Having been granted rulership over the city of Vanhoover, and confessed their feelings for each other, Lex Legis and Sonata Dusk have started a new life together. But the challenges of rulership, and a relationship, are more than they bargained for.
Lex slowly trudged around the medical tent after Sonata, striving to make his steps appear sure and confident.
He knew that everypony’s eyes were on him after that speech she’d given, and although she’d quite clearly used her magic to influence the crowd, he wasn’t certain that the calm she’d imbued them with would hold if he showed signs of weakness now. As it was, he had his work cut out for him figuring out how to live up to the assurances she’d made on his behalf. But at least she didn’t try to convince everyone to fight as well, he reflected silently.
That had been his biggest worry when she’d started to improvise: that she’d make an effort at convincing the camp ponies to join in the fight against the incoming horde of ghouls. While Lex was fully aware why that wouldn’t work now the way it had against the kraken’s army of monsters, he hadn’t been sure if Sonata was, and when she’d started to extemporize he’d had a moment of panic. Fortunately, she hadn’t tried to treat the camp ponies as some sort of auxiliary fighting force, and disaster had been averted. Or rather, a greater disaster, since I still need to figure out how to actually protect everypony. He was still thinking of how to do just that when he finally rounded the medical tent.
“Hey,” called Sonata, giving him a cocky grin. “So, how was that? Pretty awesome, right?”
Lex gave her a level look for a moment before turning his gaze westward, peering into the darkness toward Vanhoover. “You did a good job.”
Sonata’s grin collapsed immediately, her eyes widening and eyebrows shooting up to her hairline in surprise. “I did?” she asked, not even trying to hide her shock. “For realsies?”
Lex nodded, only half paying attention as he turned more of his thoughts toward how they were going to fight the undead ponies. “You informed everyone of what was going on, while avoiding a panic that would have put them in greater danger.”
She nodded slowly, still giving him a wide-eyed look. “So…you’re totes cool with all that stuff I said? And with my, like, enchanting everyone?”
That was enough to make him glance at her. “Your use of magic was entirely justified due to the circumstances, Sonata,” he frowned, slightly irked that they had to go over this again. Wasn’t it obvious by now that there were instances where using magic to abrogate personal autonomy was the right thing to do? “As for the rest of it…” He hesitated then. In truth he wasn’t happy with the other part of her little outburst, since he was fairly confident that she’d been using sarcasm to try and suggest that his failings were somehow acceptable due to being beyond the limits of his abilities, a sentiment that he felt was utterly disingenuous. But there simply wasn’t any time to worry about that right now; chastising her for such a thing when they were less than an hour away from fighting for their lives was simply not a worthwhile undertaking.
That, and he suddenly didn’t feel like scolding her. Not right now at least. “…we can talk about it later,” he finished.
“Aw yeah!” whooped Sonata, apparently thrilled by his lack of overt disapproval. Rearing up on her hind legs, she wore a grin that was dazzling in its intensity. “Who’s the bigshot who’s hot-to-trot with the sexy voice and the killer plot?” she sang, before licking a hoof and reaching back to slap her rump. “This mare, that’s who!” Falling back onto all fours, she chuckled heartily. “Oh, I wish Aria was here to see this! She’s still a big whispery fish and I’m enchanting ponies by the hundreds! She’s gonna be so jealous!” She paused as something occurred to her then, her smile dimming as a realization slowly worked its way through her brain. “Come to think of it, where is Aria? She wasn’t with the crowd, but I know I told everyone to come gather ‘round.”
“She’s gone,” murmured Lex, still devoting the bulk of his mental faculties to battle plans.
Sonata blinked at that. “‘Gone’?” she echoed. “Whaddaya mean ‘gone’? Like, gone-gone?”
“She abandoned this place a short time ago,” replied Lex absently. “The Night Mare informed me.”
“Aria ditched us?” asked Sonata incredulously. For some reason that thought didn’t bring her the glee that she’d expected to feel. Instead, there was a hollow sensation forming in the pit of her stomach, empty except for a vague sense of hurt that her sister had just up and left without so much as a goodbye. But that doesn’t make any sense, she thought to herself uncomfortably. I’ve wanted her to leave ever since she showed up again, so why…?
Suddenly not wanting to think about that anymore, Sonata shook her head, focusing on Lex again. “So,” she spoke up, slightly louder than she’d intended, “what’s the plan?”
Lex didn’t answer for a moment, and she was about to ask him again when he called out, “Severance!”
The scythe came floating toward him a moment later, and Lex waited until it was within a few feet of him before speaking. “Cut that tent down,” he ordered, pointing at the field hospital behind him. “I want the upper part of the material completely separated from the lower.” The scythe immediately moved to obey, swinging itself through the air and piercing the tent fabric at a low angle, a few inches above the ground. Without hesitating, it started to move around the circumference of the tent, its blade tearing through the material as though it weren’t even there. As it did, he turned back to Sonata. “Once it’s finished cutting the fabric, we’re going to lay it over the ground in front of us,” he explained, nodding back in the direction of Vanhoover.
