Feedback- Toss a bone~

[Dracos]

Mmm.

I will note that I liked the amount of time we were in Earth Plane.  5-20 sessions is a nice general size category for spending 'mostly' circulating one plane.  Compared with Stratusberg where the air plane was largely 'one trip, one city' it allowed for more depth, more experiencing the flavor of the plane, more denizens and all that good stuff.  What conflicts against this is when we land and a card is our only objective and also an objective that says 'leave the plane' rather than experience it and find other objectives of interest there.  Part of what made the earth plane work well there was the card was very far away behind a lot of obstacles.

I think I'll differ here with Rat on that I would prefer that it be unaware that there's a huge risk/time demand on the far away card in the future.  Knight will want to generally keep heading toward the card anyway as every action, and a 'need to move there immediately' makes it feel like a dick move to go 'and let's go free some slaves from the dao while we let your brother get tortured and possibly killed'.

This isn't to say I'm opposed to them being in real danger.  I just don't want to know about it while we're half a plane or more away.  When we're like say, in the same city?  That's awesome timing if it needs to happen.

[Carthrat]

All we can really do is act as things happen to us and deal with things as they appear. Sometimes we'll be pressed, sometimes we won't, etc. I like it when things fit together.

Cards do have the long-range psychic connection going. Granted, I didn't expect actual communication to be possible, but it apparently is in some cases, so it'll probably come up again.

[Dracos]

Rat has a cool avatar. :)

Hunting down a neat goliath avatar that isn't naked barbarian with a great axe to join in the fun is apparently exceedingly hard :(   I've found one sorta that's at least civilized warrior...with a great axe.

[Dracos]

Good session. :)  Light, but a good flavor change from the Earth plane.  It allowed both Nikkolai and Knight to expound on their nearby goals in their personal quest, got rid of my curse, had nikkolai be awesome, and also introduced a Courre into the group.  It's a shame mari missed it, but overall good stuff.  We're set up nicely to head off toward the White Knights, and there's a whole lineup of major quests that have been nicely introduced for when we finish the hardsoil stuff.

Dune also gave a fair talking to on planar views after the session that I appreciated.  Still have my view, but I see his more now.

Negatives?  Kind of disliked being written out for not rolling aid.  I suppose I should've but it seemed obviously in the bag with knight rolling 30, and I said as much in ooc.  Adail I suppose is right that I should always roll on every opportunity to do so, but yeah, either way, didn't like that we paid more attention to the dice than what characters were doing.

Really find Rat raising 'death isn't harsh enough, resurrection isn't tough enough' to be super irritating (especially for someone trading permadeath as a penalty for additional powers even though your viewpoint isn't new for you).  I'm on death 2 and character 2 at this point, having already sat out a session in the past for dying and whipped up a new character following it.  This death involved getting a geas and getting cursed, a plot line that ran for six weeks and nearly got us all killed by Ogremoch's minions.  It also permanently drained 3 hp from nikkolai, providing a chance for nikkolai to really solidly pay it forward against dealing with his lich.  While I wouldn't have blinked an eye at a personal quest being required as part of getting the curse off, it really annoys me to see this thrown up post session.  Dune made good choices for keeping the game going, and I'm annoyed at seeing a doubly sympathetic 'resurrection should've totally been tougher'.  Really, what were you looking for?  Con drain?  Losing a Level?  Some other horribly obnoxious permanent cost?  Having to quest for two weeks while I sat around suffering because I hit a 5 percent you die chance?  Seriously, I've yet to see a game where this is brought up and death was treated trivially by the players, but it's always brought up when someone comes back from the dead in a manner that lets them keep playing the game and really at this point ticks me off to hear it because it's never in a constructive 'you know, this death and resurrection would've been cooler and more dramatic in the game if we did this group involving activity'.  It's never 'Okay, dead player, while they're dicking around with resurrection, you're going to get a side quest running during the session doing things in your heaven or hell so that you can keep playing'.  It's always 'oh, dice came up bad, hit the player.  No, hit them harder, they haven't suffered enough for letting their character get killed'.

Anyhow, had to get that off my chest.

[Carthrat]

The basic reason for my complaint was that death is a powerful, life-changing event (literally, ha ha ha), and if you're going to have people coming back from the dead then it needs to be treated with some weight. Your resurrection actually promised this, given that we needed to make a pact with an evil god to get it done (although the fact that it could easily be done elsewhere kinda belies this, and makes our circumstances what's dramatic, not actually dying yourself.) But...

