^ Does what it says on the tin
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:48, Thu 28 May 2015.

Might be a good idea to post character creation stuff here, so I can get a sense of who's going to be what for the story, etc.

So we've definitely got a wild mage, but we may have a sword mage or an artificer or something else, right?

I think Swifty is playing an Artificer now, it's been bouncing around a lot, lol.

One quick question - do we need to worry about tracking (and therefore buying) normal ammo? Well, I won't be using a ranged weapon but will Swifty need to if she does?

If you're starting at level 1 then yes, but any other level only track magical ammo. If there's any special circumstances we'll figure it out on a combat by combat basis.

I was thinking of starting at level three, so we get our basic equipment and some magic items for free :D.

Yep, I know you guys won't go nuts so you'll get a 4th level item, a 3rd level item, a 2nd level item, enough money to buy a 2nd level item (I'll look that up if it's ambiguous) and you'll have reasonable carte blanche to come up with the stories around those items.


I liked how you had the magic items in your game actually be enhancements of previous items too, so feel free to have that for any items that seem odd to own when lower level.

I trust all your imaginations, and for everything else I trust mine :p

Don't worry, I'll check my gear and stuff with you before I start and you'll be able to see it on my sheet anyway, once it's filled in :).

Just checking in to see how you guys are doing.

Got Swifty's character sorted yesterday in terms of abilities, powers, everything like that. Just need to sort gear for both of us now but it was about midnight and we were both tired and decided to leave it till today. Swifty has gone with a Half-Elf Artificer in the end :).

Cool, just keep me in the loop. I might have a stickied thread with any decisions made just for reference and helpful stuff.

I'm just sorting my gear now - Swift's not online atm but she said she would be at some point today. We're also going to sort out whether ou characters already know each other and how they'd've met and stuff, even if only roughly.

Unless you want to be strangers first for character purposes / rp fun, I'd prefer you guys to known each other. Still, its your characters you wanted to try out, so I'm flexible. :)

Yeah I figured it'd be easier if we already knew each other - saves coming up with some motivation for us to do once the game actually starts :D.

One question I just want to clarify - do we get all non-magical stuff for free? As in, anything in the "Gear" section (and non-magical weapons/armour/implements if for some reason we don't want magical combat gear)?

Edit - I'm not planning on trying to get a free castle or private island or anything, don't worry - I just wanted to check that all the items are free ;).
This message was last edited by the player at 13:09, Sun 31 May 2015.

Depends what you mean. You get 520gp (I believe that'sd the cost of a level 2 magic item) to buy potions,etc or just to have 'on hand', and some permanent  magic items.

Everything else don't worry about within reason. By the time you've started adventuring proper its assumed you have had the opportunity can buy / acquire what else you would need and be a decently equipped adventurer. So don't sweat having a bow and a decent amount of ammo for example, when at first level that is a luxury for certain builds. However, don't just assume you have a wagon or whatever.

I'll vet the equipment list anyway, so take what you want and we can discuss sanity if you've grabbed more than I'd expect.

Yeah, it's 520gp for a second-level magic item. I've not spent that yet (will probably use it all on another magic item, though, or a first-level one and have some spare cash if none of the second-level ones grab my fancy) but I've done my three free magic items. Gear-wise there's not much I think I need, really (it's mostly basic stuff - backpack, food, etc), but I'm nearly done and then I'll get on with copying it across onto my char sheet on here so you can have a look :).

Don't forget potions and other consumeables or rituals.

I can't cast rituals and I'm not fussed about potions. I just spent all 520gp on another second-level magic item :D. I'm gonna get started on typing up my sheet now...

Okay, my sheet is done. You might want to turn on the word wrap thingy as mine's stretched across the whole screen. I think I remembered to put in all the details for my items and stuff but let me know if there's anything you have a problem with or whatever :).

Edit - Oh yeah, there's nothing in the fluff of any of my items that says this, but can we say that my robes change size to fit me if I change shape, just so I don't turn from, say, an elf into a minotaur and suddenly rip through my clothing? ;)
This message was last edited by the player at 16:07, Sun 31 May 2015.

The word wrap is on, I guess that only affects the viewed output not the editor itself?

Will have a look at the powers, etc later - your insight and bluff seem +2 higher than I'd expect, is there another bonus from somewhere I'm missing?

Looking at my GM Menu in my own game, I think the setting you need to make sure is activated is under "Edit Character Sheets", then tick the "Fixed Width" box. If that doesn't work I'll just manually move the longer lines onto multiple lines :).

Oh you posted while I was posting. I got +2 Insight and Bluff for being a Changeling.

Well that's the opposite of what you asked for :p I can make it fixed width but yes, you'll need to add line breaks as your current sheet will display unreadably :)


You get +2 bluff and diplomacy according to your sheet (need to check later on my own rules) and i was taking that in to account.

So that answers insight, but that still means your bluff is too high (+2 changeling +4 charisma is 6 like dip) and your diplomacy is about to be too high

Ah, wait, did you make the character with a generator? The +2 bluff/diplomacy would be added automatically, without you then adding +2 to bluff/insight. Might it be that then?

Let's see, I got +2 to Bluff and Insight for being a Changeling, and +2 Bluff and Diplmacy for that Fey Bond Feat...which I'd forgotten about and actually that may not have been added in automatically (I'm using Hero Lab).

Ah, sorry, it was just the changeling core ability bonus, which is bluff and insight

There we go, everything seems fine there then

How did you get your ability scores? Point buy wise I'm 5 points over

Ok, so I believe your abilities should be 13,10,16,12,14,16 - which would leave all your bonises the same

For chromatic orb, your hit damage should be 3d10+8 i believe, and your miss 1d10+5


Everything else seems good. You sure you don't need more basic equipment?


Also might be good to note the capacity of your rain cloak - 2 gallons right now I believe

Why should my stats be different? That's what I rolled (and added bonuses where apppropriate from being a Changeling).
For the Chromatic Orb damage, it doesn't have the Implement keyword so I don't think it gets the +2 from the staff.

Ah, then well done for rolling well! You're 5 points ahead of a point buy :D


Chromatic orb is also implement by the wizards' own d&d insider and at least one internet wiki, so it was either errata'd or a mistake in the hero generator thingie. So go ahead and add that extra damage!



Anyway, that seems to be it - pretty much everything just being me catching up on the character creation stuff rather than anything to worry about. Except for finding some extra damage for you :) Don't forget the +2 damage vs bloodied enemies from your gauntlets during battle.

Yeah, I'll remember to add that in. I did consider adding it into each power's damage notes but couldn't be arsed and didn't want to clutter them up, especially considering I have a whole bunch of other stuff I need to remember anyway (see my Class features :D).

That's cool about Chromatic Orb - I'll add in the Implement keyword and increase both the damage rolls by two, then :).

And just to check...I asked earlier but you didn't respond specifically to it - since I can change shape to be any medium humanoid but all my stuff stays the same (equipment and stuff, I mean), can we just say that my robe changes size to accommodate whatever form I'm taking, just so it doesn't look really weird (too big/too small), given that various Medium races can be rather different in size - elves, dwarves, and minotaurs are all Medium, for example ;).

The power explicitly says you keep your gear when you change, so it's probably an aspect of the power anyway. So even if you have to wear like another armour to get in to somewhere, etc then any gear like that will expand/contract as needed.


But sorry, I thought I'd said, that's totally finer, it's up to you if you want to say you had some mundane/magical changes made to make it stretch, or if you just treat it as an aspect of your power. Or if its just that you shape your body to minic large thigns but squish in to smaller clothing still :D

Hehe okay I'll just say the clothing always seems to fit me no matter what shape I take - I'm limited to Medium-sized humanoids anyway so it's not like I can turn into a gnome or a giant or anything ;).

Something I wanted to check, just to make sure we both agree it's the same thing - with some of my powers/effects, different stuff can happen depending on whether the attack roll is odd or even. I take that to mean the roll after the application of modifiers, not the base roll of the die. So say I rolled a 12 on the die and had +3, that would make 15 which is odd so I'd used the odd-number effect. Sound okay?

Oh yeah, one more thing - can we roll our own dice? I recall you were okay with that back in the first game you ran over on the DM forum :).

Oh yeah and one other character sheet thing - I rolled a d10 for what her current Wild Soul resistance is when the game starts, so that's why she randomly has Resist 5 Radiant :).

Actually I'd go the other way, you take the original roll of the die as the odd/even. That way even if there's some bonus, etc we've forgotten - or if we have to discuss something about it - then the wild magic thing is instantly taken care of and won't get messed up. So you can apply the bonus/penalty right away without any confusion.


And yeah, your own dice are fine, as long as you note what you rolled separately as well as the final roll


So say "I rolled 12 + 8 = 20 for my nature skill roll" don't just say "I rolled 20".  Lets me know if there's something added/not added yet.

Okay :).

I just remembered to edit the Chromatic Orb damage...for the Miss damage it says it's just 1d10 so it wouldn't add the Cha mod or anything (it doesn't say that it does, anyway), but the Staff says it adds its damage to all damage rolls so I've added +2 for that (+1 for the magic item and +1 for the Staff of Ruin increase-all-damage thing), and of course the gauntlets would also apply if the target was Bloodied so then it would be +4.

Yeah, I think I said in the original post 1d10+5, don't forget your dex mod of +3 applies because its arcane damage thanks to your chaos power feature. All you lose is the +3 cha mod on a miss (and 2d10, of course!).

Oooh yes I forgot the Dex Mod...

Bah, your dex mod is no longer important I JUST GOT LIGHTENING BOLTED OFF MY MINECART IN MINECRAFT!


Lol, that was insane. I saw a lightning bolt up ahead and was like 'ooh, storm's close' then next thing I knew I'm flying sideways in to the water!

didn't take that muich damage - currently in peaceul mode - but not sure if I lost the cart of was just blown clear of it. So weird!


Anyway...that was all. Just weird... never happened in 5 years of playing, especially while moving!

Rofl cool :D. Hey did I mention I've got a server up? Started it a few weeks ago. You're welcome to join if you want...it's modded, though - you'd need to download the ATLauncher and install and run it from there (still need to log in with your normal Minecraft details), and you'd need a share code from me so you get the right version of the mod, and the IP address so you can log in, and I'd need to add you to the whitelist...and you need a decent computer and 64-bit to be able to run it in the first place. It's using the Resonant Rise modpack if you've heard of it.

Yeah, you mentioned it but it sounded like it might be a little too intense performance wise for my poor computer just now so I hadn't gotten around to checking it out :(

Hey, I see Swifty is checking the forum, feel free rto post a hello so I know your character account works :)

Okay, no worries :).

Swift's character is done, btw - just need her to copy across the details into her RPOL sheet. She has a template from another character that she can use :).

We're now discussing the details of how we might know each other, but I do have to go to bed as this new job means I have to get up at about half past six every weekday morning...

New job? You got a new job? Does this mean more money and perchance being able to get a flat and stuff?

Lol one would hope so...dunno about a flat, don't like the idea of paying rent indefinitely and possibly getting randomly kicked out. But for now this is just maternity cover on a six-month contract (started last Tuesday so I've done an epic four days so far :D), but so far I've been told multiple times that I'm really fast and stuff so it's looking good so far ;).

We were just discussing character details last night, just to let you know. We decided that the two probably met when Meri was in trouble from some bullying individual or some elves or something, and Nym happened to come along...the bullying person/people were probably threatening some kind of hostile magic on Meri and Nym saw it and had a reaction along the lines of "Oh cool, you do magic? Look, I can do that too!" and proceeded to start demonstrating some of her own magic. At that point the bully/group decided that they actually had somewhere else they had tobe, like right now, and buggered off. So Nym helped out Meri without even meaning to and they ended up sticking together from there.

I see Nym as a kind of child-like Cloudcuckoolander who mostly does stuff by accident, winning Bluff/Diplomacy rolls more via accidental Refuge in Audacity than any deliberate attempt to deceive. I think her brain got a bit fried by all the raw magic running through her blood or something ;). I took that Fey Cantrip Feat so I could get Prestidigitation and then use that as a way to show her power "leaking" on occasion, or otherwise give her the means to do magical stuff without needing to use actual zappy-death powers ;). I had to take Fey Bond as it was the prerequisite for Fey Cantrip (well, there was an alternative prerequisite but it was Fey Origin and I don't have that because I'm a Shapechanger, not Fey), otherwise my first Feat probably would've been something different. But with Prestidigitation this means I can randomly change the colours of items and make random coloured sparks appear or something. Also I don't need to carry anything that'd be needed to light fires :D.

Anyway, I've also got a portrait now but expect it to change at some point - because I rolled Radiant as my first Wild Soul damage type to be starting the game with, I thought something with blonde or silver hair would be good. I've decided that Nym is gonna be a Half-Elf at the start as well.

Out of character comment - Yay! :D

In-character comment - "Pfft, I could have handled it.  Nosy people always butting in on other people's business...  Damn stuck-up elves think they're so good..."  *mutter... mumble...*

Lol, all seems good - both the meeting backstory and the grumpiness.

You're like the odd couple!


Can both of you now check on the prologue post (but don't post there) and see if anything seems off. The prologue post will become the story summary thread.

If you're happy with the prologue post, then I shall post the first game post probably tomorrow in a new thread as a Chapter 1 to start us on our way.


Meri, I shall be checking out your sheet for the rest of the evening, and will let you know mechanically if anything is needed. But that shouldn't get in the way of starting as soon as tomorrow :D

Prologue looks okay (other than one part which says "YYY" which I imagine is supposed to say "Meri" ;)) - hey look, Swifty, you get your own lab to start off with even though you can't enchant stuff yet :D. And Nym gets to play around with the weird sentient toy which just showed up :D.

Cool, I have changed the name in that place too :)


Just to summarise the familiar rules, since I can't find them on the compenduum! You seem to know them by the familiar description, but wanted to state them here anyway so you know what I know!




so the homunculuus can be in your pack Meri until you chuck it out :)

And yes, you can try to teach it to be your assistant,



Meri, this means your arcana skill should be +2 greater to be +11 right now.

I copied and pasted the pages on Familiars from the Arcane Power book (as I have the PDF...so does Swift but on a broken computer ;)) and sent them to Swift so we both have access to the rules for that. You can go to here...
http://www.goddessfantasy.net/...e/Arcane%20Power.pdf
...if you'd like to download it yourself for free. That site also has pretty much every other 4th Edition book as well (the site itself is in Japanese or something so I found each one by Googling for Goddessfantasy <name of book> and generally they came up :). Alternatively I can send you my own PDFs, several of which are from there anyway ;).

I was gonna have a Familiar myself but I swapped it out for Fey Bond when I decided I wanted to get Prestidigitation so I could have a legit method of Nym letting forth small outbursts of magic whenever she wants (not to mention playing around changing the colours of her items and stuff :D). I wouldn't have taken Fey Bond if it wasn't a prerequisite I needed in order to do that, but right now I plan on probably taking a Familiar next level. Maybe. If I don't spot something else really cool that I want instead :D.