“How come?” asked Sonata, before her eyes widened a moment later. “Ooh, is this going to be like one of those traps in the cartoons, where they cut across it and then its suddenly pulled upward like a net, catching them inside?”
“It isn’t a snare, Sonata. What would the ropes even be tied to?” He gestured up at the empty sky with a snort. “We’re going to use this to cover the area where you had those holes dug, so that the ghouls won’t see them before they stumble into them. The fabric might even make it difficult for them to find purchase when they try to recover their balance.” But he didn’t hold much hope for that. In fact, the entire trap was a weak one, and likely wouldn’t do anything more than mildly inconvenience the undead ponies, but so far it was the best thing he’d been able to think of, and implementing it was better than nothing.
Determined to keep being helpful after how successful her speech had been, Sonata immediately tossed out another suggestion. “Okay, how about this? When the ghouls come at us, we yank on the tent fabric like it’s a big tablecloth and knock them all down, and then pounce on ‘em!”
Lex sighed in mild aggravation. “The ghouls’ collective mass is going to outweigh what we can effectively displace that way, Sonata. In the unlikely event that we managed to accomplish anything at all, it would only be to tear the material.”
“We grab the edge and roll them up like a big carpet?”
That time a snort of derision was the only reply she received, making her pout as she realized she wasn’t helping. Not wanting to let the silence stand, since she knew she’d only end up thinking about Aria again, she changed topics. “So how many ghouls do you think we’re going to be dealing with?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Lex after a moment’s thought. “Without any sort of estimate as to how many ponies made it out of the city when the elemental bleed started, to say nothing of how many survivors are still in the city, there’s no reliable method for estimating the number of undead in the city.” What he didn’t say was that, using the ghouls he’d encountered so far as a statistical sampling, he’d still drawn up some theoretical equations regarding the ghouls’ potential population. Although there wasn’t enough data to come to anything conclusive, it still allowed for some degree of speculation…and the numbers weren’t to his liking.
“…so, what, like fifty?”
He gave her a grim look then. “I’d be shocked if there was anything less than ten times that number.”
Sonata gave a low whistle of surprise at that. A hundred and fifty! Geez! That was a lot more than she’d originally thought! Sobered at the thought of fighting so many undead ponies at once, Sonata was silent as Severance returned, finishing up cutting away upper part of the medical tent. As the fabric fluttered down, Lex grabbed hold of one end of it in his magic, dragging it forward, only for Sonata to immediately wave him off. “Let me. You just keep thinking of a plan, okay?”
Giving a noncommittal grunt, Lex dropped the fabric, letting her grab it in her teeth and begin dragging it toward the holes she’d had dug. It took her some effort, and he could already hear various things that had been inside the field hospital falling over as she pulled the now-collapsed ceiling off of it, but he ignored it as inconsequential. Instead, he turned and took hold of Severance in his telekinesis, bringing it over to him. “When the fighting starts,” he instructed it, “your job will be to keep the ghouls away from Sonata and me so that we can use our magic without interruption.” That was, he knew, the best use of the scythe’s self-directed capabilities, since unlike in the battle with the kraken there wouldn’t be a particular enemy that needed to be singled out for termination. Moreover, a defensive role would be likely to avoid the scythe’s nebulous prohibition about being relied upon too much. Although it could autonomously attack on its own, ordering it to act that offensively would almost certainly make it abandon-
No, Lex realized suddenly, the thought coming through so clearly that it startled him. That’s not right. Severance could be used to a much more offensive degree without violating its restriction about being depended upon too much. It had before, after all.
During the battle against the kraken, the monster had attacked them at range, picking up a huge piece of the ship it had crushed and hurling it at them. Cloudbank had been wielding Severance at the time, and despite her overall lack of combat prowess had swung Severance at the incoming missile, the result being that it had sliced it completely in half. Lex knew that because he had personally witnessed it happen. The weapon had never done that before, which meant it had quite clearly utilized that level of cutting ability by its own volition, but if that wasn't depending on the scythe too much, then there was no way…
Lex grit his teeth as that train of thought became a cascade. Severance had slain a sahuagin that had taken him by surprise when he’d first arrived in Vanhoover, bisecting the creature as it had leapt out of the water at him. It had removed his horn for him when he'd had no other way of getting the drop on Fencer after she'd taken Pillowcase hostage. It was the only reason he could regain his primary magic! And yet somehow that didn't constitute a form of overreliance?!
A shudder went through Lex as he realized that he'd never fully clarified precisely what Severance's parameters were for being overly depended upon. He'd flat-out told it to tell him when it had first given him that warning, and yet it had been cagey, refusing to provide clear and unambiguous parameters, instead being content to let him blindly navigate its warning without tripping over its threat of abandoning him if he relied on it too much. But now...now that threat seemed like little more than a cruel joke made at his expense. It was enough to make his features twist in fury as he turned his attention back to the scythe.
