The Coffee Table

[Navilee]

Getting XP only for killing things encourages amoral killers.

We didn't truly do anything other than kill, though.  Well, you did the killing.  :p  I actually figured the break-in XP was rolled into the combat, considering we killed all four and took a whopping total of 2 damage.

Loot, boo.

Without personalizing hauls (which would strain credibility somewhat that they just happened to have one item of relative value for each member, etc or simply handing over a pile of gold, it is hard to avoid having loot hauls.  Especially as D&D is primarily an equipment-driven system whereas Iron Heroes is not (to the degree they have an optional abstract money system once you actually hit rich).

Incentives for performing things in a cool fashion may be nice.  As opposed to penalties for slaying everything and whatnot.

I second this. Ad hoc XP awards for fast-talking (and not simply a die roll, either; it is easy to fall into the trap of letting a die talk you out of a situation which strains credibility to a degree) or avoidance or even fighting with your head are a definite step in the right direction.

You should've made us all work harder to surprise the halflings, and definitely shouldn't have just given us a full party surprise round. 

I was incredibly surprised that the two of us who circled around got a surprise round.  And I also did Summon Monster incorrectly as they act on the round they get summoned.  'Tis not MtG.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveBadBand We're these guys.  That's hillarious and awesome. 

You are the evil one, not us!

My thoughts:

I enjoyed the session; the intro was a little abrupt, but that can be forgiven.  I would have liked more rear-end interaction with that unfortunate gnome, but I will live without.

All-around, an enjoyable game.  And isn't that the true measure?

[Dracos]

Loot, boo.

Without personalizing hauls (which would strain credibility somewhat that they just happened to have one item of relative value for each member, etc or simply handing over a pile of gold, it is hard to avoid having loot hauls.  Especially as D&D is primarily an equipment-driven system whereas Iron Heroes is not (to the degree they have an optional abstract money system once you actually hit rich).

I actually really liked the salary idea because it was something that handled both the 'why do you always get gold' and abstracted away the loot concept.

Ignoring my own general gripes for a moment, there's a really good reason to want to abstract that away.  It positively cripples normal humanoid opponents if you don't give them reasonable magical equipment for their level (10 percent effectiveness drop at least, more as levels go higher and your wealth is a bigger part of your character).  A level 6 character with magic armor and weaponry does more damage, dodges things easier, and hits easier than one without such.  But what happens if you give them reasonable magic equipment?  Then the players get it afterwards and as they already have reasonable equipment, their wealth skyrockets.  It's why a lot of DMs do tend toward monsterous opponents (aside from them being easier to make) because monsterous opponents are powerful without necessarily swinging around a whole set of things the players instantly get.  I know, the archetype: it's really cool to see an enemy use a magic toy you'll get after the battle!  but it means that wealth tends to grow quickly.

Abstracting it away means that enemies could hold more magic items and shit all the time.  They can come at us with all kinds of neat stuff...and if we don't get it when they die, its not a big deal.

But I'm too whiny on loot :P

[Dracos]

Anyhow, feedback on last session and the intermediate time:

You're an amazingly flexible DM rulewise.  That's really cool.  Hope that ends up resulting in a good game for all.  You say you keep calibrating, and I guess you are.  So far we haven't had very exciting combat though, and I think that's possibly because our enemies don't show enough intent when they have the option to and there are few of them (Equal to less than the party size).

In the game, we're perhaps being too special agent style for jon, who I think is expecting us to be more wild killing style.  I know while I was quite unhappy during the first encounter, it was also that I felt I'd be interferring with the others trying to be cool.  I was really quite confused at Merc's reason to not kill them right away in the OOC room, and I waited longer trying to figure out thinking the rest of the party was doing something.  Anyhow, I'll kill them more frequently in the future.  As merc said, I aleph'd myself.  Just generally to the others, much more up to playful teasing when I'm having fun then when I'm not.  Hearing jokes about it when I'm mentally going "If I stab these now, Sim won't get to do her cool swap thing she's trying to do" was really irritating :(.  Anyhow, I'm rusty at playing evil and been erring on the too good side.  I'll err more on the people dead side :P

As to how long it took, scenes will expand to fill the time unless they are time boxed by npcs or Dracos >_>.  Well, just meaning anyhow, most players will take as long as our given.  If there's no time pressure to figure something out, they will take a long time deliberating both OOC and IC about it.  There should've been more risk about it.  Having one of the two warforged (or having more warforged so they could do this) wander around, be able to potentially overhear, and or other pressures on not taking forever would've aided here.  As it was, those guys were fixtures.  They didn't move or act as people at all really outside of when we talked at them.  At the least, they get to keep making checks while I'm shadowing.  For them (and most), it is irrelevant, they can't roll that high, but just saying.  There was lots of ways they could've added non-combat challenge into the event.