Oh yeah I saw that link in my travels, cheers :)


Cool, so I don't need to post rules stuff to you guys then! I might  still do it to make sure my understanding meshes with you lot. 4th edition gets pretty dense with all this added stuff pretty quickly!

Game has started! Not sure if the Chapter 1 post triggered as a post or not, I started it last night.

Yep, can see it :)

Not too sure whether to rewind it or not, or just fill in the backstory with our own conversations (or Meri's griping about having to stop her work just to follow this damn bouncy ball around!  hehe).
I'll wait and see if Ameena has an opinion on the matter :)

Cool :)


Obviously if you rewind and then get too far from where I started chapter 1 I will just change the post, but hopefully it gives you something to steer towards.

Obviously I'm not going to solve themystery of the ball right away, soanother reason to jump was to be able to summarise the whle 'what is this *poke poke poke* stuff.

But I'm equally happy to play it all too.

I suppose we can backtrack a bit or something, to get a clearer idea of why we're travelling (and have some random dialogue to start getting into character), unless we were just wandering becuase why not. Nym probably wouldn't care much anyway ;).

Sorry, I thought I'd made it clearer, the ball has been gesturing and indicating it wants you to go south.




So you guys might have tried to figure out what it was or tried to ignore it, but likely it would have bounced around and got in your way sometimes, and other times tried to be as cute as a ball could be and take on your colours and try to coax you to leaving, and so forth :)


So you can go go back in time, but I'm guessing it would be a lot of poking, prodding, and figuring out what it wants or figuring out what is south that's so important anyway.

I figure that starting after deciding to see where it wants to go, whilst considering some of the decisions and discussions you might have had previously as you walk along might be easier.

Ahh okay. Well I don't imagine Nym knows what's in the area anyay - she just kind of wanders about being curious and playing around with her magic :D.

Yeah, even if you guys have traveled around, I reckon its not unimaginable that an out of the way village sectioned off by a river might not be a place you're immediately familair with. I walk around a lot and there's parts I wasn't aware of were right on my doorstep :D

Obviously you can decide how much travel you have done down this way(Nym might not even reaslie she's been this way by the sounds of it!) and for anythign else there's skill rolls for nature/history :)



So it sounds like Meri's call, maybe weighed a little in favour of backing off a little if for no other reason than to let you guys chat and react to the situation before the ball stops?

So maybe walking along the road by the main forest?

Out of curiosity, how would the ball have reacted to Meri getting extremely annoyed at it interfering with her work and trying to zap it with her magic? ;)  hehe

If Meri's asking that then can I ask how the Ball would've reacted to Nym playing around with it and probably trying to change its colour and stuff? :D

Lol, assuming this is what would have indeed happened, the ball would have been impervious to the actual magic itself. However, it would have still skittered off and rolled in the directionof Nym, taking on Nym's colours and floating in a 'shaking' manner behind her leg.

And then later might have gently rolled on the table trying to bat some item towards Meri as if trying ot help, taking on the appearanceof one of her items or clothes. Or it might have tried to help Timur, then when Meri looked around would have rolled off the table and under the lid of the table, as if hiding... occasionally rolling just over the liptoseeif Meri was still looking and was about to shout/ at it / blast it again :D


Basically, this ball would act like a child where you don't know if its genuinely hurt and wanting you to love it, or if its some sort of evil machiavellian trickster trying to see cute to not get yelled at :D


Sure, kids are cool, but NEVER TRUST THEM AN INCH! :p

Lol cool, probably gets on well with Nym then as she's rather childlike herself :D.

Of course you can, the idea was that even if the story carries on you guys discuss OOC how the ball was before so you can still RP against it now.

As with Meri, direct magic would not have worked. However, the ball would have then after a delay taken on whatever aspect Nym was trying to give it, sometimes with odd quirks. So for example if trying to make it all red and feiry, sometimes it might have just been a blazing orb (teperature wise cool and not actually burning anything) and yet other times the fire might have resembled water, as if the sphere was a globe of burning water, almost transparent.

It sounds as if Nym would have gotten the chance to feel the ball happily sitting in her hand, warm and sleeping kitten like, almost purring :D

The ball would have probably been receptive to attempts to play with it, though always it would have made attempts to include Meri after a while.

Edit:

Lol, I reckon so. Though it would still try to hang with Meri and her familiar too.


Lol, maybe Meri is going to become the grumpy parent of this group, to a trio of well meaning but oblivious child like creatures :D
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:31, Tue 02 June 2015.

Oh,in case it was not clear, the first reply was to Meri's question about being yelled at/magicked. The replies qwith quotes were then to Nym's double posted question :D

Aww, feeling kind of guilty now...  (;~;)

I think in that case, she might have calmed down a little and just glared at it before resuming whatever she was doing.
Probably shooting it another death glare if she noticed it trying to bat stuff around, hehe.

I think she'd only resort to trying to blast it again if it kept getting in her way to the point where her temper just exploded (it is disturbingly easy to push her to that point actually!)
Even so, she wouldn't actually try to destroy it, more just wanting it to stop pestering her.

A tiny part of her is actually kind of intrigued by it.  The Artificer in her definitely wonders how it works, what makes it move and act like it does, and how it came to exist in the first place.
Good luck getting her to admit that though ;)
This message was last edited by the player at 20:46, Tue 02 June 2015.

Lol, don't feel too guilty, it might know exactly what it's doing and this is all an evil scheme...

DON'T TRUST SHINY ROUND THINGS!


Besides, what's the fun of playing a grumpy character if you can't be mean to things. This one is great, it's all the innocent of a puppy or kitten, but you can blast it with magic or kick it and itrs not going to be physically hurt. Emotionally hurt, of course, but not physically hurt...


Lol, would Meri keep being grumpy or reluctantly be nice to it?


Edit: Ah, I see more text :)

Yeah, that's cool. As said in the prologue, the ball would have had the spooky ability to know if Meri was reaching for it in curiosity without any attempt to do anything too nasty, or if she was going to make a move for it to get it out of herway, or do anything a little more...destructive... :p
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:50, Tue 02 June 2015.

I think she'd still be grumpy, but less of a destructive way and more of a "dammit, what the hell do you want, and how can I get you out of my face?!!"  hehe

Meri is basically Team Mum isn't she, while the Ball is the mischievous child, Timur is the child that probably usually tries to help mummy with her work, and Nym is the dreamy child who's usually in a world of her own and likes playing with dangerous things whilst someone completely failing to get hurt :D.

Except Meri is less maternal and more "What did I do to get saddled with all these annoying distractions?!"  hehe :)

(I'm sure she loves you really...  Right?  Right?!  Guys?  Anyone?  (O.o)  Hmm...)

Anyways, I'm thinking that after the ball pestering Meri and getting zapped a few times, Nym might have figured out that it wants us to follow it, or maybe just decided she wanted to anyway.

Then she could have persuaded Meri to go along with her.
Might have been tricky, but Meri's own inner curiosity as to what this thing is, from a magical crafter's viewpoint, would have provided an exploitable weakness to help persuade her.
(And if that failed, maybe telling her that doing what the ball wanted would get it to leave her alone to work in peace, would probably have done the trick!)

She'd likely have complained bitterly about it, including some choice insults in various languages (mostly Goblin and Elven, her two favourite languages for cursing in!) directed at the ball, and threats to introduce it to the furnace in her workshop if whatever it was leading them to wasn't EXTREMELY important.
But she'd have gone along anyway :)
This message was last edited by the player at 21:26, Tue 02 June 2015.

Everyone know Timur is the favoured child, right? :D At least it tries to be helpful!

The Ball may well have even sat in the furnace after that, happily playing there running out of it when Meri spotted it, completely unharmed :D


Ok, so I have to go to bed soon, but you guys have some cool characters here! And seem fun together. So decide if you want to backtrack a little or a lot or just start in media res, and post accordingly. I can then update tomorrow evening if needed, or just leave you all to it for a little bit :D

Or if you prefer I can set you up a second post backing the time up a little first.

Nym probably tries to be helpful sometimes. Sort of. Probably. Well, she probably doesn't try to be unhelpful, anyway ;).

Dammit!  (>.<)  lol

I don't mind too much, really - Nym will just react to whatever happens to be going on at the time (well, probably ;)).

Oh, to answer a private question out loud, it never hurts to roll more than one check for separate items. At worst a bad second roll I'll just ignore and fold in some general information based on your query. And a good second roll may get rewarded separately even if the first roll was bad.

Where's the harm!

Ok, game map is up, next game post incoming. The scales are probably all over the place for the map, the hill and so on is a little ways off.

Link back to this game

And no, this wasn't lines in paintbrush I'll have you know.... I use Paintshop Pro :p
This message was last edited by the GM at 17:42, Thu 04 June 2015.

Wow, very artistic! :D

Is it an abstract avante-garde representation of humanity's destiny in the new post-modern age? :)

Lol cool. So the red bit across the water is the ford? Are the blue bits off to the left the ruins of the old village or the houses of the new one?

Yep. Well, either that or it's a sub-conscious expression of my desire to dig out some ice cream from the freezer :D


And yep, red bit across is the ford, the bridge is on the right as a break in the road, and to the left the river is skirting around the hill. The blue squares are the new houses of the new village. With the three storey house on the right most edge overlooking the river.

I haven't marked the old ruins, you can imagine a couple to the left of the road you've been walking along, and the rest are to the right and upwards going off the map. The other couple of intact buildings and up and right from the edge of the current map.

I'll keep looking, but I think it was this sort of thing I was recalling.



Funnily, your new friend Holder might just have the phrase warsmith somewhere in his NPC notes :)


Also, note for Meri that I forgot if I mentioned  - you do have both the disenchant and item creation rituals in your book, just you can't use them yet. But since it's a level 4 ability, you may well get to play with it at some point. So keep that in mind when you decide upon the level of your crafting abilities.

Yeah, Enchant at level four, Disenchant at level six - they're already shown in Hero Lab but in red as they're unavailable at the moment, so the validation thing shows an error due to having rituals that can't be used yet.

Yeah, I didn't list them on my character sheet.  Have to remind me when I do learn them :)

Yeah don't worry, whenever you level up we can sort all your stuff on Hero Lab and I'll send you over the new version of your sheet every time so you can update it on here :).

Text colours!


Are you happy enough following multiple people speaking, or would you prefer I add colours for speech to make conversations easier to follow?

Nooo plz no, no coloured text for speech, it really irritates me :P.

Btw how can Holder's sex be in question? Minotaurs are mammals - the females would have boobs (or udders, or something), surely? ;)

A flat chest and an abundance of hair can make identifying that sort of thing a little trickier than you are making out :p

Now I'm curious if Changelings can shift genders as well?  (O.o)

Ok, this is a rabbit hole that ends with us having an army of hermaphrodite changelings constantly breeding with themselves and creating a clone army to replace the world with!


Leading to this:
http://media.oglaf.com/comic/kingshaped.jpg

Ah yes, regarding wild magic, in 4th edition it's more controlled and available as a fun option for misses, etc at higher levels.

In 5th edition it's the result of both crit fails/successes and also on a 'when the DM wants' basis, and looks like this:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/a...1406928036&stc=1

Hmm, I sense a good plot idea...  ;)

Yep, Changelings can totally change sex if they want to - makes things rather awkward if you start wondering what happens if one gets pregnant...

That Wild Magic table thing looks cool...reminds me of the Warp craziness tables from Dark Heresy, except in that there were two, one I can't remember the name of but which were generally minor effects, the other was Perils of the Warp and generally were pretty bad - a 99 meant you became a Daemonhost (a Daemon possesses you and goes mental - your character is essentially dead and their body is now being used to try and kill everyone else, who of course then have to try and kill it themselves), and a 100 meant your character is sucked into the Warp with a faint "pop" sound (again, insta-death for your character).

I'm using Prestidigitation as a means of having Nym's magic "leak" or generally as a way for her to play around and do minor things without having to let loose with some kind of offensive combat attack :D. And as I had to take up two Feats in order to get it, I'm bloody well gonna use it as often as I can :D.

Didn't you see the Arnold Schwarzenegger's documentary film Junior? Men can totally get pregnant and have kids :D


And yes, Warhammer 40k tends to go less with 'fun setbacks' and more with 'grimdark death and hopelessness' for its random tables. I loved the ork weirdboyz who could use psionics but their heads could explode, or their battletowers could blow up wiping out half your army!


And indeed, feel free to play with prestidigitation as much as you like. Nym might not consciously do things, but just like with skills you as her player can have an effect do something useful against an enemy!

Well, Prestidigitation can't be used as a weapon or anything that really has a mechanical effect - it's just for show, really. But when I saw the Feat for it (Fey Cantrip, which gives me one Wizard Cantrip of my choice, so I chose that one) I thought of all the possibilities for having Nym express her magic and just had to have it, so I swapped out the Arcane Familiar Feat I'd picked and took Fey Bond instead (prerequisite for Fey Cantrip as I'm not of Fey Origin, which was the alternate prerequisite). The way I'm playing Nym, she has the magic in her blood and can feel it there all the time, pulsing away - when she uses it, it feels good to do so and she feels like if she doesn't use it, the urge will get stronger and stronger and in the end something will explode out of her. So Prestidigitation is the mechanical means of her activating some kind of pressure valve so that she doesn't explode a house or something if she hasn't used magic for a while (changing shape doesn't count as that's a racial ability). I'll probably take Arcane Familiar at level four if I don't see anything else that looks good (not sure how to fluff that suddenly turning up but maybe we can think of something) :).

Yeah, you can't basically use it as an attack power, but I'm not worried about that aspect of it since I know you won't power game that. So just remember that while you can't blind, block, etc an enemy, you can still have a duck appear out of nowhere near them or blow out their torches or something. Sure mechanically they have all their actions and so on, but narratively it might have an effect. At the very least give you a circumstancial bonus if you or anyone else was going to intimidate them. That sort of thing!


Familiarls are a little more ephemeral in fourth edition. So while they can be constructs, real animals, etc, part of the flavour is that thye are a part of the spell caster's soul. So you could very well just spontaneously generate your own playmate that keeps coming in and out of reality. That's what happens when they die, they are supposed to just regenerate back in the wizard's possession after a short/long rest.


With Meri's familiar, I guess the flavour is that even if it gets thumped, its either easy to repair or such a mish-mash of parts that a few quick ad hoc adjustments during a short rest should see it come back to life again.

Yeah I think Meri sort of built her familiar or something. That's cool about them being a part of the wizard's soul...I know what kind of familiar I want but that'll probably only be in mechanics - it's probably not likely to look like that species, or at least not for long or very often, and certainly so if it's a manifestation of some part of Nym's ever-changing magic :D.

Yeah, that's how I'd planned on playing it :)
Having her patch it back together again at rest.

Not too sure what exactly it does to boost alchemical items though...

Maybe Timur is the "happy" part of Meri's soul! ;)
This message was last edited by the player at 17:34, Sat 06 June 2015.

