The Gossip Board

[Dracos]

3) You nailed it well.  I generally enjoy combat, but when the restriction is 'cannot hurt other person' well, it quickly becomes unfun in the system for me.  The why of it is that I don't feel the system expresses non-fatal violence very well at all without being geared up for doing it.  The majority of the rules that involve it really are quagmires or lists of penalties against everything that helps bring the combat to a close.

2)Man, Rat really drew out for me again a lot of what I had forgotten about how very bad the grapple rules end up being.  I don't mind grapple existing but I now totally hate the rules on it and look forward to never rolling grapple again if I can avoid it.

1)I don't mind confusion.  I was really bothered by how that chase scene went.  It was a chase scene of a tremendously slower character in the woods.  For Kam, this really should've been a scene to easily shine and be awesome in.  He's totally at home with chasing and hunting things in the woods.  He's fast, strong, swims well, jumps easily, climbs over anything in his way...yadda yadda...  And I didn't roll poorly either, but it all felt irrelevant and incompetent.  I mean it might be greedy as I did get to get to her first...but it was just was just barely and by that point I already felt like I was hardly managing to be competent at all at giving chase to someone on foot, something that Kam should excel at.  

I really like it when things play toward thematic strengths or weakness, in general.  It's why I thought the reward last session was particularly cool.  This session felt like it really downplayed a thematic strength of kam in favor of having magical challenge.

4) We talked in the room and privately.  I'll toss a reflect here later after it has time to digest.

Just a general bit, I know I was stepping on rat's toes there, but even if I wasn't taking a hostile angle, we're going to be doing the card talks often and I think it is unrealistic to expect the rest of the party to stand back each time and not participate in the debate.  This isn't your one big arch nemesis (Well it might be).  It's one of 25 others?  Anyhow, given that, I really don't think its realistic to expect the whole group to go quiet for a big center stage bit there.

[Carthrat]

1/2/3: I have no problem with confusion like that; it's basically fog of war. It often seems odd to have everyone knowing what other people are doing when they're far away. It's way too easy to metagame it up, and even when people don't do that, it's honestly unsatisfying to have to pretend not to know things.

I don't have any problem with the grapple rules because I mostly know how they work. That said, I'm not exactly a big grapple fan either. I don't really care how often they appear. (I do hate one thing, which is how really huge monsters have grapple checks of like +40, that's no fun! Heroes escape from being clamped on by mighty jaws ALL THE TIME, or even hold them apart! But okay, that's not really relevant.)

But in this specific case there was quite a bit of lameness, I'd agree there. Partly my fault, I should've surrendered or asked for a timeskip but my inner troll felt noisy? Yeah, sorry.

PvP, well. I don't have anything really against stuff like dominate person or whatnot showing up and mindraping us into fighting our comrades. It's just another threat we have to deal with there. The more sensitive issue of PvP is having characters willfully oppose each other, which... is not on this game's agenda, I believe. HOWEVER I feel that if our characters disagree on things they need to hash them out and find a compromise, not just sweep it under the table. I also think dilemmas between us are, overall, interesting to play with.

Might as well get this in the clear- look, the party consists of at least two people with an agenda and dubious morals (knight, nikki) and two good-beyond-good types (kam, adail), conflict here is quite possible.

I will happily follow the goodly moral lead in most things and not run off to kick dogs or whatnot, and I'll take a harder path if the easier path is evil somehow on your guys say-so. I have two provisos!

1) I won't accept a plan that I think is certain to get us all killed because it's the 'good' thing to do when there's a much better one that's more dubious but more likely to be successful. It's a scale thing, basically.
2) If the good thing to do forces me to sabotage my own quest, or, worse, ignore it, except some angry IC arguments.

4: I really liked how Rogue was done. When I got mind controlled I was a bit disappointed since I thought it meant 'oh well, Rogue's an asshole and I guess this will make it easy to get him killed since I know he's bad'. It didn't really occur to me that he'd already know Knight's deal, and I can understand wanting to avoid wanting to return to the deck, which made it neat again. The challenge to me now is to develop arguments against it, of which I have a few I'll keep in reserve rather than spoiling them now. I don't think I'll need to introduce any further elements to do so; I'll try only to use what I've already established as fact. (So no, say, 'the deck will destroy the world unless completely reformed!' stuff out of nowhere, because that's lame.)

