The Chronicles of Korvakopla #17

Here’s the conclusion to my participation in the mad ventures of Korvakopla. My gaming will now go on another indefinite hiatus. After Tannel’s player moved away, I don’t have a handy means to transport myself to the game anymore. There are a number of complications to the matter that would likely interest no one at all. This (most likely) last post will deal mostly with stuff that required the perspective of a longer game and stacks of material.

I don’t remember the events of the last sessions too well as plot goes, but mechanically, now… that’s another story. We had finally switched to 4e-designed content, meaning no more official or GM-made conversions. The effect was immediately noticed. Downright staggering.

Admittedly, my bookkeeping leaves a lot to be desired on this one, but I’m fairly sure we smashed our way past our previous encounters-per-day record at least once (meaning seven in a row now) and tied the previous record of six twice. We also – and here my bookkeeping is quite accurate – went from playing between two and four encounters per session to five or six (!).

Also, we weren’t even as pressed to make these records as we were the old ones; there was at least one encounter where no one in the party took a single point of damage (indeed, if temporary hit points wouldn’t evaporate, some of us would’ve ended up higher than we started) nor expended any dailies, though this last one isn’t so rare, considering our style. As I recall, the record of seven encounters in a row wasn’t eight because we Dinged and wanted our cool new abilities.

I’ve been told that my dropping off hasn’t significantly hindered Korvakopla. In my last sessions the avenger had already been dealing as much damage per strike as I would deal in the whole encounter, so small wonder. Of course, this is certainly in part due to the inherent easiness of the 4e material – and I dare anyone to argue that point. There still is no healer, nor any leader unless you count Tannel since he was the one who sometimes remembered to plant the party pooled Battle Standard of Something. And don’t forget that they’re now four players hopping through hoops intended for five with a healer to back them up. I can’t really sit myself down and settle on what I’m supposed to think about that.

Also, we were at level 25 when I dropped off, which means that people have been getting their hands on their lvl 24 and 26 ED abilities. As an example, for Joaquim this means that if things are looking down, he can make himself practically impossible to hit or damage for the rest of the encounter.

If the GM forcibly holding back player strength isn’t intended as a necessary balance tool, 4e stuff has a long way to go at the later levels to where party cohesion would be nearly as important as at lower levels. I can see in my mind’s eye how a party of five bow rangers would deal with every encounter in three rounds, tops, possibly without losing hp with even the slightest effort put into mobility and defense.

—

Here are some statistics. I love statistics, please ask questions.

-Personal highest damage per encounter: 748 by Bardegran the level 17 or 18 character. In my efforts to design a character that wouldn’t get nerfed, I ended up truly outdoing myself in the end; Sarfgrou, who retired eight levels higher and had access to all the perks of epic-tier feats and such, never got higher than 531.

-Personal highest average damage per encounter in a session: 440, also by Bardegran. Sarfgrou’s highest was 394. Here’s a breakdown that unfortunately doesn’t include levels. However, they progressed in a fairly linear fashion. Sarfgrou started at level 18. Average damage per encounter/number of encounters that session: Bardegran – 440/2, 222/2, Sarfgrou: 242/2, 265/3, 274/3, 358/2, 300/2, 207/2, 394/3, 219/4, 157/3, 222/4, 367/3, 214/3, 265/2, 159/5, 270/6, 122/6.

The last three sessions there were the 4e ones. You’ll also notice that the last one has the lowest average damage per encounter ratio recorded. 122 per fight? Total suck, Serric could and did deal twice that in a single well-placed hit. Didn’t exactly scale appropriately, my damage progression didn’t. Still, the comparison is somewhat ill-placed; the avenger was well built and was actually rivaling Joaquim in total damage output in the last sessions.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #16

Here’s a character recap for you, describing attitudes and appearances where necessary. I’ll attach an update like this at the top of new posts every time there’s a character change, though I don’t think there’ll be any of that anymore, barring some actual obstacle to ressing the current characters. Anyway, when Serric joined we all described our characters and it seemed like a good idea to me to have that stuff typed up for all to see. Some previous erroneous statements will be corrected here.

-Tannel, elf wizard. Usual-looking elf with a big thing for electricity, thunder and teleportation. Has a staff with a kind of fluffy hair sausage twined or floating around it due to the abounding electrical currents. I imagine it flaps around energetically with dailies due on the mighty winds of melodrama. Known to use two staffs occasionally. Has the ears of a red dragon grafted into the side of his helmet. Large-sized dragon, I believe it was, but possibly Huge.

-Joaquim, eladrin wizard with obscene stats and defenses. Joaquim underwent the half-dragonization ritual a while back, becoming a half-mirage dragon as a consequence. Among the powers he gained from that was a breath weapon, which I envision as a cloud of dull, psychedelic gases with a tendency towards pink and purple. He also gained a set of perfectly white mustache (and possibly a beard) that he really likes to twirl when, well, when given any solid excuse at all. (Really, just hold a picture of an elvish Pai Mei in your mind and bask.) Reminiscent-of-evil speeches, gloating over beaten enemies or taunting the still standing ones, an occasion to drain a glass of wine, it’s all good. He also has cat ears enchanted onto the shoulders of his armor (or the side of his helm?), which he looted off a defeated enemy after they were denied him as a quest reward. For added visual awesome, wears a Skull Mask nowadays.

Joaquim fell (or purposefully hopped) ”slightly” off his rocker in an enchanted forest. Now he aspires to become a star – literally, of course – via his Epic Destiny. For spell fluff purposes, he has the souls of an earth elemental and a fire/smoke elemental captured in an orb, like two pokemon in one pokeball. When they emerge, they tend to take on colossal size and smash everything to smithereens with any attack that hits or doesn’t.

Yeah, this guy is the soul of the party.

-Tsardis, air/fire-soul genasi swordmage. The only female charater in the party. She also underwent the half-dragonization ritual. Her dragon was actually a half-black dragon basilisk, so as an end result she is a quarter-black-dragon-quarter-basilisk-half-air/fire-soul elementally inclined humanoid. With four legs. If she ever has children, I imagine we’ll get straight to Mongrelfolk with a one-generation stunt.

A typical way for her to take a Short Rest is to sit down on a rock, effectively straddling it with legs on all sides. Unfortunately I don’t recall what kind of ears Tsardis is sporting.

-Sarfgrou, half-orc rogue. Sarfgrou is a murderous bastard who was found in a jail cell which had been his abode for fifteen years. Sarfgrou has good disposition towards life despite the hand life dealt him (murderous, but optimistic). Gurgling speech these days. Half-dragonized with a water dragon. So; a manic quarter-human-quarter-orc-half-water-dragon mutant murderer, with a battle cry ripped from ‘I Am Murloc’.

Combat-wise, likes making fountains out of enemies with ongoing damage. With a starting Con modifier of zero and an AC of Hell No he’s a perfect glass cannon. Nice Ref, though. Sarfgrou’s ears are a desmodu’s (think up the ears of a seven-foot bat), and they’re affixed to his Snakefang Snakeskin, which is a form of magical leather armor. They really should be moved to his helmet, as he also has a Skull Mask.

-Serric, elf avenger. Appearance is elf standard. He was locked somewhere in Death’s Reach by the gods around the time of the war with primordials for being just too damn dangerous. I’m not sure if he earned his ears yet (meaning getting the frag on an enemy with ears). Probably did and I’ve just forgotten. The most level-headed person in the party, like as not. Combat-wise, he’s an elf, a Deadly Trickster, and avenger, with auto-crit powers, and uses a Vicious execution axe as his weapon. Every fight is a crit party for one and all.

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We played one session on a sunday, another on the next monday, and went for the rest of the week without one, and also the next week as the GM had some school project which needed doing. So there’ll be almost three weeks in between games assuming we get one set up this weekend, which means I’ve forgotten almost everything we did in the last two sessions.

I do remember one scene, in which we’d killed some bad guys after though not necessarily because they refused to tell us some things. The ritual Speak With Dead was put to use, which is really a good option for all situations, all told, since the target is forced to answer and there’s nothing in the ritual description suggesting they’re allowed to lie, either.

The GM didn’t have them tell us everything so openly, though, and there was some social maneuvering necessary. Meaning diplomacy, intimidate, or bluff. Only the wizards could use said skills, of course, since they would be the ones casting the spell. No serious complaints from anyone, despite our wizards not exactly being masters in the subtle arts of interpersonal manipulation. Here’s the gist of how the first attempt with the ritual went:

Joaquim (of course Joaquim, ya fools): Hi homie, remember that one time we went drinking? Had a blast, didn’t we? How’s about you do me a favor and tell me [something about something]?

Dead guy: You killed me! I’m not telling you anything!

J: Come on, man, don’t be like that!

And suchly on for a bit more, until bluff was rolled. J knows little about bluffing, and nothing was gained except a memory of the scene. x’D

Second attempt:

J (again J, again of course): Hi.

Other dead guy: Huuurgh. Why do you keep me from my reward in eternity?