Aww, that sounds so sad!


I now have a mental image of the homunculous jumping up in the air and bat the bottle in the right direction, one of the few tricks its actually manage to learn. Or perhaps it learned that one too well and that's why its terrible with actually using stuff in the workshop? :D


Ok, now I'm imagining Meri throwing things at it and it thinking Meri was being nice and playing and that's how it learned the trick :p

As long as you stick to one familiar type mechanically, and the reason for the bonuses it grants makes narrative sense, I don't mind the 'skin' of it changing all the time to Nym's whym's :D

Well she often throws things when she's really angry or upset.  Something I'm sure the Ball experienced once or twice too, hehe.

I'd thought of that actually, have Nym's familiar constantly changing shape with her :)
(no chance of being able to randomly change between different familiar types each day just to add further confusion?  hehe)

Hmm, actually since Amee-nym (Nym-eena?) won't abuse it, I guess we can go with a randomly rolled familiar for the day full stop if you prefer. I won't let the mechanical stuff be intelligently decided all the time, and even at once per day I think I'd prefer to have the mechanics be random (showing the mood of the familiare that day, maybe) but I wold be up for creating a table of elegable familiars.


Either way, we can discuss it assuming you live passed the next encounter :p

Not all the familiars really suited Nym, though - I was gonna go with the Raven (whose appearance changes into random other birds or parrots or something, or any other small winged creatures) because that one can speak and knows all my languages, and if I take the Linguist Feat later on (something I've been considering) it might be a way to fluff how I suddenly become fluent in three languages all at once or something ;). And I may not definitely go with the Arcane Familiar - when I level up I'll have another look through the Feat list and go with that only if I don't find anything else that makes me go "omg must have that one right now!" :D.

There are so many familiars it would make sense to just have a list of 6 or 10 of them to roll between even if it was random, or at the very least weight a larger list to have some common ones appear more often.

Anyway, I'm open to suggestions if / when we get there :)

Well there's only twelve of them, and in some cases their bonuses would be useless or just highly unlikely to come up - Meri's homunculus, for example, gives a bonus to creation rituals but I don't even have the Ritual Caster Feat so that's never gonna be of use to me ;). I'd rather just have one Familiar and its appearance change, fluff-wise. Otherwise it's like I'm taking a Feat but it randomly becomes useless to me for no real reason.

Raven it shall be then :)

A Silver Raven, or a Silent Raven? :)

Silver? Maybe, sometimes. Silent? Lol, this is Nym's familiar...

:D


Ok, posted a new map showing two arrows (well, three cause I included a North compass indicator). The original map is now the group 0 map.
Link back to this game
(Link back to this game)

You might need to refresh your cache if the new map doens't show up.


So the diagonal line is showing the Ball's original direction, heading right towards the falls. The Hillwater that forms the falls is the right hand river. The Smallwater is the one coming directly south.

Note I've included the original passage of the Hillwater in brown, that's not necessarily a track.


Now, Ball is currently gesturing to the corner of the smithy, on the outside, as indicated by the smaller arrow. Whilst that's in the direction of New Stonebridge on the hill, it's not rolling in that direction, it seemed to be specifically the outside edge of the smithy...

Who knows what Ball's asking you to do, but it's not just 'eh, let's go to the hill instead.


Edit: Oh, the map isn't showing the roads out of 'Old' Stonebridge nor any other intact buildings, I dind't include them. All I have done is add the river.

Also, this map is absolutely not to scale, it's just to give you a directional representation for everything I' speaking about :)
This message was last edited by the GM at 10:23, Sun 07 June 2015.

Well, at least it helps show us where stuff is - I was getting a bit confused with all these places being described ;). Any reason why the map is upside-down (south at the top)?

You guys came from the north and headed south, so I oriented the map how you would have approached the area and experienced it, rather than 'upside down'.

Why I made everything have to be in the south rather than in the north, who knows? Ok, I know, it just seems natural to make progress by going down or right, doesn't it?

[Private to GM:
Sorry, I meant to ask for a Stealth roll aswell, that's what the -2 was for if you stayed in minotaur form. Confused myself by typing about the second perception roll first.

Anyway, since you changed form, we'll just say the relatively low roll if for being cautious :)]
This message was last edited by the GM at 13:05, Sun 07 June 2015.

I dunno, I just feel like I'll get confused if north isn't at the top, lol.

Well I can rotate it around for now because you are looking north. If Meri doesn't mind I can do maps from the north always in future no matter how you are approaching the place, and only give directions in compass points.


Link back to this game

Updated the game map, added the previous map as the group 1 map.


Refresh if you can't see the changes.

Cool, looks better with the labels and stuff as well :).

I'll answer this PM here just so its easier to discuss and get Ameena to weigh in.




Well you've maybe missed the opportunity to trap the ford (this time around... :D  ) but certainly you can trap other places if you want to go all urban combat on these guys and lure them in to traps.



The trap making kit is vague as its usually used to power a trapsmith's traps (its a theme, they get some encounter powers like you get artificer stuff). I thought Thievery covered making traps once you'd disabled a trap, but that seems to be missing in 4th edition or I'm not finding the section. Will check again.


In your case I reckon the trap making kit only contains the precision tools to make fiddly parts, and some amount of things like spring, etc. that you couldn't readily find otherwise.

So you'd need other materials, like for going boom you'd need something boom worthy from elsewhere. Luckily your are in a forge and near an inn to macguyver some stuff if you like. Spirits or unstable elements or even you acid vials!


I will say you can make a basic trap in around 10 minutes for a DC 15 Thievery check. The trap will be a one use, occupy one square, and have a DC15 for being spotted. It will attack using your int modifier (+3) vs reflexes, and do 1d6 plus your int modifier damage (+3 again).

You can raise the DC by 5 to add a second non-lethal effect, a second use, make it +5 harder to spot, increase the damage die by one level, or lower the construction time by 5 minutes.

To give you an easier second set of options, I'll also let you make non-lethal traps that take only 5 minutes, for a DC 10 check. Note increasing the DC reduces the time to 1 minute for this type of trap.

A basic non-lethal effect you can use be daze (save ends), slow (Save ends), or knock prone.

If a second person helps, the DC gets lowered by 5. You can't reduce the DC below 10/15 for non-lethal/lethal traps, but that means you can reduce the time at least, or add another

If you fail a check by more than 5, you'll know the trap isn't likely to work how you want it. And if you fail by more than 10 it will just not work. If you fail by less than 5, you won't know the trap isn't complete. It may still have an effect, but might do less damage, or have a chance of not springing, or be easier to spot (random)


How does all that sound? Fair? Too complicated? I think in a different game this would be the system I'd push for, but maybe since I don't think you guys will abuse trap making (or be near sources of items, NPCs and surroundings like this again) we can maybe just go with the rule of cool/ fun and say that if you come up with something fun go with it?

If you like mechanical stuff, we can go with some variant of the above, otherwise I can just say say that for each person you rope in to making traps (you included), you can make 5 traps that either have a non-lethal effect or do 1hp damage.

Each 5 traps need a DC 15 theivery check, and so the failure will be one random trap not working as aspected, and a low fail meaning you know which of two or more traps aren't good.

Seems  better for you to make a few traps and have fun placing them. The choice of how they work is up to you.

You could also set up other people making the basic traps, and still then make something exotic yourself like and acide in the face from a doorway home alone style trap :p


You might spot that 1hp damage is low, except you might therefore suspect that you have quite a few minions to deal with rather than tougher opponents :)


I've realised you have a tiny homunculous, so if you can create a distraction away from the ford first, maybe it could go and place something under the water

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me. I don't plan on making any traps mysel - mechnical gadgetry doesn't strike me as the kind of thing Nym would ever bother with, as obsessed as she is with her magic ;). That said, my Dex is good (joint-highest stat along with Cha) so I suppose I could help set stuff up if sufficient persuasion were provided and there were no distractions nearby :D.

Repeated staff pokings? ;)

Any suggestions from a player point of view what might be the best tactic?

As the DM I suggest abject surrender :p

You mean right now to deal with these approaching guys? Well, from their clothing they're evidently used to ambushing people in the forest. We're here with a couple of buildings and the guys who live and work in those buildings and so probably know their layout and contents really well. We also have the means to gain high ground and a decent ranged vantage pint (go upstairs in the inn and fire stuff out the windows) if these guys are intent on picking a fight. We probably should give them a warning or something first, though - after all, they haven't actually done anything hostile just yet - they're just coming over with weapons out which while aggressive isn't actually an attack. Yet. If we go with the "hide indoors and shoot them from upstairs" tactic then maybe you can put some traps in the doorways/on the stairs (make sure our new friends know about them first, of course)...maybe while Holder or Tym or someone is talking to the guys to discern their motives and otherwise stall for time, in a location that is within sight of whichever window we can get ourselves to ;).

Don't forget for benign reasons most of the top floor windows have thick curtains to hide your movement aswell, and the bottom tap room even has some convenient holes in a pane or two :D

The ruined buildings on the east of the ford road would need a stealth check to sneak to, but for the moment you still have time to get in position there without too evil a DC



Anyway, the 'hide in the inn and trap' it plan sounds cool, I'll leave you guys to discuss it OOC until you have some cool ideas to discuss IC with the NPCs.

I'll check in in between reading GoT (already watched the latest episode, and like, daaaaaaaaaamn man)

Assuming by goT you mean Game of Thrones, or A Song of Ice and Fire, I haven't read it yet but I've seen bits and pieces of some of the episodes of the TV version - I'm waiting till it all comes out before I read/watch it, so I probably have a couple of years to go yet ;).

Anyway, I'm not really one for meta-ing tactics OOC - I'd rather do it IC rather than talk about it all in fine detail OOC and then basically repeat it all IC.

Sounds a good idea.
Meri probably would be up for the idea of staying to chat with them.  (Means she's pretty much at point-blank range if she has to blast them!) ;)
And unless they have some kind of ranged attacks, they would probably only be able to come over the ford one at a time, and would be balanced kind of precariously, so if they had to fight Meri there, they wouldn't be able to dodge her attacks too well...

Up for trying to trap the inn.  Though not sure what to do if they go for the smithy instead...

Pity we couldn't rig up something to launch the Ball at them.  I mean it's indestructible, it doesn't really have anything to worry about!

Also not sure how to translate all these bits of thoughts into IC language.  I'll post if I come up with something...
This message was last edited by the player at 17:56, Mon 08 June 2015.

The Ball is indestructable, yes, but also highly unreliable...almost like it was planned that way :) Notice it can't talk to anyone either? :P I think this is just a Meri-type ploy to palm it off on to someone else!


The inn is quite a complicated building, whislst the smithy appears to be a small personal building - probably Tym's actual home - and the large open smith area you are standing in. So you might be able to split a few off friom the group distracted by the smithy but the bulk would likely go to the inn.


So I'll wait for a Meri post, whether plan related or just reacting, and then we can have the NPCs weigh in, and maybe bring up some of these options, of course.



Regarding GoT and ASoIF I'm enjoying them both, but not sure I'd ever recommend them due to the violence/sex/sexual violence/child murder and constant kicks to the gut in terms of storytelling :p

Anyway, season five finishes next week, and I think there are only tywo more seasons after this so by May 2017 you can start watchign the show. Given it's taken George RR Martin 16 years to write five book, with the sixth coming out at some point soon-ish, and one or two more books planned, you might be waiting quite a while to read the novels!

There are two more books to come in total according to when I looked it up on Wikipedia a month or two ago. I'm aware of the vast amounts of violence, sex, swearing, and other fairly icky stuff but I'll give it a go anyway (when it's all out so I don't have to wait if I like it and get to the end of what's currently available) ;).

Well I was thinking more of using the Ball as ammo from a makeshift slingshot or something :)

Poor Ball is target practise and target obliterator to you! :p


And ASoFI is currently supposed to be seven books, but George RR Martin has teased it might get so large it becomes eight books. Who knows!

I hadn't watched it until last year, near the end of series 4. I basically devoured the whole lot of episodes in an extended weekend in time for the end of last year. such a long wait until April and now it's almost done again :(

The TV show should finish first, and I think doing TV to novels is the better way around. So many names and stuff thrown at you in the book, being able to cut through them by having faces and plot knowledge of half of them is really useful! Plus its better to see the streamlined version then see the longer stuff where one character was actually two in the book, etc.

Was looking through my powers on my character sheet and realised I needed to tweak the damage on Chaos Bolt's secondary attack slightly - I forgot I should add the +5 like I did to Chromatic's Orb "miss" effect, because it's Arcane and Implement so I get the Dex bonus and the +2 from the staff every time (and another +2 if Bloodied, I know ;)).

Yup, pointed it out at the time, didn't notice you hadn't updated! :)


Running out of time tonight, I might get a map and post up, if not it will be tomorrow evening :(

Ok, the inn map is currently the new group 1 map (refresh to see it!)

Or go here:
Link back to this game


Ground floor on the bottom, top floor on the top. Main entrance is bottom right, the stairwell up is directly ahead and curves around left to imerge in the hall at the top.

So for doors, you really only have the main door and the room Nym will presumeably take (deluxe room). However, you can certainly trap the stairwell in more than one place. And the hall upstairs can be darkened by just extinguishing candles (its not got any light from outside aside from underf doors) and so trap there in at least one place.

All the doors are unlocked by default except the tap room -> kitchen door, and the cupboard door.

If you need any candles put out (or lit) without needing to reach up and get them down, just let me know (as long as I'm within two metres of them) ;).

I sort of hope that these guys, if they do end up attacking, don't make it all the way to where I am because I don't think Jorri will be very happy with what his deluxe room may end up looking like as a result ;).

I'll let you know exactly what sort of a mess Holder left the room in during the next update :D Melee combat might make it less messy, who knows!

Out of curiosity, how is combat being handled in this game? Will we have to wait to know if our attacks have hit before we can roll damage, or will we be told the enemies' defences in advance, or will there be some other method? I suppose we tend to post often enough (since we clearly all manage to frequently be online at the same time) that even if we do it the slow way it hopefully shouldn't drag too much. I was gonna take note of whether or not my attack rolls hit to determine what kind of defences my targets have, if necessary.

Best roll all your rolls as if you are going to hit each round when you make your actions.

There's enough complication in the enemy groups and how some of their bonuses are handled that I don't want to have to list all the sets of conditional defenses. I can hint narratively whether an attack was close of a defense might be low if the occasion arises, and you can always roll insight to figure out someone in combat too.

Indeed, I think I already gave you one hint about one of their defenses much earlier :D

Oh, two more combat things. The doors are all effectively one person doors, forgot to answer that question earlier. So they will be a choke point for people getting passed.


Also, battle posts will be the same as normal posts. You can post conditional actions you might take if something else happens, but presumeably you will both be acting independantly anyway.


