General Discussion

[Sierra]

8. Well, as I said, the crit effect is something that would only apply if it misses/hits in the first place. If you roll a 20, and you'd have missed with the skill, it's not a crit, it's only a crit if it had succeeded. Similarly, a roll of 1 isn't an auto-fail and auto-disaster. It's only so if you'd have missed in the first place. And yeah, on the 'disasters', I'd still add some sort of recovery method, at least for PCs, such as the balancing because of a bad attack, or Nama getting a reflex save when he tripped over his shoelaces, or the like.

I do like the idea of PCs being the only ones who get the max damage effect on a threat confirmation roll of 20. Unless other players say anything against it, I'll give this bonus effect just to players, not NPCs.

This sounds pretty reasonable to me.

[Dracos]

Let's see...

props on letting us throw a wrench and rolling with it.

Me and you need to sit down and chat on table.  And probably a couple other things as I'm a wrenchthrower build.  You 'may' want to in some fashion use the modified harrier if I'm already giving you pain there, because as soon as I hit level 3, I introduce a constantly changing +hit/damage depending on how many 5 foot squares I moved.  Soon combined with defense and skill bonuses and things.

I think It's obvious but harriers do more stunts/challenges/etc than anyone else, since the usual 'penalty' is 'you don't get iteratives, its some form of move and attack', but since that's harrier's shtick, it's going to roll that way always.

We ran HARDCORE into the problem with level 1 characters.  At 25 'flat' miss chance before anything else is thrown into the mix means that 1 out 4 actions that people are doing simply fail regardless.  It isn't until level 4-5 where a '1-2' will generally hit AC 10, making how skilled the characters are relevant to the odds.  Until the bonus is in that range, we can expect to see this sort of very sporadic flip of the coin effectiveness on pretty much everything but a handful of skill checks (Mostly just Maya's).  Level 2 is going to continue to see this.  Additionally buffing enemy hp to match us with abilities based on 'how many hits you take' will significantly increase their risk factor.  Generally, it's just something to expect with low level play, regardless of how 'capable' we seem, that there's a really high percentage of failure for even basic task resolution presently.  Eventually we'll get to that comfortable spot where there's some things we're good at and some things we're not and all of us succeed commonly on basic abilities, but again, that's not till at least level 5 mathematically.

I hope there's some room for wild antics like I pulled yesterday.  Technically, the scenario ran toward punishing that a bit (Enemies grouping to protect the boss) rather than spreading out to hinder the party.

I assume they killed the mayor or someone.  I hope in session 2 we establish them as something beyond completely random assholes :)

Also...loot topic? :3  We may or may not loot the goons I suppose, but I at least got 1 gold coin..and a handful of copper.  Yay silliness.

Man, I had more coherent stuff to say, but I don't have much coherency anyhow.

[Merc]

On Loot, do you guys want me to do it now, or RP through it next session with a minor timeskip? I was honestly planning to just RP through it as you searched bodies, checked survivors, and generally tell people 'okay, danger's over, you can head back to the plaza', etc.

I don't care either way.

[Sierra]

We can RP through it, I guess? I'd assume the aftermath of having our hometown get horribly violated is something that should play out onscreen anyway.

[Dracos]

We should definitely RP through 'aftermath'.

That said, I actually don't think we should even really acknowledge the whole looting in this time.  I mean, if we're being RP heavy, we probably don't actually loot them (which would suck as we could all use basic money) because we're not proper adventurers really yet, and it's not what happens in a town when bandits attack (It'd go instead toward the guard to help them track down why and what of the whole affair). 

I'd encourage thus handwaving the looting, and RP out the aftermath otherwise.

In general I'd encourage loot early so that it is handled during the '2 week downtime' rather than anything during session.  Session times will tend to run long if we let them and the better we handle intermediate stuff beforehand the more time in game.

In other words, do what I say, not what I do in skies where I totally fail on that sometimes :P

[Dracos]

Not so random thought:
We need to be better at 'who's next' being asked right after each action happens.  So that we don't lose 20-30 minutes again between actions not knowing who's going.


Random pokeout:
Anassia join us in OOC next time more.  Its more fun if everyone is joining in and then the DM/players don't wonder if you're there when your turn goes around :)  don't worry, we don't stab people in the face and tear their heads off.

[Merc]

Yeah, that was my expectation with this encounter. You -can- loot the corpses of evildoers, but here it's something of an RP situation. I do have the stuff they had listed out, so I can just type it either here or once it comes up in session.

On the next thought, that was mostly because of the number of NPCs present. As I said, I won't have such huge numbers in the future likely, at the very least not often. If you look at logs, you'll note I made it very simple. Whenever it was someone's turn, I simply typed "ooc - [name]" unless it was an NPC, who just got appended as a follow-up. I was generally quick on typing that ingame/pre-logs for PCs, it was mostly my own end where I was lagging on turn.

[Sierra]

We should definitely RP through 'aftermath'.

That said, I actually don't think we should even really acknowledge the whole looting in this time.  I mean, if we're being RP heavy, we probably don't actually loot them (which would suck as we could all use basic money) because we're not proper adventurers really yet, and it's not what happens in a town when bandits attack (It'd go instead toward the guard to help them track down why and what of the whole affair).

All of this is very true. Elise at least isn't going to be down with stopping to check what kind of swag the invaders had while there's still potentially work to be done. (I can't speak for the party thief in this regard, of course.)

[Dracos]

Yeah, I was, toward the end hoping every strike at Kenmore would just finish it as I was tired.  Naturally, I was a jerk and didn't let that murdering bastard get away.

I wonder if anyone did a cheat sheet for us on IH stunts.

[Merc]

Semi-unrelated note: I fixed Penuche's brain so he shows roll results and total roll, instead of just total roll.

His base coding is kinda not built for it, so I really had to hack it up, so Penuche sometimes lags with roll responses, but it works now.

I'm working on making a spreadsheet for stunts/challenges/skill tricks/magic effects, as well.

[Merc]

Heh, found this in my picture folder. Is it Elise? =p

[Sierra]

Hah. I never thought of her as particularly kawaii, but that's the basic idea.

[Dracos]

Elise-chan... You wear too much! :P

Anyhow, I swapped greatsword with bastardsword. 

[Merc]

*nods* It's less damage by a small bit, but it doesn't give all the messy feat tree stuff.

[Sierra]

Elise-chan... You wear too much! :P

Right, you try convincing her of that.

Out of curiosity, why the change in weapon?