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Cramulus's D&D Game

Started by Cramulus, December 06, 2010, 03:20:52 PM

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Requia ☣

Quote from: TGB on December 07, 2010, 03:35:08 AM
Incidentally, I decided that a katana should be 1d8 18-20/x2 and the 'falchion' should be 1d10 18-20/x2 back when 3rd ed came out.

As an exotic weapon?  Interesting, I think there actually isn't a weapon filling that slot.
Inflatable dolls are not recognized flotation devices.

Cain

An illusionist pretending to be an envoker/conjurer is a good one.  A similar good twist might have been having a psionicist or Shadow Mage in the same position - especially the latter, since their magic works rather differently, but gives bonuses to (IIRC) illusion and enchantment spells, allowing for similar methods in misleading them.

Don Coyote

Quote from: Requia ☣ on December 26, 2010, 09:27:35 PM
Quote from: TGB on December 07, 2010, 03:35:08 AM
Incidentally, I decided that a katana should be 1d8 18-20/x2 and the 'falchion' should be 1d10 18-20/x2 back when 3rd ed came out.

As an exotic weapon?  Interesting, I think there actually isn't a weapon filling that slot.
The katana would be a martial twohand or exotic one hand and the 'falchion' would stay a martial twohand. This all from memory, mind you.

Cainad (dec.)

Quote from: CramOnce they had figured out that Mogadore was an illusionist, they were able to prepare themselves using better divinations and detection spells. It was a good boss fight because they totally would have lost if not for that clue.

:lulz: :lulz: Oh, you.

Cramulus

I ran session two yesterday. It was a great event!

Props: I think visual aids really stimulate the imagination and help people visualize the world we're in. I really enjoy making 3D terrain and other thing to spice up the battle board. We just got a new TV so there are all these styrofoam packing blocks lying around the apartment. I printed out a bunch of high res images of Venetian Facades and taped them to the blocks so I could have accurate looking building blocks.

When the players have an encounter in the streets of Ave Sestina, I use 1 inch grid paper (which represents water), and laying dungeon tiles (representing streets) and my homemade building blocks. This way there are three levels of altitude in every combat - players can climb up onto roofs to snipe at opponents, they can get pushed into the canals, or they can just go toe to toe with melee on the street. I'll post some pix later, because the set up is really cool!


Skill Challenge: At this game I had the opportunity to use an unusual skill challenge called a Branching Challenge. For those of you who haven't played 4th ed, Skill Challenges are a way of resolving complex problems through roleplaying and the D&D skill system. In a Branching challenge, there are several distinct ways to solve the problem, and the outcome is determined by which skills the PCs use.

In this challenge, the players had to get access to the Lower Stacks, the guarded library sealed away underneath the Lyceum Ars guild tower. They were looking for a certain book down there, but the guildmistress wouldn't just give them access, even though they had a writ from a Councilman.

There are two basic ways of solving this challenge:

Legal Entry - convince the guildmistress to give you access. This used skills like Diplomacy, History, and Arcana. Insight checks can give you bonuses on these roles and can unlock Religion as a way of gaining legal entry. (an insightful player would sense that the guildmistress is a servant of Ioun, and is thereby sworn to share knowledge, not ferret it away, and could negotiate with her based on that)

Illegal entry - sneak into the tower! This used skills like Thievery, Dungeoneering, and Acrobatics. Perception checks can give you bonuses on these roles and can unlock Stealth as a skill that can be used in this challenge. (the character spots a route they can sneak through)

A few skills could be used for either goal, like Intimidate.

In order to access the tower, you have to get 12 successes at any of these skills. We played with 10 minute rounds, and every player was allowed to do one "thing" per round. Whether they made a legal or illegal entry into the tower was determined by the number of successes in the "legal entry" or "illegal entry" category.

Had they failed the challenge, they still would have gotten into the Lower Stacks, but there would have been some guardians waiting out side for them when they came back out.

