The Gossip Board

[Carthrat]

Ok! I think I've just set up a high-stakes gamble over weapons. Or at least a trade.

What I've got on the table is a Magmacore, the 700gp that belongs to me alone, and the roughly 2.5k in the party loot area. I can see not wanting to gamble that last bit, but does anyone have an objecting to me staking/selling/bartering the magical spear away?

Additionally, a witness for the game/trade would be nice, and I'm thinking I could ask Mari or Nikki to come along.

[VySaika]

Go for it with the spear, sure.

[Dracos]

It's exotic and awesomely different.  Go for it.  But bring Mari AND Kamvakua at least.  One for cunning, one for 'you ain't running with our loot'. 

Oh, and Win.

[Anastasia]

This'll happen early in Tuesday's session, guys. Between that and talking/resolving stuff and a few other odds and ends we'll be busy.  What we may do is have you guys split into two groups and deal with things at the same time for faster progress. What else is on your agenda? I figure the discussion over the soul needs to be done together, then...?

[Dracos]

I'm fine with Adail and Nikkolai handling the soul talk if they want? :P

Eh.  Let's see the agenda.

Fixing Nikkolai (Or is this handwaved?)
The gambling thing with Knight. 
Dividing the remainder (Not a big deal)
Heading back to magma thing so Adail and Mari can do their thing?

Not sure what else is on it?  What am I missing?

[Anastasia]

Okay, if you guys wanna get together to chat and so some RPing on your own initiative feel free. Doubly so since i may miss next session.

[Dracos]

Feedbacky~

Anyhow, last session was much improved from the previous one (Which I voiced my problems on there).  The encounters were lively, and dare I say, the shopkeeper encounter was quite charming.  It set a good tone as far as future interactions go that I know I'll at least have the expectation that 'Evil City!=everyone trying to kill good guys in it', which is good as the previous expectation was something that excluded me and adail really from participating effectively and this one allows for more wacky interactions to happen.  The opener really was a good job by the way as far as "look, I won't have them auto-attack you if you aren't doing stupid shit" that set the tone well for the rest of the session.

Overall, I think you were really on the ball last night and ran a great session.  As a party we also did well in having some interesting social interactions go on and not treating the city like a series of devils to kill, always good.

Also, now Kamvakua wants to hunt kraken someday.  It sounds awesome and he's never done it.  He will drag the party aboard a ship to fiercely hunt down the White Squid, which Knight vaguely recalls being at some point for some reason.

Because I'm a horrible monster, observed neutral/negative feedback:

The charm scene was awesome, but really only had room for one person to be on the stage.  While the multi charm brainwashing was neat in a lot of ways, I think it tends to be a complicated enough setup that one is enough.  I think this was reflected in him just giving up after losing on knight rather than taking the rest of us (which he had pretty good odds to do really).  Anyhow, Knight took the stage here, did an awesome job, and now we will always think of her as pretty magikal Knight, Knight.  We will expect that her next fullplate has a skirt attached because she is pretty in battle.

SLA Charm stuff, sadly, is rather hard to counter.  It generally is either 'instafail' or 'instawin' in its nature.  I think the intent of charm person is that folks are supposed to get cha roll bonuses when given orders against their own interests but that's only covered by descriptive prose (oh it's very hard to do~) and not by actual direction in the spell.  Nothing wrong with it, made a good scene, but yeah, observationally, there really was no reason that fat demon couldn't have decided at any point to finish the job and just take us all really.  Nikkolai should really take some notes as a cha based character, that said we might stab him if he tried :P

Kamvakua is good at playing a guard.  That said, I would enjoy a break from it.  While he'd continue going along with it,
from an OOC stand point I'd like a break from setups that are primed for us miming being around a single powerful type (E.g. Heading toward more neutralish areas than hives of Evil for a bit should do fine for this.)  Truthfully, I wouldn't mind some narrative sage type opportunities, though I suppose I haven't been fishing for them.  I should finish up my background sometime :P

Getting caught up when we came out of the portal with micromanaging travel down a straight path was bad.  *whaps gently with the newspaper*  Personal preference is just to read the flow and decide.  I don't think anyone in the party would've particularly blinked an eye if you said we were anywhere along that path and threw an encounter at us.  We had no map, no special strategy aside going forward, and generally that's for the best, it allows you to say whatever you want when the dice comes up about what we're traveling through at the moment and as we're not micromanaging the fine details, we won't have a 'what, but we were going to sleep here and oh no we would've been, blah blah'.

Setup wise, I think we let it be overdone on intro.  I guess that's mostly my fault in retrospect, but I think the Evil Danger Enemies were overstated in the intro (Heck, we didn't even cross a single efreet the whole trip!  It was a city of only devils as far as we saw).  The delivery target was neither under really lock and key or whatever we were trafficking very obviously bad at least as far as they city reacted to us.  It probably could've been couched more as the courier task into dangerous territory that it was.  But yeah, that's also granny tam, which is a setup where we don't ask too many questions up front because magic spells are being flung at us as she gets bored :P.

[Carthrat]

Yesssss there's not a lot us mere mortals can do against charmspam. It kinda means any magical tingling is going to be met with lethal force from now on, which is a bit sad but probably necessary. Or at least saying, very loudly, "Someone is fucking with my head!"

[Sierra]

Really not sure what Mari wants as a reward at this point. She's probably due for something frivolous and superficial* (actually, she sort of wants to talk to Granny at length about her options, but that requires the presence of Dune), but talking it over could be fun. Going drinking with Knight also still needs to happen, especially now that Knight has discovered her PRETTINESS. Also grudging expression of gratitude to Nik if he's around.

*(Though something that will prevent possible future mind-rape is also tempting)

[Carthrat]

Mindrape is difficult to defend against absolutely. Existing solutions... Buy potions of protection from (alignment), mindrape stops functioning whilst spells like that are active; a scroll of magic circle against (whatever) does the same thing for a group at a time, which could be handy when force-feeding a potion to a happily dominated patsy isn't an option.

Then we have until the spell runs out to murder the person responsible.

[Dracos]

Actually, the problem with it is that the defenses and effect of it are absolutes generally, thus very limited spread absolute defense, and equally stuff that's either "oh you been FUCKED" or 'No effect whatsoever'.  There's little notion of mental damage, degree of success and the books don't give good guidelines as far as what's harder to do or not.  So it is just as hard to charm someone and encourage them to be slightly more reckless by telling them how awesome they are as it is to suggest that they should go join the blood war aside from DM step in.

[Carthrat]

Pretty much. I don't have a good clean solution, though.

Clearly, though, the Eoris sheet should factor into it, somehow.

[Anastasia]

Charm spells can be brutal rape, no doubt.  While I agree the current paradigm has some issues, I'm not looking to revamp it.  I do plan to use it sparingly, since mass charm into a bad situation is kinda vicious of me.

[Carthrat]

It doesn't really bother me since there are in-world ways to counteract it.

[Carthrat]

I don't know what our immediate plans are, but whether I can take him along or not, I need to go visit Bell before we start any new long journeys.