J: Not much of a reward for Orcus-worshippers, I fear. Anyway, remember when I introduced you to your wife?

ODG: That hag was horrible. I sacrificed her to Orcus and ate her. Tasted like [something].

J: Smooth moves, dog! Anyway, that was a good turn I did you, right?

ODG: Sure wasn’t. Horrible bitch.

J: Well I did find you a woman, aight? So how’s about you tell me [something about something] in return?

And bluff was rolled, with similar results.

We’ve had scenes of that mold before, and once J rolled a 20. T’was good.

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Houserule update: when disabling traps, the disabler has to use the lower of his perception or thievery. Meaning the guy with thievery – that’s me – can’t disable any traps beyond a tough heroic-level one because my perception is untrained and with mods and bonuses of zero. Our MO used to be Tannel goes first and sees everything immediately, then I follow up and disable what I can. Tannel has a higher passive perception than I would have if I took 20. As a matter of fact, he might have higher perception even if he took zero while I took 20. So now our main (read: cosmetic and purely formal) trap disabler (read: trap-springer) is either Joaquim or Serric, as one of them has the best balance of perception and thievery. Another useless and more or less unrealistic houserule. Still, traps are mostly jokes so it’s not that much of an issue in the end.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #15

The first part of this post is an introduction to a tool that I will now give to those who know me IRL. The tool in question is a kind of get-out-of-jail-free-card for conversations – a social joker, if you will. A ticket, even.

Here it comes. What I said earlier, about everyone being satisfied with Gregg’s utility and application? Never mind that. The player had some undisclosed disagreement with the GM on the subject of what constitutes a fun encounter. This disagreement had been present for most of the game, but for whatever reason it now finally culminated in enough of a divide that Gregg’s player left.

So I say ”all clear”, and before the next session rolls around, a head has rolled. I found this out on the exact same day as I wrote my last post, actually. The ticket I promised to you now follows; when you who know me find yourself inolved with me in a conversation that concerns or relies on my ability to gauge the mindset of another person – or any such matter of empathy – you may speak these words at me, and I will yield: ”You are not qualified to make statements concerning another person’s mood or intentions.”

You may translate the wods to Finnish if you like, so long as you stay true to their meaning and application.

—

The first session after Gregg we played with four players. Mostly uneventful, the only noteworthy thing is that now everyone settled on their epic destinies. Houserulings that applied: those who had received inherent stat bonuses on adventures so far couldn’t increase those stats beyond the theoretical maximum, as defined by the point-buy system’s limits and core material.

Most importantly this meant that Joaquim got shut out from his two or three most important choices, those being some Lich setup, Demigod, and Chosen, I believe. He ended up with Radiant Servant or Ascendant or some such. Tsardis took up the Lich one due to having started out with an Int sufficiently low that he could still stack the new bonuses with the inherent ones he’d received. Tannel became an Archmage, and I became a Demigod. My only other choice was Deadly Trickster, but since Demigod was suddenly freed by the houserule, it was left for me. Yay.

This last session we had a new fifth player join in. He plays an elf avenger-X?-Deadly Trickster who uses a Vicious executioner’s axe. Name’s Serric. Between all those abilities he’s got more attack rerolls than Joaquim has defensive junk, and that’s saying something. I might mention that this session ended with J, Ta, and Ts at level 22, and Serric and myself at 21. J now has all NADs at exactly 38 and AC at more than that.

The avenger does what I do, except better. I suppose he’s a bit more sticky as he deals more damage that I do so I have slightly less reason to bemoan my pitiful defenses that I used to, but still. No nerf-stick imminent so far, though I have been wrong before when trying to guess the intentions of people. *grumble* The next session should tell for sure…

The second out of the three encounters in this session I didn’t deal any damage, or even attack. Yeah, not once. Guess why? Flying enemies. Fuck that, up the ass. There were two landbound enemies that I tried to get at but the first one died before I made it to melee range and the second sat through his whole fight inside Tannel’s immobilizing tentacle rape zone. Fun, fun, fun.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #14

Episode X, Bard Power!

Rage’s player changed characters. Again. I’ll be the first to agree that sitting still and sucking it as a melee character against all these flying freaks isn’t cool at all, but I also agree with the GM when he said that free character change time is over; next time there’ll be a price tags of some sort. Small enough danger, though, for I’m already committed to this one, the wizards have nothing to complain about, the swordmage is far more versatile range-wise than most melee characters, and the new character is a Bard. One more arcane character means four out of five, which fact wants to tell us something, even if that something is nothing more than “no one cared to read up on another whole book full of classes and abilities”.

And not only is he a functional controller, but also a primary healer. He’s got seven heals per encounter and five more as dailies to fall back on. That is all kinds of awesome. The character’s name is Gregg. He’s modeled after something I wasn’t familiar with. He wanted to ride an elephant but the GM didn’t like that, so phooey. Joaquim’s player reminded me of a comment he had made when there still was only one PHB; in effect, it went like “once PHB 2 gets out a lot of the stuff there will get nerfed or banned or PHB 1 is made obsolete”. It might have come to that if the GM wasn’t already holding such a tight leash on what characters (and especially strikers) are allowed to do.

So far it hasn’t happened but I assure you, sure as sunrise J’s player, Gregg’s player and I could, between us, get any remotely effective combo h4xed onto the black list.

J’s player seems firmly rooted on the opinion that bards are straight up superior to wizards in just about every way, and while Gregg’s player didn’t agree out loud he didn’t object either. Examples cited were damage, size of AoE’s, amount and quality of controlling effects, utility of utility powers, as well as the fact of bards being every inch as much a leader as a controller. I found that hard to accept at face value so I made some comparisons based on what’s in the PHBs.

Damage was quick to check up on; if the bard goes for melee and uses his melee weapon powers, the damage dice will be larger, otherwise it’s even. As amount of dice goes, wizard either has a clear advantage or it’s even. Wizard has far more lingering area damages and secondary targets. Considering the natural power creep that one can expect as more books pile up, it’s even more noteworthy that the wizard not only kept up but pulled ahead. Wizard wins.

As AoE’s go, wizard has more of them and they’re often larger. Since many of bard’s abilities are melee, it obviously cuts down on the choices. There was one level, maybe 13, when bard had only single-target attacks, something which wizard doesn’t suffer of. Wizard wins.

Control effects and utilities follow the same pattern. Most utilities are defensive, mainly personal buffs for wizards and mainly party support for bards. Wizards control enemies with penalties and effects, while bards control allies with buffs and effects. The variation between “amount and quality” of controller effects is so broad in both method and purpose that comparison is useless. Can’t declare a winner here as the two simply don’t even attempt to do the same things. All in all, both hold their own just fine.

Now, bard is also a fully fledged healer. In addition to that, its multiclass versatility means that for the cost of feats he can pick the best abilities and combos out of any other class. Doing that, however, makes him King of the realm of Glass Cannons, never mind all the healing you have or could have. And not to forget seeking out the combos is not worth it since you’ll get to use them exactly once. In any case, bards are so customizable that playing playing them is bound to be interesting.

To sum up, I don’t see the wizard’s turf being in any way compromised, at least by the bard.

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Our swordmage was absent this last session and our bard kept his range, so I was the only melee guy. Huzzah. The newly acquired healing hit the spot since I got no flanks at all throughout the whole session and got to play meatshield some more. On the other hand, with two primary and one secondary controller the enemies were kept dazed or blinded practically through the whole fight, so it wasn’t such an issue. Gregg was established as a functional and interesting character.

I don’t remember much about the plot. There were shadar-kai monks as good guys and undead as bad ones, and the shape of our quest is “find something so you can get someplace”. The last fight had, if I recall, three flying enemies, one earthbound enemy, and one dwarf who could ride on one of the flyers. This is not 3e conversion anymore, either, we just still get fucked, Fucked, FUCKED over with these flying enemies. Jesus. Well, at least our party now consisted 75% of controllers so no one had to die as a consequence.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #13

Since 4e doesn’t have any much divination spells that we knew of, our method to contact Mordenkainen in the last session was unorthodox; Joaquim just raised his voice a bit and said, “Hey Mordenkainen, I know you can hear me anyway…” The GM then muttered something speculative about whether M was tough enough a guy, and made a Tough Guy Roll. Turned out he was tough enough, and did hear, and cast something 3e-based so we could talk. It tasted like victory.

Also, something long in coming! I give you: Korvamobiili! ^^

http://xcalibur.cc.tut.fi/~konev/korvamobiili.png

:’DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

X’D

:’D

Now then. This session we had a different GM. The usual one showed up with flu and a raw voice and got miffed at some comment from Joaquim’s player that no one else (including J’s player) seemed to notice, and refused to run the game. Luckily another Excalibur member who has occasionally sat in on our sessions showed up around that time, so he just took over the material and ran the game for us. Since we were long in deliberating certain issues to be detailed later, he got enough time to familiarize himself with the material. No complaints about how the game was run.