The curse, geas, what-have- you- they did not come into play very much at all, so I find your complaint about needing to struggle with it for six weeks to be somewhat flat. No effort was necessary to 'cure' it, either, we basically showed up in Arborea and It Was Done. There were no issues involved in getting it done, I would've been happy enough to undertake some quest or go through some process or whatever. Instead... more convenience. The world seems to exist to solve our problems and provide for our wants sometimes. This isn't even unique to you- it's not every game you get a pegasus just by asking for it- but I think this trait is particularly heightened in this case, since all we really needed to do to cure the curse was apparently live long enough for someone to show up and fix it for us.

I don't think it was just a 'bad dicing situation' that got you killed, either.

Finally, I thought the rest of your party being basically guilted into trading HP for your problems to be solved was kinda lame. It's not like we can say no without looking like enormous dicks. I didn't mention this because Nikkolai seemed to have fun anyway so what do I know? But this is what I thought.

[Dracos]

It wasn't just a bad dicing situation.  It was a stupid death.  It was me taking a ridiculously unnecessary risk that raised the chance of dying from a flat zero to five percent in order to make very sure that the harpy queen didn't just casually go over and skewer the heavily wounded mari.  It was also something that had it gone slightly differently we would've just been going 'that was awesome' in the ooc room, much as we had been mere moments before when I was pondering out loud about doing it.  But the circumstances OF the death don't really matter.    I can't think of anyone who particularly enjoys getting their character killed, much less having other players go 'you should stay dead longer so that it is more meaningful and we have to struggle over the character's death while they miss out on 1-3 weeks of gaming'.

I'd have put no complaints (and expected) a quest on it.  I would've had little complaints about having to bear it a while longer.  That said it was't the 'curse'.  The whole ogremoch plot arc basically revolved around them profiting as much as possible from Kam's death and nearly got everyone killed.  I'd say Dune gave it a reasonable amount of screen time.  It was kind of lame demanding an hp payment from other party members, but it's really no more different than the go to of losing con or xp for it.  Overall, I think Nikkolai rose well to it and we can make interesting play off of what happened.  But the details of the resurrection follow up also don't matter much.  It just bothers me that this flail against convenience for the sake of keeping is never phrased first in "Hey, dune you're handing us too much neat stuff'.  It's always phrased in a 'man, death should've been more epic, resurrection should've been harder' and it bothers me.

It's fine you have a very strong opinion of death, but we live in a game world where we regularly go out and KILL things and things try and kill us.  Just because they are there!  Where gods regularly resurrect both good and bad guys based on vague things.  Where folks who die go to another plane that you can travel to with a spell.  You can kill a guy, plane shift, and go kill him again if you want to be a real jerk about it!  It's not that my opinion on it is right or yours is.  There's one opinion that really shape's how death is handled in the game, which is dune's.  I think overall he's taken a pretty reasonable angle to it, and it annoys me seeing a session closer with him apologizing to claims that he's not harsh enough.

Anyhow, I'm argumentative, but I didn't really want to make a long thing out of this.  I more just wanted to shout out "Hey, this annoys me."

[Carthrat]

I'm sorry if you didn't like my phrasing, but I don't know how else to put it concisely. I'll try again.

The world should not bend around the PCs wants and whims. It is one thing to strive for what you want, and quite another for the world to simply give it to you on a plate. The world did not hand you your ressurection on a plate; it came with strings attached. I liked that! (In fact, the whole Nixale segment was pretty much the most fun part of the game for me so far, for a number of reasons which I relayed to Dune in PM a while back.) Those strings were just randomly cut with no effort on our part, save enduring them long enough (which itself wouldn't have been so bad if it, I dunno, ebbed over time or something- the details DO matter! The game IS the details in many respects.) I didn't like that so much, not for dealing with something that seemed so important and dramatic as a soul-binding curse.

I dislike this insinuation that we run around killing stuff just because it's there, because I'm pretty sure we don't actually do that. That's a lame D&D aphorism that needs to die.

As far as the fact that ressurection happens.. well... I can't really argue that it doesn't exist. I don't like it much as a plot device and want it to be treated with a certain gravitas if it has to happen, which I think is a pretty reasonable thing. It shouldn't be something you undertake lightly. Ogremoch's deal ensured that we'd continue to take dying fairly seriously. The karma that kicked in later to free you of the constraints... caused me to question it.