"You lied to me!"
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A hundred and fifty...heh. Oh Sonata, never change. Rule of funny may apply in the show but it would be disconcerting if that rule applied to Sonata's suggestion in such a serious situation.
Wonder what Severance had lied about, though to be more specific, what the scythe had withheld from Lex. I'm a little groggy from my flu so I don't follow Lex's train of thought but my best guess is that there were inconsistencies from Severance's statement of over-reliance and its actions that Lex had witnessed. Given the inconsistency, either the parameters were higher than Lex had assumed...or there never was any to begin with.
The calm before the storm, looking forward to seeing how it unfolds.
At this rate Severance is going tohead back over to Cloudy and just sit there with Lex still refusing to follow deities requirements ?
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I think I fixed that while you were reading it. This chapter underwent some immediate editing after release (yesterday was a crazy day for me).
I've recently realized that, for any scene she's in, Sonata has become the barometer for how dramatic it is. She can be either serious and heartfelt, or inadvertently making jokes, as required, and both options remain plausible for her character. This means that she can either nicely counterbalance Lex and help to dispel tension, or abet his serious nature and make the tension rise. It's very useful in setting the tone!
Unlikely. Sonata's misunderstanding was funny, but when it comes to actual calculation and data management Sonata is beyond unreliable, whereas Lex is virtually never wrong. As such, his estimate should be given more weight here.
As for Severance, the implication in this chapter is that Lex is realizing that the scythe's warning about abandoning him if he comes to rely on it too much is not just ill-defined, but based on how it's acted up until now is essentially so plastic as to be useless. This isn't to say that it's completely untrue - I suspect Lex knows about what happened to Cloudbank when she asked it for help after Tlerekithres magically dominated her, causing Severance to essentially shut down all assistance to her - but at this point the idea does seem to be near-totally unenforced.
I suspect that more information will be forthcoming in the next chapter.
8907672 I have an outline in mind for what's going to happen, though given how often the story has unfolded in ways I didn't anticipate, even I'm not entirely sure how things will actually go!
8907953 Stay tuned to find out!
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Now there's a feeling I can emphasize with easily.
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Oh yeah. Gold dragons have always eaten gems in D&D. In 3.5, they introduced the Gem dragons, including the Amethyst Dragon that I think Spike resembles the most, and they all primarily subsist on ores and gems. That was one of my early favorite things about MLP, that they had this shout-out to D&D.
Well I know you won't like it, but the "Vaults of Orv" in Golarion are absolutely massive underground spaces at the bottom of the darklands, the size of continents (epic magic was used to prevent the surface from caving in).
Again, I'm relying a lot on lore here, where they endlessly say "Orv is the most dangerous place ever, only the mightiest of heroes can even reach here, etc." That's too vague to be that helpful, but I can say that "common monsters" for Orv are mostly monsters with a CR10+ rating.
That's a really different example than "a hermit in the woods sees an orc come up asking for help and shoots him." Would this angel in your example kill an orc on-sight if the orc approached peacefully asking for aid? I don't think so. Heck, an angel probably wouldn't kill a demon on sight if they made a big show of coming in peace and doing it in a non-threatening manner.
I think non-sapient animals don't really fit this either. I will say I agree with the idea that rather than having animals have neutral alignment like a druid, they have "unaligned" because they're not capable of making value judgements, they run off incredibly primitive instincts.
It really doesn't, because both those examples are utterly different from "sapient mortal hermit in the woods gets approached by a potential threatening humanoid who can communicate, but acts peaceful and requests help." In the example I'm giving, and in a lot of cases, alignment is going to be at least as good a predictor of actions as any other piece of information you are likely to have about that NPC. (Of course, if you've got a 2 page bio on the NPC and their troubled history with orcs, etc, that's better, but you're not going to find that in the average statblock).
They shouldn't bother to heal a foe, not that they wouldn't. (Once again, excluding dudes with visible holy symbols who can heal them).
Yeah, I think that's correct.
Like I said, this has happened to me and my party many times (running in a melee heavy, no cleric party). I've seen it happen many a time in PFS, depending on the composition of the party and the scenario. I'll admit that sometimes there are big wide-open combats, but frequently if you're fighting in tight rooms and corridors, there's no room for the reviver to go around the monster and get to their buddy without getting stabbed. I'm basing this purely on my personal experience.
Hmmm. I agree with your logic here now, but I feel like you're contradicting yourself. Didn't this start by you talking about how NPC dungeon denizens will do anything and everything to survive in the short term? If they are willing to think longer term, wouldn't the reconsider that promise they made to give their souls to a demon in 12 hours if it will come fight adventurers invading their home right now?