This session we found the portal that was supposed to take us back to Toril. Yeah, supposed. Anyway, it included a couple of posts lining said portal. Taking Korvamobiili along was not in question, of course, so we drove through with it. Now, as a mechanical creature, Korvamobiili is able to squeeze into tight spaces. That didn’t go over so well though, and the GM said we just ran over the portal’s posts. Owned! or so I claim. The ritual we performed to activate it worked and we were whisked away.

We arrived violently in some generic limboish world-between-worlds full of ambient light. Korvamobiili took some damage, but we have a ritual to fix it so we weren’t overly worried. Then, if I recall (this took place all of about 24 hours ago, don’t expect too much of my memory) we needed to use the portal again and did. This time Korvamobiili was smashed utterly. After the inconsolable wailing and a long time of discussing our options – including everything from carrying, dragging, magicing and bag-of-holding the Huge-sized stone vehicle – we left it there. Joaquim insisted on a complete formal burial and rolled around 35 for his Religion check, so all were comforted somewhat. Rest in peace, Korvamobiili.

The first fight was some ghoul horde and their resident leader. Encounter level was estimated 23 (initially 22, plus reinforcements and optimized monster potitioning due to some circumstance I didn’t catch. We’re all 20), and there were flying enemies and the leader had an at-will stun attack and every ghoul damaged people in melee range upon death. Initially there were two swarms that damaged all around them when simply attacked, so you can imagine how well that went with our melee characters, who, again, have no healing support. And of course swarms take half damage from non-area attacks, joy of joys. End result, four people died and the fifth survived only because the flying monsters – of whom not a one died as I recall, since the wizards had to at least try keep the melee folk alive – left as a deus ex machina. Laaaaame.

The survivor was Rage. He looted Tannel for a magical four-leaf clover that was the second-oldest item in our loot, and certainly the oldest that had had any potential use for over twenty sessions. Back in 3e it would’ve been a one-use Limited Wish, so he wished back to life Joaquim, who then resurrected everyone else. Hey ho, and off we went. Oh, and a ghoul ran away with our one hundred thousand gold battle standard.

The other fight was apparently to balance the first one, and had monsters whose only attack was straight-up melee with no effects. There was something of a boss, Large-sized and everything, but Rage disarmed him before he got to use his weapon for anything. All his useful attacks the the Weapon keyword to boot, and since our wizards had immediately Mage Handed the weapon a dozen feet away and over a wall, it was really just straightforward butchery. Anyone remember what I said about the mix of yber-encounters and inconsequential ones? Well; applies still.

How I got into fantasy and RPGs

There’s this new initiative going on where RPG bloggers make a post about how they got into roleplaying and how things progressed from there, started by Sami Koponen at Mythopoeia. (http://legendmakers.wordpress.com/) The idea seemed nice, so here’s my piece. This also delves heavily into how I got into fantasy in general, as that was a far stronger turning point for me than my discovery of RPGs. I can track all my current hobbies and all but one remaining friend to the day I discovered fantasy. For an inestimable debt owed in favors you don’t know you did me; thank you, Thomas Abrahamsson.

You are advised to consider every statement I make to be prefaced by several doubt-conveying and indefiniteness-marking statements such as “I think but I’m not sure”, “As best I recall”, “What most likely happened was” or some such. Especially as regards chronological distances and sequences.

I got introduced into RPGs by a friend called Jukka, who dragged me twice into an RPG session with Tommi and the Niku also referred to in his history. I don’t remember when this was, but before I started highschool. (As I wrote that, I had a flashback to sitting in a bus and hearing Tommi and Niku, who I didn’t know at all at that time, discussing Orcrist and Glamdring from the Hobbit. Huh.) I have this impression that Jukka was more along for and after the shits and giggles, as evidenced by the Paranoia session, which was anathema to me because I generally don’t like playing against friends no matter who’s winning or if victory as such is even possible. I don’t think the Paranoia session was my first; might’ve been, my memory sucks, whatever, no one *coughelsecough* actually cares at this micro-of-a-level.

I’m not sure how it managed to happen but I started to play with Tommi and Niku fairly quickly after that, without Jukka there. Though there was always the healthy sense of self-irony of anyone discussing fantasy, they regarded RPing as something apart from mild and temporary amusement, and that elusive sense of seriousness struck home. There was a lot of a session of this and two of that back then, with pre-designed systems and homebrews that I barely recall, and D&D 3e. The first character that I connected with was an elf archer in one of Tommi’s homebrews, named Kisfal in a groundbreaking move of precedence-setting as regards the naming of my dime-a-dozen elf characters. The name was actually reused from a certain forum where I made such an ass out of myself that my very memory shies away from that whole topic. Brr…

It now seems odd to me that I got in as deep as I did. This for background:

There was a time I wasn’t into reading, fantasy or RPGs. Then I found Elfwood. (Just Google it.) I wish I remembered when that was, but it was long ago. The site’s bound to be nowhere as novel as it was back in the day, nor commercial-free, and nor am I impressed so easily, but the impact then was immediate and immense. (If you can, think back to a time when video game webcomics were a new and novel concept, a site with some thousands of members could boast to be the largest fantasy art site there was and how slowly the pages used to load…) I could and would show you the exact picture that served as the soul hook, but it’s not there anymore, nor anywhere else that I can find. On the Very Off Chance that anyone knowledgeable enough reads this, it was Min Rho’s coloring of a picture by Adele Sessler, of Faeren holding a sword to his throat.

From there I got into fantasy art (meaning Elfwood). From there, Tolkien. I started reading in the upper grades of comprehensive school, but only really got beyond Tolkien in highschool. After Tolkien the next stop was RPGs – which would never have stuck if I hadn’t been a fantasy fan at the time already – and the broader scope of reading came last. So as a checkpoint summary; Elfwood -> fantasy art -> Tolkien books -> RPGs -> literature (first Star Wars and then all things fantasy).

Back to where what I say has something directly to do with RPGs. The One Game that stands out to me was a D&D-based game where Tommi was GM and three players (soon two) played dragons. My character, Animagynth, was actually reused from another game that had been far more of a oneshot. I don’t know if the others thought of Dragongame as another such short jaunt, but it never seemed so to me. The other player lost interest in the game far sooner than I did and his character’s death ended the D&D incarnation of the game.

It was resurrected in a homebrew system of Tommi’s, where I later also submitted large stacks of material. (The process of thinking up stuff and the discourse which passed for “quality control” are fondly remembered.) It was a solo campaign with me playing and he as GM. In the best times we could play almost every day of the week, several hours a day, with almost no time sacrificed to working out detailed battle tactics or counting roll modifiers a’la D&D. Long story short, I have a Log, over fifty pages long, written in small print with no marginals to speak of and not much more space between the lines – really, just imagine enough digital text to choke a donkey – that sometimes brushes by weeks of playing in-game and out of game with a couple of sentences (this somewhat balanced by going into excessive detail at times. Ke ke ke…). Shorthand and acronyms galore.

Before, after and during that there were other games with the two other players in our village, but they didn’t stick in any way. I wouldn’t have minded another long-term game but it was simply not happening with that group, and there already was the epic solo of the Dragongame going on, which eliminated any interest I might have had in another solo game. There was a short interval somewhere with a game posted on an internet board, which quickly provided evidence suggesting that I’m far better at “actual roleplaying” (I hate even saying that. Duh) online than face-to-face.

As an aside on that topic, while I do understand that there are people who can best relate to the acting and dramatics of intense conventional roleplaying as opposed to any other element the hobby can offer, it might as well take place in a different galaxy for all the part that it I can find for myself there. I’m not that expressive.

My RPG hobby or at least its interactive ground to a halt after Tommi moved away from town. I was never interested enough in RPG theory (and indeed I hate the whole scientific analyzing approach to anything with a vengeance), hadn’t made any new contacts in my playing days that I’d uphold later, and had bad memories of trying to be an active member on forums (*shudder*). That lasted for about a year or two or so, up till I started playing at the Tampere university of technology (TTY), with a group consisting of myself and various members of Excalibur, the RPG club based there. For more on that, read every other post I’ve written thus far. Unless I’m mistaken, Niku studies at TTY and is an Excalibur member. If not, I’ve at least spotted his name on the roster of one of the campaigns hosted for first-year students there. (So-called fuksi-DD. And I do hope I didn’t make an idiot out of myself my mistaking the meaning of the word ‘fuksi’ here.) Haven’t spotted him at the club so far, though.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #12

First I will spell out something that needs spelling out.

My character’s stats: Str 24, Con 11, Dex 24, Int 10, Wis 10, Cha 13. Race half-dragon half-orc. Alignment Evil. Basically, he is phenomenally strong and fast, but on the frail side. Also dumb and simple, nasty and bloodthirsty, but energetic and positive despite having been locked in a prison for 15 years. (Not part of the original concept, but it’s the way the GM introduced me and I didn’t care enough to contest.)

