another one showing how it's done. :)
Piranha Strike isn't Power Attack - it should apply its full bonus to main and off-hand light weapons. Nudge that tally up by another 2 per off-hand hit. ;)
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11th level generating 90-100 damage/round ... uh, yeah, that's pretty darned good.Well, that's assuming the bad guys continue to have armor classes in the teens.
It's 1d6 (weapon) + 5d6 (sneak attack) + 1d6 (sonic from the bard) per hit. He's dual-wielding, so that's 3 hits per round, 4 when Hasted.
Then Piranha Strike adds +4 with the main hand, +2 with the off hand for +14. His strength bonus is only +1, but that's still +4 more for +18. Add the bard's +3 per hit and we're at +30.
Thus, 28d6+30 assuming all four strikes hit. With flanking and a bard giving him +5 to hit and most of the enemies having armor classes of 19 or under, that's not a ridiculous assumption...
Slather a greater invisibility on him and it's good night sleep tight don't let the maggots bite for a great many foes.
Decently supported sneak attack characters are nasty business. Glad to see another one showing how it's done. :)
Piranha Strike isn't Power Attack - it should apply its full bonus to main and off-hand light weapons. Nudge that tally up by another 2 per off-hand hit. ;)
I actually looked it up before I posted. It has the same wording as Power Attack:
This bonus to damage is halved (-50%) if you are making an attack with an off-hand weapon or secondary natural weapon.
And don't forget that that's my complaint: Irwin isn't doing any of that! He's lucky to do a single 1d6+1 strike per round.
So Deady's frustrated (again), other players are calling him out on being ineffective (which he hates), and so he's making another character.
I'm trying to end the cycle. I sent out a somewhat-nasty e-mail to all parties saying that I was going to clamp down on any any all abuse and metagaming.
We'll see how well that flies on Wednesday. I suspect I'll be doing a lot of yelling...
...but hopefully it'll make for a better environment for everyone in the long run.
Ultimately, the most important thing is for people to have fun. If what you're doing generates fun for both you and the group, it's a good thing! If it doesn't, you need to adjust a bit - perhaps just the one player, perhaps the group, perhaps both. One thing that is cool, though, is that he's not doing it alone. So that's nice. :D
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I always use Piranha Strike on unarmed strike/Dex builds, not TWF builds (since I don't care for TWF), so I'd missed that important detail with Piranha Strike.
Thanks, NBH!
Edit: I'm not reading Engrish properly. What is going on with poor Deady that he can't get his characters firing on even one cylinder? o.0
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Sounds like he likes to move around and stab people in the toe. :-)
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Have you tried putting a Chainsaw in some treasure. Pea Bear has been literally carving up Scrapwall with hers. :-)
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Thinking NBH needs to pull a "Dave" from KoDT. Have him find a "HackMaster +12" or something analogous. Say, a bane chainsaw that runs on an eternity cell or functions like a Mr. Fusion (pour beer in, fire that puppy UP!).
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What does KoDT stand for, I know that scene. :-)
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100 damage per round of hitting on every attack is honestly not too surprising at 10th level? At least in theory, DPRs (including the risk of missing) can get above 150 in this thread. But yeah, getting players to use their class features is sometimes a losing battle.
(my player with the skald has not used his raging song in 5 sessions)
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Quick non-update: I had to cancel tomorrow's session due to Impus Major's excessive homework, then immediately his choir notified me of an event on the 26th. We may be out for a couple of weeks...
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It's conspiracy to make me play Rift again, isn't it?
>:(
I'd make an even more upset face, but I can't because I'm on a phone in the carline.
Boo.
Have a good couple weeks, though!
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I am kinda back to Lord Of The Rings Online instead of Rift.
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I don't play MMOs much, but SWGemu is fun.
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More of the Same
One of the things that really strikes me about the kids is their absolute consistency in getting themselves into trouble.