Your logic also makes sense if the attackers are willing to die for their comrades, ie make sure they prevent one party member from being killed so their fellow tribe members don't have to fight it later, even if that means the rest of the adventuring party kills them.
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The cool flavor text in Sombra and Sonata's character sheets on your blog. They seem to be set in a future time, one I am very eager to see.
I.E Lex and Sonata are rulers of a small nation state on the western seaboard of Equestria.
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Of course. Ghouls don't get any abilities they had in life. Earth pony ghouls don't get earth pony strength and hardiness (though they get ghoul strength and hardiness, so probably not much difference). Unicorn ghouls shouldn't be able to use their horns either, though I can't remember if we've seen that or not.
8907580 I think we all want to see Lex and Severance forced into some kind of weird male bonding ritual.
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I don't recall the details about their diet, but the gem dragons were introduced back in AD&D First Edition, debuting way back in Dragon magazine #37, "That's Not in the Monster Manual!" We saw them again in AD&D Second Edition too, first in MC14 Monstrous Compendium Fiend Folio Appendix before being put front and center in the Monstrous Manual. Also, those dragons were notably psionic in power; as such, I really don't think that Spike is an homage to them.
It's not that I don't like it, I just don't think that they're all that they're cracked up to be. In Pathfinder, magic of that scale tends to be a plot device that isn't really something you can count on the game system actually portraying, particularly since we've seen the Vault Builders themselves (in The Emerald Spire Superdungeon), and they're CR 20/MR 8 creatures.
Which sort of underlines my point: everywhere has CR 10+ monsters. Literally, pick an environment and you'll find gouts of monsters that fill that particular niche, at virtually all levels of power. Given that there are a lot of places that are also described as being crawling with ridiculously powerful monsters (the area near Rovagug's prison, for example, or the closer you get to the center of the Worldwound), and I think that idea's wearing rather thin.
Ah, but by saying it's different you're ceding the point that alignment alone is not all-determining, and that there are other salient points to be considered, which is sort of my point. If you can't say that all angels will slaughter demons on sight, you can't really say that all Neutral Evil druids will slaughter any humanoids that approach them either. There are other factors that need to be taken into account, and alignment isn't the be-all end-all it's so often taken as.
I personally didn't care for "Unaligned" as an alternative to "Neutral." I get the underlying idea - even classical depictions of Neutral have struggled to balance juxtaposing ideas of "Neutral as removed from aligned influences" and "Neutral as encompassing disparate alignments" - but creating a new category just didn't feel right to me, since I was never sold on the idea of alignments needing to be a sapient choice anyway (hence why I had no problem with mindless undead being evil).
Leaving aside what I said previously, if I'm reading you right you're admitting that having a large amount of background text undercuts the "alignment as determinant" argument, which is rather confusing, since it pretty much admits that alignment isn't going to be the most salient aspect of a character's behavior. Literally, everyone has pages of background flavor text; it's just that most people don't have them written down anywhere. It's the GMs job, not to come up with massive backstories for literally everyone, but to run them as if they had them. Of course, that's very hard to do, which is why shorthands such as alignment are used, but they're just that: shorthands. They're not meant to be straitjackets.
You know, reading that back over I think I meant to say "healing a downed friend." Or maybe "kill a downed foe"? It's a bit hard to recall now, but it was one of those.
Honestly, those sorts of fights sound like the very definition of hack 'n' slash.
I'll take your word for it - I've seen this sort of thing happen also - but I have a hard time believing that it's the majority of actual play. That's just my guess, certainly, and it's entirely likely that Pathfinder Society has ratcheted this sort of thing up (given what I've seen from how their scenarios are scripted, I have no trouble believing that), but this is the sort of thing that strikes me as metagame-play rather than game-play. That can be fun too, but I think it becomes less so when other ways of engagement are scrutinized (and all too often found wanting) under the auspices of "that's not optimal!"
There's no contradiction, there. That's because "short term" doesn't mean "this combat encounter (which might be only six rounds)." It means "survive this particular engagement," where "engagement" is the period from the opening of hostilities until the hostile force has been killed, captured, or otherwise conclusively defeated or driven off (or, I suppose, the defenders have fled or surrendered). "How to survive" is a strategic consideration more than a tactical one.
I'm having some trouble parsing this, since I thought "the attackers" were the humans/demihumans raiding the dungeon in these discussions. Presuming you meant humanoid defenders, then I don't think that - stereotypically - they'd sacrifice themselves to earn their entire tribe a tactical advantage; more like they'd be fine with giving up a quasi-metagame advantage of "leave them alive and hope they have no ranged healing because you're hoping they'll try to move in and heal, provoking an AoO."
Right, which is why it's important to deny a downed enemy a chance to get back up, so that they can't go back to contributing to the action economy. Your position is that they really can't anyway, but I find that to be too limited in its presumptions of "short combat, no ranged healing, AoOs will usually hit, extremely close distances between fighters, etc."
