...and it _is_ my birthday! I know this because Live Journal e-mailed me a reminder and asked if I wanted to send myself a birthday card. You gotta love artificial intelligence.
So what have I been up to? Well, there was this "Christmas" thing and not wanting to underestimate other people's cyber skills I want to say all of the presents were _great_. :)
Certainly nothing needed to be returned and this does put me ahead of the cousin who got the size 54 shorts. He's a big lad but not that big.
I've done some gaming too. There was a Traveller (Mongoose version) random character generation session. As usual we ended up with a set of 40-something people who are theoretically highly accomplished (3 Barons, 1 Admiral, I Colonel) who are just barely skilled enough to run a scout ship. There are reasons why I'm not that nostalgic about Games From Back in the Day.
My character is a Baron/Colonel who's a 40-something ex-Marine with an improbable level of physical fitness. Taking what I could find in that I named him after one of my High School social studies teachers who matches all of the above description except for being a noble officer. Thank you Mr Reynolds.
The important thing of course is that he has a suit of Battledress (powered armor for non-grognards) and a Plasma Gun. I expect these things to solve many problems his lack of skills will not.
There were two sessions of our Pathfinder/D&D game. The first went better than the second though both were examples of the GM (thankfully someone else) v. the module.
First was a repeat of an incomprehensible encounter for our 9th level party with a CR 15 monster that broke multiple rules and totally out-classed the group but was supposed to only almost kill us for 3 rounds and then swim off like it was bored. WTF? It's done this twice.
Then we received an urgent message with a Plot Hook in it. We were supposed to dash off somewhere and do something. Most of us were saying "Find someone with spells and hit pts left and tell them." but our Druid said "Don't worry. I'll just turn into an Air Elemental and fly there.".
He did this and the defenders of the adventure site were totally unable to do anything about him. Fortunately for the GM the druid totally lacked the skill to fix the plot device. He did bring back an excellent scouting report though.
So the next day we went there and killed all the bad guys and discovered that we couldn't fix the thing either. So we sent a message to the villagers telling them that it was safe for them to fix their own problems now. They gave us pie in return.
Then we had to go fix a sort of seperated- lovers-and-curded-swamp thing. See, she was an undead Nymph who was turning the local wetlands into a Swamp of Darkness trying to find her lost lover.
He was an undead Lovechild of Lammashtu (a sort of Pathfinder Prestige Class) who was being held at Hook Mountain by a bunch of Ogres.
She threatened to drown our homelands in her tears unless we brought him back to her. Jaik tried to explain that he wasn't from around there but as usual his attempts to be the Voice of Reason went unheard. It was only a handful of Ogres that he'd have killed anyway if he'd stumbled over them.
So a little journey, some Great-axe Fu and the lovers were reunited. She promptly reincarnated him and passed on to The Great Beyond. He decided to become Guardian of the Black Swamp and do some wetlands reclamation and everyone was happy though I'm not sure why. Probably something about the joys of volunteerism and ecology.
The next week we got another message about somebody else we had to go save and off we went. We got to the uninteresting town of Sandpoint just as the Stone Giants were invading. You know, Stone Giants are really much tougher than Ogres. A transition through Trolls and Hill Giants might have been nice.
So there we were and it was our turn to struggle against the module. We had mostly handled the Stone Giants we ran into when the red dragon showed up. The wizard and the druid went flying off to deal with him
. The rest of us finished off the giants.
Right there when we'd gotten all the giants it would have been a full encounter taking well over half of all our hit pts and spells. That's when the second wave of giants came in, this time with Dire Bears to help them.
The druid has run out of spells to use on the dragon and comes back to help us but the dire bears save v. his only Charm Animals spell and it's heavy melee time again.
About this time the dragon fries the wizard and flies off having won that duel by about 20 HP. If he'd just failed his save v the Cone of Cold it would have gone the other way..
There was a bright side in that after the falling damage the 7th level Goblin Thief who lived in the Elven Wizard's Handy Haversack died too. There was much rejoicing.
So us survivors finsh the second wave and then discover that there's a _third wave_. This one is led by a level boss Stone Giant with a pick in each hand. Gotta love the picks. They have x4 crits just to make sure that a PC dies.
By walking slowly to meet the third wave while the druid used up another Cure wand and then having some better than expected luck we got the third wave before they got us.
Really though, what nit-wit of a designer throws 12 Stone Giants, 3 Dire Bears and a Red Dragon against a 10th level party of 4 in a single long encounter that seemed carefully timed to make sure they didn't have enough time to re-group and recover?
Ah well, the survivors made 11th level, the Gnome fighter took Leadership and is picking up a cleric as a cohort. The Elven Wizard was Reincarnated as ...an Elven Wizard which greatly simplified matters. Nobody offered to bring back the Goblin. His new cohort is going to be a Bard.