There's few enough of you that the bandits will most liekly act before/after you, and even if not I'll be able to shuffle their acts in.



for other fights I might do a battle grid and make it more mechanical, but for this one I'll try to let it be more narrative. Since you ranged powers are mostly 5 square bursts, 10 square attacks and one 20 square attack I believe I can let you know who is in range easily enough.
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:27, Tue 09 June 2015.

I just don't want to roll an attack and damage only to find it didn't hit and I potentially wasted a really good damage roll, that's all...especially with something like Chaos Bolt which could potentially hit every target on the map (if they're lined up right and I get lucky on the even numbers) ;).

The roll would be different if you wait to roll damage anyway, so it's not a wasted roll, you're just letting more rolls be born that would otherwise have gone unrolled  :p

Err, sorry, what? What roll would be different? If I roll attack then I have to see if it hits before I roll damage - if I just roll attack and damage and the attack roll wasn't good enough I just wasted a damage roll, unless I use it for the next attack but what if I don't use that attack again (because I use a different one or the battle ends)? Then I have an ever-increasing stack of damage rolls building up and waiting ot be used. Or something. Lol, I am confuse :P.

You roll real dice, so it's not like if you roll damage and roll and 8 but its not used, then you've wasted the 8.. You will be sitting differently and holding the die differently and it will be a different roll anyway and you'd probably roll a 3 :p

A roll is a roll, if you roll attack and miss then I ignore that damage roll. Good if it's a bad roll, and there'll be others if it was a good roll.

Exactly - what if I'm throwing Chromatic Orb and roll 9, 9, 10, only to find I missed and only get a 3? :(

Also if attacking is the first thing I do in a round (probably not relevant for the moment as I'm not likely to be moving from the window till I run out of stuff to shoot at) then I'll still have my other actions and will need to know if I killed stuff (especially if there's Minions present and I possibly killed one or more of them with a Chaos Bolt) in order to see if I should be getting out of the way or whatever.

See, this is why I came up with the method I'm using in my own game, lol :D.

We can figure it out as we go along.

The reason for me doing it as I want to do it is that I won't be able to maintain the faster posting level for that long. I was going to start warning about a slow posting level, but there's been enough reason to try and get the story going quickly (and even getting to encounter) to give some momentum and aslo figure a few things out.

4th edition already snarls up at the combat level and becomes very slow - especially if players start getting very paranoid about using up all their actions efficiently (to the point that the very useful minor action got dumped in 5th edition for this reason).

So I sort of want to keep the momentum going and not have combat become strung out.



Anyway, I am way over my lunchtime, but hopefully that lets you guys start some actions.

Obviously the first decision being 'act right away, or don't and draw in more people first'

Ok, crappy happy map of the battle area, with people's names on and everything, is main map - refresh your cache if you cannot see its awesomeness.

/games/63699/misc/gamemap.jpg

Oh, I just called the bandits idiots...I might be internalising Tym!

Big update, also updated the map:
/games/63699/misc/gamemap.jpg

Sorry the map was 'upside down' last round, I've putting it both north is up and also orietned to how your characters would see things.

Yay, you guys have managed to kill (and I mean kill, not one of your take downs so far has been remotely non-lethal in description :p ) 8 bandits, only 5 more to brutally slay :D

So, I'm trying to run the combat resolution more narratively, in that once all the actions have been taken in turn, I'm describing them a little more logically. Readied actions or assuming you guys take readied actions when you have expessed a plan help.


Is that ok or confusing? I can also explicitly summarise the round actions if that would be better, though of course that's more work for me!




And for Meri, to explain how the explosion to roof went. Nym has her cool sandles that let her survive a fall by appearing to the nearest safe space 5 squares away. Of course, jumping out the window woulnd't work to get to the smithy roof as she wanted, because the road was far closer than the roof.

I said if she could get 2 squares away from the window by a jump, I'd let her use the boots that way Unfortunately a 2 square long jump needs a DC 20 athletics check which is a little tough right now for either of you I believe. One squares would only need the coin flip of a DC 10 athletics check though, so I said if she could make that, and then used some form of explody magic (which I presumed she was gunna use anyway) then as long as she let herself get caught in the blast I would let it add an extra square of movement so her boots would kick in the the smithy.

Nymn's dice complied, getting the bare minimum to make the DC 10, and then scoring a 1 on her own attack against herself!

A couple of ways it could have gone so badly...


Anyway, so that's what went on behind the scenes.

Now for the fun of inn slaughter. Try not to burn the place down :p

Muahaha...acidic death and epxlosions for everyone - come get some, ya buggers! :D

Can I get down safely from the roof without hurting myself? If I can, then before I do can I get an angle to see inside the kitchen where Snake-Face went? I might go after him, or at least make sure he's not up to anything nasty, before I join the party at the front door...

[Private to Meri: All rolls are usually d20. Healing and damage and duration are usually the exception, but any action rolls are made with a d20 - so attacks, skill checks, death saves, saving throws, etc. So reroll those two attacks! And yes, you can use knack for success as a minor action on either of them]


I'd say you can use a whole move to carefully hang off the edge and drop down with no ill effects. Untrained acrobatics still lets you 'hop down' for free if you wanted to keep your move action for moving around, but it's a DC 15 to succeed and failure = falling for 1d10 damage and being prone. Doens't seem a good option but it's there if you want it.

If you were trained you could just fall and beat the 1d10 damage and be fine, or course!


Sadly snake face hasn't reappeared, which might speak to him either never popping up where you can see him, or rolling a stealth to move around better than your passive perception. He is a sneaky dude, after all!

If you wanted to find him you'd need to go to the kitchen window, and most likely follow through the window in to the inn. Might be an idea though, who knows what he's doing right now...

He's probably killing poor Tym :(

[Private to The Altweaver: Rolled 14 for the first one.
And...  WOAH!  20 for the second!  I've never rolled a 20 before... EVER! :o

Probably won't need Knack for Success then...]

Hmm, can I not just drop down as close as possible to the window and see in from there, or is it too far to see properly? I thought the buildings were pretty close together. If I produce light, can it shine into the kitchen and make it more visible or something? Probably won't work in broad daylight, will it, lol.

The road is four squares wide. And its light outside and dark inside. From the smithy roof as I said you could have seen inside enough if you readied an action to spot movement if he'd stood up, and could have beaned him. But you can't see into the room fully.

As you've been busy he's maybe managed to move around without tripping your passive perception. Or he's been crawling on the floor so you couldn't see him.

You can certainly drop down and then use a second move to run over there. When you are standing at the ktichen window you will be able to see much better in to the room and unless he is hiding well or no longer in there, you will be able to see what he is doing.


Note he's smashed the window, so if you have any ranged area effects you cna always just blindly blow the kitchen up :D After all, Jorri's probably dead by now so won't care :p
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:37, Fri 12 June 2015.

Or you've got a stunned NPC underneath you, you can always yell at him to go look :D

Oh, and for no reason whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatsoever, to explain natural 20s for no reason.... certainly not to distract from your worry over poor Tym...

Natural 20s automatically hit. And if the hit would actually be a hit (so if the totaly was 25 and the victim has AC25 or less, for example) then you roll a critical hit. This means all your normal damage dice rolls are maximised. So the weapon damage, any sneak attack damage, etc would all be the full score.

Also, if you have magical weapons, etc, you'll find they also let you roll a bonus die on critials. Usually one die for each plus.


Sorry, been trying to search for the staff on D&D sight / pdf, which involves lots of thigns slowly downloading and opening :(


Yeah, the critical die is 1d6 :)


Again, for no reason, and sadly with minions not really necessary!
[Private to Meri:
Edit: Oh, 14 and 20 are your rolls before +5 added, or is that including the +5?]
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:34, Fri 12 June 2015.

Yeah, wish I'd aimed that one at Banlee.
Sticking with my original attacks though.

Such is the way of the dice, best idea is to keep having actions and roll lotsa dice to balance it out
[Private to Meri:

Double posted, so ask again - were 14 and 20 your rolls before +5 added, or is that including the +5?]

Lol yeah, Swifty was just telling me in Skype that she critted on a Minion - that's about the worst possible time to get a critical pass, isn't it, lol...

I didn't think of asking Holder...but if I spend my turn asking him to see if Snake-Face can be seen then I'll have to wait for Holder to have his turn in order to do that and then Snake-Face'll have time to do something else and I might lose an opportunity to shoot him in the face with magical death :(.

Better than a critical miss on one, that would be worse!


And yeah, it's always best to do stuff yourself then order the NPC to cover your back if nothign exciting is happening. So go check the window, then yell at Holder to guard the window if you can't see a snake face to blow up :D

What happens with a critical miss?  Do you accidentally zap yourself? :)

[Private to The Altweaver: They were before the +5.  Wasn't completely sure if there wasn't something else meant to be added.  Forgot that bit after the attack roll bit wasn't part of the attack roll...  :)]

No botches in my game (nor the normal rules), you just auto-miss.

For minions it can be even worse with a miss because they don't take miss damage. So some cool reliable powers and dailies end up being worse against minions than 'full' monsters! :D


Also, I won't have auto fail / auto succeed on skill checks (again, not in the rules). But I'm always open to having fun or cool stuff happen on a 1 / 20, so we shall see.

Critical hit against someone with 1 HP = Messy explosion?  :)

I hope so, lol...if I ever manage a decent amount of overkill on someone (eg doing 20 damage when they only have about 3hp left), I want them to die in a decently descriptive way appropriate to whatever kind of effect it was that finished them off (turn to ice and shatter, dissolve in acid, burn to a crisp, explode with Ludicrous Gibs, etc) :D.

So noted :p

Nym, just to check with you cause I have to go out soon, pulls? The RAW is they need to bring the target further away. Because 4th edition has it that diagonals basically don't count as further away, that means moving someone sideways can't be classed as further, right? They's still be the same amount fo squares away. So only the furthest three squares of the eight around a target are accepteable.

Gunna let a push go sideways just now anyway, because I'm the DM dammit, but just want to know for sure for next time.

I can go check the usual places later, stupid handbook doesn't have a cool diagram for it. Stupid handbook.

Edit: Had a few moments to research more and it seems that yeah, my understanding meshes with what is said elsewhere. A sideways movement isn't a push.

Except in this next update, because I am the DM dammit!

But just be aware that at other times it most likely won't be. I'll still reserve the right to impose the occasional common sense/rule of cool to the battlegrid :D
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:53, Sat 13 June 2015.

Yeah, my understanding is that a Push must result in the target being further from you than before the Push, a Pull has to bring them closer, but a Slide can move them in any direction you like.

It's more the interpretation of 'nearer and further'. Technically sideways is slightly further in real life, but not in 4th edition.

Yeah, I meant they have to be more squares away than before you moved them.

Ah well, I would refer you to my character bio to the left for both the 'shhh' and the I'm the DM dammit for the next update :D

But yes, push is only backwards from now on, unless I think it's appropriate :)

*sniff* no hysterical people falling down stair *stupid honest players, I'm the DM dammit. I'll make you regret not taking advantage of free benefits, ooooh yes :p *

Wow, the 'delete entire thread' and 'take me to my main menu' buttons are scarily close together! :(

So now the combat is over, any comments, questions, critisisms, requests for next time?


I don't think I'll do ready actions next time for enemies. You guys can ready actions, but I think knowing that enemies aren't going to suddenly shoot you the moment you go through a more might free you up a little more.


Also I can't believe I missed that 4th edition wasn't the edition with the trap making rolled in to skills. Feel embarrassed, and we'll certainly firm up some easy but useful and fair rules for trapmaking for later on. I really should have checked on exactly what the kit did, rather than assuming it was just an artisanal tool :(

In case you were interested in the composition of the group, you only had two non-minion enemies - a 3rd level solder Bandit Leader, and a 2nd level skirmisher Common Bandit.

The rest were minions, three 2nd level artilery Bandit Archers, two 2nd level solder Goons, two 2nd level Footpads, and then four 1st level Human Gang Members

The goons and gang members had a mob ability that allowed them to gain better defenses if more than 3 were clustered together, and the footpads got more damage. Also the footpads and common bandit could shift a square on a successful attack.

Both the bandit leader and common bandit had encounter-syle powers that never connected / got used, and the common bandit also had sneak attack damage available.


I could say you guys should never split the party, as it denied you the ability to work together and compliment each other's powers, but it also split up the bandits and being hunkered down forced them to come to you and not use some of their melee powers. So overall it seemed to work out well.

That was the XP for a hard 2 player or medium 3 player fight. Though I under leveled the fight and also made most of them minions to make up for it. Though of course that balanced by having way more enemy available to throw at the two of you and your fragile allies.

So it was supposed to be a battle where you could totally kick arse without loosing too many permenant resources, but hopefully you guys found it fun/challenging?

Yeah, there is no specific skill for trapmaking but I suppose it'd come under Thievry since that's what you use to disarm them. It's Perception to notice traps, however - I know earlier editions have Find Traps as a separate skill or something but that isn't the case here - anyone can spot a trap if they look in the right place, they just might not have the expertise to disable it and I think only Rogues can disarm traps above a certain DC (or maybe you just need to be trained in Thievry without necessarily being a Rogue).

Anyway, I think the enemies not being able to ready actions will probably help since we'll know that we'll never trigger anything like that. I don't think I've ever bothered with readied actions myself at all, lol.

If we're doing exp, will there be other ways of getting it outside of combat? I recall from the DMG that it's supposed to take about ten Encounters to level up (assuming the Encounters are pitched at about your level) which is why I dont bother with exp myself and just level people up when they hit a certain plot point or have some extended downtime or whatever. It saves having to come up with specific content in order to make the PCs get stronger ;).

Anyway, that combat was fun. I liked jumping out and exploding. I say "exploding", but that invokes images of fiery stuff I suppose...it was cold and lightning but it still zapped everything close to me. I have a feeling the deluxe room isn't quite so deluxe any more ;). I'm having pretty good fun playing Nym in general, really. Someone should probably go and see if Jorri is still alive though...but I'm guessing that's where Holder went.

Ooh, I tried to send this and you've posted something else. Yeah, it was fun :). I'm looking forward to seeing what other powers I get at higher levels to nuke people with and stuff :D. Was cool to be able to use the environment and stuff to get vantage points and hide behind and all that. The perfectly-timed botches by various people (me against myself, Banlee jumping out the window, etc) were pretty epic as well :D.

Thievery is indeed the skill I used, I thought I'd made that part visible to everyone? Disable device was the skill in 3rd edition, and combined with crafting you could figure out traps. I recalled there being a make trap in one of the editions, but yeah, thievery only covers disable device in this edition.


Skill challenges and encounters give XP, along with any bonuses I like. I'll play it by ear


I usually don't bother with XP, which is why I wanted to do it in this game, just for a change and to actually build 4th edition style encounters and pacing.



This combat there was a lot of PMs and hidden comments when discussing mechanics stuff, I guess to keep it out of the way. I think in future it might be best to put them in the OOC thread so everyone can weigh in on stuff. I'll keep private lines and messages for passive insight/perception, and character knowledge stuff and questions of that nature. Mechanics things are probably best visible :)



Holder is inside the inn, though Tym is most likely going to go see if Jorri is alive, assuming not, once he's spoken to Meri.