From my PP (Death Dealer) I have the following ability: “No Respite: Enemies adjacent to you take a -2 penalty to saving throws.” This also works with Sleep, so in an earlier battle I used the following to describe my actions: “I stroke the dragon’s head gently to lull it into deeper slumber while feeding him my rapier through his eye.” Now, it later occurred to me that an ability called “No Respite” might need to be a smidgeon more violent. So as a rule of thumb we can assume that I always kick enemies on the head.

Now, the following quote from how No Respite works is full and literal, and this means that it requires no actions to use or any awareness of anything on my part. So I’m constantly kicking all enemies upside the head when they get near. I need not be aware of doing it (and indeed it’s likely that I’m not, as my passive Perception (taking ten) is 20 and my Stealth without any roll is 22), and I even do it in my sleep, gurgling all the while of course. My allies might notice a mild breeze as my feet are constantly brushing past them without inflicting any ill effects, but my enemies’ concentration suffers from unending kicks. And remember; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOpdyytB3OY

Thus, before you as our end result proudly stands a tortured but manically optimistic half water-mutant murderer who gurgles like a murloc  and is continually kicking all enemies around him in the face without knowing he’s doing it.

Goddamn, but that is one fine sum-up for a character. If I manage to have that printed on a T-shirt, you’ll see me walking around the next Ropecon in it. There just are certain unique avenues of eloquence of expression and priceless visual images that can not be found on too serious a game.

In the game, we finished what had turned out to be a mini-module, still a 3e conversion. Next session is the custom-designed adventure, I think. During this one, Tannel ran into copyright problems with the spell he specced for himself and Tenser sued him. Despite help from Mordenkainen in the trial (skill challenge that wasn’t possible due to no Aid Another allowed and Tannel not having any skill in diplomacy), Tannel was DOOMED to pay 1000 gold in reparation for the infringement and to keep paying royalties (5 gp per month) for continued usage of both his own spell and Tenser’s Floating Disk from here on. Hah, I still well remember the first time Tenser’s apprentice came demanding tribute for the spell, and Faler vippa’d femma to him out of amusement.

There was a fight with the evil Erythnul-worshipping adventurer party, which we killed. Wizard-show again, their healer must’ve spent a dozen rounds locked in a tomb without line of sight to his party and taking cold and poison damage the whole time, and later immobilized and taking tentacle damage in addition to that. Same thing with their paladin, though he didn’t stay there quite as long. Their invoker was inconvenient but got to do as much as he did mostly because people started ganking his summons instead of him for whatever reason. There was also an avenger, but since he was rather hard to hit most folks’ attacks hurt me more than him. And yes, I got to be the main tank again. Easy fight, all told, for everyone except me. I dropped twice.

Then there was an Artifact-class rubik’s cube that we failed to open (skill challenge that was possible) and everyone took 150 damage. Tannel died instantly, two others dropped but didn’t die. We lost the prisoner we’d taken in the fight earlier, though. Oh well. Tannel got ressed and the adventure got finished. DING to level 20! I’ll be taking Deadly Trickster for my ED next level, since the immediately acquired rerolls are nice and the utility power promises to have an amusing introduction…

As a curiosity and a boredom-break I recreated Lordi Jää as a 4e sorcerer. There were two fairly basic avenues, a Dragon Magic build and a Storm Magic build. More are certainly there with other classes, but I wasn’t that bored. Both builds make good use of Arcane Energy Admixture or whatever the hell the name of that feat was, Lasting Frost, Wintertouched, and careful power selections, as is only usual. Originally it was just the Dragon Magic build down there at Paragon, but I later bumped it to full 30. The Storm build was fully a thought exercise based on changes made to the dragon build. The dragon build was far simpler, made available by a specialist PP that completely monkeys any and all Close Blasts. Both builds had easy access to more or less wtfh4x attack bonuses for little effort.

So, Dragon Magic Man is a twin-staff-wielding guy whose all Blast attacks penetrate all immunities and resistances, no matter the damage type. All his cold-type attacks penetrate cold res of up to around 30-40 points, which should punch through just about anything. He’s mostly made of blasts, bursts and ranged attacks. This guy bumps up AoE (particularly Blast areas) sizes, AoE damage, multi-target vulnerabilities, and damage resistance penetration. He veered away from pure Ice Power due to the simple fact of Blast > Cold.

Magic Storm Trooper is a more melee-oriented build that utilizes the tried and true Pew-Pew-Power-Phreak Paragon Path that is the Daggermaster. Twin-implement wielding here as well. Less AoE but more single-target DPR, less cold penetration but still enough to suit most needs. This build turned out going above 100  DPR with at-wills fairly easily, and all without the self-damaging Bloodclaw masochism that plagues all melee ranger builds I’ve seen.

Houserule updates:

-as of level X, I’m thinking 13-15, we can have an extra Daily and Encounter power in our ability pool. We can still only use the regular amount per day/encounter, but it’s like a free level-specific Expanded Spellbook feat for all classes. I only found out about this now.

-Weapon/implement expertises got errata’d into oblivion, freeing up a feat. They are now inbuilt into all chars, but to get the full adavantage in encounters and dailies, we have to describe the attack. This also I just now found out.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #11

Aight. We got to fight another dragon.

This one was a controller-dragon, loaded with shit designed especially to keep everyone from moving away, or very fast. The fight being underwater halved our speed, and the terrain was difficult within five squares of the dragon. This, along with Rage’s movement speed on five squares, meant that he could move one square per move action. Two if he Ran, which lowers defenses nastily, but that was a moot point since anything within 5 squares of the dragon was always dazed, meaning one action per round only. This, and an at-will of the dragon’s which let it yank all enemies with five squares to its side, meant that once combat was joined, only the wizard had any options left for leaving.

As a water dragon, he himself could, of course easily shift upwards out of flanking positions and the like, so our defender was locked in place and our rogue without combat advantage. Once again, only the ranged characters – you guessed it, the wizards – could do much anything at first. That was simply the nature of the fight. Well, eventually Joaquim Sleeped it and we sawed it to pieces and that was that. Beyond that we’ve now had another two fights where Rage didn’t get to do much anything. The player wants to change characters, I believe, but his plans have involved either a warlock or a sorcerer, meaning ranged striker. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen yet, as our last fight was a defender-show.

The GM had used monsters without checking them first, and in this case the error was that they all had [to-hit bonus appropriate to this level]-4 as their to-hit bonus, and our defenders had an AC so high that they could only hit on criticals, meaning 19-20. Rage and Tsardis tied four such folk for many many rounds, with Rage taking only light damage and Tsardis nothing at all. I had trouble grasping that, but there it is. Fire resistance and high AC + crippled salamanders = gg.

For contrast, the other half of the fight was taking place way elsewhere and was myself and the wizards versus some salamanders and their hellhounds. Guess who got upstaged? I wasn’t short on combat advantage this time because the wizards have so many dazing effects to put on enemies, but all in all I got to kill one dog. The wizards Tentacled the others to death. Something that lets them immobilize/slow everything in a huge area, plus of course their thundercages, thunderwaves, thunderlances and so on which means that the enemies were lucky to get in a single attempted attack. Cloudkill wasn’t even needed. I’m hoping the next fight will be my turn to be useful.

So, after the dragon died, the wizards played butcher and made me into a half-water dragon. Now our scout can scout because he has darkvision, yay. Also swim speed and water breathing, but that’s, of course, not the best part. It’s usually something about the shallow, exterior layer of th ephysical changes that’s the coolest, as in Joaquim’s moustache. Well, as a tried and worldly Warcraft 3 and Guitar Hero player, I immediately realized that there was now the perfect theme song out there, just for me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOpdyytB3OY

The opening words of the song are now my battle cry. With that, if I can but go first, all fights are already moral victories.

There was also a scene before we went to fight the salamanders, which is a quest from a desmodu city we found. They also gave the job to another adventurer group that was passing by, but we couldn’t determine if they were Evil or Not, so Joaquim wanted to see their cleric’s holy symbol. The fact that it was being kept out of sight was indication enough for most, but we wanted to be sure. So he went to chat with their tank (or someone other than the cleric anyway). Here’s the gist of it:

J: I was wondering if I could purchase some healing from your cleric.

T: That might happen. What do you need healed?

J: My injuries. I’m wounded.

T: I don’t see any wounds.

J: Well… *takes his staff and cracks it on his arm for a respectable 12 points of damage* That. I need that healed.

The discussion went downhill from there, but hey, there was a lofty height to get down from!

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #10

So the temporarily NPC’d Avenger character belonging to Elariu’s player was following us around, finished off the desmodus and hauled us off to Greyhawk to get us ressed. Then we went back to delve where we left off.

We had two proper fights, in which I took exactly one surge’s worth of damage. Bad rolls on enemies, higher defenses than my previous characters, and defensively oriented utility powers helped. I still have the worst AC in the party by well and far, particularly considering I’m a melee character, and my Will defense is both the backstory and punchline of its own joke, but apparently I can still get by. This might be promising, though I still am nowhere near the all-defenses-at-40+ silliness that Joaquim produces on a regular basis.

