We need to start a discussion on whether, as the group will eventually have to go back to Frieland (you are administrators now, you can't just spend all your time hunting and conquering, in movies, that's what the bad kings do...), we want to resume developing the kingdom as part of the game, using the mechanics, or do we prefer to not focus on those items (the AP allows for it)...
Your thoughts?
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I can start preparing monthly stuff again, but if nobody else is terribly into it (and my terrible dice rolls have left even me a bit sour on it), 'taking 10' or whatever might increase our chances of not utterly failing the AP.
A 'turn' only takes me 15 minutes or so, IIRC, so it's not a hardship or anything. Just give me a heads up when we start heading back, and I can get a few months 'in the can.'
I liked the kingdom building rules and would be willing to find more time to help in the process.
I'm gonna read the rules on kingdom building. Hopefully I'll be able to comprehend them and possibly take a shot in helping out Set. I feel bad about leaving you out on the ropes like that, Set. At least markofbane's there to lend a hand.
I'll give the rules a shot and see if I can figure this out.
No promises though! (I ain't the sharpest marble in the jar.) :)
I'm gonna read the rules on kingdom building. Hopefully I'll be able to comprehend them and possibly take a shot in helping out Set. I feel bad about leaving you out on the ropes like that, Set. At least markofbane's there to lend a hand.
I'll give the rules a shot and see if I can figure this out.
No promises though! (I ain't the sharpest marble in the jar.) :)
that reminds me, I'll need to familiarize myself with the kingdom building rules before my group starts on building the kingdom.
** spoiler omitted **
Have we built anything building wise in this land? If so; what?
And in your profile, DW, you have the Warden role with bonuses to DEX and WIS. In the player's guide, it's STR and CON. If we're going by what's in your profile, then Kriger is in the wrong role.
Nevermind about the buildings, I missed the top of your profile where the kingdom stats are. I guess I was too focused on the rules.
(Again, my perception sucks in real life. It's absolutely horrendous.)
I am still curious as about the latter issue though.
Okay. I got another question: How do we get more BP's?
We only got 4 and that's squat.
Also, how is it determined what phase we are rolling for?
Five of our hexes have an F in them. One has a C and the other an M. What does those letters stand for?
Looking back, I see we rolled a couple of natural 1's. That's automatic failure according to the rules. What happens in that instance?
Reading a bit more, please tell me Economy checks aren't the only way to get more BP's?
Have we built anything building wise in this land? If so; what?
And in your profile, DW, you have the Warden role with bonuses to DEX and WIS. In the player's guide, it's STR and CON. If we're going by what's in your profile, then Kriger is in the wrong role.
Copy-Paste error it seems... Now corrected. I had done it right to calculate the bonuses though. Good catch.
Okay. I got another question: How do we get more BP's?
We only got 4 and that's squat.
Also, how is it determined what phase we are rolling for?
Five of our hexes have an F in them. One has a C and the other an M. What does those letters stand for?
Looking back, I see we rolled a couple of natural 1's. That's automatic failure according to the rules. What happens in that instance?
Reading a bit more, please tell me Economy checks aren't the only way to get more BP's?
Regarding BP: yes, the dismal management of the former administration has brought the economy to a halt and the treasury is in poor shape. Changes are warranted! Vote for Mastermind! ... Ahem! *Puts his hood back on and Resumes omniscience and ubiquity.* You can increase BP through the Economy roll, but it also helps to reduce consumption. Considering the rolls, you've made the right decision. You can also inject your own gold in the kingdom, but it's crazy expensive.
F=Farms, C=Camp, M=Mine; they have different impact on your resources.
Let me check about the natural 1s.
Regarding the natural 1s...
Set's last rolls. I think in those cases, the roll is the roll, because you need to know by how much you make it or not. There's no real problem here, as you allocate resources to focus on a thing in particular... at the expense of another. The Barony is till in its infancy, and no one expects things to run smoothly and life to be easy. The populace of settlers is worried though, but still on board and understands why the taxes are heavy and the rewards small. But if things don't look up in a few months, the government will have to make difficult decisions...
Regarding BP: yes, the dismal management of the former administration has brought the economy to a halt and the treasury is in poor shape. Changes are warranted! Vote for Mastermind! ... Ahem! *Puts his hood back on and Resumes omniscience and ubiquity.*
lol! (Typical new leaders. Spend, spend, spend!) ;)
You can increase BP through the Economy roll, but it also helps to reduce consumption. Considering the rolls, you've made the right decision. You can also inject your own gold in the kingdom, but it's crazy expensive.
D'oh! That's what I was afraid of. And yeah, it really is way expensive.