It makes me sad to see the issues death and harsh curses and other things raise neatly dealt with by the wayside in order to 'keep the game going smoothly'. Is that how other obstacles in our path will be rectified in the future? It kinda saps the integrity of the world. I appreciate that this is a game, and obviously you want people to have fun which they can't really do whilst not playing due to being dead- but it's also a collective story (sorta) and at least some attention should be paid to principles of storytelling.

[Carthrat]

On a more generally meta level-

-Don't start an argument if you don't want to argue. I can't help wanting to respond when my comments are questioned.

-Yeah, Dune lays down the law, but it's clear we both also have our own ideas on what's hot and what's not, and if there's anywhere they should be voiced in relation to this game, surely it is whilst giving feedback? In the end I accept what happens and continue, the game is too fun to push too hard on this (but I'll always defend my viewpoints regardless.)

[VySaika]

Staying the hell out of this one in general since for the most part I don't actually care, but I didn't mind the silver platter fix in this case. It realy affirmed for Adail(and to a lesser extent for me, since I've been having him act like this without any real garuntee that's how the world worked) that the Good guys really do take care of thier own. It's not a case of "oh the Powers That Be can just fix everything for us~" since we sure as hell wouldn't come to them for everything, and if we did they'd stop helping pretty quick, but in a case like this where there was de nada we could do about it on our own? Yeah, it works for them to help out. Sure, they could have made us find the door to the Court of Stars on our own, sure they could have asked for some quest in exchange, but you know what? Sometimes it's nice to just see Good being Good.

[Dracos]

On the meta level, that's fair.  On the obvious meta level though, we've not seen eye to eye on death for the many other times we've talked about it.  Having the long argument won't change that.  I'm the same way where I can (and sometimes do) go forever in an argument.  Overall, I'm a believer that if the principles of storytelling involve players sitting out for long lengths of time, they can go screw themselves.  There's lots of ways that don't do it, but I appreciate in a weekly game that resurrection is available and that the follow ups for that happening don't last forever either.

I took your statement harsher than it was.  My own bad on that.  Rereading it, you were really always just complaining about how it ended rather than the route.  Sorry about bitching.

Anyhow, we didn't really do nothing though either.  We went to a place where there's not one but thousands of people that could break that curse and is the bastion of my own allies.  It's not like we continued wandering through the planes and it was just dropped on us.  While Dune took a 'holy spirit from above cures it', it really wouldn't have changed very much had we walked a bit further and asked where the nearest CR20+ holy good eladarian.  We were along a path where it was inevitable that in short order we were going to be meeting a holy power capable of dealing with the curse who was friendly not just 'oh another band of adventurers'.  Like you have your cards and things, both Kam and Adail have higher planar allies around Arborea.  Encountering them is in part a toss back both to backstory and to the Knight of the Stars feat kam has.

[Anastasia]

Negatives?  Kind of disliked being written out for not rolling aid.  I suppose I should've but it seemed obviously in the bag with knight rolling 30, and I said as much in ooc.  Adail I suppose is right that I should always roll on every opportunity to do so, but yeah, either way, didn't like that we paid more attention to the dice than what characters were doing.

I thought I'd said OOC that if you wanted to count you needed to aid Knight here, but a log-check revealed I didn't. Whoooops!  I was using that to keep track of who was actively involved and gambling on the outcome. My fault.

I'm sorry if you didn't like my phrasing, but I don't know how else to put it concisely. I'll try again.

The world should not bend around the PCs wants and whims. It is one thing to strive for what you want, and quite another for the world to simply give it to you on a plate.

This I agree with 500%. The gameworld does not automatically bend to the whims of the PCs; the PCs effect the world and it effects them back in turn. Now speaking of karma, this doesn't mean it's the end of it. A powerful entity did you a favor when you were down. There's nothing wrong with this: It's a Good aligned paragon. This doesn't mean she pats you on the end and forgets she ever helped you. You're in as much debt to her as you were to Ogremoch. She's not going to gank your soul or make your life miserable, it's not what she is. These things have a way of coming around and evening out in the long run in the Heavens, I'm aware of this and making things meaningful is something I strive for. Unlike Ogremoch, it may be something that helps you even more in the long run at danger to yourself at the short term, or a sacrifice, or something else in tune with the desires of Chaotic Good.

I gave up Kam's revival easily enough because I wanted to keep the game smoothly running and Drac not sitting out for multiple sessions. On the other hand, it wasn't a free cookie that negated the gravity of death. By the same token, this easy recovery is a chance for me to expand the gameworld and give you more meaty situations to work with, not just waving a magic wand to make everything all better.