I'm honestly no longer convinced that the whole "CR-appropriate fights drain one quarter of a four-man party's resources" shtick is really true anyway. I'm not even talking about party size, optimization, or tactics either. The problem is that far too much emphasis has been given on CR meaning what people think it does. This isn't an issue of monster-construction guidelines either; even a casual glance at Paizo's charts and the monsters they've published make it clear that they are, as some pirates say, more of a guideline.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Trailblazer or not; if not, it's an alternative "3.75" game that came out around the same time as Pathfinder, and which had a lot of the same ideas but, to my mind, better execution by being willing to go farther. It never made much of a splash, mostly due to being put out by a very small company, but it's worth noting. More germane to what we're talking about now, however, is its monster book, Trailblazer: Teratologue. This book, among numerous other things, introduces the concept of "spine CR." To elucidate, this is the "spine" of the monster's stat block, in that it only measures gross physical ability and staying power (i.e. Hit Dice/hit points, BAB, size adjustments, ability score increases, base saves, and I think maybe certain feats).
As should be made clear, the "spine CR" essentially measures a creature's ability to function like a "tank" or similar character in a melee battle. The kicker is that this is contrasted against the monster's full ("normal") CR, which takes everything into account, especially special abilities that don't get included in melee and require actions to utilize, such as most spell-like abilities. The thing to remember here is that because a monster's normal CR is calculated to take every aspect of their stat block into account, this means that a high-CR monster with a lot of spell-like abilities is going to have a considerable portion of their CR depend on having - and, ergo, utilizing - those abilities. But because of the issues you mentioned, that doesn't happen a lot of the time.
Consider a balor. It's CR 20, but it has a huge list of spell-like abilities. Put it in close-quarters with a few melee-types in the group (maybe after they've been buffed), and how many of its spell-like abilities will it really get to use, instead of taking that full attack action? So really, if you run it that way, you can't judge its combat effectiveness by its CR; you have to use its spine CR instead. And the spine CR for a balor is a paltry 10.75...almost half of what the full CR is.
This is why the whole "four level-appropriate encounters per day" ideal was crippled from the get-go. It wasn't because of munchkin players (though those didn't help), but because no one really understood how the underlying system was built, and ended up emphasizing all of the wrong parts, taking suggestions as gospel when they were barely even educated guesses, not explaining their underlying principles or helping people to even figure them out on their own. It's not surprising, in hindsight - the developers for 3.0 barely knew what they were doing in quite a few places, hence why we needed to wait until 3.5 to receive "patch" prestige classes like the eldritch knight to try and shore up just how badly multiclassing hurt spellcasters.
Believe it or not, I've played Pathfinder adventure paths too; my current group doesn't delve into the system nearly as much as I like to do, and in all honesty we spend a significant number of our sessions just fooling around and only half-paying attention. I like those guys a lot, so I don't blame them (putting in the requisite work to make an epic campaign setting is, well, actual work, and we're all there to have fun via blowing off steam rather than trying to construct any sort of grand narrative). At the same time, the GM doesn't want to build a custom world (he's tried before, with mixed results), and so he typically uses Pathfinder Adventure Paths because they've already done the heavy lifting for him.
There's a difference between reductive and simplicity. You're right that some NPCs would want to leave downed PCs just downed and move on to the next one, but if we're basing our debate around the idea of what a bunch of savage and cruel humanoids living in a dungeon would do in response to a group of armed invaders, who were able to prove themselves to be a credible threat, then it makes sense to presume that they'd kill them if possible, unless there are specific reasons not to.
That's true, though I don't think that it necessarily needs to rise to the level of storytelling. If actually killing your foes after bringing them down below 0 hit points is sub-optimal, then I think that something more fundamental has gone wrong with how the rules are trying to portray the (entirely reasonable) presumptions that they've presumably been built to model. (Of course, that's quite likely something of a trick on the designer's part: they don't want the threat of death to be too deadly, otherwise it would eventually catch up to the PCs. That's why, as of D&D Third Edition, you stopped having 0 hit points meaning "instant death" by default.)
I'm using the term "meta-game" slightly more generally, in that the game rules are considered before/above any in-character aspects to what's going on. Ideally (to me, at least) there's no real difference between what the rules are modeling and what the character can attempt to do, but there are instances where they don't seem to match up, hence my complaint about how the scenario you're outlining results in a life-or-death battle that nevertheless disincentivizes dispatching downed enemies. Notwithstanding the idea that the designers wanted it that way, this results in (as I perceive it) a contradiction between what the characters would recognize as the best course of action (putting your enemy away for good, particularly when healing is so ubiquitous) and what the game rules apparently incentivize.
