I’ve had to drop the idea of writing up scenes for the campaign. The overly long breaks between sessions, the death of an established character whose replacement didn’t grow into his role, and the third adventure path’s regression to what amounted to little more than dungeon crawling were, in combination, too heavy a load to work with. The breaks were particularly crippling: this is definitely not a student-friendly game for those preferring to take it seriously; it’s for either teenaged kids with all the time in the world, or adults whose homeworkless jobs can go on with unchanged schedules for months on end.

But aside from these tertiary concerns, what of the AP itself?

Can’t say, really. It was more of a pit stop in between going to get what we wanted and… something. The leadup to the next one is less than clearly outlined. If memory serves, the original motivation for most of the characters to go to Saventh-Yhi was, in all possible Platonic purity, to Get Them Treasures. Well, we’ve switched employers now that our first sponsors have packed up their things, and presumably the investigation and looting of the city will proceed for a time until a more pressing concern is unearthed. For our dauntless party, the whole thing about being involved with the excavations and the like was purely a marriage of convenience; to my knowledge, none of the characters really cared about the forgotten secrets half as much as the swag – with, perhaps, the exception of Kuros: I still don’t know what that guy is about, and I play the man. Awkward. Somewhat embarrassing.

I wouldn’t know how to grade this one because I’m not sure we played it the way it was meant to be played. This was partly because of group dynamics (“lol lore, hell yeah geepees”), partly because of out-of-game reasons (them breaks, man… them breaks), and partly because, as the GM admitted, it was mostly just an XP grind to get us into such a level that we won’t all of us get immediately and gruesomely killed come the next phase of the adventure. The whole adventure took four sessions, which makes it the shared second shortest path thus far, along with Sins of the Saviors from Rise of the Runelords. Come to think of it, CSS was quite similar in style to Fortress of the Stone Giants, which we played through in only three sessions.

In Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv I liked the permanent little bonuses that you could get from the other survivors of the shipwreck. I was very pleased to see that there was another such thing in the second adventure path.

- As for why I like it so much: firstly, accruing these little bonuses from adventure to adventure is a concrete reason to hang onto a character through the whole adventure. Not that doing so should require special incentives, but all the same, I approve of rewarding the practice.

- Second, it makes for an excellent “You Been There” certificate, like a sticker on your suitcase. One duh-class gripe I’ve had for a long time is that regardless of what you write up for your character’s history, you don’t ever really get anything special to show for it; your starting gear and wealth is what it would be for a character of your level, end of story. You could write a novel’s worth of backstory when making a character that starts out at level 6 or whenever, and you can choose your skill ranks and all the rest to match, but that’s it; no extra mechanical candy. Here, you can actually point to something Unique on your character sheet (or on your character itself, as the case may be) and say, “I was trained in combat by a disciple of the Red Mantis!” or “I rescued the holy dancers of a tribe deep in the Mwangi Expanse and they gave me these mystical tribal tattoos that awaken the power of my inner hippo.” This, to me, is awesome.

This sort of thing should totally be a standard part of any adventure path. Generic XP that don’t care where you got them from just don’t have the same oomph. I have good memories of another game where abilities gained this way played a much more salient role, and seeing them in a game like D&D is great. I hope there will be more of these down the line, and I wish even more that my first character hadn’t died. Wherefore hast thou left me, Sujiu?

Other than that, in terms of story the module was a solid continuation of the first. We had an unfortunate months-long break between the last and second-to-last sessions, and I don’t remember all of it as well as I should.

In terms of play mechanics, the tale is rather more gritty. There have been some questionable encounters where the balance issues seemed skewed enough to stand out. My character, Sujiu, died in a nightly ambush against which the only reliable defense that I’ve been able to think of would have been to have high Perception skills on every character on the watch rotation. Well, our watchman failed his roll, and the result was a surprise charge from a “CR 3″ bear (my ass) that almost killed a lvl 4 Fighter with solid defenses in a single round, give or take a surprise round. The kill came on the second round, as I recall. In another fight there was an incorporeal foe that could only be hurt by the one magical weapon we had in the party. We had run completely out of healing by the time that bugger died, and three of our party of five couldn’t even have outrun the enemy if it had come to that.

We are now one session into the third adventure path, and the only reason we didn’t lose a barbarian to a similar damage overload as the one that claimed Sujiu was that our Cleric (newcomer, played by yours truly) incorrectly thought all his Cure spells were empowered. There at least the whole encounter was purely our own stupidity; the halfling went and flapped his gums at a ranking servant of Angazhan. I’m wholly on board for difficult fights, even TPK-potential-difficult ones, but I hold that they have to be fair: death shouldn’t come as a lottery. If the bear that killed Sujiu had charged our sorcerer or oracle (and possibly our rogue/alchemist), they would have died just as hard. If I had had but a few less Cure spells left upon fighting the incorporeal enemy, the casualty count would’ve been up to nothing but the DM’s discretion. And if I’d calculated the effectiveness of my healing correctly, we would have had at least one death in the party from the Angazhan-Servant encounter, probably more. Though again, the balance issues of that fight get a pass from me, because the fight did appear evitable. We’ve had one death thus far, but, no joke, we could have had more than one full TPK.

So. I miss my archer, but on the whole it was still a good module.