That’s the cost of playing a striker, I suppose; they get nerfed far more readily than other character types despite the indisputable fact that controllers frankly blow striker damage outputs completely out of the water without even trying. If one wants to shine with effectiveness, the only way in this game would be to play controllers. Strikers in other games, perhaps, but not this. But that’s all after-the-fact analysis, and I’m happy with Sarfgrou.

Textbook run-on sentence: I hadn’t heard any of this, since I’m the only member in the group who doesn’t have access to TTY’s extremely utilitarianically (you tell me what the adverb form for “utilitarian” is) set up IRC and thus have no valid means of communicating with everyone else, but the GM had called the TPK humbling us, or taking us down a notch, or whatever. Which would be fine and all in a purely munched powergame kind of game where every character is an excercise in a particular way to break the system, but to me it’s just silly to “take down a notch” a bunch of characters of whom half have already been individually nerfed. It’s liberating in its way, not needing to put any effort into finding yourself the good combos that would get slapped down after one display.

Well, whatever. Death penalties are enough of a joke these days that it really doesn’t matter.

Increasingly – nowadays exclusively, perhaps – my views on game balance or power creep or whatever have to be interpreted through the lens of our houserules. As a result, there probably won’t be much commentary on rules from now on, and little on the adventures beyond the awesomeness that still happens. On the next session, I expect the GM will rescind his houserule that when you can’t see, all terrain is Difficult; the wizards hit level 19 and got Cloudkill. Bye bye beautiful. For all that, I got some kicks out of the comment about PHB2’s power creep the GM made (“a lot of stuff needs nerfing”, or something suchlike…), when there are so many Dragon-magazine-powered duh-builds out there. Joaquim’s player has several, I believe.

On a related note, I’ve asked him to bring some of his 3.5 characters for me to see. Haven’t gotten them yet, but there’s a promise of cool stuff there. One character of his in particular lives on in enough infamy that he’s been used as a GM’s club in other games to hit the characters upside the head for being stupid; the threat in our game was that if our swordmage starts selling his sword and then recalling said sword from up to one mile away and thus get basically free money, Lordi Jää is going to show up and lay the smack down.

Houserule update: describing attacks for +1 to hit got reduced after the introduction of the Expertise feats, so that now you need to describe what you do to even keep the full benefit of the feat, and you don’t get any actual bonus to hit beyond what the feat would normally give you. The feat works as usual for at-wills, though.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #9

This one was a very good session in many ways. If you can actually predict everything that happened from that statement, take up horoscopes or something.

The actual start of the game was delayed by the usual 45 minutes due to GM lateness (wrote up my character for NiTessine’s Rise of the Runelords game this saturday while I was waiting, among other things) and 30 more because we’d started a 3v3 in-party fight. When the GM arrived, I pretty much simply said, “What are my prospects for changing my character?” The following discussion, in its shortness,  involved an observation about my new trend of character longevity, the fact that we don’t have a healer anymore, my pledge that the new character wouldn’t ever refuse to be serurrected if he was killed, and my views on the intended char’s power level and style of play. I took the conclusion to mean “no”, so simply decided to go ahead with my plans of having Bardegran seek out a sword.

Then I was surprised. Once the fights was over I got permission to roll up a char. And more awesome, the first array was 17, 17, 12, 10, 9, 9, which was so awesome I didn’t even roll a second one. Stupid, yes, but I was excited; I shouted “Kiitos, JUMALA!” and renewed my pledge that this char won’t ever refuse to be ressed if it comes to that. Also, I happily report that even though I had to basically look everything up again to write up the specs for everything, it only took me 90 minutes. Ownage. No one mentioned Bardegran again. It suspect these things have to do with how easy a character’s name is to remember and pronounce.

So, after smacking down Igwilw and saving Greyhawk, Korvakopla had been approached by a representative of the guild or club of people who came to this multiverse from Toril. It was a large club. They were told that there was a way to get out and the representative wanted to team up with us to get there. Only the gate could only return one to the destination, so it’d be a race after a certain point. Well, Korvakopla accepted.

So we started heading down to some ruins-turned-drow-city or whatever. First fight was some desmodus and chuuls. Chuuls sucked but the desmodus had some irritating smoke sticks and a mass stunning attack with a large range that only served to draw the fight out since they had nothing to really hurt us. Well, it was a basic fight, though I only got to use sneak attack once due to the geography and the smoke sticks. Rage dealt damage exactly once in the fight, I believe. Sigh.

Then the next one. It was seven desmodus including a Bossmodu, plus a beholder. Yay, a Solo plus seven mass-stunning brutes. Still, the last ones had been more irritating than anything and there was reason to think they wouldn’t have an unending supply of smoke sticks, so we went. Oh, we didn’t even know five of the desmodus would be there, nor the beholder, but hey! Level+5-grade encounters for the win! Five party members and no healer.

The fight went fine, I even basically dropped one of the desmodus in one turn. But the no-healer bit pretty much decided the outcome.

TPK HELLS YEAH

I had considered naming this post the Epitaphs of Korvakopla but we might still be ressed. We’ll see. Some impressive shit was thrown down there, though.

I died first. My char was able to defend himself better than my two earlier ones, but he still had the worst AC in the party and that was bad. Also, surges not accessed. I got couped and everything and died of heavy damage at two failed death saves.

Rage was killed on the same round. He went because he couldn’t access his surges; he was probably left with like 14 of them, even after two prior fights. Could’ve drank potions, except the beholder made him sleep so much. Heavy damage, two failed death saves, same as me.

Tannel went down next. He almost fell on the same turn as Rage and I, but saved his death save, and instead died on the next round. Cause? Damage, two failed death saves. It was beautiful symmetry, can’t really argue that we would’ve survived if there had been no focusing.

Then there was a significant pause in character deaths since it was the two survivalists left, Joaquim in particular. Still, J went fourth. It was absolutely crazy; he had three of four defenses at a value of everyone else’s best+4 or something, then no less than five abilities with which to make an opponent reroll an attack or increase his own defenses or teleport away. He hadn’t yet taken any damage when the first three party members were already dead, I believe. When he was almost out of everything, the last rabbit he pulled out of his hat was an item that gave him burrow speed that almost worked; would have, except the floor was too hard. Even that had to be checked. If the line of sight to the exit hadn’t been blocked by the single smoke-stick thrown in the battle, he could’ve teleported away with the eladrin racial power.

Wizards are tanks, controllers are better than everyone else.

Tsardis actually ran out of surges. He was the last to die, and actually was already down and dying while Joaquim was being killed. But then, while he was at two failed death saves, he rolled a 20, got to use his last surge and sprang up. He could’ve ran, or at least tried to, but decided to go for all-or-nothing and was killed.

Now, the reason for the 23-rd level encounter was that we could’ve tried to sneak in earlier instead of use force. I really can’t imagine how that would’ve been any more possible now than at any other time -except, I must presume, that the Module Wall of what the monsters are designed to perceive was a different color this time. Well, whatever. It was all good, and for a wonder it’s not sarcasm when I say that it was a good fight and a good session.

The sixth character, which is an Avenger and Elariu’s replacement, was the tag-along guy from the guild of displaced Torilians at Greyhawk. He could’ve finished off the two remaining desmodus easily (the fight was really, really close). Now, in-game, the decision of whether our characters get ressed depends on what he does. Out-of-game, it depends on what we want. Tannel’s player won’t play any other character, and in addition to that the agreement in the group was that we’re not going to simply draft a replacement party from that silly guild at Greyhawk simply to play through this adventure path and campaign.

Currently, I think it’s likely that Elariu’s replacement gets us ressed and we’ll be on our merry. The only actual option is that the game ends. Some wouldn’t mind horribly, but I think all would prefer not to. Now, Joaquim is too fucking crazy a character that his player is going to throw him away, especially, as it turns out, that his player also thinks that character replacement is bad even in a game of this kind. Tannel’s player’s views were already stated. This shoots down our golden opportunity of making a party of strikers munched until they only move sideways. Well, the issue J’s player brought up was a valid one anyway. Oh well.

Tsardis and Rage are question marks. Rage hasn’t been very effective and his player has fair cause to complain, and does it less than I would. Still, he’s also changed characters a lot recently; more than everyone else put together, since he also did the selfless thing and played healers. It’s now established: no one wants to play leaders; it’s boring and swiftly punished.

In expectance of continuance…

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #8

The session was earlier than I thought. I don’t ask questions because that way lies pain and madness.

The following is mostly ranting. I feel all my points are valid and my bitching justified, but I can’t pretend to consider my own delivery very mature, all told.

In this session we did get to finish the module. Got to the last fight, which was… yeah.

