The Gossip Board

[Carthrat]

oh boy

Many classes receive what I feel are an inappropriate quantity of skills, especially when compared to similar classes (fighter vs. barb! the barb's already better at fighting, but he gets more and better skills to boot...)

Many skills scale exceptionally poorly, particularly athletics skills which are entirely outclassed by various contrivances later. What's wrong with high jumps?

Several skills should really have been parceled together, e.g. hide/move silently, spot/search, open locks/disable device etc.

Because of the way some skills work (again, stuff like hide/move silent, search, disable device etc) they can ruin attempts to puzzle things out or apply certain methods to some situations (hiding isn't hard if nobody's looking for you; the fact that many people can make spot checks can completely fuck some infiltrations that shouldn't reallllly fail...)

Social skills are one of my biggest rants and can be applied to many systems. The issues are generally ones of scope (i.e. 'what can these skills do?'), applicability/power (i.e. 'so just HOW CONVINCING is +20 diplo compared to +5 diplo?), the fact that people are really complex folks and generally you cannot shift someone's viewpoint that easily in a single interaction (i.e. 'can I roll diplo to instantly befriend my archrival? nat 20!!1'), the fact that sense motive as a lie detector is really fucking gay (i.e. 'IS HE LYING YES HE IS GUYS KILL HIM'), arbitrarily scaling DCs (i.e. 'well you have +20 to diplo so I'll set the difficulty at 30. Oh, you only have 15? Well it'll be 25 then.'), that sometimes their presence means otherwise reasonable statements are taken horribly (i.e. 'why won't you ally with me, the orcs will totally crush you otherwise')

Some skills are fucking godly and broken, e.g. tumble/UMD. By 'broken' I mean 'if you can have these skills, you will have them or you aren't playing as well as you could be. No questions.'

[Anastasia]

Is that all, Rat? Tell us how you really feel!

[Carthrat]

I HATE DIPLOMACY CHECKS

WHY CAN'T I RUN UP WALLS WITH BALANCE

WHY DO I NEED A FEAT FOR SURVIVAL TO WORK

[Anastasia]

With epic balance, you can balance on a cloud! Isn't that a worthwhile use if you can get DC 120?

[Carthrat]

yeaaaaaah but I think the DC should be like 30 <_<

[Carthrat]

Ok, maybe 40. The point is, 120 is too high. <_<

[Dracos]

They were playing hardball, no doubt. There was room for what you said - look at what Adail did with the information on the Xorn king. A proper counter-offer did get consideration, but they weren't going to hand it to you. They were in a position of power and weren't going to let up. The design of it was to place the choices on Kamvakua, who as an exalted character I was hoping would thrive in this sort of incredibly difficult situation where the easier path is one of folding to evil, and the hard and possibly lethal path is one of defying it.

eh.  It didn't come across that way to me.  Maybe I dropped the ball on it but really the easier path was 'lash out and be barbaric' and the harder path was 'do anything but'.  I dunno.

I did think it would have been IC for Kamvakua do to something besides rage. He's been played as a noble barbarian type, yeah? His entire PrC is about righteous wrath and his feats give him unusual control while in a rage. That ties into the above about facing a difficult situation versus evil, and hopefully using that rage as a weapon, not as a constraint to bind Kamvakua.

Yeah, we ended up going for different things there.  I played up the rage because it felt too much like shots at his way of life rather than something on a good/evil axis.  It also was effective evil treachery.  It was the type of thing that largely didn't go well in Kam's experience range.  Situations where he has to sit and convince the other guy not to wipe out a group of people by talking to them isn't something he does much at all.  He glares and suggests that they take a different route through another plane instead.

I suspect had kam not just been the total epicenter of "Hey, I offered you stuff in good faith for free" I might have played him more on a diplomacy front there, but it really did feel like that was the third time they backstabbed them and was doing it in a fashion that was just anathema to him.  I really think I would've had it react better had it not been so "I have no interest in anything else whatsoever".