And glad to see the player cares about Jorri, since Nym is ordering ale despite the number of only unconscious enemies and potentially dead allies around :p


Technically enemies reduced to 0hp and knocked unconscious should come back to 1hp after a short rest, however with Tym's blow and Nym's acid I'll just say those two aren't coming back to consciousness for the better part of a day unless one of the PCs tend to them.



And yes, the rolls worked out well in many cases, Nym's suicide jump certainly being the highlight!

Yeah, I guessed there were PMs passing between you and Swifty based on various visible OOC comments and stuff she was saying in our Skype chats :).

Regarding the current situation, I don't know if you noticed, but Nym's brain doesn't quite work the same way as anyone else's ;). She's not specifically ordering ale, anyway, just knows that in pubs you get food and drink, which might help the upset-looking man feel better, never mind the fact he's basically hysterical :D.

If either Banlee or Snake-Face happen to wake up when we're not expecting it and manage to actually do anything, I don't think it'll take much to put 'em down again and we each took 'em out solo easily enough that I'm sure they'd both reconsider taking us both on at once, never mind Tym and Holder ;).

Also, I wouldn't really call the window-leap suicide. Maybe Banlee's was, but mine wasn't - even if I hadn't made the roof I'd've landed on the ground without any harm since the trigger for activating my footwear is that I'm falling. I might've landed right next to Snake-Face and got shot at from the guys on the roof, but the fall itself wouldn't have hurt ;).

As a DM thing I'll tell you straight that unless you wake them up they won't wake up for a day. So while your characters are welcome to feel paranoid, and you can wake them up to question them, you can also leave them in the care of the NPCs for a day and not worry about Evil DM Gotcha Plans (tm) occurring.


Actually Banlee's wasn't a suicide, he should have survived the fall, just Meri got a lot of damage done in her last shot, followed by max fall damage. I guess he just tripped on a ledge or his nat 1 on bullrushing the window resulted in some smashed glass :D

Well, it was still silly of him to throw himself out the window when he knew that at the least he'd find an angry minotaur waiting for him even if he didn't get stabbed by all the grass or fall over and take damage on the landing. Imagine if he'd landed wrong and broke both his legs or something (not that DnD has a mechanic for broken bones, but still...) >:).

Naturally Nym is doing everything in a completely random order now and taking care of the guy who shot her in the arm rather than worrying about taking prisoners of the unconscious tough guys or checking on the friendly guy who got thwacked :D.

Nym might be scarier, but she's definitely taking on the "Good Cop" role here :)

Lol and she's not even trying :D.

Sorry, I meant to say about healing.

Basially, the heal skill lets you do a couple of cool things in combat. For a DC 15 check, you can either stabalise a dying person, or you can let a person suffering a condition instantly kick off a save throw (or have +2 to the save at the end of turn).

Dying means you roll a saving throw each turn, and if you fail three times you actually die :( so being able to stabalise someone if you don't have healing of they don't have surges left if cool.

Oh, a saving throw is a simple duration tracker, where you roll a d20 (aalways a d20 with everything except damage and durations, really) and if you roll 10 or more you succeed, and if you roll less you fail. So it's a way of fiuring out how long effects are, or in the case of dying how long you can hold on without help :(


In Jorri's case, because I killed him on DM fiat and you guys were far away, I didn't want to roll saves. So I left him stable. So therefore although stablising someone shouldn't have brought him back to 1hp, in your case I made it that a successful stabalising did. So he's not only stable, but now he's conscious and so can kick off his own healing surges now, what little he has of them.

If no one had healed him or cared, I might have started rolling hourly or daily death saves from tomorrow onwards and played it by ear.


In Tym's case, I went with the old 3.5 style of Heal and allowed you to diagnose and treat his injury with a DC15. By 3th edition you are in film world of 'you're all good until your ded, but otherwise as long as osmeone comes by you're all good'

If you hadn't healed Tym, he would have been ok but I'd have treated him as staggered for the next day or so until Holder treated him. So that would have left Holder looking after the two if you went away.

As it is Jorri will be fine, Tym will be up and about too, so that means Holder can always go and tell New Stonebridge what happened, and Tym/Jorri are still around to watch the prisoners.

Just realised Nym hadn't logged in today, so if you guys want some RP time to speak to each other then I can retract the NPC actions for a few beats.

Otherwise, it's scary possibility for Nym to deal with and torture times fun for Meri :D

I think Nym is happy making friends with Crass and trying to get him a new home as Jorri's cook and never mind what moody Mr Tym says :D.

As for the healing, I haven't healed myself yet because I prefer to get the most out of healing surges if I can, and I'm currently six points down with my surges recovering eight, and I think I only have six surges per day and no idea if we're gonna have combat again. If we do I have Second Wind (and Meri) to heal then and if we don't I can heal when we take an extended rest and get all our surges back anyway :).

Don't forget, we need to spend surges to refresh Meri's infusions, but she makes new ones from scratch at an extended rest (at no cost). It's one thing I don't really like about Artificers - no other Leader class has to pay a cost to be able to re-use their healing powers beyond taking a short rest to refresh them like any other Encounter power).

Then again no other leader just goes 'hey, want better weapons and a refresh on your daily item powers? Poof!' so it's probably a balance thingie. I did throw an extra infusion at Meri for today through Holder.

Really the brew potion ritual will be your friend for gaining healing potions I think. So you need to start acting more like players and asset stripping dead foes for their scrumptious gp to fuel your potions! :p


(PS please don't act more like players and go on killing sprees)


And yeah, you are under no obligation to use your surges to recover, even if narratively you get patched up. You could still be mentally fatigued, or feel fatigued later when the adrenaline wears off or something and only feel awake again when you spend a surge in battle, say. The only tiny warning I will give you about fights is that planning for two players is a little odd... to create an interesting mix of foes/ area, I need to spend far in advance of your easy and even medium levels.

Then again, what I think I will do is simply make many of the encounters also skill challenges. Ie you get half XP (which is still reasonable) for avoiding the encounter sometimes, and if you trigger it then you get the opportunity for the full XP, knowing it's most likely a hard fight your're triggering.


I am planning for the full working day of 4E, which tends to be 3 - 4 encounters. We'll see how that ends up looking in terms of posting rates, XP rates, and so on, but that will match up to your available powers. So yes, figuring out combat healing might be an idea. Or at least spending item and daily powers that protect you would be cool.


One of the 'annoying' 4E things tends to be status effects, lots of monsters have them to make the battle challenging. With only two people around though it's going to be far more noticeable and annoying... yet many monsters are cool and dangerous because of them. Well have to see how that works...

I may well allow the Heal skill check to trigger saves be a minor action, and maybe let powers tht trigger saves end effects. We shall see!

You can always just skip on the exp altogether and level us up when it makes narrative sense - when we pass an important plot point or are able to spend downtime in a suitable location (eg a city or other establishment with facilities suited to our classes), or if we find a magical wibbly thing that when we touch it, it"increases our magical knowledge" or something. Then we can level at whatever rate you deem reasonable but without your having to construct more Encounters (combat or otherwise) than you'd otherwise be planning to. I mean, I remember from reading the DMG that it takes about ten Encounters (pitched at your level) in order to level up. That's quite a lot...

With regard to status effects, I'm not so fussed so far...I mean, they can be very annoying to have on yourself but they're also super-useful to chuck onto bad guys. I'll try and make sure I take more status-effect-inducing stuff as I level up if I can, if it looks good. I have a nice bonus as part of my whole Wild Magic thing, under erm, Chaos Burst I think (the thing I forgot about for half of the last fight), in that if my first attack roll per turn is even I get to make a Saving Throw (if it's even I get +1 AC till the start of my next turn I think), which means I can potentially have two Saving Throws per turn as long as my first (well, so far only) attack roll is odd :).
This message was last edited by the player at 13:21, Mon 22 June 2015.

Hmm, have to remember to take more status-effect-neutralising stuff next...  (O.o)

Also, Yay for magical wibbly things! :D

The problem isn't being forced to provide too many encounters, its quite the reverse really - any reasonable encounter / group of enemies I'd like to stick in your way seems to come up as a hard XP rating. Even if I don't use XP to track when you level up - and I really want to try it to start with, since usually with 4th ediiton it's been one shots or levelling up just whenever - XP is still a good way to track how balanced encounters are. So we'll see. You might find you leel up quickly to start with :D

10 encounters isn't a lot at all. Remember an 'encounter' is either skill challenge or a group of enemy you overcome one way or another. Usually a game session is supposed to have three - four encounters per game day (assuming a three - four hour session is covering an in game day). So what they're saying is that players probably want to level up every three to four sessions (assuming you have some time passes / down time sessions).

Also narratively a level up doens't have to be a level up. It's just a nice way of tracking that heuy, remember how in series one of this cool tv show of a game you could only kick one guy in the head. Now you are better at stuff and can kick three in the head. You don't have to have mystically got better nor spent six months training, it can just be an indication you're getting better through constant use.

Anyway, we shall see!



The status thing is only a warning for monsters doing it to you, I will never stop you guys from usuing all your powers ot the fullest. Just like readied actions from monsters, you guys still get to use them. Oh, not I might use readied actions to juistify creatures actually being able to act and stop the game from slowing down because of combat logistics. However, you never have to worry about a readied action going off during your turn to block your actions.

If I spot it getting too annoyiong I might swap the status effects from 'hah, you have limited actions this turn' to 'hah, you have limited actions against monster X this turn' or 'hah, monster X gains an addition minor action/shift against you'. Something like that where you all still get to act during combat. Being locked down is no fun normally, let alone when there are two of you where it could also be disasterous!

Yeah, the lack of a tank will most likely be a problem if we ever get into close combat - Meri is a little less squishy than me but still by no means what you'd call beefy ;). We can probably get away without having a Controller since I think we both have a couple (so far) of powers that inflict negative status effects on targets, but I suspect we may need a Defender at some point unless you somehow only give us fights which let us hide on high vantage points and shoot at people without getting clobbered in melée :D.

One thing about tracking exp is we'll most likely know when we're gonna level up, so you can't surprise us with that. I mean, if we get into a fight and only need 50 exp to ding, then we'll know that that fight will have us doing so. So it's nice (or frustrating, when we still hvae ages to go ;)) to see how close we are to levelling up but it means you can't surprise us with "Hey, you guys can level up now!". Well, we can see how it goes either way. You could always secretly track exp and just let us know when we've dinged, as well...

Yeah, be creative and mobile in combat would seem to be a good idea. Don't go out of your way to fight against statis effects rather than take cool powers you want...after all, sometimes the best defense is just a good offense.

One thing I'm not going to do is boost your part up to four or five with GM PCs. I'm not really wanting to run a complex combat where I'm doing most of the work :p Plus I want your victories to be your own.

As I say, most likely if your just cautious or creative then you can avoid situations that could become combats, then just concentrate your resources for the times you want to kick someone's butts :)

Plus you are PCs with tons of cool powers you surely want to use. Don't be too timid. I'm not really in favour of killing you off, a defeat is more likely going to see you captured, robbed, or perhaps just waking up temporarily lost.

Boring?  Boring?!  :(  *sniffle*

Oops, for some reason I failed to notice your last post in this thread, Wuffy...maybe I loaded the page and then accidentally closed the window or something. Anyway, yeah, for combat we should be fine as long as we don't get trapepd in melée range of stuff (or get stuck with too many negative status effects or too often). I think pretty much all my combat powers (as in, all the ones I can choose from, not just the ones I specifically pick when levelling up) focus on blowing shit up, with a few negative status effects (Blind, Prone, Dazed, etc) and shoving people around. Plus the added randomness of my various Wild Magic features :D. So my tacttics in combat are likely to be what they are in many other games, that of "if you deal enough damage you don't need to worry about amour/protection because they'll be dead before they can hit you" :D.

I'm sure you'll make some combat encounters avoidable but sometimes I, at least, will just want to blow shit up (as both a player and a character, I think ;)) and then maybe some gribbly monsters will come along that we can just nuke. I would love if I got lucky enough on rolls to take out a whole group of Minions with a single Chaos Bolt but I think I'll just have to live in hope ;). At least with At-Will powers you keep the same ones for the entire game (unless you choose to retrain) so I should have plenty of opportunities to do that :D.

Awww, good thing Meri the character was too busy outside to hear that :(

Edit: Yup, I'm aware that sometimes players will want to avoid a carefully prepared encounter no matter what, and other times they'll happily blunder in to a dangerous area just for fun and blast stuff :)

You might realise the previous encounter was built with that in mind - lots of minions in case you wanted to just wade directly in to combat and blow stuff up, so you wouldn't die and could take out people with more ease :D But also a lot of people to whittle down or have to avoid if you wanted to go for sneaky guerrilla tactics or evasion instead.

I expect I'll be combining those two approaches and using sneaky guerilla tactics and evasion in order to blow stuff up ;).

Seems like a good idea to me :D

Rrgarding opportunity attacks:


You can only trigger only one OA per turn from each other combatant. So the Spectre could only hit you once regardless of reason on your turn, though it can still hit once during Meri's turn too. Same for you guys. For example if Meri and you were together with the spectre beside you, she could ready an action to fire a ranged attack when you run away to make sure only one of you gets thumped that turn :) If you did it individually, you guys would each take an OA. Though if you did a move and ranged attack, only one would provoke an OA.

Is it only ranged attacks that trigger them?
What's a "Close Burst 10"?

Ranged or area attacks (the other two types being close and melee attacks). So a close burst 10 would be fine (it means the power expands outwards 10 squares in each direction with you as the origin).

To explain better now I've got firefox bahaving again.


So, there are four attack types:

Melee: You thump someone with your sword, etc. The idea is that you 'threaten' people in the square around you, so if someone tries to run passed you, away from you, or looks away from the battle (tries to fire a ranged shot or an area spell) then you can get a quick stab in. You can only use a melee basic attack (or something that says it counts as one) because it really is a quick jab when your opponent foolishly takes their eye off the nutter right by them with a melee weapon :D

Note some longer weapons can threaten more squares because they have a longer reach, and of course some larger creatures can have a longer reach too. So if you are fighting someone with a giant polearm or a huge monster, maybe don't assume you can saunter along or ignore it just because you aren't toe to toe!

Your static shock is weird, as it is melee but melee 5! Because its not a basic attack, you don't threaten any squares with it. But because it is a melee attack not ranged, even with a range of 5, you therefore don't provoke an OA using it to blast someone :D


Close: These are affects which use you as the origin. It's a little confusing, but burst and blast are two different things.

Blast is an effect that happens to the side of you. So say burning hands! You cover the area indicated with the spell, and the edge or corner only has to touch the square you are in.

Burst is an explosion or a radius effect. It explodes out form an origin.

