Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat: The Fall of Plaguestone, Episode 30: Baby Shark.

This week’s episode features a battle against an old nemesis…

(record scratch)

(pushes glasses up on nose)

At the risk of being tedious and pedantic, that’s actually a mild spoiler. We never actually SAW the person shooting at us from the tower in the initial courtyard battle, so we probably shouldn’t really know it’s the same person. Though, how many elite orc archer types can one castle have? Whatever… we’ll pretend we recognize her by her fancy bow and move on I guess.

On the other hand, I guess that finally puts my long-running “Noala is an enemy plant” theory to bed. I very briefly thought that “enemy archer” was “Noala is actually Vilree’s lieutenant and snuck into the enemy camp while we were preparing”. But now we’ve got an orc archer on our hands, so consider that idea formally retired.

The single biggest development this time was the almost-death of Ember.

First, I’d like to point out that if you’re listening to both of our shows, this happened within a few episodes of losing CHDRR in the Dead Suns game, so… amusing coincidence, but it’s been a rough month for my poor pets. This does mean I’ve already mentally decided that whatever we play next, no pet for me. No animal companion, no familiar… just me.

Second, I’d like to point out that I was specifically holding Ember out of the battle because I remembered her being vulnerable to either water or ice (couldn’t remember which one, and couldn’t find the stat sheet for her as we were playing). So I swear I was TRYING to keep her safe. But then the shark retreated toward her and it presented a prime opportunity to flank, which was just too good to pass up. And frankly, if the brine shark hadn’t critted, it would’ve been fine and we’d have been in fine shape.

As far as the ruling, it actually looks like it’s NOT GM discretion; It looks like companions are subject to the same rules as the characters. Quoth the rulebook (page 459):

“Player characters, their companions, and other significant characters and creatures don’t automatically die when they reach 0 Hit Points. Instead, they are knocked out and are at risk of death. At the GM’s discretion, villains, powerful monsters, special NPCs, and enemies with special abilities that are likely to bring them back to the fight (like ferocity, regeneration, or healing magic) can use these rules as well.”

So it’s not even GM discretion… Ember lives! Which is a relief on multiple levels. Tactically, I’m already down a shield, I’d hate to also lose my fire-cat too. Having my character functionality slowly whittled away on the way to the final battle is kind of a drag. But also, I’d hate to have gone through all that trouble to get this cool, fairly unique mount, and then have to trade it in for a boring old horse. No offense to horses in the abstract, but… come on.

While we’re talking rules… I agree with the consensus that it still feels a little silly that alchemical flasks are a martial weapon. I mean… if someone broke into my house right this minute, I could PROBABLY figure out the mechanics of picking something up and throwing it at the intruder. Having said that, allow me to make the other side of the argument. First, on a game mechanic level, it’s an easy way to make alchemical bombs something that alchemists do well – make it a preferred weapon and a class feature, easy-peasy, they’re the designated bomb-tossers. But if you want something that works more in-game, one could argue that the skill is not the throwing, but judging of distances and blast radiuses (radii?) on the fly to be able to accurately put a bomb in the right place in the middle of a firefight. (Also allowing for movement, as everyone’s turns within a round are supposed to be happening semi-simultaneously.) Going back to that previous example, yes I could pick something up and throw it at an intruder. Could I pick up a grenade, figure out where to throw it to hit the intruder but not hit my dogs, while the intruder is coming at me? Maybe that IS a martial skill.

Of course, it’s no skin off my nose. I’m trained in martial weapons, so more fun for me.

As we reach the end of the session, we head to the bottom of the stairs and are presented with the classic RPG dilemma – we’re mostly out of resources, and what we were all hoping was a final room is really an entire additional section of the complex. (Even without Steve zooming the blank map out, we could see two corridors and two or three doors just from where the stairs let out.) So what do we do? We’ve got to assume both Vilree and the orc archer are down there somewhere – so that’s at least two formidable opponents – and maybe even some additional minions too. We simply don’t have the resources for that, but there are ALL sorts of hints that waiting too much longer would be bad for the town.

At the end of the day, you can’t help the town if you’re dead, so I guess we’re stopping to rest. It just doesn’t feel very heroic. You don’t see Superman popping off to the Fortress of Solitude for a nap halfway through the story. (Except for Superman 2, where he kinda does. Maybe not the best example.) But it’s just one of those unsolvable “problems” of any RPG system – as a game mechanic, you have to set the refresh on resources to SOMETHING. If you make it too easy to recover resources, the game becomes trivial and you lose a sense of accomplishment. If you make it too hard to recover resources, you end up with a lot of stories that end in unsatisfying character deaths. So you gotta pick something and just hope that it matches up pretty well with the story beats the majority of the time.

So… long rest it is. Next week we tackle the basement level, hopefully, find Vilree, and also hopefully aren’t too late to save the town. While you’re waiting, feel free to drop by Discord or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat: The Fall of Plaguestone, Episode 29: Here Comes The Drudge.