But maybe I'll glance out of character and also note I'm not the biggest fan of playing out tight diplomatic scenes with a non-diplomatic focused character.  Rat likes that more (and power to him there).  For me, it's less my taste and I'll often end up doing somewhat poorly in that fashion if I'm not expecting to be doing it as I'll tend to lean more toward "well, trying to be super clever in language is not what this guy is about, how can I express what he's about?"  Here I went tribal/furious/Freedom or Death.  I did play with the 'can think clearly' bit in rage, but I took it more on the line that he wasn't going into berserker about the setup coming from 'one of his own type of people' and less 'I'm calm and serene despite being in the grasp of fury', at least on this take of it.  Kam was angry about the whole thing, and not because he was whipping himself into a battle rage, but that a repeated offer of slavery or death for his friends was anathema.

In retrospect, there was a lot of cooler things I could've done along that vein...but even knowing it, I really would've still taken the same general direction rather than the route reached victory in this case.  I mean, that's partially why these are RP games and not chess.  Choosing the wrong actions for in character reasons is part of the game.

[Dracos]

Ok, maybe 40. The point is, 120 is too high. <_<

30 is a min of level 27.  At this point everyone can fly freely because a magical item of flight that takes no space is effectively 3 coppers investment to them at this point. :P

They all should be riding their little yellow clouds.

[Anastasia]

Ok, maybe 40. The point is, 120 is too high. <_<

It depends on the campaign in question, though I agree with the underlying point that balance needs to be fucking useful sometime before mid-high epic.

[Carthrat]

Nah, not 30 ranks. I mean 30 on the skill check.

I mean, this doesn't just apply to balance; stuff like climb/jump etc could also use useful applications later on. It does very heavily depend on game tone though. Sometimes you really don't want impossible things to be possible without magic or something.

[Dracos]

And sometimes in magic heavy worlds, you wonder why anyone would be such an idiot as to practice athletics where you can jump a mighty ten feet high over magic where you can jump over a mountain.

[Dracos]

Anyhow, I should yammer on desired direction~

I would much rather head to Arborea than to Stratusberg right now.  We can bug the air denizens on our way back.  This is totally driven by greed of getting uncursed, but also that there's a lot of neat folks there.  Adail's knights are there, which make for a good set of recruits and they might be able to help me out (Unlikely).

  The Court of the Stars is there and they make it their business that cool places don't get overrun by evil because they like having party spots.  They'd definitely be able to fix kam's curse no problems.  Challenge?  They have a moving front door that is findable because the queen wants us to come by, not because we want to find it.  Mari actually would probably find the place fun though and Kam would totally not mind swinging by if we get a chance.

There's the elvish cities (land of the dead) that provide a very solid 'if we can't go there' recruitment and curse fixing spot.  Personally, I think it'd be fun to head into there for a short while, check out the rising tree architecture and the homes of various patrons of good, possibly hear a little planar news on other Cards, and well just give greetings again.

I'm hoping it's a given that any knowledge that isn't in the books that is created for arborea can be just considered 'already known' by Kam or Adail given they both spent quite some time there.  Maybe not fine details, but 'where x cool cities are' certainly :)

[Carthrat]

Technically we have time to do both, so.

[Sierra]

We likely do. For me it's a matter of which is going to take longer, though. I mean, we don't have a ton to do in Stratusberg, right? Find out who the local head honchos are, talk them into helping, basically. Getting Kam uncursed soon is obviously desirable, but it doesn't really factor into diplomacy and that's all Stratusberg should involve. Unless they demand that we perform a QUEST or something first (and if they do, we can still just say fuck it and do that on the way back), that's pretty much it. Seems to me that it's easy enough to knock that out before jumping to another plane where we're not 100% sure of a way back.

[Sierra]

It occurs to me that it's kind of a dick move to say, "Yeah, Kam can deal with being cursed for a while." I just figure help from Stratusberg is likely to get there sooner.