F=Farms, C=Camp, M=Mine; they have different impact on your resources.
I was thinking that might be it. But we also have a mill, so I wasn't sure.
Thanks for the info!
Okay. Now when it comes to rolling; how do we determine which to roll for when it comes to Stability, Economy, or Loyalty? Do we just choose? Or is that something determined by you?
For the first twelve months, It will be only Economy.
Testing...
1. Stability check:
2. Pay comsumption(0 BP)
3. Economy check: (+7 BP; 11 BP total)
4. Unrest effects: +2 from terrible rolling; -1 from Royal Assassin; +1 total. (I'm glad this is just a test. Although, the economy roll would have been sweet.)
5. Leadership changes(none)
6. Claim Hexes: The hex with the word "Bridge" in it.(1 BP)
7. Develop Hexes: Build road(1 BP); And whatever else.
8. Establish/Improve: (None) (Or possibly something useful. I don't know.)
9. Edicts: (No change)
10. Events
In this scenario, I should have a total of 9 BP after this, barring any buildings that would have been purchased in a normal scenario. At least, I think.
Plus our size would then be 8, which would keep our comsumption at 0?
Now Set: Did you just decide what to build on #7? Something to the effect of; "That sounds good, I'll build that." I guess I can ask the same question for #8 as well. I'm just trying to understand how you went about it. Me personally, I'm terrible at deciding on what to build.
When it comes to claiming hexes, outside of what has already been deemed land belonging to Brevoy, can we claim any other land that has been cleared and next to a green highlighted hex? Just like that?
And by building a road, would that give us 8 roads? Which would boost our Economy by +1? And our Stability by +1? Or have I miscounted? Or possibly just got something wrong somewhere?
Also, in the above improvement phase, please tell me what I've left out, messed up on,(besides the stupid unrest I caused) etc., etc. 'Cause this business is absolute madness! You know, learning the entire game of Pathfinder was easier than this! :P
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Now Set: Did you just decide what to build on #7? Something to the effect of; "That sounds good, I'll build that." I guess I can ask the same question for #8 as well. I'm just trying to understand how you went about it. Me personally, I'm terrible at deciding on what to build.
Stuff that didn't cost too much (since we always had crap for cash anyway) and that would add to Economy rolls or reduce Consumption costs in later turns was pretty much my priority. Camps, Farms, Shops, whatever.
Feel free to dump taxes entirely. Normal Taxes give you +2 on an Economy roll, and to offset their cost on Loyalty, you've have to balance them out with 2 BP worth of Festivals (the equivalent of a +10 Economy roll!). Festivals and Promotions are balanced between each other, but Taxes are worth only 20% of the other two, so nuke them into the floor, if you want. You'll end up spending five times as much BP to counter their effects on Loyalty, otherwise, and that's just at Normal Taxation. It gets even more lopsided as you go higher...
(At Heavy Taxes, you get +3 to Economy, and -4 to Loyalty. To offset that Loyalty penalty with Festivals costs you 8 BP, the equivalent of a +40 to Economy!, leaving you with a net -37 Economy for your efforts. So, yeah. Taxes are the debbil.)
Eventually, if we ever dig enough out of this hole to make a building capable of creating a magic item, we can sell those for money, I think, but that's not gonna happen this year.
Servayn's still using his 70 gp worth of starting stuff from character generation, IIRC, so I think I'm just gonna dump all my gold into trying to try and salvage this mess, if that's an option. It's not like a Summoner needs gear. He's got 420 gp, plus a share of the cash on Other Mastermind's profile, which hopefully should be worth enough to give us a BP or two.
All those areas that say 'Frogman', 'Kobolds', 'Pit trap'; I'm guessing those are areas y'all have already explored and taken care of?
Just wanna be clear.
Yes, though the frogman hasn't been resolved per se.
Cool. Thanks.
The exploration is grinding you down...
The posting is too sparse and it makes it so that people are posting even less. Please help move the game along in the difficult spots by posting, even if it is to confirm another player's suggestion. The expectation is once a day mostly.
Interaction between players is as important to keep the game interesting as interaction with the DM. Some of you have posted once in the last week.
I feel I will need to act and set up stricter rules. Let me know if you have ideas.
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The exploration is grinding you down...
It really is. The terrain has pushed us outside of our mandate, meaning that we are just kind of wandering around, and not advancing our mission. (And if there is something to find, we've 'left the map' and aren't gonna find it anyway...)
There's not much story to this chapter of the AP, from what I heard Cody say when we were originally talking about it in this thread (IIRC), and the exploration seems to be fighting us, and the nation-building is not only fighting us, it's kind of kicking our (well, my) ass.