We start today with a bit of a show note. Last night was supposed to be a recording session for us, but things came unglued because of technical difficulties – like… three different things one right after the other. Clearly someone stole a monkey-god idol they weren’t supposed to, and we all ended up paying for it. IT’S THE CURRRRRSE! (Cut to a close shot of the idol, lit with ominous shadows, with tinkling discordant piano notes.)

And yet we still had a blast because we just sat around and BS’ed about stuff. (Well, it was less fun for Steve because he was mostly down in the electronic boiler room trying to fix things. But the rest of us had a grand old time.) The reason I’m mentioning this is to offer a little reminder that it can be fun to get your gaming group together for a non-gaming session every once in a while. The game tends to impose roles, which sometimes puts us in boxes. Most obviously it separates the GM from the rest of the table by placing them in the role of rule interpreter and captain of Team Monster, but even within a party, people can start to get a little locked into the roles they play in the group. The healer ends up subservient and follows the lead of other players; the face of the party tends to dominate conversations, things like that. Setting that aside and just enjoying each other’s company for an evening is the sort of thing that keeps a gaming group together over the long haul. I highly recommend it.

(Though I’ll also be honest: the new Fire Emblem Three Houses DLC dropped last night mid-session, and I was sorely tempted to feign some “technical difficulties” of my own and go play that. MUST MEET THE SEWER CHILDREN! But that’s a whole other blog. In answer to the obvious questions: “Golden Deer, even though I think Claude is kind of an asshat” and “Petra”.)

OK, uncharacteristically wholesome digression over… time to kick some alchemical drudge ass!

This was one of those fun fights because the acid pools created an element of challenge that was interesting without being overly punitive. Yes, the squares of acid made movement tricky – at one point, the board looked like a half-finished game of Minesweeper. But as long as you didn’t end your turn in one, there wasn’t any real consequence, so it mostly just involved planning your moves carefully.

For an example of “too punitive”, there’s a room in the Emerald Spire where it’s complete (magical) darkness AND difficult terrain, and you’re facing bad guys (orcs or kobolds or something – it’s a low-level encounter) who can see just fine. Some of whom are archers. So you’re wandering around bumping into stuff, hoping you find someone to attack, while they’re shooting you to pieces. That’s an example of being challenging without being particularly fun.

This also strikes me as a fight that really works because of the way Second Edition has limited attacks of opportunity and opened up the battlefield. Put this same fight in First Edition for a second. Then you’ve got pools of acid everywhere, but if you try and escape them too aggressively, you’re choosing between guaranteed acid damage or eating attacks of opportunity. So… “damage” or “also damage”, and we’re back to “challenging, but not fun”. But in Second Edition, it flows much better.

One interesting outcome was that the flow of combat put Prue on a bit of an island. When the fight first started and we didn’t know what the drudges could do, Prue decided to charge further into the room to get in the drudges’ faces. As you do when you’re a front-line fighter. Get in faces, beat ‘em down. But then the drudges started spitting acid, and the rest of us tended to retreat backwards whenever we were standing in acid. So eventually, we had a mini-lake of acid with Prue all by herself on one side and the rest of us on the other. Also, we kind of gave them control of the main choke-point on the battlefield, the doorway. Oops.

The other thing you might have noticed is it mostly took Ember out of the fight, but that a conscious decision on my part. Once I realized that movement was going to be a key component of the fight, it dawned on me that running out of moves and potentially leaving me or Ember standing in acid was probably a worse negative than the positive of any additional damage she could do. (Also, at least early in the fight, the doorway made a natural chokepoint and just getting her into the action was going to be difficult.) If things got dire, I would’ve brought her forward, but as long as we were in reasonable control of things, I figured I’d just let her sit this one out.

Cynically, I also enjoyed this fight because I didn’t get any of my rules wrong – I didn’t use Lay on Hands, and I got Liberating Step right (for the most part). Now to be fair, some of that came about because of Prue’s choice to run into the room: she was out of range of either of those effects, so I didn’t have a CHANCE to screw it up. But we may also be catching up to the point where we actually realized we were doing it wrong and started doing it correctly. Though having said I did it right, there might have been a lost opportunity to do it BETTER. Liberating Step also includes giving the ally a Step as a free-action: as I’m re-listening, I’m thinking there might have been opportunities to use that to not only block damage but to be more clever about moving people out of the acid. Ah well.

And then at the end of the fight, I had almost forgotten about The Leap. That was literally me being a knucklehead for the sake of using a feat that a) I had never used and b) my teammates had made fun of me for taking. So even though it was only 10’ of acid and I could’ve just run through it and ended my turn on the other side, I wanted to try my leap just to say I did it. The DC of the check was pretty low – single digits, I believe – but the universe being the Great Equalizer that it is, I fully expected to roll a Nat-1 and faceplant into the acid. If that had happened, I TOTALLY would’ve deserved it. But no… I finally get to be Brixley the Bullfrog.