I think you're underselling it, here. Wisdom is a fairly popular ability score, especially for single-attribute dependent classes, due to how it props up Will saves. Likewise, Survival is a class skill for some of the major nonspellcasting classes, including fighters and barbarians (and rangers, who are barely spellcasters). The major point being that a DC 20 isn't that hard to hit; even without other modifiers, a group could conceivably hit it with some reliability, since it only takes an hour to retry a failed check and the DC doesn't go up very quickly. It doesn't need to work all the time, either; it just needs to happen enough to emphasize to the PCs that "this is viable for your enemies."
Well, that gets into another point, which is the presumed use of minimum caster level for scrolls. As a cost-saving measure, it makes sense that you'd see that in terms of market goods, but on the other hand the reverse should also be true: you should be able to buy spells scrolls where the caster level is higher in exchange for a higher price. (Since a lot of spells are level-dependent in terms of what they do, there should be a market for this where the appropriate spells are concerned.) And of course, someone making their own scrolls will probably be extremely cognizant of that.
And this gets back into the issue of the intersection between plausibility of inconvenience versus gaining a tactical edge. It's not inconceivable that the PCs would all sit around in pitch blackness (and not leave the area of the spell, since they won't know who's the target of potential scrying magic) in a comparatively close area (e.g. good luck with a lot of downtime activities) to try and foil being scryed upon, but it sounds like a massive inconvenience, particularly if it goes on too long. Of course, that's only really worthwhile if the place you return to has at least dim light anyway, since that's the only way the spell's "supernatural darkness" that foils even darkvision would kick in.
Well, you said your group (like a lot of the hypothetical groups I hear about) was melee-oriented anyway.
Which gets back into what we've been going back and forth on, since this presumes that there's no particular advantage to the dungeon being on guard no, In fact, you seem to have gone in the opposite direction and presumed that you can trigger a heightened state of alert and then run away after they'e buffed up, only to return after their buffs have worn off, weakening them; needless to say, I don't think much of that idea, since it presumes extremes of behavior in the other direction; the same way the enemies won't sit around and do nothing while the next room over is being attacked, the won't gulp down rounds-per-level potions at the sight of a celestial badger either. They're not video game characters who can be aggro'd, they're intelligent beings who can make judgment calls.
See the paragraph immediately preceding this one. The "booga booga! Okay, they drank their potions, now run! See you chumps in a few hours!" strategy isn't much better.
Yeah, I was being pedantic. The point being that it's always something operatic, rather than episodic.
Eh, it sounds like a slight variant to me, since now it's "campaigning to save the
princessmcguffin guy" instead of "campaigning to save the world via killing a BBEG." Both of those are far cries from the old "rogues on the make" scenarios where you have characters who are scoundrels (albeit with hearts of gold) who are at least partially in it because they want to get rich.Never played it, though I read the novels. They weren't terrible, but they weren't exactly great either. The bhaalspawn template in Dragon #288 was kinda cool, though.
I think it was someone else that I was discussing this with months ago, about how full-progression arcane casters were essentially able to super-specialize in multiple things at once, depending on what spells they had available on a given day, and that was why they were so strong in 3.X/Pathfinder (along with the near-total removal of their weaknesses from earlier editions).
I'm glad that you were fine with not overshadowing the party; I'm just echoing a sentiment I've heard elsewhere. Namely, that someone will come up with some sort of broken character that's super-specialized in some combat-ending power which is nevertheless legal under the rules, and then when the other players rightly point out that this is ruining the game for them will turn around and complain about how they're being "punished" by the rest of the group for being too good at what they're doing. I personally find that to be wildly selfish, as it essentially outsources personal responsibility under the guise of "the rules should restrain my worst impulses." Certainly, unlimited use abilities don't help, at least when they have status effects like that (the old 3.5 warlock was far less bad in that regard, as most of its abilities were simply damage; the kineticist, by contrast, has quite clearly been given too many toys to play with, and has gone off the deep end).
Honestly, I think a lot of that is going to be redone by the time the playtest is over, so I wouldn't worry about it, though at this point my entire group has all but written off Pathfinder 2E anyway, since they've reached that point where they're far too invested in the books they've bought/received to jump ship. More to the point, I think that what they're doing is largely futile if they don't just try to scale back the inherent presumptions that magic items are necessary for personal advancement as you level up, but I suspect that ship has sailed since they quite clearly don't want to depart from the d20/3.X mainstream quite that much. Unfortunately, Automatic Bonus Progression is probably the only thing they have going for them, but most of their hardcore fan-base has already learned to hate that system, so they have their work cut out for them in introducing a better one.
8911002 Ohhh, that! Well, I hope we get there too, preferably sooner rather than later!
...except, of course, we're over two hundred chapters in for less than a month of time.
8911007 We haven't; none of the unicorn ghouls we've seen have used magic, even simple telekinesis. I just wasn't sure how much basic innate (i.e. racial) abilities should be affected by turning into an undead creature (or at least, that sort). But I eventually decided that not having a template for it meant that they lost virtually everything.