There’s this little form that we fill out after every session that basically contains some info about where the session was played, who was present and who GM’d. I don’t know why these records are kept and asked twice upon a time but didn’t get an answer that stuck. This is not an ongoing global campaign or whatever. The players’ part is to write something in there, which to all appearances serves no greater purpose than let anyone willing to look at the forms admire your shoddy handwriting. No one ever looks at the forms to my knowledge, and no one certainly cares. Comments such as “Lol” have been observed, and no one has ever called anyone to account for something written there.

Still, there’s those of us who put something of substance there and read what others wrote. After this session Rage’s player wrote this: “Most boring fight ever”. And I can’t really say I disagree much.

Surprise surprise, it was more flying enemies. Remember something about this? Flying enemies = bore?

Our fighter’s only contribution was to soak up some minor damage after everyone else had already been targeted and stuff healing potions down others’ throats. Our warlord dealt damage twice or thrice and that’s it, though he spent every possible healing ability to keep others alive. I Twin Striked with thrown daggers which was all kinds of pitiful, but I at least got to do something. The swordmage pulled some enemies closer because after a while they decided to be gracious enough to not go any farther away than that. Before that he was as impotent as the fighter. Another fight ruined by rigid adherence to 3e origins.

Our wizards did the damage, with Stinking Cloud being the game-decider. The warlord and Joaquim in particular were subject to heavy focusing, but with the defenses and abilities Joaquim has, he only dropped once. Tannel and Rage didn’t suffer much.

And another melee character bites the dust; the warlord died. Four healers dead now. This is starting to get truly irksome. Who wants to play the first aid kit when the only reward is you get raped? And as said before, strikers aren’t allowed to deal damage. The GM’s inflexibility is starting to get really prominent. Never could’ve guessed that someone of his experience could get to the point where he’s ruining the game far beyond any overpowered exploit the system has to offer  (other than penalties to saving throws, which are just sick).

I’ll elaborate: during this session I went from Lvl 16 to 17, and then at the end the GM gave all characters enough XP to push the lowest-ranking guy to lvl 18. Some are now close to 19, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles. With Faler I had more XP than anyone, now I’m at shared last place. Gummybears, anyone? Please?

Well, with these levels we’re getting close to epic levels, which admittedly are not very epic in 4e. Though the Epic Destinies have some true perks, much of them only start cashing in later, and the only immediately relevant change for everyone is the upgrade in available feats. The crucial bit in Epic-tier feats is that everyone gets an expanded crit range of 19-20. With our houserule that will be 18-20. There’s a feat like that for light blades as well, but that doesn’t stack with the range Daggermaster gets. And remember that I got excluded from the crit range expansion houserule.

This is what all this amounts to: once we hit Epic levels, everyone will have the same crit range, except that while everyone else gets it for the cost of a feat, I get it for the cost of my gods-frelling-damned PARAGON PATH. Oh, and everyone else gets to use good weapons while I’m still tied to my d4-dmg-die dagger suckitude. Once I realized the full scale of just how preposterous this scenario is I flatly said much what I just wrote, but I was only told that my character is just fine effectiveness-wise as he is. Well, fuck that. And if I’d been informed of the personal crit range change before character creation, I would never have made Bardegran to start with.

After the session, while we were ferrying a couple of the players home, I thought out loud about extorting the GM for a new houseruling with my dropping out of the campaign and him having to find another sucker more desperate than I to hose with his shittier rulings as the threat, but Rage’s player said he didn’t think it too likely that the GM would compromise on the houserules and instead wisely suggested a far better way of dealing with the issue: having Bardegran walk into the sword of some enemy. Hell, with my rushing into combat with a character I cared far more about the GM probably won’t even notice. Also, since we don’t have a healer anymore… (And I seriously think no one will want to play a healer from now on.) This seems at the moment the best thing I could do, a state of affairs I would call disastrous. For the reason, see below.

This course of action would give me another chance to roll up passable stats for Tayrel. However, the uneven spread of gummybears is a tough one to swallow: by this time the older characters have had the chance to get the following inherent bonuses: 1. +1 Int, 2. +1 Int, 3. +1 AC and Will. Oh, and what with the two wizards and a swordmage we have, the Int-based characters have cause to be happyish. The only one who got that second +1 to Int was Joaquim (I knew what I had to do but decided to play my character more like he’d do things. The others didn’t realize the catch…), and his Intelligence score at level 18 is now 26 or 27. If he was holding the Lvl 30 magic item that we procured instead of Tannel, it’d be two more. Crazy stuff. The inherent bonuses to stats that they can use while others can’t doesn’t bug me as much as the item because at least I could’ve had the same bonuses, but where’s my perfectly trailored Lvl 30 wondrous item that gives me +2 to my best stat for no item slots consumed?

Faler got +1 Int and had been dragonized before he died, and Bardegran has the +1 to AC and Will now. I feel bonuses of this sort are a good way to encourage keeping characters, but it only makes changing characters a more bitter business when you’re already being exploited for the worth of your entire Paragon Path and more. This is all pocket change, however, more or less literally. My biggest issue with the character changing thing is that our GM fights the same damn crusade that so many others do; the great and arbitrary effort of keeping untoward amounts of loot off the hands of their players -with the exception of Lvl 30 wondrous items for one guy only, apparently.

Elaboration: with this latest stretch of the module added to the reliquary we found we hit upon some serious loot. Faler’s gold and liquified equipment are also there, but they were reduced from our future loot (a decidedly unpopular decision that we nevertheless took somewhat in stride. We’re getting used to the GM’s antics…). Anyway, in this last session alone we ended up with 120k gold. Per person, to five remaining characters. I have just about no idea how our shit could pile up that much, but the end result is that now everyone has a metric assload of gold they can use. Except the warlord’s player, who got totally hosed because he died.

Now, I’m all for opposing the free-farm system of Create Char->Get Free Items At Creation-> Kill Char, Keep Stuff, Make Better Char With Unfair Resources. That kind of exploiting sucks. However, if I was GM, I’d at least allow the players to pass on the loot they’ve found on their adventures to their next characters if they so wished, with only the starting equipment that they needed to function being buried with them. (Even this would, of course, be a problem if you roleplayed enough that some random straggler bursting out of the demon heart in the Abyss wouldn’t be included in the party within five minutes, but that’s not a problem that applies to this game.) Anyway, with Elariu’s death all his equipment and his fair share of the loot was buried with him.

And if I’m going to kill off Bardegran, I’m going to permanently lose +1 AC, +1 Will, and 170385 gold pieces, an amount of currency that marks the shining milestone of the game as the only time ever that we could buy any item of our choice up to own level, or even above that. Hell, we could buy two items of our choice if we could find them at the market. Still nothing that would be a true and genuine upgrade in power level to +5 is available due to the scaling of the prices, but it’s at least a definite step up from the “You get random equipment and don’t get to keep previous character’s gold” bullshit. The one, first, and likely ONLY time we could buy what we like, and it’s gonna go down the drain. Well, misery shared; Elariu’s player is just as bad off.

Now, attempts at negotiating with the GM have been shown for futile and demeaning excercises in uncompromising robbery and outright beggary. You lose what’s yours and get crap to start off with. With the fairly-earned money alone I could buy everything I need for Tayrel to be everything I’d need him to be for several levels into the future, but God fricking smite me down if that attempt wouldn’t be turned down the instant I made it. I wouldn’t even need all or any of that money, if I could just get the starting equipment of my choice. Hell, I’ll be more specific: all I need is One. Damn. Weapon. of my choice. Wouldn’t think it’s so gamebreaking, since Tayrel isn’t built to be even as strong as Faler. The loss on inherent bonuses is bitter but completely fair and weighs nothing next to the unfair rulings.

In conclusion, I could piss on an on about every little thing that I’m not satisfied about for hours, so I’ll cut myself short(er) and finish with an actual solution of a sort: what I would allow the players to do if I was GM. Input on whether all my bitching is causeless and petty or at least based on justified outrage even if blown out of proportion is welcome.

WIWD: let players keep the loot they (their characters) have found while adventuring and let them decide their own starting equipment, with no allowances or above-char’s-current-level exceptions. I wouldn’t have any hardcoded deterrents against character farming and would only deal with the issue if and as it arose. In my current case, with my having made a char that I didn’t know would be shafted on his second session ever, I’d rule that all his equipment was lost when he died, but the new char would still be allowed to choose his new items and he’d get to keep the gold Bardegran had. Elariu’s player had kept his character longer but hadn’t known as much about what he was doing as it was still his first 4e character, and he’d also built his own char for the good of the rest of the party, so I’d let him keep Elariu’s equipment as well (or at least pass them on into the party pool). Complaints? Unfair or overpowering to someone?

…

…

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this. I could make a “This game is supposed to be about fun”-pitch to the GM but I’m confident that would net me fuck-all. I suppose I’ll try at the next session anyway, and get Bardegran killed as soon as I can. If wanting to play characters you like – instead of the ones you made without knowledge of the very rules or whatever Damocles’ Nerf was due to befall you after your first fight – is still penalized through every possible avenue, I suppose I’ll drop out of the game.