Anyhow, the second encounter started poorly in a few ways.  The first of which is that, as Impulse and Alis both said ooc, there wasn't a visible value behind killing the titan outside of killing the titan.  There's lots of ways to do this.  Having the titan visably offense, a menace, smashing buildings and things is a good one.  Just being a giant isn't quite good enough.  Having such things in the way to our end objective is a lot more effective than after we've gotten it (and thus want to avoid combat because combat is the only way we get a lose condition after that point!).  Any passive encounters should generally be before we hit our objective for the boss.  If it isn't, then it needs some stuff to make our characters not want to skip it (We don't.  I'm a combat nut :P).  Other ways we could've been incentivized here IC could've been having him pass us first while we were yammering and the little one order the titan to watch and guard the lakefront and smash any boats coming in.  Instant conflict of interest.  He could've had him search or patrol or whatnot.  Now he's a nusiance.  At the distance he was at, he was an oddity and he should've closed it quickly while we were yammering.

I'm surprised as well, the two other warforged did not come outside or join in.  It seemed a very reasonable side result to us not killing them earlier that they might notice fighting outside with a titan.

Somewhat disappointing was that the titan ignored terrain.  When I saw it, I lead us into the nearest small alleyway.  This wasn't intended as evading the combat as was luring the opponents to more favorable terrain for us.  The idea here being that if the titan rushed us, there wouldn't be enough room.  Maybe it was simply large, in which case it only takes 10 feet rather than 15 or 20, but it would've been neat if there was some reaction to that.  Even if it was just sending the buildings skittering as it went around them or even having them collapse at us, reaction would've been nice.  Sort of worried about the focus on calibration.  It's going to change and frequently based on the environment really.

Anyhow, spells and save based attacks are probably a very good way to go right now for actually doing damage, especially to Alis.  The risk of course with them is that they always do damage (We don't have any relevant defenses that reduce the damage to zero in the party yet for such things), so any prolonged combat with such characters is going to be brutal.  With fighter types there's a miss chance.  Usually with mage types that are using save or damage, save or suck, or save or die spells, it's usually a chance for rogue types to shine, but we don't have any really, and so its just damage for us.  Not a bad thing (enemies should threat), but also not something that we can do anything about presently.  Where possible, combat is more interesting when we've got options to do things about the setup.  If we flipped it around, I'd have the titan trample Alis or Impulse the first round (and both the second) while suddenly being untargetable to the other two because they have a building in the way.  This would've acknowledged the terrain effects, but also used them against us at the same time.

I suspect that the EL was probably quite high, though not quite feeling it.  I'm glad you're starting to take advantage of the fact that loot doesn't have to match at all with what we encounter.  The enemies could've used some of that love.  I suggest the MiC book as a place to grab random low cost boosts for enemies.

Random curiousity:
Does vampiric type stuff work in the Mornlands?

[Jon]

You're right about all the parts where you said I did well and wrong about all the other parts.

Does vampiric type stuff work in the Mornlands?

If by that you mean "steal HP from this other dude", then yes. Natural healing doesn't work, and spells of the healing subschool don't work. (That's where your whole 'recover HP each night' was handwaved to come from.) Other modes of HP gain, like repair damage or goodberry, still work.

[Jon]

Are there any kinds of world-threatening menaces (the Lords of Dust, the Dreaming Dark, the Halfling Mafia, the Tarrasque, Spelljamming Neogi, undead plague) that you guys are not interested in? Or any sorts that you prefer?

[Merc]

Impulse wants to fight halfling barbarians riding t-rexes and bears with warforged grafts that shoot lasers.

Other than that, he's not picky.

[Jon]

Impulse wants to fight halfling barbarians riding t-rexes and bears with warforged grafts that shoot lasers.

Well, sure. I mean, who doesn't?

[Dracos]

I'd more rather be part of the halfling mafia than opposed to them really, if that wasn't evident. :P

At the moment, I think it's a bit early to be worrying about such menaces and more  around what merc suggested sounds fun :P

[Jon]

[19:49]  <GM> would you guys prefer Xen'drik or Sarlona next as a destination? Xen'drik is like Africa in pulps. Sarlona is gonna be more like China or India.
[19:49]  <GM> Sarlona is also Karu's homeland
[19:49]  <GM> well, a small part of it is.
[19:50]  <GM> but that's the part you'd be going to

[Merc]

I don't really care that much, but let's say Sarlona. There better be some of those psychic guys in a wheelchair and bald for us to kick over!

[Dracos]

Heh.  Indifferent here as well...  But I half wonder if both are a bad option presently...

I gotta comment on last session though.  Felt it went extremely badly.  Da how so?  In yammer form~  Yeah, I critique harshly, sorry.

For a trend, this is two sessions in a row of nothing but combat.  This might be acceptable if we were really pulling off awesome combats, but we aren't really.  We're not getting a good balance really of out of combat and in combat play.  And I don't just meant talking but play in which we're not actively stabbing at things.  This is hurting the general invitation of combat.  It's not being part of the flavor, but the entire experience.