In practice, it worked out really well. The mage and the warlord hung out in the guild hall chatting up the guildmistress while the rest of the party scouted for a back way into the tower and a route down to the lower stacks. Rather than mapping out the tower, we narrated it through the skill challenge system. In the end the party was ALMOST granted legal entry, but they decided that it would be more fun to break in, so the chatty characters eventually joined the stealth team. When they got in, the score was 7 to 5 (illegal to legal).


In previous D&D editions, you'd tend to have the high Charisma character make all the diplomacy checks while the other characters at the table hang around until it is their turn to do their thing. I like the skill challenge system because it gets even the hack-and-slash members of the party thinking about how they can help. (the tiefling paladin in the party tends to keep his mouth shut in social encounters, but we managed to coax some dialogue out of him when he realized his Intimidate skill was actually really useful here)




Cainad (dec.)

Cool!

I kind of really want to try out a 4th ed campaign now, maybe even just a one-shot game. At this point my nerd resistance to 4th ed has devolved from "3.5 is teh BETTAR!" to "I don't wanna spend money on new books." Which is, of course, circumvented by swiping them from the internets.

Telarus

Nice AP account Cram. I haven't had a chance to play in a 4ed game, but the skill challenges are definitely an interesting concept. They seemed a bit simple at first, and I didn't know how the X successes before Y failures thing worked out in actual play (BTW, did this Branching Challenge have a Failure threshold, or where they just working one set of successes over the other?)

Seems to have a lot in common to the 'indie' Set-Stakes-Then-Roll advice from some of the weird games I've ran, but with multiple rolls.
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Cramulus

yeah, you fail the challenge if you rack up three failures. Which sounds like it would be pretty easy to fumble, but the difficulty classes are pretty low though. And I give bonuses based on your RP. So in the end it ended up being 12 successes and 1 failure, when the rogue rolled a 1 trying to sneak through the tower. But since it was the group's first failure, he didn't make enough of a mess to jeopardize the mission.



I ran another skill challenge where they had to solve a logic puzzle. The puzzle had five clues, and involved finding out the names of four guildmasters, and the order that they joined the Lyceum Ars. The puzzle took place in a big room with book shelves along the corners (and lots of obstacles in the room to mix it up). Each book shelf had one clue, and you had to make a DC 11 history or arcana roll to find the right book. Meanwhile, spiders were attacking, creating webs all over the room, et cetera. When a spider died it had two baby spiderling minions in its belly which hatched and attacked.

So essentially in this challenge, you need five successes, and if you fail a challenge you can re-test for that shelf, but there's no failure threshold. In the original plan for the encounter, spiders would be respawning constantly until they solved the puzzle, but by the end of the fight people were getting restless so the spider eggs stopped hatching. Great puzzle though, it was one of those encounters that had something for everybody.

Telarus

Research, a Logic Puzzle, and Combat in the SAME SCENE!


:evil::1fap:


And I've been wanting to use "Gauntlet" style monster generators for a while now. Nice touch.
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Cramulus

you can do some very gauntlet stuff with minions. For the XP value of one monster, you get 4 minions. Minions die in one hit. They can be nasty too, because they help the tougher monsters by flanking, grabbing you, giving you a round worth of fire vulnerability, stuff like that. People who can do area effects (like wizards) can clear a lot of minions in one attack.


here's some of the city blocks for Ave Sestina




--this is supposed to resemble Venice.




Cramulus


Telarus

Telarus, KSC,
.__.  Keeper of the Contradictory Cephalopod, Zenarchist Swordsman,
(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
/||\   Episkopos of the Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Join the Doll Underground! Experience the Phantasmagorical Safari!