I did not expect other people to stand back in this or other debates; I'm not even all that fast a typist here, it's difficult to formulate a response because I, personally, am quite sympathetic to Rogue! So I'm not about to crack down on that. I mean I dunno where I'd have been without Nikki there either. Also, I feel that whatever happens, Knight is likely to come out of this much firmer in purpose- even if it's not her original one, so I think she'll be more blunt in debates in the future.

But I WILL get mad if people insist on shutting down the ability to actually talk this stuff out at all, and it felt like Kam was prepared to do that any second. It's not that I don't see your point though, it's very hard to trust someone capable of mindrape. I think it's an issue when mediation has some chance of success to keep tempers flaring. I think Rogue's rationale wasn't impossible to understand or anything, so.

[Carthrat]

We don't actually have to travel with Rogue to his master's place, btw. We can go separately and meet him there, if we're worried. I don't think we need to, but tossing it out there.

[Anastasia]

Re: Mind control. It's a valid tactic for sides to use on occasion, though in this case I felt it to be very unpleasant. I think it was worse in this case since it was out of battle and had a lot of potential to get outright long and messy. It's one t hing to be dominated and someone takes a turn to slap a dispel or a protection from evil on you, it's another for...that.

[Anastasia]

Re: Rogue talking. That wasn't me so much telling you to shut as Rogue not caring about the rest of the party at the moment. He came to bitch at Knight, not have an argument with everyone. After the first wave of bitching on both sides passed I felt he was more diplomatic, but I also think it's obvious he doesn't think much of Kam so far.

[VySaika]

Re: Confusion - Don't really think it was nessesary to me? I think we're faily good enough RPers here not to metagame, but this wasn't the big deal of the session to me. What I don't like is that because it took us, as players, a moment to decide what to do after the trees came down, it seemed like it was assumed that our characters just stopped moving and let Knight pull further and further ahead. She flat out should not have been able to outrun Kam or even make it to the stream before him unless the stream was right on the other side of the tree. Kinda agreeing with Drac that Kam's mobility advantages(as well as Knight's mobility issues what with being in heavy armor and all) felt like they were swept under the rug for the sake of drama. That wouldn't normally bother me, except that it happened in the same session as attempts at massive rules lawyering to further hinder our progress.

Re: Grapple - It goes fairly smoothly when the parties involved have the rules damn near memorized, and also when it's people who are actually grapplers doing it. Needless to say it's not something I will ever be doing in this game, what with my nob-full BAB, lol strength and MINUS EIGHT SIZE MOD. I think the problem here wasn't so much grapple as needing to do subdual damage. I probably could have done more there, but frankly Adail beating Knight's AC is about as likely as her beating Adail's. Possible, but not too likely. And a whole lot less happens when I manage to land a hit.

Re: PVP - Frankly, I'm of the nearly exact opposite of Rat here. I don't like in-party conflict of basically any stripe, and especially when it turns to flat out rolling against the other PCs. This is expressly why Adail isn't a preachy type celestial and doesn't attempt to convert Mari or Knight(though in Knight's case it's more that he sees her as less mortal, more Outsider without a home. She IS the way she IS, there is no changing that. It's her nature, as determined by her birth. Same as any Outsider). Nikki he works on a bit due to the promise to the Valk way back when and the fact that Nik seems like he's more receptive to it.

However, as Rat just pointed out, there will be moral conflicts, and I won't pretend they aren't there. Just don't expect me to really enjoy the arguing.

Though on that note Rat, I will ask that you please knock it off with the whole "Noooo Good in the party is bad! Do not want!" jokes? They were funny the first couple of times, but it's been overused to the point that I can't tell if you're joking or serious anymore, so it's getting on my nerves.

Re: Rogue - No, I'm not advocating everyone shutting up and letting Knight do all the talking whenever a card comes up. This particular time though, it was very much His Goal and Her Goal being at direct odds and letting her take the lead in talking it out seemed like the best idea. Or at least having us all talk it out and not going "NO TALK! ONLY VIOLENCE!". That's a really annoying stance to take when everyone else is trying to settle it with talking. A favorite saying of mine here is that it takes everyone to avoid combat, but only one person to force it. I'm glad Kam didn't just decide "screw it, swinging", but the vibe was there the whole time and it was...well, probably wouldn't have annoyed me so much if I weren't already frankly pissed off from the first half of the session, to be honest.