...and Jaik? He gained Greater Rage, traded in 7 +1 Ogre polearms and a couple of Giant picks for a belt to boost his ST and Con and chose a Feat which I would not have for reasons of Munchkinism if the campaign
wasn't pushing him that way. Next session I anticipate being able to _average_ 100 pts of damage per hit. If the designers want to declare War we'll show them what that means in these here parts.
So, Life is Good (especially if it's your birthday).
So what have I been up to? Well, there was this "Christmas" thing and not wanting to underestimate other people's cyber skills I want to say all of the presents were _great_. :)
Certainly nothing needed to be returned and this does put me ahead of the cousin who got the size 54 shorts. He's a big lad but not that big.
I've done some gaming too. There was a Traveller (Mongoose version) random character generation session. As usual we ended up with a set of 40-something people who are theoretically highly accomplished (3 Barons, 1 Admiral, I Colonel) who are just barely skilled enough to run a scout ship. There are reasons why I'm not that nostalgic about Games From Back in the Day.
My character is a Baron/Colonel who's a 40-something ex-Marine with an improbable level of physical fitness. Taking what I could find in that I named him after one of my High School social studies teachers who matches all of the above description except for being a noble officer. Thank you Mr Reynolds.
The important thing of course is that he has a suit of Battledress (powered armor for non-grognards) and a Plasma Gun. I expect these things to solve many problems his lack of skills will not.
There were two sessions of our Pathfinder/D&D game. The first went better than the second though both were examples of the GM (thankfully someone else) v. the module.
First was a repeat of an incomprehensible encounter for our 9th level party with a CR 15 monster that broke multiple rules and totally out-classed the group but was supposed to only almost kill us for 3 rounds and then swim off like it was bored. WTF? It's done this twice.
Then we received an urgent message with a Plot Hook in it. We were supposed to dash off somewhere and do something. Most of us were saying "Find someone with spells and hit pts left and tell them." but our Druid said "Don't worry. I'll just turn into an Air Elemental and fly there.".
He did this and the defenders of the adventure site were totally unable to do anything about him. Fortunately for the GM the druid totally lacked the skill to fix the plot device. He did bring back an excellent scouting report though.
So the next day we went there and killed all the bad guys and discovered that we couldn't fix the thing either. So we sent a message to the villagers telling them that it was safe for them to fix their own problems now. They gave us pie in return.
Then we had to go fix a sort of seperated- lovers-and-curded-swamp thing. See, she was an undead Nymph who was turning the local wetlands into a Swamp of Darkness trying to find her lost lover.
He was an undead Lovechild of Lammashtu (a sort of Pathfinder Prestige Class) who was being held at Hook Mountain by a bunch of Ogres.
She threatened to drown our homelands in her tears unless we brought him back to her. Jaik tried to explain that he wasn't from around there but as usual his attempts to be the Voice of Reason went unheard. It was only a handful of Ogres that he'd have killed anyway if he'd stumbled over them.
So a little journey, some Great-axe Fu and the lovers were reunited. She promptly reincarnated him and passed on to The Great Beyond. He decided to become Guardian of the Black Swamp and do some wetlands reclamation and everyone was happy though I'm not sure why. Probably something about the joys of volunteerism and ecology.
The next week we got another message about somebody else we had to go save and off we went. We got to the uninteresting town of Sandpoint just as the Stone Giants were invading. You know, Stone Giants are really much tougher than Ogres. A transition through Trolls and Hill Giants might have been nice.
So there we were and it was our turn to struggle against the module. We had mostly handled the Stone Giants we ran into when the red dragon showed up. The wizard and the druid went flying off to deal with him
. The rest of us finished off the giants.
Right there when we'd gotten all the giants it would have been a full encounter taking well over half of all our hit pts and spells. That's when the second wave of giants came in, this time with Dire Bears to help them.
The druid has run out of spells to use on the dragon and comes back to help us but the dire bears save v. his only Charm Animals spell and it's heavy melee time again.
About this time the dragon fries the wizard and flies off having won that duel by about 20 HP. If he'd just failed his save v the Cone of Cold it would have gone the other way..
There was a bright side in that after the falling damage the 7th level Goblin Thief who lived in the Elven Wizard's Handy Haversack died too. There was much rejoicing.
So us survivors finsh the second wave and then discover that there's a _third wave_. This one is led by a level boss Stone Giant with a pick in each hand. Gotta love the picks. They have x4 crits just to make sure that a PC dies.
By walking slowly to meet the third wave while the druid used up another Cure wand and then having some better than expected luck we got the third wave before they got us.