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That was also my point. I never said alignment was the only salient point, nor that it was all determining. I was disagreeing with you that alignment should be one factor in determining someone's actions, while you seemed to be saying it should have no role at all.
I do think that alignment is often the best single salient point.
Not usually. Your boss for the adventure book and 2 or 3 prominent NPCs, sure. The monsters in the story with "see Bestiary 2," not so much. In the Bestiary there will be a general paragraph or two describing their attitude, which usually fits their alignment anyway. And even when there is prominent pages of background flavor, it rarely gives enough guidance to predict how a monster/NPC will react in every situation, unless you are fighting goblins with a dog and a horse in tow. Alignment is a good default for those large majority of possible actions where there isn't a specific clue in the text like "this particular NPC will betray any divine healer after a cleric killed his father."
I think it's reductive to instead substitute in "if this creature was a human, what logical action would they take" if the creature is substantially different from human.
So hours, not seconds or days?
To be clear, AoOs are just a bonus, the primary benefit is in moving on to attack a new foe that is still actively attacking you so you can stop them from attacking you sooner, rather than wasting a round taking out an unconscious foe while the conscious foes get additional rounds of attacks.
That's pretty cool. I'll admit I don't know all the ways that CR is calculated. I always assumed they just assigned CR bumps for SLAs with the assumption that the NPC would get only 2-3 off, but I've never really looked into it.
So you're saying that sometimes it is strategically a bad idea to dispatched down enemies, and that's a fault of the rules? It kind of seems like you're starting with the assumption that enemy NPCs should always try to slit the throats of unconscious PCs, and then working backwards from there.
I can say that certainly in history and most of fiction people don't "make sure" of their enemies when there are live enemies threatening them, though of course most of fiction doesn't have the level of magical healing that Pathfinder and related systems have. But I don't think its quite as ubiquitous as you're asserting. Your party might be doing a really good job of having a designated "heal-bot."
Do the PCs spend their rounds downing unconscious NPCs? If not, have you ever asked them why not? I would think that if downed NPCs are consistently getting healed and back into the fight, they would start spending the time to finish off NPCs.
That's a good point. There's a difference between the NPCs using a tactic every single time, and using it from time to time to make the PCs wary (as they should be).
Good point, that wizard better have a point in Linguistics and a braille spellbook!
I guess it depends on how cautious the NPCs are. I imagine an NPC in an inner room hearing loud noises and sounds of traps going off might down their rounds-per-level potions because they assume its the PC party themselves tripping up alarms or traps. You're saying the NPCs would move into position to have visual confirmation of the PCs before buffing, in which case the summoned monster booga-booga strategy ( love that title, BTW!) doesn't work.
Dangit, now I want an adventure path like that. They've built an evil campaign, why not a neutral campaign?
Yeah. The whole reason I prefer D&D to other tabletop games is because it's cooperative play. For me the most important thing about building a character isn't "will I win the game" but "does my character carry his or her weight in the party."
Eh, sometimes. Listening to the Glass Cannon podcast and it's annoying that there's this terrible player who alternates between looting treasure while his party mates fight for their lives, to throwing around random Evil Eyes with random effects on random targets and acting like he's done his job. Status effects have to have more than a 10% chance of mattering, IMHO, for them to be considered overpowered.
Looks like they were mistaken earlier, now they're saying magic armor will also boost your touch ac and saves, so you're right that magical gear acquisition will still be a big driver.
Woot Woot! 👐
Very excited for next chapter, both because I want to hear more about Severance's restrictions, and I love Lex and Severance arguing.
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That wasn't what it seemed like you were saying; by that token, that wasn't what I was saying either. Alignment has a role to play in determining personal disposition, but it's precisely that: disposition. What actions are taken as a result of that are something else again. Though personally, I'm starting to have more sympathy for the original conception of alignment, which was with regard to (intrinsic) allegiance to cosmic forces.
You didn't get my point. "Literally everyone has pages and pages of backstory" is shorthand for saying "every character should be run as if they were a fully-developed, independent individual." That's obviously an impossibility, but it's still the ideal that GMs should strive for (without making themselves crazy in the attempt). Hence what I said before about various shortcuts and guidelines in an attempt to reduce the burden. All of that can certainly help, but only to a degree. Ultimately, even hobgoblin mercenary #2 is going to think of himself as the hero of his own story and act appropriately, rather than fighting to the death because that's what the book says (at least, not without a very good reason).
Leaving aside that we're talking about humanoids who arguably aren't that different from humans, what you've described here isn't a reduction: it's a limitation. There's only so much the humans playing the game can step outside of the totality of themselves in order to portray an alien entity.
It's not something I think you can put a rigid time-frame on; it's going to be "this circumstance (in its totality)." Certainly, anyone will want to survive the fight that they're in right now, but - presuming that their Wisdom score isn't completely lacking (I see this as being a Wisdom issue more than an Intelligence one) - they won't want to do so at the price of worsening their chances of living through tomorrow if they can help it.