Otherwise, no Adail doesn't trust him at all, but he does trust Morwel. And if she's put even some small stake into what he does, Adail wants to play this out a little further, and definately talk to her about it, instead of just smiting him upside the head. He really doubts she'll approve of his preemptive strike idea there, and especially the methods he used to do it(and if she does aprove, you will get to see the Queen of all Eladrin chewed out by an irate Musteval. That shit is not Good.), so he's thinking that she may well decide this is a mistake after hearing that. Sure, this is me trying to second guess an entity that's several orders of magnitude wiser then I am, but eh.

Definately like the idea of recruiting him to help against the lich bitch, though. I'm a bit sad, OOC, that this seems like it's going to come up sooner then I expected. I won't have Sacred Flames or really any cool stuff to help for the fight with. ;_;

Re: GM derping - Think this session holds the record for that so far. I'm impressed~

And now to hit post and see how many people I've managed to piss off with this one. Please remember folks, I'm never actively trying to be a jerk, I'm just bluntly honest to an extreme.

[Dracos]

But I WILL get mad if people insist on shutting down the ability to actually talk this stuff out at all, and it felt like Kam was prepared to do that any second. It's not that I don't see your point though, it's very hard to trust someone capable of mindrape. I think it's an issue when mediation has some chance of success to keep tempers flaring. I think Rogue's rationale wasn't impossible to understand or anything, so.

Quite fair.  Kam WAS prepared to do that at any second...but neither did he actually do it.  Kam's an intimidation based character and when he sees threats to his friends or their ideas, sometimes he is going to posture quite threateningly about it.  Generally, this should actually be successful more often than it seems to because he's a terrifying presence to have angry at you (especially while in rage mode), and it should be encouraging for folks to not WANT to accelerate going into a combat state.  It more often produces the opposite though (Big scary guy, I'm going to argue angrily with him.  Why am I arguing angrily with the big guy who looks ready to stab me?  What was I thinking this would accomplish?).  Just want to say, that bothers me a bit :(  curious what ko thinks there.

I was, as I expressed to ko privately afterwards, disappointed with some of the choices with Rogue.  I was looking forward very much with the intent of being sympathetic to Rogue's plight.  Just like you, the mindrape put him solidly into the 'okay, he's someone to kill, not to listen to' range.  I was having Kam offer pretty hard the 'apologize for doing something horrible FIRST' route as a way to show "hey, I'm fighting for my freedom and desperate"...but all he gave was "I'm right, it's fine, anything to preserve my freedom is totally okay".  Kam isn't heartless, he heard what the guy was saying, but with Rogue responding with posturing to his demands for saying sorry it left little faith in his humanity as a character.  This really surprised me with a character taking the diplomatic route because I'd expect him to defuse Kam's rage, not just fuel it by being angry right back.  Kam's totally not a diplomat.  He's a barbaric fellow with strong opinions on what's right and wrong.  Expecting him to take a reconcilitory diplomatic take to keep things even is just not going to go well.  When NPCs are also stoneheaded after doing evil actions, it really pushes toward a conflict setup.

I really think it can't be overstated how very many other options Rogue had in Kam's eyes to approach Knight.  Even going with the assumption she was a horrible tyrant that would put him down by force, he could've casually waited in the safety of his allies or practically any group on the plane would've stood up to defend him if such an evil was coming his way and chose to attack first.  There is no shortage of great powers in this plane that would casually had put us down and left us trapped until we explained why we were trying to kill or capture him.  He could've opened with a duel, a debate, simply fled the plane entirely as he already demonstrate the ability to escape better than knight could easily follow.  He could've just gone to baator quietly and that'd for the most part stick an almost unclimbable wall between him and knight.  He could've done any number of approaches that didn't involve inciting betrayal and mindrape.