Really though, what nit-wit of a designer throws 12 Stone Giants, 3 Dire Bears and a Red Dragon against a 10th level party of 4 in a single long encounter that seemed carefully timed to make sure they didn't have enough time to re-group and recover?
Ah well, the survivors made 11th level, the Gnome fighter took Leadership and is picking up a cleric as a cohort. The Elven Wizard was Reincarnated as ...an Elven Wizard which greatly simplified matters. Nobody offered to bring back the Goblin. His new cohort is going to be a Bard.
...and Jaik? He gained Greater Rage, traded in 7 +1 Ogre polearms and a couple of Giant picks for a belt to boost his ST and Con and chose a Feat which I would not have for reasons of Munchkinism if the campaign
wasn't pushing him that way. Next session I anticipate being able to _average_ 100 pts of damage per hit. If the designers want to declare War we'll show them what that means in these here parts.
So, Life is Good (especially if it's your birthday).
After a slow November December isn't off to a very fast start either. We were able to get together a minimal session of Group #2's largely vanilla D&D game, sometimes known as "Jaik and the Little People".
Technically this is the Pathfinder Beta system which continues to function pretty well.
As i said it was pretty vanilla. We'd done most of the set up in our last session 6 weeks ago and now it was mostly time to finish clearing out the adventure site.
It was the sort of thing that suited my character Jaik the Barbarian. Mostly this meant low AC foes allowing for Power Attack resulting in short but intense fights.
I got the routine down. Power Attack Ogre, drink his healing potion and then move on. It wouldn't have worked nearly as well in 3.5 with the Barbarian's fixed number of Rages but in Pathfinder you pay for Rage by the round with "Rage pts" and have a lot of flexibility in splitting up your raging.
You can also spend Rage pts for special stunts. So I had this routine down where I Raged, spent some extra pts to juice my attack, did a full Power Attack and used a special Pathfinder Feat for extra damage with 2-handed weapons and was rolling 33+1D12 for my first attack every round. Like I said, short but intense.
Thanks to Cleave and a crit on the normally weaker 2nd attack I even did away with 2 Ogres in 1 round. Not that it was totally one-sided. Some of the Ogres were doing 3D6+36 but just on HP Jail can usually win that sort of fight.
Luckily the DM was rolling badly and never got a crit on one of those. Jaik might have been able to take one while he was raging anyway.
Jaik was the one with the crit luck yesterday. In the final fight he charged and did a 144 pt crit to one of the Ogre bosses. That's a new record in these parts anyway. We were outnumbered 7 to 1 by Ogres in that fight and it only lasted 3 rounds.
The other players were doing well too. Our skinny Elven Wizard (known as "Magic Finger" in barbarian-speak) was rolling just enough damage to take down the basic ogres with one Fireball. "Talks to Dog" our Hlafling druid was mostly jsut laughing and healing Jaik.
So, not a tremendous _sounding_ sort of session with witticisms resounding off the walls but it was amazingly cathartic to get together with a few friends on a gray afternoon and lay down some smack on the bad guys. The new Prez's recovery plan needs to have more people doing this sort of thing.
Life is Good (as long as the crits go your way).
Technically this is the Pathfinder Beta system which continues to function pretty well.
As i said it was pretty vanilla. We'd done most of the set up in our last session 6 weeks ago and now it was mostly time to finish clearing out the adventure site.
It was the sort of thing that suited my character Jaik the Barbarian. Mostly this meant low AC foes allowing for Power Attack resulting in short but intense fights.
I got the routine down. Power Attack Ogre, drink his healing potion and then move on. It wouldn't have worked nearly as well in 3.5 with the Barbarian's fixed number of Rages but in Pathfinder you pay for Rage by the round with "Rage pts" and have a lot of flexibility in splitting up your raging.
You can also spend Rage pts for special stunts. So I had this routine down where I Raged, spent some extra pts to juice my attack, did a full Power Attack and used a special Pathfinder Feat for extra damage with 2-handed weapons and was rolling 33+1D12 for my first attack every round. Like I said, short but intense.
Thanks to Cleave and a crit on the normally weaker 2nd attack I even did away with 2 Ogres in 1 round. Not that it was totally one-sided. Some of the Ogres were doing 3D6+36 but just on HP Jail can usually win that sort of fight.
Luckily the DM was rolling badly and never got a crit on one of those. Jaik might have been able to take one while he was raging anyway.
Jaik was the one with the crit luck yesterday. In the final fight he charged and did a 144 pt crit to one of the Ogre bosses. That's a new record in these parts anyway. We were outnumbered 7 to 1 by Ogres in that fight and it only lasted 3 rounds.
The other players were doing well too. Our skinny Elven Wizard (known as "Magic Finger" in barbarian-speak) was rolling just enough damage to take down the basic ogres with one Fireball. "Talks to Dog" our Hlafling druid was mostly jsut laughing and healing Jaik.