I'm as enthusiastic a booster of the city-building stuff as I'd thought you'd ever find, and it's just demoralized the hell out of me, because of the success of the AP pretty much boiling down to 'Set rolls crappy, we never dig our way out of that hole.'
I think 'pure sandbox' without some sort of missions or quests or Side Treks or something is feeling a bit like spinning our wheels to me, although that could just be me having become too lazy and spoiled by MMOs, where you can always find a dude with a question mark over his head or a 'mission terminal' or wanted poster or something that will point you to the next adventure.
Maybe we should head back to the Fort and wait for adventure to call, because we sure aren't finding it out here.
Too much sand. Not enough box, I think.
In the interim, Servayn can attempt to teach the kobolds how to use nets to catch bats, since we've recently discovered that bat swarms frequent the area. Just have to teach them not to overhunt, because if they kill all the bats, we'll have a mosquito outbreak and malaria and whatnot. Bad times! :)
Eh. I'm just in a mood. Gimme a day to think it over. I've learned not to make snap decisions in this kind of mood.
Yeah, sorry about not helping in the nation-building aspect of the game. I'm trying to get a clue as to how it works, and think I understand it somewhat, but not near enough as to how to go about it exactly.
Plus I think Loyalty is the only thing Kriger would be best at rolling at.
Did you guys see the new private messaging Paizo just added?
I also thought I'd enjoy the Nation Building, but it seems to me better sitting around a table, than online. I think the campaign just needs a jump start. We're really just wandering around hitting roadblocks, then moving on. I kind of feel like a pinball :-). We've got a good group here, and I want to keep going, but we need something to happen. Part of this is just one of my faults with d20 games. If you don't have the right skills, or knowledge you're stuck. I know from watching hundreds of westerns on tv that the horses are perfectly capable of swimming across the slow moving river with no problem, but not in character.
Also the avatar tagging and the funky parenthetical notations of our characters sex/race/class/level!
Kewl.
That is pretty cool, Some dude. :)
Thanks for those comments. I'll see what I can do and perhaps come back with a few proposals. I's like to hear from Kalsgrim and Davor as well.
Yeah I'm not sure about nation building. I need to to research myself but it does seem like it needs quite a bit of thought. I'll go with the majority.
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Thoughts on this rabble-rousing dude;
1) Kalsgrim can probably speak to the man directly, making whatever Diplomacy roll we need to try and change the rabble-rouser's mind, and, ideally, anyone else present at his current speaking location, with Servayn taking 10 on an Aid Other check to give him a +2.
Janku might be good for another +2, depending on his Diplomacy roll. I'm not sure if Davor or Kriger have that skill...
Corso would likely be quite handy in that area, from what I remember of him, but he's stuck in NPC-land right now, sadly.
2) If the rabble-rouser happens to be some soft perfumed sort, that will make a nice contrast with our rougher appearance. The frontiersy people that would be attracted to a fledgling nation such as this would likely find it easier to identify with hard-fighting people who work with their hands, and are beating back the wilderness, than a pampered city dweller in finery. Might even be worth a circumstance bonus to talk down some of his points. If the rabble-rouser looks more like a grisled woodsman or ex-mercenary in well-used armor, then we can't play that card, obviously...
Nope. No diplomacy here.
Davor is more intimidation than diplomacy so no help there. -1 to the roll.
In the Serpent Skull game I'm playing, we are playing around with Flex time to keep things moving, and it seems to be working so far. Perhaps the nation building element could be handled flex play style.
Thanks for the link, but I'm not sure that it will solve our problem more than getting the story in fast forward and avoid sandbox and kingdom building.
As far as exploration goes, is it safe to say there is an encounter in each hex? Every other or every third hex? Perhaps we can set some default choices to help move us through blank hexes. For example, we'll explore the "West of Tuskwater Lake" area, starting in the northwest corner, moving east until we hit the lake, dropping south for a hex, then cut back west.
Problem is that's what we were already doing, no?
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Random thoughts about the future;
Servayn intends to learn Terran and Auran (2 ranks of Linguistics) to better control his elementals.
Other than that, his skill points should go towards stuff that advances what we're doing here. Profession (farmer) and Knowledge (religion) will help him on his side-trek to settle the kobolds down.
It looks like we are going to seriously need a way to stay in touch with the community while 'gallivanting,' and other than some complicated system of mirrors able to signal across many miles, I've got nothing other than using Independent Research from p. 219 to research up a 1st level spell that conjures some tiny wisp-creature that can fly back and forth with messages. If the critter has a Str 1 and no effective attacks, being pretty much 'animal messenger for arcanists,' it should balance fine as a 1st level spell, and if Servayn uses his last two skill points next level picking up Knowledge (arcane) and Spellcraft, he might even be able to do that, in an off week.