This is what proper wilderness exploration is. Our party was less than perfectly geared for the effort, with two characters with move speed 20 trying to fight through constant difficult terrain and no one having really invested in Stealth, but that’s part of the charm. The fighting balance of our party is fairly good, the only thing missing is a dedicated trap-springer. No one in the party has an even moderately good Perception, so I expect we’ll be walking into those things for a while yet. Other than our wisdomless party structure, we’re in pretty good shape.

Compared to our previous starting adventure Burnt Offerings, this one was more brutal in that the jungle is just stocked with all kinds of threats, and the safest spot on the island is nowhere near as safe as your average Varisian border town. You are essentially camping out in a dungeon, and the safety guarantee of your home base is “we just cleared this room, let’s hope the monsters all sit still in theirs.” That is to say: the work day is longer than five minutes, boys and girls, and you do not ever truly leave the dungeon to rest in between. No one leaves the island. ಠ_ಠ

Continuity-wise, SfSS is the close blood sibling of Burnt Offerings in that they drop hints about the things to come in almost identical ways. Neither one ends in an explicit ‘This way for your next adventure!’-sign, but both drop ancient symbols that are signs of a bygone age, old empire, forgotten civilization, ancient ruins, etc. Picking up those serpent-skull holy symbols it actually occurred to me to think, “Is this a devious sendup of some sort? A bit of deceptive foreshadowing to get you to think this is going down exactly the same plot path as Rise of the Runelords?” I don’t think anyone who stopped to pick up both those Sihedron holy symbols and these newer serpent skull ones could escape the déjà vu. I just hope the plot won’t turn out to be a new skin of novel color sewn on the skeleton of a forefather.

http://www.fictionpress.com/u/646260/Gastogh

http://www.fanfiction.net/~Gastogh

The Fictionpress account will mostly consist of original arrangements of songs, usually Finnish-to-English. What original writings I have do not as of yet form enough of a narrative whole to warrant posting. Perhaps later, but that’s not yet on the itinerary. At the moment there are only two songs in there (Finnish and English versions of Finntroll’s Aldhissla, lolwtf¡), which were uploaded primarily to see how the system works. I have three arrangements sitting in the queue (Uriah Heep’s Lady in Black, Heather Dale’s Mordred’s Lullaby and Hassisen Kone’s Jeesus tulee), more or less ready to post, but there are some minor issues and authorial reservations involved, so they’ll have to keep for a while still. Writing post-worthy song lyrics? Not all that easy.

The Fanfiction.net account will, for the foreseeable future, only hold the one story sitting in there now. I plan to build on that one more or less regularly, though; there’s lots to feel (and thus to say) about tha Jungle, after all.

So. I’ll eventually upload these new texts I have on fanfiction.net and fictionpress.com and keep this blog around for RPG posts. Links will be posted when the first uploads are made. As to this place, maybe this time I’ll write up a post on each module we finish in our latest Pathfinder campaign Serpent’s Skull. Better to do that timely-like instead of as a recap after thirty sessions.

Korvakopla’s tale reached its conclusion. I jumped back in at around level 27 or so and we finished at 30. So, the campaign spanned some 25 levels all in all, which I find respectable.

This is how each character ended up: the team got to return to their own cosmology or stay behind in Greyhawk’s world. If I recall, we all went over, even the GH natives. Not sure, though. Joaquim became a star – literally, of course – as per his epic destiny. Now starlocks can form pacts with him. I’ve no recollection whatsoever of what happened to Tannel or Tsardis, unfortunately. Serric set out to find new evils to avenge, and Sarfgrou rolled along into the sunset on Korvamobiili, happy as one like him could expect to be.

And no, I never did overcome Bardegran’s damage-per-encounter record from twelve or thirteen levels and one tier back.

- – -

So, the more recent thing I did was participate in the Pathfinder campaign Rise of the Runelords that NiTessine ran for us. Perhaps the most remarkable thing for me personally was getting to play a D&D 3.5(-ish) character for so long. We went from level 1 to 16 (would’ve gotten 17 and 9th-level spells if we coulda’ cashed in on the XP from the last fight, mehmehmeh), which definitely marks my high with a character in this kind of game. So we did it with by following the “Fast”-column level progression, whatever. It’s still a personal high by a lot.

The party consisted of Skrym, a shoanti barbarian, Jearis Tarlangaval, a gray elf wizard-scout, Michiell “Kajo” Grellsson (or smthng, name’s translated), a human cleric-type with levels in three classes, Sir Gelrick of Magnimar, a human paladin, and me, with an elf druid named Dairhe Faulilj. The party and their details can be found on the Mekanismi Wiki (it’s in Finnish).

Not only did I get to play through a long campaign, as I like to do, but I got to do it with a character I liked. He was a bit out of place as the play was rather less “conquer-the-wild-frontier” than I had thought it would be, but that’s not so important now; the epilogue I got to write for Dairhe is pretty much what I’ve wanted to do for a druid character ever since I first played one years ago.

Dairhe didn’t have too much downtime between in-game projects of various sorts, be it repairing a fortress of chanting up the party’s magic items, but he’s definitely got a life to live now that his game is over. Dairhe sits solidly as my number two character ever. At two it’s a pretty short list, but the competition is grossly unfair.

I need to finish more long games. Fortunately, there’s another one on the way. Next year we’ll see what happens to an archer in the Mwangi Expanse.

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.

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 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.

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.

—

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.