Last night started out promisingly enough, with the party heading over to explore the ruins of the Sargavan camp to determine just what the Aspis Consortium had been up to. They spent an absolutely reasonable hour poring over the camp, looking for magic items, hidden caches, or other survivors. They found nearly two dozen dead, signs of another 2-3 dozen marched off as prisoners, and signs that the Aspis Consortium had split into 2 groups when leaving. Additionally, a barefoot woman had gone through the camp, carefully plucking all the magic items that might have been there. They decided to give the dead a decent burial. In a sign of things to come, Malek tried to get Bara to dig a mass grave, and instead she buried herself. Just for fun, they launched a Sargavan corpse towards her and she caught it in midair and devoured it. Karlen and Mufasan were suitably horrified at the party's mistreatment of their dead, so the party abashedly apologized and got back to burying the fallen properly.
Once the dead were buried, they dropped off Karlen, Mufasan, and the Aspis Consortium prisoners at the Pathfinder camp, and decided to... go explore Vault G?!?!?!?!?
Yep, I had SO enamored the group of the Sargavans that they didn't even ponder a rescue mission. I'd planned the whole night around the kids chasing down the in-progress caravan of prisoners and rescuing them but nope, kids didn't care. They were going to explore vaults, darn it!
Fortunately, I had a few vaults prepared, so when the kids went to Vault G, I did as recommended and randomly picked one of the prepped ones, so they're in the Vault of Silence, which is one of my favorites anyway.
And, as is classic for the kids, the entryway was a mass of hilarious chaos, interspersed with Hooken one-rounding each bad guy in turn:
Worst... gift... EVER!!!!!
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accomplishing nothing but making Bara happy
I am pretty sure that this sentence is self-contradictory...
You don't want to see Bara unhappy. You really don't.
Well, maybe not NobodyHome-you, but the party certainly shouldn't want that.
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Yep, I had SO enamored the group of the Sargavans that they didn't even ponder a rescue mission. I'd planned the whole night around the kids chasing down the in-progress caravan of prisoners and rescuing them but nope, kids didn't care. They were going to explore vaults, darn it!
They knew better than to go back to Book 3.
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They knew better than to go back to Book 3.
Yep, I had SO enamored the group of the Sargavans that they didn't even ponder a rescue mission. I'd planned the whole night around the kids chasing down the in-progress caravan of prisoners and rescuing them but nope, kids didn't care. They were going to explore vaults, darn it!
Hey now, hey now! Don't mislead the little buggers bundles of joy! The rescue mission is Book 4, Event 4 if I'm not mistaken...
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I find it highly amusing that Bara's Handle Animal DC is substantial enough that Malek will seriously consider Skill Focus (Handle Animal) as a general feat. :)
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I find it highly amusing that Bara's Handle Animal DC is substantial enough that Malek will seriously consider Skill Focus (Handle Animal) as a general feat. :)
His highest unmodified roll was an 8.
Not gonna get many froghemoths a'moving rolling like that!
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Maybe he would get better results with Diplomacy?
Or Bluff?
(no, honey, I am not going to spend another night with the party searching through lethal vaults, it will be a peaceful beer and poker night!)
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Ugh. Impus Major didn't get enough homework done on Monday (stoopid (but very fun) Halloween!), so no game tonight. We resume next week!
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OK, this is getting downright annoying!
Have I mentioned that the current vault the kids have entered (the Vault of Silence) is my absolute FAVORITE, and how I can't wait to see how they handle it?
So of course Impus Major came home sick on Friday, I started feeling poorly on Sunday, and I've had an elevated temperature (between 99.3 and 99.8) all week.
So today my cold (because all symptoms point to the dread Common Cold) moved to my throat and sinuses.
When you can't talk for 5 minutes without getting a sore throat, running a game becomes... problematic.
It's all because I WANT to run!
Hmm... hmm... hmmm... Oh, no, I'm SO glad I'm getting another week off! Hmm... hmm... hmm...
I'm so sorry, my friend! I know how awful sick can be!