That's only if you see that last attack to a downed foe as "wasted," rather than "denying them all the future attacks they'll ever make (not just in this fight, but ever)." Remember, if these guys are going to come back to finish raiding the dungeon tomorrow - and you, the defending humanoid dungeon-dweller - are still alive then, then this guy is going to be taking attack actions against you then, too.
Meh, I remember being at a seminar at Gen Con back in 2002 or 2003 (I can't remember which), where some WotC designers (or were they developers) were talking about streamlining monsters' spell-like abilities and making sure that they were only for combat-useful stuff. Their example was the 3.0 titan, whom they mocked for having things like summon nature's ally II ("Why does he have that? Is the titan just lonely?"). Sure enough, if you look at the 3.5 titan, his spell-like abilities are much more combat-focused.
Of course, this had its own drawbacks in terms of world-building and literally everything else that happens outside of combat, which cuts down on the narrativist and simulationist aspects of game-play. (You can see a complaint about this change on pages 89-90 of Dicefreaks' The Gates of Hell, which is an excellent fan-resource.) What all of this did to CR I don't know, but I suspect that the calculations that went into it weren't nearly as rigorous as you'd expect.
Quite frankly, I think that they should. Given that the d20 System doesn't attempt to simulate how, in the real world, a person's combat capability degrades as their injuries pile up, and with the ubiquity of healing magic, I honestly can't really see any reason why intelligent antagonists wouldn't try to kill PCs that are near death. The entire point of the fight is to kill the other guy, after all.
See above. History and fiction don't have to worry about this, because of a lack of reliable healing and a much higher certitude of "injured = unable to continue (effectively) fighting." The d20 System doesn't have those things; even if you remove the ready access to healing (which is already a major departure from what the system makes available), there's still the fact that you can fight as well at 1 hit point at you can at maximum, to say nothing of never becoming fatigued from fighting all day long.
Most PCs don't do this because a lot of GMs that I've seen are willing to say that "0 hit points = dead," for NPCs, unless the PCs specifically say that they want to interact with a dying character.
Personally, I think an easy way to resolve the entire thing would just be to make a coup de grace an action that could be performed as an AoO, which helpless characters are automatically trigger as soon as they're within a potential attacker's threatened area.
That's sort of what the potential failure chance does. NPCs can try to use a given tactic every single time it would become relevant, but if the numbers mean that it's only going to work 25% of the time, then that's roughly how often the PCs can expect to face it...but they won't know which time is that time.
Right, that's another reason to not sit around in deeper darkness all day. Little inconveniences like that have a way of piling up.
I thought you'd get a kick out of that name. But yeah, there's a compromise to be had. If the NPCs are able to make a reasonable determination that the PCs are making an advance, then they're going to be much more likely to buff themselves before they get there, whereas if they have reason to think that the PCs are on the verge of retreat, then they're probably going to be more inclined to save them (especially if they think that it's just a pretext before a renewed assault later).
"What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
To be fair, I think most tabletop RPGs expect that you'll be part of a party, group, or team. D&D, to my mind, simply has its own niche regarding what the team is going to do. Fortunately for the game, "killing things and taking their stuff" appears to be a perennial classic.
I don't listen to podcasts, so I'll take your word for it there, but if you're able to throw an effect with a 10% chance of effectively taking someone out of the fight every round, then that's still a fairly optimal choice, since most other people will have a 0% chance of taking someone out in the very first round of combat (mooks notwithstanding). They'll increase their chances over time, to be sure, but the nice thing about unlimited-use effects is that they can be spammed, making it a matter of "when" rather than "if." (Also, that guy sounds like a terrible player.)
I'd be beside myself with surprise if they were seriously going to get rid of systematized wealth-by-level. They'll try to clean it up, to be sure, and make it more flavorful rather than numerical and meta-game-y, but if they want to still be recognizable to their existing fab-base, they simply can't go too far. They don't want someone else to do to them what they did to WotC, after all.
8913181 I think you'll like this next chapter then. (Though I loved coming up with Sonata's little rhyme here...fun fact: try saying that line of hers to the theme of Shaft, and it becomes even more hilarious!)
Oooooh, Lex has realised that any use of Severance, provided he orders it to do something, is not over reliance on it, and that no such thing exists? Severance is a tool like any other, and it is up to Lex to use it how he sees fit, with all its abilities.
9219866 It's not so much that "overreliance" doesn't exist, but rather is (insofar as Severance defines it) a state of mind - or rather, an attitude - on the part of its wielder, rather than any criteria for what tasks are being ordered. If Severance's wielder was in a bad spot and started yelling "Severance! Save me!" that would be overreliance, as Cloudbank found out when Tlerekithres took control of her body.