The Gossip Board

[Dracos]

G'dammit, why haven't we had a general discussion topic yet?  I blame rat.  He's very blamable.


Plan for this week.  Lets roll.  :P
12:58   Dracos_at_work   Our drow commander will bring her slaves into the exchange.
12:58   Dracos_at_work   While our mouse secret agent assassinates the dao president.
Nothing could go wrong with this.

[Anastasia]

Serious strategy talk, Drac?

[Dracos]

Possibly.  I'm joking, but...

Sneaking into a slave exchange using a drow matron wanting to buy new slaves or some such sounds like a very viable way of getting in there while off their guard.  Some collars or bracers or things for the look and feel.  A good escape plan when we need to get 10-100 humans out after slaughtering a group of surprised Dao.  Adail could totally be our surprise ace, hiding and scurrying around near us as we go in, manuvering to go examine the cages, the locks whatever, while Mari talks to the dao to get information on our human slaves that we're totally going to purchase from them.  Given those things, I'd totally go with it.  :D

Both knight and Kamvakua can make very plausible guard slaves.  Get Zeph a good illusion or disguise spell and have him cringe around mari and it'll be all the more plausible.

Heck an illusion on Kamvakua of a drider might even take it further.  But I think our illusionist got axed a while ago :P  I have no idea btw, how good the dao are in general at seeing through deception.  I can't find any statistics on them around, so we'll have to go the old fashion "Gather Information, find out the best deception plan~"

Luckily, Diplotank Nikki is good at getting drunk :)

Also Nikki can probably provide the magical dwoemer for our chains or collars or whatever to make it look real. Heck, we might even be able to bluff them when we do attack that it's just a slave going wild or whatnot so they don't quite realize its a full fledged ambush in the first round or two, and potentially don't call for help~ :D

[Anastasia]

A cunning plan.

Will the rest of the PCs go for it? Will Mari become human again? Will Nikkolai get Knight and Mari drunk enough to have fun?

We'll find out!

[Dracos]

/amsg "... LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOY JEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINS!"

Go for it? *Whistles*

:P

Seriously though, what do you guys think of the TOTALLY INSANE PLAN? :D

[Sierra]

I'd wondered about exploiting Mari's condition in some useful manner, yeah. This actually sounds pretty reasonable. We don't have any idea how many dao are in there or their strength, so having some excuse to chat them up and have mighty mouse sneak in and look around before resorting to violence is probably a good idea anyway (especially with heavy gravity making that hard for all of us).

Don't encourage Mari too much here, she might start to like it.

[Dracos]

Don't encourage the hot drow roguey?  I don't understand.

Mmm, maybe I've been listening to Zevran too often :P

But yeah, we should be able to have Nikki shine as the information gathering monster he can be if he puts his mind to it, which should resolve most of our lack of prior intelligence on the Dao and the Drow issues.  :)

[Carthrat]

I would endorse this plan (and it gives Knight an excuse to shut up and say nothing for a session or two.)

We should do some research in town beforehand to find out if there are any Drow cities in this plane, or if there are any portals that go to locations near the same. Good for our cover story.

[VySaika]

I'm game for doing the spy bit, certainly. Burrowing speed+stealth skillz+great Listen check makes me pretty good for it.

[Carthrat]

Are we winning?

[Anastasia]

It's messy.

[Sierra]

Long story short: the dao figured out what we're up to and we either have to fight our way up from the bottom of their compound or find some way to BS out of this. There may or may not also be an erinyes around that we have to contend with (who may be just as much a problem for the dao as for us, which is something to think about).

Since we had one of the dao with us at the end of the session--badly wounded and intimidated--our best option probably lies in finding some way to use him to facilitate our exit. If all else fails...well, we were in the dao's dungeon at session's end; if it comes down to fighting our way out, we can take the wounded dao's key, open up the cells, and see if anyone there could be useful in busting out. Further violence probably isn't desirable though--we passed a lot of guards on our way in here and we'd have our work cut out for us.

We should probably settle on a course of action before next session, since we left off basically right before we had to come up with an escape plan.

EDIT to note that the existence of an erinyes is certain, it's just that she vanished right at session's end and she could have dimension door'd out or just turned invisible on us.

[Dracos]

Logs up.

My thoughts: Yeah, let's keep the dao on a short leash and get out of there.  If the erinyes goes to get dao help, we're in bad shape anyway.  Hopefully she decided to just cut her losses there (nearly getting killed and having her minions turn on her) and that she is secret from the other dao as anything but a slave.  If she really does have more dao in her pocket, she could easily screw us without even showing up again for an encounter. 