So a close blast 2 is a 2x2 square you'd stick beside you somewhere, whereas a close burst 2 would be a 5 x 5 square that would have you in the centre.


Area: Spells and effects can also have their origin as not you. In this case they are area effects and provoke opportunity attacks because you aren't guarding yourself :)

They usually have a burst description too, just this time the origin square is whereever you say it is, within the spell's range. So a burst 2, range 10 is a 5 x 5 square you can plant anywhere within reason (the centre of the square must be within 10 squares of you.


Ranged attacks are normal ranged weapons, and some single-target spells. And once more, you take your eyes off the nutter right beside you, and they will thump you for it :D

The idea of moving around in combat and opportunity attacks:

If you use your normal movement, and move out of a square someone 'threatens', then you provoke an opportunity attack. So running up to someone to bash them is fine, run passed them or away and you get hit as you run passed! Thoguh it can just be the cost of making that move.


What you can do is use a special move type known as a shift. A shift means you use your whole move action to only move one square, but you provoke no opportunity attacks. So you could run out of combat, but you'd need to use one move to shift, then a second move to run. Alternatively, you can use a shift to move one square away to cast a spell or make a ranged attack, but of course your attacker can simply close that distance no matter how much they are slowed or even if they are prone, because you are only a square away.


Now, some powers let you shift yourself or others, and hopefully you can see thebenefit of that. It means you can get people out of danger or positioned better.

For example, your cool 'hey, have a free +4 to skills' power also lets someone shift 2 squares for free. This would have been perfect to put Nym in position at the window.

I'm not really wanting to retcon everything in the previous round, because I assume for the sake of 2 damage knowing where the critter is is much better than Nym being under cover and none of you knowing where the creature will strike next!



The previous edition of D&D had a few more things that provoked these opportunity attacks, but for simplicity the list is now whittled down. Previously standing up from prone or some other move equivalent actions would also have drawn opportunity attacks, and some combat moves like grabbing someone also let an opponent strike you first :(

I knew I had that power, but didn't think it would work in that situation, hence I decided to block and reduce any potential attack instead.
Didn't actually think the opportunity thing would happen, I'd guessed the invisibility meant it was going to try and spring a stealth attack on one of us and thought Nym needed a defensive boost more than I did :)

Ah, that's cool if it was a tactical decision.

Was more of a tactical decision that changed to a "oops, didn't know that was going to happen, but at least no-one is dead yet" decision :)

Is it my turn yet, or still Nym's?

Still waiting for Nym's actions, the it's the spectre's actual turn.

Sorry, I just realised the staff power was only a minor. Hmm, so did mean to ready an attack in case the spectre reappeared?

Oh ok, didn't notice that...

[Private to The Altweaver: Okies, I'll use Thundering Armour effect on Nym.  Blasting the spectre with thunder damage and pushing it one square away from her :)

Attack: 20 (15 + 5)
Damage: 7 (3 + 4)...  Piffle! :(]

You can go ahead and post the results of your readied action, since it will hit.

Action points:

I think I mentioned them before, but glossed over them. You start with one action point each day after a full (extended) rest, even if you had more than one the previous day. Each 'milestone' (two successful encounters) you get another.

You can spend action points to get an extra standard action during combat. Which is very cool. You can only spend one in a round.

I believe you can only spend one each encounter too, but that seems boring so I'm waiving that restriction.


Anyway, you guys just had a second successful encounter for the day, so you get an action point. So Meri has two and Nym is back up[ to one I believe?


Meri, one of your artificer powers gets an extra use or something if I recall correctly for a milestone... I'll check which one it is if you don't recall which one I mentioned before.

Ah ok.  Basically like "extra moves"?  Handy :)

So we get one each time we have an extended rest.  And one after every two battles?

Not sure about powers and milestones.  I know most of my powers do increased damage at higher levels though...

They are indeed. And yes, start with one, and get one for each two successful encounters (that's what a milestone is).

Your artificer powers of impart / augment energy also start of with one use a day (the same counter, you chose one or the other). And at the same time you get an extra action point, you get an extra use of either impart of augment energy. So you can refresh your staff and Nym's boots if you wanted, or hold on to one or both uses until later. Augment gives a one off +2 attack bonus to a weapon that can be used at any time that day.

So do I need to spend an action point to use the energy powers then, or are they counted separately from action points?

Argh, so much stuff to keep track of.  Hard for someone currently running 5 games at once!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrCPIrs90eg

No, they are counted completely separately from action points, just they will always refresh and be gained at the same tiem as them so it's a way for us both to remember :)


And lol, I know that feeling well! It's ok, I have Game of Thrones to comfort me...no, wait, it does the other thing!

She ever said that to Meri? ;)  hehe

I dunno if she'd've ever said it to Meri, but she might've said something similar when she was near Meri, seeing how she's so happy just waffling on about whatever comes into her head at any point in time regardless of whether or not anyone around her is listening (if there's even anyone there to listen) ;).

Maybe these two have a little more in common than Meri realises ;).

Sounds a bit like the real me sometimes :)

And yep, I have occasionally done that thing where you're sitting with a load of other people and you start telling them this little story or anecdote, only to realise that no-one is actually listening to you, so you just sort of trail off awkwardly and pretend you never actually said anything...  :/

I don't tend to sit with a load of other people because I'm not great at interacting face-to-face with more than one at once, so I never get to the "trail off awkwardly" part because I feel awkward to begin with ;).

Me too.
If I get to know people I can chat with them in the offline world.  Then I get to the "being ignored and trailing off awkwardly" stage, when I realise that I lack the qualifications and professional experience required to engage in social activities...  :)

Yeah, I tend to be better at face-to-face conversation if there's only one other person there, and it sort of helps if we share an interest (so generally, gaming is the one for me ;)). Online, it tends to go without saying that the people I'm gonna be interacting with are into gaming, so it's not so much of a problem and we tend to be chatting in a textual format anyway so it's fine :).

In the brief IRL interactions I've had with Nym, she seems to be able to carry on a conversation happily on her own one on one :D


I definitely fall in to the 'introvert' category, so while in a small gorup of people I Know I can be chatty, being social too long, or needing to be social in an unfamiliar setting is mentally draining. I must admit to being in more of the 'carry on regardless even though people are looking at me oddly' and then just feel bad afterwards :p


Anyway, on to shinier topics - daggers!

Daggers do 1d4 damage. If you throw them, your attack roll bonus is your dex mod (the low number) +1 for your level and +3 because you are proficient with them (so dex +4 vs AC). The base damage is 1d4. The range is 5 squares (or 10 long range, for -2 penalty to your attack roll). If you use them in melee instead then then you add your strength +4 vs AC. Note that most of your sorcerer attacks won't work with the dagger, so attacking with the dagger is a basic melee/ranged attack. On the bright side, that means you can have the dagger in your off hand and use it instead of your impliment as an opportunity attack if desired.

I can double check the stats are right unless one of you wants to put them in to a programme yourselves.

Sounds about right to me. Dagger damage is definitely 1d4 and the Str-in-melée-Dex-at-range thing is true of any weapon. Okay so not all of them can be thrown/fired, but I mean any time you make a ranged basic attack with something it uses Dex rather than Str. I can blat people on the head with my staff if I need to, and Acid Orb can be used as a ranged basic attack so no problems there, at least ;).

I don't think the daggers will be any use to me.  Staff needs both hands free if I recall.
Also my At-Wills can do more damage than 1d4, and one is melee based, so I think I'm ok if forced into melee range...  Well, probably not, but at least I can dish out some pain before going down! :)

The ability to do 1d4+5 cold/radiant and 5 ongoing cold / radiant once, with an attack roll using a versitile wepaon that's not too bad compared to your normal attacks, hopefully doens't make it too useless. :D That's the idea, a non game breaking 'could be useful' for emergencies only. Or for when you have a craft idea and need something odd.

ooo, so I could maybe craft them into something more than a one-off? :)

Did Nym take either (or both) of them?
Can always just carry one around anyway :)

No, I didn't take either - I was just approaching as Holder was giving them to you. Pointy objects aren't really her style but maybe she can be persuaded, I dunno. I don't really know what she's thinking half the time, or how she's likely to react to any given situation :D.

I meant crafty idea, but hey, who knows :D

I'd assumed Holder was higher level than me if he can actually craft stuff...  :(

Nope, level 1 :p He's crafted normal weapons which you could do as discussed, putting temp enchantments on things which you can kinda do too, and doing some NPC things because not every person you run in to should be instantly classiable by class and should be useful or cool I reckon :D

Besides, he never said if he had help with those two items... who knows how old they are ...


And I am amenable to you finding someone or somewhere or somehow later on to make them perhaps more permanent magical items, or convert their energy to a different use. If you have any ideas, always ask :)

At worse, maybe the business end of a nasty trap :D

Ok, I forgot to mention twice when including the mention of Nym's shoes, I was wondering whether recharging Nym's shoes, or recharging my staff power that reduces all damage to one of us for a turn would be more tactically useful :)
Leaving this one up to Nym, but I only just now remembered to ask that...

Busy patching together another system here.
Almost out of working parts, but this one only has to last for about a year or so until I can save up for a new one.
It doesn't have any Dell parts, so hoping it'll actually last for a decent length of time :)

Good luck!


In my unbiased opinion, recharge the one that will help you least :p You can only recharge each magical item once a day, so whilst keeping a use free for now is a good idea, don't forget about it later - you can refresh the staff and show if you don't drain anything else today.

I suppose it depends on what's more likely out of one of us getting hit a lot, given that we're going to a most-likely-dangerous place which probably contains at least one hostile individual, or me falling/jumping off a height, given that we're going toward a waterfall (top of bottom, we don't know what which bit holds the interesting stuff just yet) which probably has some kind of cave system behind it or something (full of crags and cracks and sudden drops) ;).

Oh well, then if we fall off something high, at least one of us will survive :)  hehe.


Scrap computer build is going sort of ok.  Got it more or less functional (in fact I'm posting this on it to test it).
Seems to be an annoying glitch that causes the keyboard driver to randomly reset back to the U.S. layout occasionally.  And I can't seem to get it to read the hard drive I pulled from the old one, so might not be able to get my stuff back :(
I'll keep tinkering with it anyway...

Depends upon what was pushing you off in the first place, might be the person falling for 2 rounds lives longer than the person teleported back up to the top :D

It must of course be pointed out that if you fall for two rounds you aren't likely to survive for three if there's a ground involved!


Losing stuff on old hard drives is crappy, especially if you are doing creative thigns and are between back ups. It was stupid, but I was literally coming to the fun part of designing a magic card set when my old lap top blew up, and it was like..wait, no...I...was just going to back up once I had the framework done...nooooooo


Got an external hard drive powering thingie for the drive, but it blew that power supply so I reckon stuff on it is just gone :(

Skill challenges:

The idea of skill challenges is to provide a framework for a non-combat encounter. If combats are the excting action/fighting scenes of a film or TV show, and single skill rolls are off hand encounters/single actions beats of a story, then a skill challenge is the protracted cool scene of the film. The perilous jounrey up a mountain, the 10 minute shennanigans as the heroes try to rush around to various merchants playing them against each other and alsostealing some parts so they can eventually take a ship from harbour. Or maybe it'#s mapping the action scene where you are trying to track a run away thief through city streets. You know, cool stuff :)


So whilst making the traps for the inn earlier was an offhand beat where Meri went 'lookit, traps everywhere!@ later on if you wanted to build a complex trap to catch a Dragon in, that might be a skill challenge where you put force various ideas to pool resources, gain knolwedge, and then put it in motion as a cool complicated trap! The forest path could have been a skill challenge too, except I didn't want to stop you getting to the falls. But you can maybe see that a longer and more complicated route looking for something more hidden might have involved nature checks to start but then athletics/acrobatics to get passed blockages or try to shimmy up trees to get more info, perception rolls to spot things, and so on.


Anyway, the idea with a proper skill challenge is that it will have a compliexity from 1 - 5 that determins the amount of successes you need to generate from 4 to 12. Sometimes I will know some beats of the story you need to succeed at, other times I'll be looking at you to generate ideas to reach your goal and the cxomplexity is me telling you how many cool ideas you need to feel confident.

You can only have three failures or else you fail. At higher complexities, there are also things called advantages. There are bonuses I can give you to help - at level 3, you need 8 successes. However, I can give you two advantages. So maybe succeeding on a hard DC actually equals two successes. Or maybe I'll let you remove a failure . Things liek that.


Anyway, that's the provisions put in place by 4E for having framework to involved RP stuff. We'll use it as and when. The thing about skill challenges as opposed to just normal RP and skill cheks is that a skill challenge actually generates XP. So succeed in building the dragon trapping trap and you get Xop for it, or succeed in capturing the thief, or succeed in finding the lost Tower of OOHNOOOOES.

I don't have to teleport back to where I was standing previously - the trigger for me to activate my sandals (they're not automatic) is "When you fall...", it doesn't say how far I need to have fallen, so I figured I can treat it like a sort of Feather Fall spell if I need to get down off a height :).

Well, the new patchwork computer system seems stable-(ish).
Definitely channelling Mollie here, except they didn't have computers back in the 1930s...  If they did, and she had one, this is probably what it would look like!

Still can't read that old hard drive.
I'm fairly confident the drive itself is undamaged, it shows up in the BIOS ok.  Just that this operating system refuses to access it for reasons known only to itself.

So I now have three or four completely different hard drives (2 IDE, 2 SATA, one of them locked inside an old laptop!) with my stuff scattered across them.  Going to be fun getting all that back! (NOT!)  :/

Have to wait till I can scrape together the cash to build myself a proper computer.  So probably sometime next year or so...
I still have some of my game notes backed up on the mini laptop I was using as an electronic creative writing notebook, so I can probably reconstruct enough of that to continue working on some things.

There's one possible trick left I can try for reading one of the drives.  But it'll require a bit more tinkering and dismantling stuff than I have the patience for right now...

Is that drive you mentioned, the one with the card set thing on it, completely fried, or can it still be hooked up to a computer?
I could probably get that back for you, once I get a better system to work with :)

By the way, just to clarify...  What exactly is weird about the falls?  Is the water flowing in a different direction than straight down or something?

I'd argue exactly the opposite. You can't choose where you teleport back to, you are teleporting to the nearest safe square within five squares. So you go back to the place you were about to fall from, or if that is gone/dangerous (like a pit opened and an ogre right there that pushed you off ) then you get to teleport to the nearest safe space as long as there is one in five squares.

Also it's not 'whilst you are falling' the trigger is 'when you fall.' It's a definiteve trigger like readied actions have. The idea of the sandals isn't to be featherfall, I believe it is to simply stop an unexpected drop and put you back to the edge safely the instant it happens. You are deciding to use the power or not at that moment I guess. You can even argue its a narrative choice of the player that the magic fires in time, and nothing to do with you character making a conscious choice.

The way you'd have it work it would do the above, and also featherfall, and also just lets you teleport if you decided to drop prone. Seems a little powerful.