The end result is actually I think Kam's reflection on Rogue is far more extreme.  What he's seen is Knight brashly arguing to convince them that Rogue is the very essence of betrayal and does it at every interval, something he somewhat brushed off earlier, intending to make his own decision on it when they met...  Only to first see him incite betrayal in Knight against her party, then explicitly suggest anything is fair game for 'freedom', work very hard to convince knight to betray her own ideas and goals, and something else that I forgot.  He's seen someone who is extremely dangerous to even listen to as he is not only a very skilled talker, but also has no compunctions against using all matters of magic to deceive and control.  The notion of him going down to Baator is worrisome as no matter how much damage he does here, what he could cause if he was supplanted by devils would make this look like a stroll in the park.  The notion of sending him after the lich is tempting... but he's betrayal incarnate.  He's really dangerous.  Knight was totally right earlier and can't even see it as she's under his deceptions already.  Fighting a lich at all is a very dangerous proposition without having someone swap sides on you mid fight and conveniently take advantage of a lich being there to turn a dangerous encounter (Him vs all of us) into a pretty safe one (Him sniping us from behind while the lich and her soldiers has us pinned down).  Traveling with him is simple foolhardiness.  This is someone who has shown at least once that they can telepathically mind control at least one party member.  Maybe they can for the others, maybe not.  Kam doesn't know.  He does know that the party doesn't all have mind protection stuff.  He does know that people do need sleep and do separate to go to the bathroom.  He doesn't want to have to worry that when nikkolai went to the bathroom, he got mind controlled to believe whatever Rogue wants.  He doesn't know what limits Rogue has, but he's already seen the most knowledgeable person about him taken in twice in short order without any apparent effort on Rogue's part.  He doesn't want to be anywhere near this guy without good protections.