*sigh*

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #7

So PHB 2 is out, and it shows. As expected, there’s plenty of new material that’s good to have, and of course the one feat that every character shall from this moment on always choose. The actually interesting bits will have to wait because I don’t care enough about most of the classes to read up on them with enough concentration to form a good picture of how they’re supposed to work.

Some basic stuff got through, for example “Avenger: the new AC freak” which both Joaquim’s and PP’s player also noticed. PP actually dropped without a mention, and his new character, Rage, made his entry along with mine as we burst through the heart pulsing at the top of the pyramid in Abyss Layer #X. Rage is a dwarf fighter; nothing too fancy, but effective in a fight and with twice as many surges as our other melee characters. But of course, both our wizards have more surges than our melee folk, so there you are.

Bardegran the dragonborn daggermaster also earned me my first personal nerf: (apparently Tannel’s player was supposed to have told me this long ago, but it was news to me) I don’t get the enlarged crit range everyone else does. So everyone else works with 19-20 with their normal weaponry while I go 18-20 with daggers. Bitching mindset aside, I’m somewhat unclear as to what the GM wants with us; if we’re not allowed to be too effective at killing but more than one encounter in a row is still encouraged, are we to survive through prolonging fights into slogfests, maxing defenses and healing, stuff like that?

On a note that I can only regard as related, here are the PC roles that we’ve had in our party up till now, not counting one-shot characters, ones before my time, or the two latest entrants: 4 leaders with steady presence throughout, 2 strikers of which one was mine and the other didn’t stick for four sessions, 2 controllers who came in early and aren’t ever going to leave, and one defender. I feel this is very skewed and somewhat unfortunate, especially given the mindsets of Rage and Joaquim’s players and myself.

Still, in my second fight I dealt 748 damage (new personal encounter record already) to a self-healing enemy with about 1350 hp and her 300-ish hp cohort, so no complaints. I feel I got across my point on just how much better Faler could’ve been made, even without extended crit ranges.

I’d also heard that this session was to be the last in this module. No idea why really. We killed the lieutenant of the apparent BBEG, but even that we were only told by the GM. I had no real hints from the actual fight or plot to suggest that, since the thread connecting the BBEG to what I thought we’re out to do is either barely existent or forgotten in the time between sessions. I wants to play more often. So I suppose the last session in this adventure will be the next one, though the party will stay whole.

Damn, but I now wish I’d played Tayrel from the very first session. I’d never throw him away because of a death when keeping him would be so easy. :/   Anyway, I suppose I’ll edit this post if I read up on PHB 2 enough before the next session, which will be in two weeks or so.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #6

An epitaph for Faler Gorell, the second-longest played character I ever had, right after though still well and far behind Animagynth, whom this blog is named after. Fully thirty sessions of perhaps six hours on average Faler crawled the dungeons, but no more.

Faler has died. Long live Faler. The two causes of death: an unspoken assumption of the player’s that no one else shared, and a low Fortitude (and Will) defense. He fell to his death from on high, compelled to jump by an evil person targeting his Will and bull rushed over by melee enemies. After no less than four successful saves whilst teetering on that edge, he finally fell. The reason he didn’t put any distance between himself and that drop even at the cost of several AoO’s was he didn’t know the drop was so severe. I had thought that there was some drop until a sheer slope that he might at least slide down, but no: everyone else knew it was a sheer drop, and there was 75d10+25 damage from falling.

Secondarily, running away would have amounted to AoO’s and little else; I believe the Evil Person never missed his compulsion attack against my Will. In effect, after I got up from my prone state at the edge and went away, he’d just take me right back to where I would be bull rushed, and my Fort was even lower than my Will. Low defenses, focused attacks and ignorance, whose origin I never knew.

Elariu was also dropped over the edge but he made his save against stun at the last possible moment and floated down safely. Either of the two wizards would’ve simply cast Fly or Feather Fall. The ranger and swordmage were absent, and the swordmage could also have flown while Punainen Pelastaja would not have flinched to jump himself, or so I think.

There was considerable to talk after the fall. Small as the plot value of any of our characters is, I’m physically unable to play a character this long and cast it away as nothing. Even in a game which is almost no different above pure dungeoncrawl. In the end I decided Faler had had enough of adventuring and fighting.

One of the more surprising things heard during the talks was the GM’s line, containing something about keeping characters and replacement characters not having the same worth as originals (the general “too many small threads don’t form a true tapestry” thought was voiced). This was surprising not because of content, on which I solidly agree, but the context; I had not thought that anyone (else) even vaguely considered such things in this game. I’ll give you some background on all who have come and gone in this game, players and characters alike.

I’ve been along since session #3, and at least one and possibly three players have dropped out during the campaign, replaced by two new players until we got where we are at now. Characters who have dropped, left or died: human rogue Dorman, dragonborn warlord Ciruela, hobgoblin warlock Zormy, minotaur paladin Krumm, bugbear ranger Zavoc, minotaur cleric Argo, elf cleric Tynnyri, the chaotic evil warlord Yuriel replaced by his polar opposite (the poor player just got his char’s alignment turned right back this session), and now elf rogue Faler. Soon PP, as well. The only character who has been along since the start and hasn’t died or otherwise gone is Tannel, and he doesn’t hold any leadership position and no one could ever guess any of what I’ve written up till now. Tannel’s player is also the one least concerned with anything to do with character optimization or utility (the warlord player’s position is unclear, but he’s biggest on actual RP). Faler was easily the second oldest member of the party.

As a rule of thumb: every melee character has failed, while all (two) ranged characters so far – which would be the wizards – are still going strong. This also had to do with something else the GM said; he has his intelligent enemies target leaders and strikers. Really, the wizards could do anything or nothing at all and still be quite safe. Also related is that myself and PP’s and Joaquim’s players are very big on simply dealing lots of damage; we would get along famously if we could assemble a striker-exclusive party that relies on outrageous damage output for some unadulterated kill-them-before-they-kill-you tactics. It’s rather a shame that PP got nerfed so hard.

Back to where Faler’s death put us. One of my long-lived gripes was that I hadn’t known stat allocation at character creation was free and unrestricted. This gave Faler both a glass jaw and a glass fist in many regards, and pissed on my “must have effective if not maximized” preferences. In pursuit of his dislike for character replacement, the GM would’ve actually let me swap my stats around if I’d stick with Faler. Unfortunately, Faler’s Rogue Tactics couldn’t be changed, and all his powers were aimed for AD’s rather than BS’s, so it’s possible I wouldn’t have even come out any better on that trade. Shame to waste rare offers, but perhaps less so because there was little actually thoughtworthy choice to have.

As a last mention: we had fought another dragon, a Fang dragon this time, and Faler had just been dragonized before he died. Given a choice between the two oldest characters, Faler and Tannel, we went for the one who was to die. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

So, a new character for me. The main option I had, the bloody-minded eladrin rogue, I would’ve done in a second despite its non-maximization because he would’ve been cool to play. I’ve never said that about a blatantly evil character before, and to one reader only that might not need its rarity stressed. I don’t play evil characters. I can’t. Not even in KoToR, pitiful as that sounds.

Well, I said *would* have done, which means I didn’t. There are some limits of voluntarily falling short of effectiveness that I wouldn’t cross, and the stats I rolled didn’t cut it. I’ll list our houserules at the bottom of this post, and there you’ll find our stat generation methods. I then considered Sorcerer, but didn’t delve too deeply into it since (this will be pathetic, brace yourselves) I need the character within about a week and I don’t want to have my char upstaged one month from now when Arcane Power comes out. Power creep climbing at a steady pace, you can already strongly suspect anything made with PHB 1 alone will suck compared to what you can do with PHB 2 and AP. And as the final nail to my own credibility, the all-damage little-survival no-fluff character I opted for instead of Tayrel Drinnegaar is conceptually constructable from purely PHB 1 material. I have neither integrity nor imagination, it seems.

I usually like to play mages, healers, archers, hunters or offshoots thereof in any fantasy RPG and have done so since the start, but due to the nature of this game I’ve found no interest at all in those prospect. Interesting and variable to play plus effectiveness spells out “melee strikers” to me. So, what I made was… another Daggermaster.

Suuuuuuuck.

Well, Bardegran Taogos the dragonborn ranger-gone-rogue won’t be much of an optimization exercise, but more of a personal demonstration to how much better Faler could and should have been made. But I wanted Tayrel Drinnegaar. :[

Houserules, or what I remember of them and in no order:

-stat rolling: you roll 4d6 and keep three highest, you can roll two sets with free allocation and choose the one you like. Alternatively or by necessity if both sets you rolled were bad enough, you use the PHB-given method of point buy. In short for those who never read up on it: starting array of 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 8,  22 points. (What I rolled for Tayrel was one set with every number between 10 and 15, and the other with 11-14. “I AM A TEH HUMANS WITH TOLV IN EVERY STAT LULZ.” Apologies if you either can or can’t get the references.)