So, not a tremendous _sounding_ sort of session with witticisms resounding off the walls but it was amazingly cathartic to get together with a few friends on a gray afternoon and lay down some smack on the bad guys. The new Prez's recovery plan needs to have more people doing this sort of thing.
Life is Good (as long as the crits go your way).
It's been a very lean November for gaming but we got in a little this week with my old reliable #1 group.
First we had to do a little more character creation. I actually had my guy ready if you count a page of scribbles of the sort that led to the naming of Rognor the Illegible.
Of course, this being a contemporary superhero game this was a different sort of fellow. He's a mutant genius machine creator who goes by "Smith" (it's more of a description than than a name because he makes things) or Smitty to his friends.
But before we got started we needed to introduce Craig to the Joy of Bricks, Fortunately this is simple in Hero. The result was your average 7 and a half foot tall 880 lb guy who conveniently has this limited Mind Control power that makes most normals treat him like an average guy.
His name is Payload which I suspect is mostly going to get shortened to just "Load".
The other participant in the day's adventures is more into LARPing and was already in her persona of MonkeyChild and was busy using her super-climbing powers to convert the living room into a danger room.
So, just all of a sudden, Smitty and Load were walking down the street keeping a discreet distance from Radiant because they have Secret I.D.s and he has a Public one (mostly because he glows) when suddenly the sound of noise and confusion if not Adventure! filled the air.
This lead to something like the following random bits of dialogue (both in and out of character).
"I move to catch the car."
"I shoot the flying guy with my Boxing Glove Bazooka."
"Hey Radiant! You're healing the bad guy!"
"Radiant appears to have a Speed of 2"
"That's why he's not finished yet."
"I attack the sidewalk!"
"Oh yeah! I remember how Killing Attacks work now!"
"With his 1 pt of Stun, his 0 Body and his ability to suddenly create motorized roller skates, Smitty heads over to where Radiant is, very quickly."
"Esme, get down please." (yeah, that was to MonkeyChild)
This was mostly a rules tutorial and we need to get a little better about things like Dex and Speed order but we're getting there. We're probably even going to be using a hex grid next time. :) Yeah, you kind of need one of those for Champions. It wasn't bad for not having played the system in many, many years.
Life is Good (as long as MonkeyChild doesn't override the Danger Room safety protocols).
First we had to do a little more character creation. I actually had my guy ready if you count a page of scribbles of the sort that led to the naming of Rognor the Illegible.
Of course, this being a contemporary superhero game this was a different sort of fellow. He's a mutant genius machine creator who goes by "Smith" (it's more of a description than than a name because he makes things) or Smitty to his friends.
But before we got started we needed to introduce Craig to the Joy of Bricks, Fortunately this is simple in Hero. The result was your average 7 and a half foot tall 880 lb guy who conveniently has this limited Mind Control power that makes most normals treat him like an average guy.
His name is Payload which I suspect is mostly going to get shortened to just "Load".
The other participant in the day's adventures is more into LARPing and was already in her persona of MonkeyChild and was busy using her super-climbing powers to convert the living room into a danger room.
So, just all of a sudden, Smitty and Load were walking down the street keeping a discreet distance from Radiant because they have Secret I.D.s and he has a Public one (mostly because he glows) when suddenly the sound of noise and confusion if not Adventure! filled the air.
This lead to something like the following random bits of dialogue (both in and out of character).
"I move to catch the car."
"I shoot the flying guy with my Boxing Glove Bazooka."
"Hey Radiant! You're healing the bad guy!"
"Radiant appears to have a Speed of 2"
"That's why he's not finished yet."
"I attack the sidewalk!"
"Oh yeah! I remember how Killing Attacks work now!"
"With his 1 pt of Stun, his 0 Body and his ability to suddenly create motorized roller skates, Smitty heads over to where Radiant is, very quickly."
"Esme, get down please." (yeah, that was to MonkeyChild)
This was mostly a rules tutorial and we need to get a little better about things like Dex and Speed order but we're getting there. We're probably even going to be using a hex grid next time. :) Yeah, you kind of need one of those for Champions. It wasn't bad for not having played the system in many, many years.
Life is Good (as long as MonkeyChild doesn't override the Danger Room safety protocols).
Hi, this is Fred Brackin testing out LiveJournal as a place to replace the Pyramid discussion boards as the place to post his grouchy ramblings, cynical comments and most importantly his roleplaying War Stories.
If none of this makes sense to you, you probably don';t know me (unless you know me from Facebook but that's not going away the way the Pyramid boards are) and are in the wrong place.
If none of this makes sense to you, you probably don';t know me (unless you know me from Facebook but that's not going away the way the Pyramid boards are) and are in the wrong place.
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