Kam would like to haul the rest of the party aside without him there to discuss this and solidly voice this opinion.  For the most balanced take, I am fine with us heading toward his patron (without him) and that can be tossed out as a plan, but Kam would almost assume at this point if Detect Evil returned Negative (which it will apparently) that it is simply part of his deceptions.

~~~

Actually, an interesting thing.  By the rules, Rogue should've just lost all of his paladin of freedom abilities.  Sure he may be chaotic good if I detected on him (which I was about to say I'd do as something to at least help quiet Kam's worries a bit), but that was a very explicit violation of the individual liberty requirement of the class.  I suppose he's really a magical fake paladin of freedom who can do whatever he wants :P

Code of Conduct: A paladin of freedom must be of chaotic good alignment and loses all class abilities if he ever willingly commits an evil act. Additionally, a paladin of freedom's code requires that he respect individual liberty, help those in need (provided they do not use the help for lawful or evil ends), and punish those who threaten or curtail personal liberty.

[Anastasia]

Re: Confusion - Don't really think it was nessesary to me? I think we're faily good enough RPers here not to metagame, but this wasn't the big deal of the session to me. What I don't like is that because it took us, as players, a moment to decide what to do after the trees came down, it seemed like it was assumed that our characters just stopped moving and let Knight pull further and further ahead. She flat out should not have been able to outrun Kam or even make it to the stream before him unless the stream was right on the other side of the tree. Kinda agreeing with Drac that Kam's mobility advantages(as well as Knight's mobility issues what with being in heavy armor and all) felt like they were swept under the rug for the sake of drama. That wouldn't normally bother me, except that it happened in the same session as attempts at massive rules lawyering to further hinder our progress.

Yeah. The main problem I had was that it was broken up and confusing, so I was kinda running it by ear and communication was very poor as a result. I was telling Rat one thing in PM and others in #dunes and it wasn't really balancing out very well. The concept of it wasn't bad, but the execution on my part was downright rotten. Better coordination would have helped, what I should have done is called init right away to streamline things.

Re: PVP - Frankly, I'm of the nearly exact opposite of Rat here. I don't like in-party conflict of basically any stripe, and especially when it turns to flat out rolling against the other PCs. This is expressly why Adail isn't a preachy type celestial and doesn't attempt to convert Mari or Knight(though in Knight's case it's more that he sees her as less mortal, more Outsider without a home. She IS the way she IS, there is no changing that. It's her nature, as determined by her birth. Same as any Outsider). Nikki he works on a bit due to the promise to the Valk way back when and the fact that Nik seems like he's more receptive to it.

However, as Rat just pointed out, there will be moral conflicts, and I won't pretend they aren't there. Just don't expect me to really enjoy the arguing.

I agree with actual conflict, though my definition of it is a bit loose. Arguing reasonably over something like Rogue? This is interesting and lets out chances for outstanding role play. There's some really good moral and ethical dilemmas here, ones I hope we can handle like adults all around. No, this isn't a cloaked 'you're doing it wrong!', just saying.

Definately like the idea of recruiting him to help against the lich bitch, though. I'm a bit sad, OOC, that this seems like it's going to come up sooner then I expected. I won't have Sacred Flames or really any cool stuff to help for the fight with. ;_;

Agreed mostly. I like that you took two disparate things and used them together to solve a potential problem. It's really good RP and problem solving, as well as opening up a new path to work with. It helps things feel like it's your guy's journey, not a path on DM rails. The idea of this happening occurred to me a little before Nikkolai ran with that idea; I'm impressed nonetheless.

[Anastasia]

Actually, an interesting thing.  By the rules, Rogue should've just lost all of his paladin of freedom abilities.  Sure he may be chaotic good if I detected on him (which I was about to say I'd do as something to at least help quiet Kam's worries a bit), but that was a very explicit violation of the individual liberty requirement of the class.  I suppose he's really a magical fake paladin of freedom who can do whatever he wants :P

Code of Conduct: A paladin of freedom must be of chaotic good alignment and loses all class abilities if he ever willingly commits an evil act. Additionally, a paladin of freedom's code requires that he respect individual liberty, help those in need (provided they do not use the help for lawful or evil ends), and punish those who threaten or curtail personal liberty.

I tend to give paladin and paladin types a lot of the benefit of the doubt regarding Code related issues. It is a borderline case at best and it's an interesting shading of what he is as a Card vs what he's trying to be as a paladin of freedom. This wasn't a randomly done act without thinking it through. <_<

[VySaika]

Oh, yeah, arguing over something like Rogue is fine. It's more the conflicts of stuff like "hey, heal this guy so we can interrogate him then kill him." "Um, no." that came up in an earlier session and such that irritate me.

[Dracos]

Blunt is fine :P

Otherwise, no Adail doesn't trust him at all, but he does trust Morwel. And if she's put even some small stake into what he does, Adail wants to play this out a little further, and definately talk to her about it, instead of just smiting him upside the head. He really doubts she'll approve of his preemptive strike idea there, and especially the methods he used to do it(and if she does aprove, you will get to see the Queen of all Eladrin chewed out by an irate Musteval. That shit is not Good.), so he's thinking that she may well decide this is a mistake after hearing that. Sure, this is me trying to second guess an entity that's several orders of magnitude wiser then I am, but eh.

I agree here that one of the weirder sides of this is Morwel directly interacting with and sponsoring someone who was so willing to use methods like that.  I suppose greater powers make mistakes too, but it just seems very odd.  I was much expecting someone who was solidly good and provided a moral dilemma through that as we are both Good...but have diametrically opposed objectives.  What I found was someone who I'd have trouble believing is good, even though I'm able to detect that he's not evil with just a glance.

[Dracos]

Hmm.  The stories of earlier of him 'freeing false friends' gain a whole new level of creepy in context of last session.  It says that he's done this crap before successfully rather than failing.

[VySaika]

I'm betting the issue is that while he was around Morwel, she didn't see any of that. Just his own desires for freedom. And I'm betting that yes, the personification of betrayal in human form can in fact pull the wool over the eyes of even a planar power without overly trying. Remember, no amount of power or protections can stop you from getting betrayed by someone if you draw the Rogue. This is getting into the realm of metagaming though, so I'll stop now.

[Dracos]

btw, OOC I think the Nikki using Rogue to attack his lich is super cool.  The above is mostly from the IC Kam angle on it.

Mmm, should wait for the others to ring in, but right now it looks like we'll either be starting next session heading toward Morwel (which is actually only at her behest since she doesn't live somewhere you can walk or travel to) or with a party pow-wow on it?  Assuming it'd be good to get the latter done with...do folks want to try and meet to have the pow-wow side of things done in a side session so we can move on?  Or way too aggressive pacing? :)

[Anastasia]

I figure you guys need to have a private talk IC to hash this all out. Extra sessions for most of us don't work that well, though, so it'll probably be the start of next session.