I mean I'm not going to push too hard in the game if you want to treat the sandals like that.



And sounds like computers being computers Meri, good luck figuring them out! The drive was physically damaged because Win 8 forced me to do a hard reset because it blue screened, then literally a few second in decided to not freeze and access the drive. It appears to have mashed the boot sector and be completely unreadable, sadly not even able to be read as a drive of no consequence :( Eh, it's fine, it was nothing too important.


Edit: Yes, The Falls are projecting 45 degrees away from the rock face opposite, rather than the more shallow angle you'd expect from falling water. The Ball's presence temporarily made the falls flow normally, and then they splashed back out to weird proportions again. So The Falls are basically cascading down as wide as the combined river. Taht means if you can get passed the initial cascade, then getting behind to the cave beyond would only be as difficult as navigating the weird eddies of the pond and the river flowing through it.

The argument for the sandals being during falling would be that they say you take no fall damage, which wouldn't need to be stated if you haven't properly fallen yet. Since it's a daily power, as I said I'm happy to go either way.

As long as the drive isn't physically damaged, it might still be readable.  If it still spins up without making weird ominous grinding noises or anything.

I know when I was poking around the Synaptic package manager during my first forays into Linux systems, there were a few interesting data recovery utilities available on there :)

So the falls are falling more like \
than like | ?

And we have to climb down to the pool at the bottom and reach the cave from there?

Just trying to visualise the scene...

That's it falls shape wise :) That was what Jorri was trying to convey in the inn a while back!


On the far side of the falls where you are, the descent is a simply slope to the river, and you can go along the bank back to the pool. You can also go a little upstream too if needed to brave the pool.

If you were on the falls side of the rivers, and up by the top of the falls, the ravine wall is shear, and when you got the the bottom you'd be at the large downstream rush of the river too as it turned in to the hardwater and wound its way back to Stonebridge.


Edit: Also, there was indeed an ominous clicking noise at first. Then the noise stopped, but that's when it took out the USB driver power/reader cable thing I'd borrowed :(
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:26, Thu 02 July 2015.

So it was an external enclosure type thing you were using it with?
You sure it wasn't that that was faulty?

Clicking noises from hard drives are never a good sign...  :(
As I said though, if it's still spinning up, it might still be readable to the right piece of software.

If the drive circuitry is fried, it might still be possible to open it up and recover the data directly from the disk surface itself.  But you'd need specialised clean room and scanning equipment for that, would probably be costly :(

Anyways, yep, got the falls area pictured in my mind now.  Thanks :)

A set of a power leads and a USB controller. Intelligent little thing that my drive managed to fry. It worked a few times when I first used it, but the drive just spun andwouldn't be recognised, making clicking noises. Then when I had one final 'let's restart everything for luck' it all went quiet :(

Anyway, only my most immediate stuff wasn't backed up, and some podcast things that I'd put on the drive to keep space on my main computer, so any large expenditure of time / money doesn't seem worth it. I tried my best :)

Just in case you are waiting for each other or me rather than being busy, I will point out that the task ahead of you breaks down in to a few decisions really if you want to start by discussing those.


Do you want to try to get to the forest area on top of the other side of the ravine, to investigate the site of the battle and the flora? Or do you want to check out the cave behind the fall?

If you want to get to the other side, then you can try something to go between the two ravine walls. Otherwise, you can always go down the ravine from your side to the bank below, and go towards the smallwater and look for a place for ford/cross. That way you can go back up the other side.

To get behind the falls, the easiest way might be to go down to the bank and simply swin the pool near the smallwater end. But you could aalso try going down directly from the top of the ravine if you wanted to leap down or had some other way you wanted to angle downwards.

Sorry, been a bit distracted by stuff.
Thinking I might have to drop out of one or two of the games I'm in.  Just too much going on to concentrate on them all at the same time, especially with a mind as slow as mine!  :(

With the LW games, I've always tried to avoid swimming, since it usually caused you to lose some of your inventory, hehe.  I think that's made me a bit wary of swimming in games in general :)
This message was last edited by the player at 13:49, Sat 04 July 2015.

Awwww.

We can move to a 'questions during the week, update by the weekend' slow mode if that would help? Certainly as this is the probably the newest game I'd understand if it made the most sense to bow out of.


Hopefully you'll be able to keep in the Rebirth game?



And yeah, swimming is as easy as an athletics check in D&D :) Not wearing heavy armour really helps with that. Not playing 3.5 where armour gave STEEP penalties for swimming is better

Well I've come too far to drop out of that one now :)


First IC post as Swift Fox in that one was way back in December 2011.  So much has happened since then, both on AND off line.  Can't leave that unfinished!  :)

That game started back in 2011? Wow, it doesn't feel like that long ago, lol.

It would be a shame if you dropped out of this game (I'm not sure what Nym will decide to do if she doesn't have someoen she can follow around ;)), but if you need to then I'm sure we can deal with it. Does that mean you might drop out of my game as well? :(

Well I'd rather not drop out of any of them.  But I don't want to be the dead weight slowing them down either.

I'll see what happens.  Maybe things will quieten down a bit in the offline world.

Also yep, Rebirth started back in 2011.  At least that's the date on my first ever in-character post as Swift Fox.  A minute past midnight on December 5th 2011 (edited at six minutes past midnight).
Not sure when I started posting to set up my character.
This message was last edited by the player at 17:00, Sat 04 July 2015.

I just checked my PMs in that game and I first posted my access request on the 16th of November.

I forgot to ask Nym, did you check out Minecon today? Didn't appreciate it was on in London!

Was it? Um nope, first I've heard about it, lol.

I've seen it being posted on twitter, it wasn't until someone tagged themselves at it I realised it was in London :) Thought you still watched the videos even if you didn't play? Would have to assume the yogcast guys would be there?

No, I don't think they've gone for a while now - they go to other conventions, though. Most recently some of them went to E3 (think that was last week or so), and a while back something called erm, MCM Comic Con I think? And while I still play Minecraft (have a server that me and Ja'Ph' play on, which I think I mentioned here a little while back) I've never gone to forums or anything like that. I just sometimes look stuff up if I need to for doing stuff in some mods or whatever.

That explains that then :)

And oooh, E3, with the 3D mincraft on your table!

I tend to play Minecraft in the evenings when Ja'Ph' is online if we're both not too tired from work or whatever (he was at work today and goign to someone's leaving do this evening so not sure when he's gonna be online - no Minecraft for us tonight anyway). Right now I'm messing around in Tabletop Simulator and am finally looking into whether I can make Sentinels of the Multiverse in it so we can play it without needing to actually be sat at an actual tabletop here in mmy house where I keep all the cards (because they're mine ;)). Well, I'm sure I can do it, I just need to find the artwork for all the cards, or at least improvise it by copying the text and making up my own images or something :D.

Best way to improve Minecraft?

Holodecks! ;)  hehe

You know, in at least one mod, that's actually a thing :D.

I meant inventing actual holographic versions of the game.
Only thing better than being able to build your own world is being able to dive in and explore it! :D

We'll just have to make do with lego until then. :D

Ahh I see. Yeah, holodecks would be cool...though why you'd ever leave one to go back to the real world if you were in a really epic cool program will remain a mystery ;).

Oh btw Wuffy, do you still check out the DM forum? People have been posting lately commenting on how quiet it is in general and seem to have noticed that you haven't been around. I hadn't noticed myself but I think that was just 'cause I see youi posting every day over here ;).

Lol, nah, I'd been on minimal checking for most of last year, and I think I just stopped around ...oh...August? September? Don't remember exactly. I do recall the last time I checked in it was a mistake, I'd accidentally clicked on an RPG favouties folder rather than the link I meant to, and some new game thread on the DM forum was one of them!


I know cows was basically hands off too last year and even facebook posted me about it for me to keep an eye on things, and I was like 'oh, no, I'm the same as you'. I know Gambit's been commenting about house stuff and so forth on twitter too, so he's probably busy with stuff like that?


I presume Raxial never managed to get back to running her D&D game?

No, I haven't heard from her at all...don't even think I've seen her on Steam lately. Cows has been around on the forum. It has been pretty quiet, though Wizard Zedd posted the other day saying he'd started CSB so we should see some action there as he dies repeatedly and gets lost and all the usual stuff ;).

Lol, good old CSB runs from first time people :) Single Aroc all the way!

Hmm that's a point, I don't think he's mentioned what kind of party he's taken with him. I always just import my original party from DM as I'm attached to them :).

Oh, and I just noticed we've now overtaken my game in terms of post count, lol.

Wow, soon be 1000 before you know it!


And hey, yours is away to hit 600 then. Yay!

By the way, how does the run/charge thing work here?
I didn't even know that was a thing, otherwise I'd have moved further away around the pit to make it harder for him to close to melee range.

Charge is a specialised standard action that lets you move and then make a basic melee attack. You gain +1 to your attack roll.

However, you MUST move towards the target with each square of movement (so difficult terrain blocks a charge) and if anything stops the movement the charge fails. And also you must move at least two squares.

A run action is a move action that lets you move 2 squares more than normal, but grants combat advantage to everyone, your attacks are at a -5 penalty, and you still take opportunity attacks for leaving a threatened square.


So you could have run away, but would have given a free hit to anyone around, at +2 extra. If they have a combat advantage power it could also be bad.

Still, it is an option available. Would you have used it given the limitations to escape your friend?

Nah, I meant instead of backing up to the wall, I'd have run around the edge of the pit so he couldn't have reached me in a straight line (assuming charging only works in a straight line?)

As it was, I didn't know he could do that, so assumed his move limit was around mine, or more.  So I thought putting 13 squares between us meant he wouldn't have been able to reach me in one turn, so I had time to zap him again then retreat around the edge of the pit.
I'd thought worst case scenario was that he could throw the knife or the cleaver at me as a ranged attack.

Bit of a miscalculation on my part...

Charge is an attack thing that lets you move directly and attack too, it would be run you'd want.

Run you can move however you want, for up to 8 squares for each action.


And yeah, there was a way for him to increase his movement and still hit you.Now you know! As you say, it was likely he could still have thrown stuff at you. Maybe a spooky skull, in fact? However, your action did force him to charge which lowered him to a single basic attack, and your push did mean he had to reduce his attack roll and increase your attack bonus next turn. So I didn't advise you against it. You would have had to have moved out of shooting range /sight to get away from him, and also would have maybe been walking right in to a zombie.

So I wouldn't beat yourself up about you initial choices, they are fine. And I'm happy to let you use one or more actions as run actions if you want to be elsewhere.

Let me know or post new actions :) Note that you can use a shift to get away from melee then a run action to move afterwards, but unless you can go to somewhere not directly in line, then you can still be charged at.

Oh, I've realised you are in a bad spot right now in that you can't shift out of melee range with a single move. You'd have to burn an action point for a second shift which seems bad.

So yeah, it seems run before this turn or face your foes with...umm...with a stiff upper lip? Also with many shooty powers.

Personally and I'm not saying this would work out, I'd shift back one to be away from the chef, then you can choose to blast the zombie with a static shock (melee attack is ok) and if you kill it, you can use a funkier power on the chef. Or you could concentrate all fire on the chef I guess. I'd action point, But that's just me :) Nym can weigh in too, because I wouldn't trust me with advise for many reasons, and more importantly you've got this!

Just to explain the combat actions again:

You get one standard action, one move action, and one minor action each round.

Standard action - usually any attack power, also some abilities, also your 'second wind' you can use to heal in combat once. Charge is a standard action that lets you move your speed then make a basic attack.

Move action - either move your speed, run at your speed +2 for penalties, or shoft one square. If you move away form an enemy you suffer an opportunity attack, except for a shift.

Minor action - draw a weapon, drink a potion, some abilities/effects are this level.


You can only make one standard action unless you use an action point.

You can change a standard action in to a move or minor action.

You can change a move action in to a minor action.



So as you can see, it is possible to do more than one move or more than one minor action normally, but you have to sacrifice a better action to do it.

So normally you will make three actions (or four with an action point). Only one can be a standard, up to two can be move actions, and all three could be minor actions.

And obviously an action point can be used to generate any action you desire, but you get best value from using it as a second standard action.


Hope that makes everything less confusing!

Just a reminder (or if you don't check the OOC thread in Rebirth, then a first notification!) that I'll be busy from tomorrow until Tuesday. Doubt I'll be able to update during that time, especially for an involved combat.

Okay, no worries :).

As long as you don't leave us in a cliffhanger moment before disappearing! ;)

Sshhh, don't say that or he will! :O

But that's okay, if he does then I'll just have to think up some horrible cliffhanger to throw into my game to bug him until he gets back >:).
This message was last edited by the player at 15:14, Wed 15 July 2015.

Ah, the things that can happen when evil GMs meet...

*grabs some popcorn and sits back to watch* :)

Lol, well in Nym's game Kaelynn is right beside Mortaar, so.... really you could lose two characters in the space of a weekend :p

Awww :(

That's okay, there are plenty of things that can only hit one target...thrown items, projectile attacks, random falling rocks, inexplicable teleportation spells... >:)

"Rocks fall, everyone dies"?  (O.o)'

So, just checking, can I only use one action point per round?
Going for a "double attack" effect here, but wondering if I can use both APs at the same time to do a "triple attack"? :)

Indeed, only one action point per round I'm afraid!

Oki doki.
Also, can a "Close Burst" attack be used in melee range without provoking opportunity attacks?
(Forgot to add that question there) :)

Yup, melee and close attacks can be made without provoking an opportubity attack. Area and ranged, different story :)

Is it just me, or are the zombies deliberately trying to separate us?
We were getting pushed towards opposite exits there...
Sneaky plan, or accidental positioning? ;)

If there'd been more room I'd've gone out into the cave, but I only really had one way to go and now I can't seem to hit the bastards, lol. I'll get back and help you ASAP but I just seem to be moving further and further away from the edge of the map right now :D.

Lol, is it just me or did you guys deliberately separate yourself and the zombies are running to try and reach you :p Don't go blaming my poor zombies. Also, they are all friendly and cuddly and people keep shooting them! I even wrote 'friends' on the map and everything.


If you look at the map, basically if you had been together and forced the critters to come to you as a group, you had a pit wall to blow people off of, with a ropey rope bridge and an L-shaped long corridor to channel people down. Instead you both kinda been pushed to the wall edge.

I cannot stress this enough, for the love of Aoefel, never split the party! :D

Yeah Meri, don't go into big caves and attack poor random oblivious goblins who are just trying to have their lunch when your teammate has no idea what they're saying and therefore no insight as to why you might be interrupting their lunch ;).

Not my fault.  Meri is not a team player! ;)  hehe.

The talkative member of the group could have asked the curmudgeon what the voice was saying at the entrance of course!

Really, I think you're both at fault :D
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:43, Wed 15 July 2015.

Just checking, can I see Nym and the skull from where I am?