-newly created characters’ equipment is randomized. You get stuff you can use, but the properties aren’t for you to decide. You get your three big items that way, and then you get some level-dependent amount of money to spend as you like.

-if you’re completely inside some line of sight-blocking thing such as fog cloud or, in our case, Stinking Cloud, every square you move is difficult terrain. This one will start having some severe frakking consequences once our wizards get their paws on Cloudkill…

-describing your attack gives you +1 to the attack roll and +2 per level tier to damage rolls. Works only on dailies and encounter powers.

-Orb of Imposition doesn’t work on plot-critical solo monsters to avoid climatic last fights being reduced into a Coup-de-Fest.

-a ritual for making people into half-dragons that might be from Dragon Magazine. Not sure as I don’t get that stuff. Can’t even use it on character creation, for added fail.

-All crit ranges are increased by one.

-More to be added, I’m sure there’s still stuff left.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #5

Our merry gang continues to wander in its personal, purely self-inflicted and purely figurative darkness.

The last session ended with us in this room with an (the, really) Orb of Opposition in the middle of it. It’s an artifact that, when touched, swaps the toucher and his twin’s places. Everyone has a polar opposite running around somewhere in the world, or possibly some other cosmology. Details. We had heard that the orb only had one charge left currently, and we were to use it to make Bilarro back into Robilar.

Now, between this session and the last one the ranger’s player and the GM had had some kind of discussion about overpoweredness. I wasn’t privy to that and didn’t pry into it, but the player seemed miffed that his strikers aren’t allowed to deal damage, and is now somewhat riding along until PHB 2 comes out and he can make himself a druid. For now, there was some character remodeling in the air. None of us knew what was coming, but the player told us it’d be great. Joaquim was absent from this session, I couldn’t find out why. He missed much.

So…

We were discussing the applicability of somehow hauling Bilarro to where we needed him. It later turned out that we could simply extract the Orb and use Thick Gloves until it was wrapped it a sack. At some point during the discussion Rankkuri, who was still a newcomer to the group, caught some comment and enthusiastically got to ask, “Oh, you’re questing to save the world, then?” When we affirmed that, Rankkuri tore open his armor – tore it into pieces, even – to emerge from his drab shell with a red mask and red underpants, and a red “PP” painted on his chest. He then introduced his true identity as Punainen Pelastaja, and that he would now gladly lead us on or something.

PP’s new gear: no armor, and a Handy Haversack stuffed with fourty-four +1 magic hand crossbows. We never really stopped laughing after that. With Quick Draw, he draws two per round, fires off a round and drops them, resulting in an obscene pile at his feet after a time. Because crossbows can’t be kept loaded all the time, the GM ruled that they’d be randomly going off all the time and that there was a 45 % chance (thanks to a negative Int modifier) of what he draws not currently being loaded. This was deemed acceptable, even awesome.

For a moment Yuriel the chaotic evil half-dragon windsoul genasi warlord looked on in disgusted disbelief, then shouted something that I unfortunately wasn’t fit to write down in time, but it was something like “Ei jumalauta te ootte sairaita! Vittu mä en ikinä tästä maailmasta pitänykkään!” (“Goddamn you people are sick! I never liked this fucking world anyway!”). He then grabbed the artifact and faceorb’d himself with it. Yuriel disappeared and was replaced by a prostrate and unconscious lawful good half-dragon windsoul genasi warlord who eventually introduced himself as Elariu. Apparently Yuriel would have to deal with the prospects of suddenly finding himself huddling in a cave and soon facing some evil dragon.

After some deliberation we ended up where Rankkuri was trying to steal the Orb to use it (can’t remember and never could understand why). After he started running up walls and taking shots at Tannel’s backpack we were forced to put him down. For good measure all around, he even went to far as to try it again. As an end result, Faler has critted and dropped PP three times in two sessions and but a few in-game hours. Then PP promised he wouldn’t do it again and all was fine.

We went on to live through Alice in the Wonderland in one more twisted room of Zagyg’s twisted design, where we found some first of three shards we need for whatever. It’s getting like Zelda in some sad, once-per-week kind of way; “there’s a who in the what-kind-of-dire-strait-now and we need to get how many of what-now this time?” Lols at the Queen of Hearts giving out free opinions on the spells his mage advisor cast. Ahh, I love this game.

We adventured farther, but I’m not out to make a complete transcript.

I set some new personal damage records: 120+17 on one strike, over 500 in an encounter, and 1034 at the session. The per-round record is 173. I’ve kept stats of my damage output of every encounter for ten sessions now. Statistics are cool. Also, DING! + LVL 17.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla #4

This concludes the posting of older posts and now we move on to t3h real time updates. I’ll probably edit the first three posts later for added readability.

Our last session was 22th of February. Here’s a publicly viewable page with complete character and party pool inventories: http://xcalibur.cc.tut.fi/wiki/Peruna:Sakrin_seikkailut. For the Finnish-speaking parts of the audience, the page also currently contains the damage breakdown of our new ranger. Weird shit, yo.

First thing we did after the fight with the dragon was heal ourselves, then we headed down to where the last bunch of people were waiting. Faler had hopes that they need not fight since they hadn’t done that earlier, but to the relief of everyone, there was blood.

So, the Mirage Dragon that we fought last time left behind enough of a carcass for another quasi-dragonization ritual. This time it was Joaquim who was up for the treatment. Now, a mirage dragon is a poison-psychic kind of creature and so those abilities were reflected in the immunities and breath weapon given to Joaquim, but best of all was the moustache. The dragon had these multi-colored whiskers (think quatzalcoatl colors on a D&D gold dragon, you won’t be so far off) that Joaquim also received. Now he can sip wine from a Mage Hand-proffered glass and twirl a rainbow moustache while designing specs for Korvamobiili. Fulfillment has been achieved.

The session was also the first one for Rankkuri, the newcomer elf ranger. As effectiveness goes, it’s a well-designed character (regularly outdamaged Faler even with purposeful and voluntary nerfs, including a +2 weapon. At level 16. Huh.) and props to the player. The character got off to a less than shiny start when he alone in the party failed to resist a compulsion to turn on his allies. He got put down pretty quickly but not killed, and after some brief and pointed bitching forgiveness was swift -since, well, party.

Now for some analysis on strikers. More specifically, comparisons between rogues and rangers.

Rogues are supposed to be precision freaks, with a lot of powers for single-target attacks and gaining or retaining combat advantage. This translates to fair damage and attacks that often hit.

Rangers are supposed to be damage output bosses, what with the whole “I attack twice to everyone else’s once”. This translates to the best damage output in the game.

However… Rangers have a lot of easy and obvious options for dealing damage even on a miss, or without attacks altogether. With such options around, being all about accuracy seems rather pointless. Even the mere fact of rangers attacking twice to rogues’ once means they get to hit just as often, if not more. Statistic calculations aren’t my thing, but I believe rolling 2d20 and counting the higher roll will produce an average on about 13.

Now, as rogue Paragon Paths go, Daggermaster is a fairly obvious choice for a lot of folks. Prior to Martial Power, it was a mix of Daggermaster being strong and the other PHB choices being weak. Now, with MP, there’s some actual choice to be had, but Daggermaster is still up there. Critting on 18-20 while tying yourself to a pitiful base weapon damage essentially translates to this: you want to spam attacks in hopes of getting crits, rather than be really, really accurate. The best Daggermaster would be a ranger who MC’d to rogue just enough to qualify for the class. The second best option would be a Tempest fighter who did the same. But using a real, live rogue as the base class? No, not so great.

Currently it seems that for a melee striker, rangers will always > rogues. With ranged builds, rogues have some funky abilities, such as a combo of four utility powers that allow you to hide, walk into the midst of all and sundry and be invisible, so long as you don’t leave your square (permanent combat advantage unless someone can move you). I would be interested in seeing some reasons to play a non-MC rogue in a combat-heavy game, though.

For last, something on houserules. The expanded crit range works out well. Taking potshots is more often worth it now, meaning that being almost impotent against certain foes is mellwoed; you do usually hit something with a roll of 19, even if it doesn’t have the auto-hit feature of the Nat 20.

Creating a new character was also subjected to some weird things, starting with Rankkuri. I’m not sure of the exact details, but this is the gist of it: your primary equipment (weapon(implement, armor, neck slot item) is determined randomly. This has some benefits, i.e. not being able to always design the most broken of combos including weapons, making it somewhat more fair since not all weapons and items are even available to already existing characters. There’s only so much you can buy at the daily market at Greyhawk.

Then again, it does nothing to address potentionally overpowered combos of powers or abilities, and it seems to me that equipment is the least part of that unholy trilogy.

This, however, could be the explanation for our finding that Reliquary full of obscenely valuable items. Maybe we are to buy our items with gold from now on, instead of finding the good ones. Then again, not everything still ain’t at that market. Maybe we should stock up on lots of trinkets? I don’t know.