Once it's researched, Lukasz can be assumed to also learn it, and be able to use it from the city to 'send up the bat-signal' while we are out in the field.
If somebody's got a less expensive option (1000 gp. for the spell research, assuming I don't roll like I normally do on the spell research and summon Cthulhu to eat us all, and the permanant loss of one of my 1st level spell slots to keep it prepared, since I'm a spontaneous caster) like smoke signals or signal fires or fancy fireworks or something, I'm all for it!
Isn't there an Erastilian spell that fires an arrow up into the sky and creates a visible-at-range symbol? That might be a useful alternative, and there's a cleric of Erastil in town...
Ooh, just looked that up, Deadeye's arrow might be the perfect thing for what we need!
Deadeye's arrow is pretty cool. My question is: How far can it be heard?
(And that Order of the Stick stuff just cracks me up!) :)
Animal messenger goes to a specific location. That might limit its usefulness. As well, I wonder how far you could see Deadeye's arrow... In good conditions: a day of travel?
Unless you can get the animal messger to shoot the arrow!
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Animal Messenger's utility is limited also by our lack of having any druids in the party. Kriger might be able to send a bird back to the city, but what we need is a way for the city to be able to send a message to us.
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Signal fires are junk. Just checked online, and a 100 ft. tall tower with a signal fire on it would still only be viewable 20 miles away, thanks to the horizon. Lame. A six foot signal fire on the ground would be visible 2 miles away, so, really, the benefits of altitude taper off pretty darn fast.
Deadeye's arrow, on the other hand, has a range of 100 ft. + 10 ft./level if the arrow is thrown, or *the maximum range of the bow* if the arrow is fired into the air. (Maximum range is 10 increments, and a longbow has 110 ft. increments, for a maximum range of 1100 ft, or almost two miles into the air. Yes, that's freaking ludicrous, I know. Consulting teh intartubes, I got nothin,' cause the guy who made the chart used metric, and skipped from 328 ft. to 3280 ft... I'm gonna pull a number from my butt and say, maybe 40 miles or so, which is still only a day's travel.)
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Meh. I think I'll wait until 5th level, when I can summon a Lantern Archon, which understands all languages via truespeech and can greater teleport with up to 50 lbs. of gear at will. Summon one with my last summon monster III SLA each night and send it to Oleg with instructions to wait around a minute or two for a message and then teleport back and give it to us. We can even send back some coin and have hot meals waiting for our nightly check-in, which the Lantern Archon can teleport back to us so that we get hot meals delivered in the field!
Yes, that's right, Imma send an angel out to get me pizza. And I'm not even gonna tip the fool.
What you might get is the Lantern Archon Local 3324 Union Boss though...
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If the adventure has been written in such a way that we are forced to leave Grigori in the city while we chase trolls (who may or may not even exist), so that he can stir up yet more trouble while we're gone, I'm gonna write the guy who wrote this chapter an angry letter!
Probably a 'G,' but it'll be a really pissed-off 'G.'
Nothing of the sort. Just me torturing you by using different things in a different fashion. I like when characters have dilemmas...
Nothing of the sort. Just me torturing you by using different things in a different fashion. I like when characters have dilemmas...
Yeah I know what you mean. It really helps flesh out the characters I find when the players have their characters discussing upon their answers.
If the adventure has been written in such a way that we are forced to leave Grigori in the city while we chase trolls (who may or may not even exist), so that he can stir up yet more trouble while we're gone, I'm gonna write the guy who wrote this chapter an angry letter!
Probably a 'G,' but it'll be a really pissed-off 'G.'
LOL! I'm rolling over here! Man that's a good one! :D
I'll scan my ID Set, you can go PG13 on me no problem...
Then I'll go CR13!
FYI, a Council of Thieves game I recently joined is recruiting a skill monkey.
FYI, a Council of Thieves game I recently joined is recruiting a skill monkey.
tempted, but no ty. Don't have any characters in mind that are skill monkies.
Are we moving outside of our established territory where we have farms and such? If they have gone outside of our civilized lands, it may behoove us to go back and establish patrols. Or at least one of us with some diplomacy go back to keep things steady. Perhaps Kalsgrim should do that; return and see to adminstration while the others run down the trolls.
Kriger is one to definitely continue after the trolls. But he doesn't want the city to riot or get attacked either.
Stupid decisions! I blame Set's angry letter 'G'. :)
Erastil AND Milani!
Greatness!!! We so rock. :)