Pope Pixie Pickle

Quote from: Cramulus on January 26, 2011, 06:24:32 PM
you can do some very gauntlet stuff with minions. For the XP value of one monster, you get 4 minions. Minions die in one hit. They can be nasty too, because they help the tougher monsters by flanking, grabbing you, giving you a round worth of fire vulnerability, stuff like that. People who can do area effects (like wizards) can clear a lot of minions in one attack.


here's some of the city blocks for Ave Sestina




--this is supposed to resemble Venice.






your city looks AWESOMES Cram.
Quote from: Cramulus on January 26, 2011, 06:48:08 PM
some dungeon setup


thsi also

Luna

Awesome props.

I'm toying with the idea of dragging out the old boxed sets of Ruins of Undermountain and either running 'em as is, or updating 'em for 4th Edition.  (I have my 4th Edition books, the 2nd Edition books are still in the custody of my husband pending the big RPG "whose is whose" argument.  We may need referees, the DVD split was downright civil, but we've both got RPGs going back 25 years or more, and they've had over a decade to become hopelessly intermingled.)
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"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement."

Quote from: The Payne on November 16, 2011, 07:08:55 PM
If Luna was a furry, she'd sex humans and scream "BEASTIALITY!" at the top of her lungs at inopportune times.

Quote from: Nigel on March 24, 2011, 01:54:48 AM
I like the Luna one. She is a good one.

Quote
"Stop talking to yourself.  You don't like you any better than anyone else who knows you."

Cramulus

been keeping a log of our adventures here: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ave-sestina/adventure-log

At the last event the party got an Artifact. Though they don't know I'm treating it like an artifact, they think it's an NPC.

This leg of the campaign has been very very lovecraftian. I've had a lot of weird four dimensional beings who the PCs can only see part of as they dip into three dimensional space. It turns out that all these aberrations from the Far Plane are chasing around this little delicacy, a creature that calls himself Gehentir. They saved Gehentir from being eaten, and he seems to be tagging along with them now. Gehentir is a little pyramid made of flesh, with an eye on each side. He communicates psychically, and talks like a condescending yoda. He's always yammering on about how the players are "like motes of dust floating on the skin of a vast sea," seemingly ignorant of the fact that he's basically an helpless pile of flesh.

I'm writing Gehentir to be sort of like the main character in Flatland. He's a 4D being who's been reduced to a 3D being, and now he is very very confused. But with heavy Lovecraftian tones of "Be thankful that you are ignorant of the true 4D nature of the universe." There's a little bit oc comedic irony in that he's actually a totally helpless pile of flesh. He sort of reminds me of the mooninites:



So the way that Artifacts work in 4th Edition is kind of interesting.

An Artifact has a base set of powers that it grants. In Gehentir's case it's mostly movement related things. Once per encounter he lets you teleport. (Or as he puts it, "Gehentir will show you a glimpse of the True Shape of the universe, he will pull you in a direction your mewling mortal mind cannot comprehend." And he makes it harder for you to be pushed or forcibly moved - he'll just teleport you out of the way.

Artifacts start off with a Concordance of 5. Their concordance changes based on how you act. For Gehentir:

-Every time you kill an aberration, it goes up
-If you feed him a magic item, it goes up (proportional to strength of the item. Potions are the cheapest way to feed him.)
-If you don't seem interested in bringing him home to the Astral Sea, it goes down
-If you go more than a few days without feeding him a magic item, it goes down.

At the initial level of concordance, he grants one additional power: he can detect any ritual components within 30 feet, and will inform whoever is holding him that he can smell some cooking ingredients nearby.

As the concordance goes up, he gives you access to cooler powers, and a ritual which can draw aberrations into the area.

If concordance goes down, he can harm you in combat, perhaps teleporting you into bad spots or making you vulnerable to psychic damage. If it goes down too far, he'll attempt to leave the party and set out on his own.



This week: We'll have some good intrigue... The players may be getting their first masks, and will have an opportunity to masquerade as an adventuring party that works for one of the city's shady factions. They'll hear some info that they're not supposed to hear, and this will catapult them into the drama and politics of the Serene City.