You can't see the skull nor Nym from where you are, though you will be able to spot the glow from the tunnel and so guess Nym must be around 5 squares away from the entrance to this place :)

Nym is being scary again...  (O.o)

Ahh, it's fine, it's just her usual high from using lots of magic at once - surely it's good that she's happy all the time. I mean, imagine what would happen if she got angry. I don't think it's ever happened so far - she doesn't seem to portray any "negative" emotions (fear, anger, sadness)...she just kind of gets distracted whenever anything comes up that you'd expect to cause her to feel that sort of thing. Or zaps it in the face with something.

Still, as long as you never do anything she wouldn't like, I'm sure you'll be fine, right? ;)

I have now spotted why Nym and Meri always end up on separate ends of the battlefield!

Looks like the goblin ghosty thing doesn't have much of a... "head" for a fight...

*puts on sunglasses*

Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh...

(Sorry, couldn't resist!) (^_^)'

Oh, wow, I'm such a terrible DM, I put the giant dragon on the hidden tab of the map. Wow, it's been there all the time breathing fire on you. I guess you guys are just dead now? Well, good game.


Ok, ok, CSI Dragon isn't there...this time... -.-

:D

Edit: Also because free time done. Got the update done though!
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:50, Thu 16 July 2015.

Note on potions:

Technically by the rules if you don't have a surge and need to use a surge to drink a potion, then you can't. Healing potions are supposed to still use your bodies reserve not magically give you blood, etc. However, for this level of game, that's unfair. So as a house rule for now, potions will use surges if you have them, but still have an effect if you don't (unless explicitly listed otherwise, like cure light wounds)

So the idea is it still costs something to use them early, so either save them for later, or risk becoming dependant on them!

Also, I believe it's supposed to take two minor actions to drink a potion - one to go get it, the other to drink it? Whilst pushing the limits of the minor action, I'm happy for it to just be a minor action to recover and chug a potion. Assume it's right in your belt pouch, etc and you just pop the top with your thumb cause you are adventurers :p

So to reiterate:
By the rules, two minor actions to recover/use potions, and you need a surge if a surge is asked for

House rule: A single minor action to use a potion, and the effect still generates without surges unless explicitly stated not to.

Also looking at my notes its actually quite funny how many times you've gotten an enemy down to a single hit point in combat. Banlee, the snake faced guy and the chef all perfectly ended with 1hp. Given I've thrown a decent amount of minions at you, there wasn't that many chances to do it either!

What I'm saying is - 1 more damage for goodness sake! :D

Lol cool...well, maybe we can happen to find some loot which gives us extra damage or something, you know, just lying around on the floor where any random Changeling or Half-Elf might stumble across it :D. I bet there's a whole bunch of Feats I could take which increase my damage, but in games like this I prefer to focus on non-combat Feats that give me extra stuff I can play around with when RPing, like the way I took Fey Cantrip to give myself Prestidigation so I had a means of doing minor magical effects whenever I like (and also gain the added bonus that I never need to carry stuff to light fires with, or worry about food tasting unpleasant or being too hot or too cold, and stuff :D). I will probably take Arcane Familiar at my next level up, but that's if I can't find anything that looks more fun :D.

Technically, though, I think Banlee ending up on 1hp was due to his throwing himself out of the window after getting horrible zapped and acidised and stuff by Meri ;).

Ah, lol, that was true for Banlee, I forgot that, it was a middling acrobatics roll followed by a horrendously high fall damage roll :)

Just joking about damage, right now Nym doens crazy damage because of the arcane additional damage. Your at wills should be doing as much as 18 reliably yet they seemed to last fight!

Yeah, these dice are a bit strange.
Starting to think they're cursed.  They don't give me anything above single digits unless I circle them around in my hand a bit first before rolling them.

They have a sort of "black marble" design, with red numbers.  So they do look a bit "dark".  Should have used them for playing Forests of Ruel :)

EDIT: Found them online.  It's the ones with the numbers on them here: http://chessex.com/Dice/Speckled%20pages/25308.htm
This message was last edited by the player at 18:58, Sun 19 July 2015.

Know the type and bought a few sets but don't have those exact ones. They scare me.

Whenever I roll a 1, I'm sure I can hear them laughing mockingly at me...  (O.O)'

Magic the gathering fat packs come with d20s as life total trackers, and I'm used to the weird symbols of some dice being '1', which is life evil juju dice laughing and mocking you, but for the life trackers the weird symbol is on the 20. So it's all 'gah, I botched...no, wait, crit!' Maybe get some of those :p

Yeah I did manage to get a couple of 18s in that last fight, didn't I? If I remember rightly, one was from a crit, one was from my managing to roll max damage, and one was when I got 16 but the target was Bloodied at the time so the gauntlet bonus kicked in and upped it to 18 :D. Mind you, while those numbers might be nice now, by the time we've gone up a few levels they'll probably be looking rather less amazing, at least till we reach Paragon tier (hopefully this game will last that long! :D) and it goes up...at least, most At-Will powers I can remember looking at seem to increase by one die per tier, so hopefully these will too :). But I suppose we'll have extra Encounters and Dailies in the meantime to throw at things. Will try to make sure I get more status effect stuff to mess with the bad guys as well as generally nuke the utter crap out of them >:).

Oh, just to confirm a few things previous mentioned about encounters/XP/leavelling up.

You're supposed to level up after 8 - 10 encounters. The idea is also to run maybe 3 - 5 encounters every game day. So as you can see after a few smaller dungeons/settings or during a longer adventure you should level up.


Currently you have undertaken 4 encounters, that being three fights and one skill challenge (that could have failed to combat). One was relatively minor though, and the skill challenge I do not believe used up any permenant resources?

The plan would be that if you explore the room Meri found, one way or another figuring it out/defusing it would allow you to rest there, refreshed to push on the next game day. Since you don't know if you are on a clock or not, but you did kill the only critter that could have warned the big bad you were still alive, you can perhaps rest a little easier.


If you go any other way, you can possibly expect one or two more encounters before it would be safe to rest. That of course might factor in to how much more or little you want to do with your daily powers and especially Meri's left over artificer


And as you might spot, this level of encounter means that if successful, you should be a decent way to getting your next level. certainly if you don't have the XP to level up after the 'boss confrontation' in whatever way it manifests, I would award you bonus XP to that level anyway because you will have solved this initial puzzle. Mostly with violence :D


Sound good?



Oh, and congratulations on your second milestone of the day - each of you gets another action point to use today, and Meri gets another use of her special artificer's 'refresh daily item power/make item temporarily hit things well' power.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:49, Mon 20 July 2015.

Ah, Meri's speciality :)

Technically it's Nym's speciality as well (even more so than Meri's, given their roles in mechanical terms), but she'd prefer not to be killing random things if she can help it...or at least, not things that aren't attacking her or otherwise appearing in any way threatening ;). Anyway, the next room sounds like it could be fun, some kind of puzzle...now you just have to persuade Nym to go and check it out :D.

Lookit magic glowy stuff?


And Nym seems more explody, whereas Meri seems more crate violent stuff and use it.

Well, Meri is actually a little less violent than someone like Swift.

When she's angry, she'll quite happily resort to it though.  And in this case, she seems determined to pay back those two attacks on Stonebridge by wiping out the villain responsible and all of his buddies too.

[Private to The Altweaver: Due to her hard life in her past, she came to believe that showing mercy to someone who tried to kill you once is just inviting them to try again later!]

Just found this, which would have been even more appropriate if we'd had a Bard in the team:
http://i191.photobucket.com/al...d091873.jpg~original

Did Meri take any of the potions or anything from the goblin's shelf/table/whatever-it-was-he-was-storing-them-on/in, or are they all still there for Nym to check out (even though I rolled it several days ago IRL, lol)?

Meri left them there for Nym to identify or take any she wanted.
She seems more interested in scouting out the surroundings than looting stuff right now :)

Okay cool, I'll look up their effects later if I remember/have time/don't end up playing Minecraft till I have to go to bed :D.

I have time now so can post them all up soon. Also I'll make the post a 'who has this' and make sure one of the two of you have them.

Okay :).

Acidic fire (level 5), 50gp x 1
Power (acid, fire), comsumable (standard action)
Make an attack: Area burst 1 within 10; +8 vs Reflex; 1d6 fire damage, and ongoing 2 acid damage (save ends)

Id Moss Power (level 1), 0gp x 1
Power (impliment, poison, psychic), consumeable (standard action)
Effect: You make the following attack
Range 5
 Target: One creature
 Attack: dexterity vs Reflex
 Hit: 2d10 + dex mod poison damage, and ongoing 5 psychic damage (save ends).
 Failed save: Each failed saving throw, the target makes a basic melee attack as a free action against its nearest ally
 Miss: Half damage, and ongoing 5 psychic damage (save ends)
 Special: A creature reduced to 0 hit points by this poison is not killed, but is instead driven permanently insane (DM choice)

or
Power, Comsumeable (standard action)
You place the dust in a closed container. Make the above attack against the first creature to open the container within the next hour.


Potion of cure light wounds (level 1), 20gp x 2
Utility power (Healing), consumeable (minor action)
Effect: You drink the potion. If you have a healing surge, you must spend one. Instead of the hit points you would normally regain, you regain 1d8+1 hit points. If you are bloodied and don't have any healing surges, you still regain hit points. If neither of these things is true, there is no effect.

Ungol Dust (level 1), 0gp x 1
Power (acid, impliment, poison), consumeable (standard action)
Effect: You make the following attack
Range 5
 Target: One creature
 Attack: dexterity vs Reflex
 Hit: 3d8 + dex mod poison damage, and ongoing 5 acid damage (save ends).
 Miss: Half damage, and ongoing 5 acid damage (save ends)
 Special: A creature reduced to 0 hit points by this poison is not killed, but is instead knocked unconscious until the end of the encounter, and is permenantly and visibly scarred (DM choice)

or
Power, Comsumeable (standard action)
You place the dust in a closed container. Make the above attack against the first creature to open the container within the next hour.

Potion of necrotic resistance (heroic tier, level 4, 40gp) x 1
Power, consumeable (minor action)
Drink this potion and spend a healing surge. You do not gain hit points as normal. Instead, gain resist 5 necrotic damage until the end ofthe encounter. Only one potion of resistance can be in effect on you at once.

Potion of Healing (level 5), 50gp x 4
Power (Healing), consumeable (Minor action)
Drink this potion and spend a healing surge. Instead of the hit points you would normally regain, you regain 10 hit points.

Gravespawn/cryptspawn potion  (heroic tier, level 5, 50gp) x 1
Power, consumeable (minor action)
Drink this potion and spend a healing surge. You do not regain hit points as normal. Instead gain resist 5 necrotic and resist 5 poison until the end of the encounter. You also gain a +5 power bonus to your next Endurance check against any disease of leel 5 of lower.

Lesser Elixir of Dragon Fire Breath (heroic tier, level6), 75gp x 1
Attack power (fire), consumeable (minor action)
effect: You drink the elixir. Once before the end of the encounter, you can use a minor action to make the following attack:
 Attack: Close blast 3 (creatures in the blast); +11 vs Reflexes
 Hit: 2d6 + 3 fire damage

Potion of Delusion, level 5, 50gp
Utility power, consumeable (minor action)
Effect: You drink the potion and lose a healing surge. You gain 10 temporary hit points, and you shift 1 square towards the nnearest enemy.
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:38, Tue 04 Aug 2015.

Cool, nice load of healing stuff there...though from an IC point of view there's only one that would probably interest Nym very much (the rest she would probably consider boring and/or unnecessary) >:).

Nym isn't the boss of you, I'm sure as a player you can come up with many good reasons for Nym to accidentally have the potion to hand. Forgetfulness, or the fact all the healing potions have random flavouring as the chef was using them as stock :p

Note the powders having a 0gp value and also powerful effects despite being level 1 because, I believe, they are actually assassin powders or something? So enjoy them while they last :)

Yeah, that moss stuff looks pretty savage >:). I think Meri would be better off having all the offensive stuff...well, almost all of it. Nym can have some healing potions (I imagine Meri isn't quite selfish enough to attempt hogging them all to herself when she's the one with the healing powers ;))...and one other that will grab her fancy...

Out of curiosity, is there a way to "reverse engineer" potions with Alchemist to learn the formula to make them? :)

(Probably not, but thought I'd ask anyway!)
This message was last edited by the player at 23:26, Tue 21 July 2015.

I was going to mention my thoughts before, then decided against it.

I think that for certain potions - like the acid fire - I would happily let you reverse engineer it during 'down time' providing you still had the potion.

As you can see though, that creates a sitution wgere I gave you a cool potion for variety and so forth then encourage you to not use it and stick to your previous stuff! Hence I decided I'd see if you used it, then if not let you have the bonus instead of getting the formula.

However, thinking on it more I'd be happier to let you research it during downtime or find someone who might give you the formula, rather than make you not use it to get that opportunity! In fact, I might insist that you can't research it properly and buy the formula until you've seen it in action :p You need to know an alchemical component exists and describe its properties I reckon :D

I've probably revealed enough details of the room and the surroundings now that there is a story here of the recent past if you want to put it together.

Any thoughts? Want me to enlighten you OOC about some things?

Either I'm missing some details that Nym has picked up, or I'm just too thick to work that out.  Not sure which...

Also, I didn't poke the dog that hard :(
Meri doesn't find The Dog anywhere near as irritating as The Ball.  It hasn't managed to annoy her as often yet.  Give it time ;)  hehe.

Maybe the dog was just surprised :D


And it's all subtle and you'd just see the edges of it. If Nym is curious too I can happily reveal the details.

I've only been sort of half-reading the stuff that Meri is looking at, just because Nym hasn't looked at it yet. So I don't really have a clear picture in my head of where each tunnel leads and I notice the map got changed. But I expect there's plenty more stuff around the area to look at. Nym's just a bit sort of...distracted at the moment.

I've restored the previous map, if you haven't read Meri's descriptions properly then you probably didn't understand what the thing was?

Anyway, it's now in the group 0 map.

Oh yeah, I did sort of read the descriptions so I realised that was the combination lock thingy on the chest. Which path is that down? The eastern one?

The chest with the mechanism is down the northern corridor - the continuation of where you started from.

The eastern one is a dug out tunnel, that seems to want to go back in a way parallel to how you came in, with a shoddy gate before it.


Anyway, you can have a look over the lock IRL and see if anything stands out, and decide if you want to try and open it or avoid it. How scary could a living chest be, anyway? :p
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:30, Wed 22 July 2015.

Hmm, haven't got a clue about that combination lock...

Only thing I can think of is that the 8-arrow symbol on the lower-right one looks like the Chaos symbol from Warhammer 40K...
The skull in the middle looks a bit ominous too.

Unless the combination is written down somewhere, or there's some hint to it in the books in there, then I've no idea.

Don't worry, being a skill challenge a) you don't need to figure it out in real life, and b) I've even designed it so that's it probably not solvable in the conventional sense. If Nym is familiar with some things or you all have some google fu available, you might be able to crack some parts of it though.


Using the surroundings or your innate skills would be the idea.