Alis had a clash with an NPC here...that went totally non-reactive.  The NPC practically brushed it off a second later, his crew was never visible save in a post combat 'oh and half of them were dead'.  From the player side, it was kind of annoying because it was just posturing really and instead of being a roll into the combat proper, it played out as a counter incentive: The NPC just pretty much asked you to wait and watch a few die first to get him back.  It wasn't even relevant from a get something standpoint since we get standard loot anyway.  There should've been an offer to hire extra guards on the fly given that he had dragons flying at his ship.  Yes, we were obligated out of self interest to fight anyway, but that shouldn't have mattered to a captain wanting to not suddenly have the flight be super costly with his airship damaged and his crew half dead.  Taking it that, for some reason, he wanted to spare paying anything to random folks offering to pitch in, he immediately handed over his cabinent of magical doohickeys to Sim for nothing.  Why?  He should've been annoyed and handing them out to his crew or pet mage.  In either case, it really hurt the opening believability of the game that the NPC cast for the entire time consisted of one captain with a flipping personality who was neither terrified, or bold or trying to swing the ship randomly to flee or anything else.  The NPCs are a fairly important part of setting the tone and they've just sort of failed to be there for it so far during the campaign.  Our boss hasn't gotten a scene, the warforged two sessions ago pretty much sat as statues while we bamboozled them, the enemies have generally come at us without purpose or intent, just sort of 'we're there, let's fight!'.  At least since after session 1.

I'll admit, I also come from the GMing school that prefers subtle handicaps to the enemy when misbalanced versus player death...but that was a terrible job of it. :(  Let's see, we started with two adult white dragons, ECL 12 versus an ECL 11 party (at my present guess).  That's almost sure odds of a player death there, ignoring that dragons tend to be stronger than their CR merits with more durability due to their tendancy to be used as solo encounters.  Most relevantly, base adult white dragons needed a 4 to hit the highest AC in the party, generally sizing up for power attacking madness with more than enough hp to sit by in a hitting battle.  I was betting from early in round one on a total party wipe.  It's clear you realized it early on too, which is why you began nerfing...  but things went oddly.  

For one, the dragons relied mainly on their breath weapons, which are supposed to have a cooldown, but didn't seem to have one at all for some reason.  This actually would've been a fairly clever bit to silently nerf out of their ability list since our defenses against them suck, but it didn't happen.

Next, for some reason they were flipping sides every round.  I understand this was something to simulate their mobility but in reality it made them come across as amazingly dumb as they never got to full attack and were aggressively allowing AoOs.  If you have to weaken enemies, don't go for their iq points first or it just sabotages any sense of victory.  They could've easily just drifted alongside it without involving aerial manuevering or could've used a withdraw action every other turn or something.  In general, they avoided using damaging stuff o_O

Dragon SR looks funky until you realize that characters <= level 6 usually don't have much of a way to deal with SR at all and a generally small spell/ability pool to work with, so even a small failure chance can almost remove a mage at that level from the encounter.  Anyhow, as a direction to nerf?  Not a bad choice, but made a bit too obvious.

Dropping their hp was the best choice of the set, and it could've even been done subtly using airship cannons or whatnot to explain it...

Dropping two adult whites statistically down to juveniles?  Too much.  It's not subtle at all and robbed any real sense of interest from the fight just as effectively as their initial overpowering had.

Saying that you were nerfing them in the ooc room?  That's really not a good thing to do.  It obliterates the chance that any player had not noticed your clever machinations.  I made a mistake as a gm is better for between session comments then during since the world is built upon your arbitration.

Advice for next time?  Go after the hp first, abilities/spells second, and actual statistics last as we almost immediately figure them out from a couple rolls, while the rest is hidden information.  Be additive rather than subtractive to solve overbalancing.  Using other adventurers, fire cannons, a handy mage, or anything from the crew would've been an easy way to do it.  Revealing wounds that weren't obvious before when we got near would've been another.  Adding a tastier target to draw one away would've been a possibility.

My observation, bluntly, is that while you're comfortable with the setting, you're not comfortable running with a cast of players this powerful and so the combats come off as nothing more than experiments (STILL) with little real substance to them.  You're also really uncomfortable running characters of your own, so the only interaction we have outside of in group chatter is to stab things.

I'm unsure how I feel in regards to those, and they're pretty harsh to toss out, but dems what I see.  It definitely makes it hard to care as what it sounds like you're asking is "What encounter set do you want next?"

[Jon]

These seem like fair comments. In my defense, I was rolling for their breath weapon to recharge, with real dice on my table. It's just that with a d4 and dragons having other attacks to use, it's not terribly noticeable. (Also, they were young-adult, not adult, originally.)

I avoided using crewmembers for the simple reason that I didn't want to stat them up, and that combat already takes forever.

But I can't argue with your conclusion; the truth is, I have been dissatisfied with the setup I've given myself, and it's apparent you are too. I am, in fact, having doubts about my capability as a GM; I don't think I have the knack for improvisation that's required. An aerial fight versus dragons seemed like a neat set-piece, but it didn't work. In fact, I think the heist in the first session is the only thing that did.

So where do we go from here?