Technically, assuming an intelligent enemy, I'd bet she'd both hold a grudge and not want to immediately face us again without the cards stacked more her way.  Another 6-12 seconds and she would've been giblets if she hadn't teleported away.  The small area left no where for her to snipe from and she had no useful allies to lean on in it.  The dao aren't likely to be a good enough card excepting where she can just conveniently direct them to us to hope they finish the job. 

Hum, I forgot to hit enter and post this.   Our best result really at this point is bullying said dao until we're out of there, and knowing he's an enemy from there out :P

[Anastasia]

Miscellania!

You guys levelled up. For Rat since you weren't there: Get me before you do any levelling up. I think you're just taking pure fighter anyway, but y'know. I wanna be there for HD rolling and other stuff.

[Dracos]

feedback on recent sessions as requested:

Granny Tam was amusing...though a bit too estoric/shadow creature that made it odd.  I admit I would've liked some shadowy figure to come out at least, or some kind of illusion or whatnot.  It was a little disconcerting effectively talking at 'everywhere'.  The whole super illusion crafting and silliness and eccentricy was fun though glad I didn't get hit with it. :P

Dao rescuing was cool.  It being some but not all combat was cool.  That my crazy plan got to get used was fun and that there wasn't too much hole poking in it (Yes, it was made of straw, fine whatever) was appreciated.  I liked how it generally turned out.  The bit where we got to play simultaneous social and physical challenges was very neat.  Hard to pull off usually, so cool that it happened.  More of that kind of stuff encouraged if you find opportunities for.

Devil was cool.  I hope there be grudges held, maneuvers, and all that kind of fun stuff.  :)  Short, and without enough fodder types really.  But it was an intro, that was fine, and I suspect we overdid your estimate on how fast we could lay out damage.  Generally a nice intro, excepting that she neither got named or got a chance to SWEAR VENGENCE or anything.

I really suck at 'ask for random thing' bits.  Not a huge fan of them because I suck at them.  I much prefer 'select from semirandom loot' or something.  I tend to find it hard because it isn't scoped (What number is the other side thinking for a reasonable return, I don't know!) and it instantly puts me in challenging what my character should know for asking about items (always vague and ephermal for me) versus what I know (I know practically every damn item in the books).  I don't particularly like trying to figure that out which is why I tend to toss up loot ideas for interest and generally try and see about basing my characters purchases or finds based on what's interesting that the DM makes available and present.  Thanks for playing along with my fail on that, but yeah. :)  I don't have such issues with select among random unknown options, but when it's 'ask for what you want' I find that painful generally to do in character.  In general, I don't like having my characters being experts on magical artifacts that aren't introduced narratively in the game world because then it always is a clash between what they might know and what the gameworld really reflects (Okay, so they know about magic armor that deflects critical hits, but the game world doesn't have any available, so where did they hear about such an uncommon item anyway?)

Last session we had a splitsecond confusion bit for going to rest.  I think unless there's a good reason, we should be encouraged to just rest at night and not give any dramatic writeup of what folks who don't rest do to pass the time.  Some of it was ooc, as I think it was guessed that zeph was going to sleep :P

Next mission, while neat and different, does feel a bit isolating.  At a glance it seems like something that's better for a solo agent in most cases.  Part of the reason is that at a glance it seems overconstrained.  For instance, if it were say, finding her in a slm in a big relatively neutral city with an evil mafia type lead by said devil, that'd feel more like an intro many of us could participate.  But if the whole town is evil efreets who we're to avoid hostile interaction with as well as a devil we're supposed to avoid encountering as well, it seems like it becomes almost a pure stealth mission, which there's such a disparity of ability in the party there, it's almost better not to participate so as not to drag the stealthy types down.

Some opportunity for actual party combat with space would be nice to see.  The generally constrained encounter spaces hasn't allowed for much interesting tactics (Use strongest ability, whammy).  Though that is a hell of a lot harder to run online, so I understand.  I'm more biased here because I'm particularly playing a space controlling character now, which is a bit irrelevant without space to control.

backseatgm/shootme thought: It looks like we're getting a bit behind on wealth per level.  We're at about 78-80 percent expected.  Not really a problem, as it helps encourage fewer/neater loot, but just a poke because I love shiny toys. ;)

any feedback back the other way?