In other words, it's all good, let's have fun. I know what I'm doing! Really! <_< I'm not trying to discourage feedback but let's try and not turn it into ARGUMENT WARS 9000 PC DEATH EDITION!!!.

Staying the hell out of this one in general since for the most part I don't actually care, but I didn't mind the silver platter fix in this case. It realy affirmed for Adail(and to a lesser extent for me, since I've been having him act like this without any real guarantee that's how the world worked) that the Good guys really do take care of thier own. It's not a case of "oh the Powers That Be can just fix everything for us~" since we sure as hell wouldn't come to them for everything, and if we did they'd stop helping pretty quick, but in a case like this where there was de nada we could do about it on our own? Yeah, it works for them to help out. Sure, they could have made us find the door to the Court of Stars on our own, sure they could have asked for some quest in exchange, but you know what? Sometimes it's nice to just see Good being Good.

That too. Ogremoch demanded tribute to deign to save Kamvakua, and even then it was a dreadful thing. Good did it because it's the right thing to do, while expecting that when the time is right, Kamvakua would choose to do the right thing as well.

[Dracos]

I dunno the statements on debt in this case is weird to me.  Reason:

If a generic Moon Maiden came down anyway and asked kam to go risk his life for some good cause that didn't involve abandoning a good cause he was already risking his life for?  He'd go do it.  It wouldn't matter that he didn't owe that specific agent of a good god anything or that he owed her his life.  It's the kind of thing that makes a good character rather than a neutral one.  I find it harder to envision debt to good people as a meaningful statement.  It doesn't have any dramatic ring to me.

I like Adail's 'good looks after good' and generally agree with that play on it.  Maybe the fact that she did a big favor mean that she actually has kam in a queue of 'I'll tap this person if I have a task that fits them' but it really doesn't strike me as something that matters in the grand scheme of good.  I'd be really surprised if she showed up and phrased "I'd like you to go do this task for the good of Selune because I did this thing for you and you owe me" instead of "I'd like you to go do this task for the good of Selune.  The task is...".

[Carthrat]

Even a Good character can have weird neuroses. Maybe she'll want you to mow her lawn or something.

Although in principle I agree. Being forced to do good is only dramatic if for some reason you wouldn't normally. Which may well be the case for most characters, but you kind of expect it from holy dudes.

[Dracos]

Dune put feedback in the gossip board.  Bad dune :P

Good session agreed.  I wasn't as drowsy during it as I worried about but still need to eye my sleep schedule so I stop bombing on tuesday nights.  Dune was worried I wasn't in the attention getting, but I figured it was a natural shift from the end of last session being about Kam to this session flowing through Adail, then Knight, Then Mari, then Nikki.  So kam's at the front of the loop :P  If things worked that way, which that don't.

Neat change for mari, though I have to admit, it's kind of a pity she didn't really stay as Pixie mari for any real length of time (1 battle, 2 social encounters).  That said, she's totally picking up Eva's traits.  She is now eva's spiritual successor.  Don't die!

Call out to Knight, really appreciated the lead in on rage as part of combat.  Kam has quite a bit of exploration on that in his character, so it was fun to get to expose on it in discussion.  Thanks. :)

The philosophy bit around rogue went a little overboard.  Both on my end and as Kam I sort of faded out of caring.  I really do appreciate that having Rogue as a potential paladin of Freedom is a super cool ethics twist for the party.  It's a challenge for Knight as the rest of the party can conflict about the whole nature bit.  It was spun off by the uber-boss of Kam's knighthood, so that was also a nice conflict of interest.  I like that.  But by the third go around of arguments, I certainly no longer cared as a player.  Whatever is going to happen with him will happen depending on how things turn out when we meet him.  Not a single word was uttered that really was going to change that after establishing the base premise of "He's been 'freed' and he doesn't want to go back for his own reasons".  I guess that's mean, it really was a nice bit for Knight to express more strongly her "They Must Be One"...but it means when the discussion on the exact same thing happens, only with Rogue as a speaker too, the whole set will sound tired.

Glad to see backstory alliance type stuff coming in.  I found that fun, and I bet Adail did as well.  If we're hunting rogue, I suspect we can leverage that further as we travel arborea.  Innkeepers with favors, travelers Kam or adail have helped (or have helped us), all would be very cool to come across and go with the flavor of the characters :).  I dunno if I should be whipping up characters kam met in the past or whatnot, glancing sidelong a bit at that.  I lean more no, but it is a collaborative fun making bit.

[Anastasia]

How did you guys like the bonuses you got in the dream, or the sand in Adail's case?