And that’s where we end the episode. Drudges dispensed with, new areas to explore, and since this is more of a workshop area, this feels more like the right way to go to find Vilree. And that’s where we’ll pick it up next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat: The Fall of Plaguestone, Episode 28: Halfling Trap Detector.

The theme of this week’s episode is time management.

In the course of “normal” adventuring, standard operating procedure tends to be to gather every scrap of information and pillage every piece of loot you can find. In First Edition and even Starfinder, we sometimes boil it down to the cynical and meta-gamey “we search the room until we find whatever we’re supposed to find”, “Grayhawk the room”. Even earlier in this adventure (the Hallod fight, for instance), we were doing a bit of that. What fun is being an adventurer if you’re not getting paid?

This particular week, it’s a little harder to do that because there’s a lot of… stuff… pushing us toward trying to resolve things quickly. First, we’ve got the lone archer who survived the courtyard battle – I don’t think that’s Vilree, since it’s unlikely an alchemist would ALSO be a great archer, but it is someone who could return any time with reinforcements. Next, there’s the homunculus who should have a telepathic connection with Vilree, so it’s a pretty safe bet she knows we’re here now. And then toward the end of this session, we get the ominous diary entry claiming the final preparations for Plaguestone’s destruction are already underway. Like I said, there’s a lot pushing us to keep moving forward.

As such, I think we may have missed a few things. It’s one of those things I didn’t really pick up on when we were playing, but when we first entered the “living room” (but before we found the kitchen), Steve described one of the bookshelves as being full of “scrolls” and “exotic objects”. Or maybe “esoteric”… it was definitely an E-word that sounded promising and vaguely magical. That sounds like it could’ve been either been magic items, something that related to Vilree’s plot, or both, but I don’t think we ever came back around to searching that shelf because we were kind of in “keep it moving” mode.

The running clock does seem to be a bit of a signature Paizo move; it shows up a lot. Ironically, our Starfinder game is also in a running-clock section at the exact same time. That scenario (in case you’re only listening to this show) is that we have to disable the enemy starship before they capture the Doomsday MacGuffin – the ship is fighting its way through the outer defenses, and we have to stop them before they get to the destination. We have access to the ship’s computer so we have a rough idea of how the battle is going and how much time we have left, so… another running clock.

Sometimes the running clock is more on the order of weeks, just to keep the adventure from going completely sideways. You don’t really have to rush an individual encounter, but it does keep you from spending a week crafting or something. I suppose “the judge gets here at the end of the month” was the thing that kept us moving on investigating Bort’s murder in the first half of the adventure. But toward the end of adventure paths (like this), it’s on the order of hours, and the goal is to explicitly force the party to finish an area without taking long rests. It sometimes feels a little contrived, but at least it provides an in-story reason for it, rather than arbitrarily saying “you can’t rest here” like one of those isometric 90s-era video games.

I do think a secondary reason we’ve been getting sloppy about loot is that the “loot table” for this adventure is tilted pretty heavy toward alchemy. I feel a little guilty complaining, considering I’m the one person in the party with martial weapons training who can throw bombs the best, but still… personally I’d be more excited to search some of these bodies if there was going to be a sword of a shield. But nope… MORE POTIONS. I suppose there was that orc with the club, but I’m not sure I could live down the sheer physical imagery of Brixley swinging a club that’s taller than he is.

I don’t have a strong reaction to the homunculus encounter. On one hand, it feels a little unsatisfying like maybe we should’ve done something other than just lock it in the kitchen. But it doesn’t sound like we could talk to it, and I’m not sure fighting it would’ve been worth the time and resources, so what else was there, really? I don’t know: it just feels like some sort of thread was left dangling there, but I can’t put a finger on a better idea.

The other thing we get a closer look at this week is hazards and lock picking. I vaguely recall Cade trying to do a lock earlier in the adventure, but I think he only had one pick and broke it, and Prue ended up using strength to force it open. This time we get a closer look at the process. I have to admit, even though it’s a bit more challenging, I like the multi-step approach to locks and hazards – it always seemed kind of anti-climactic to just resolve it in a single roll (“oh look, a trap”… [roll]… “oh look, no more trap”); with this approach, there’s some anticipation involved. Makes the job of a rogue (or other trap-disabler) a little more fun.

As we reach the end of this episode, that journal entry is picking at my brain pretty hard. What if we’ve ALREADY taken too long? What if Spite’s Cradle served its purpose and Vilree has already gone… back to Plaguestone even? What if the orcs were just left behind to tie us up while she finishes the job? Or, Vilree’s previous shenanigans have involved tampering with the water supply… what if whatever’s going to kill Plaguestone has already been deployed into the water supply and there’s nothing we can do? What if we get back there and everyone’s dead?

(And by the way, I’ve still got that 2% conspiracy theory that the archer is Noala. She keeps disappearing to “clear the perimeter”… maybe she’s really one of Vilree’s henchmen and she keeps leading us into traps. Haven’t totally let go of that one either.)

So we get the living quarters cleared, and now it’s time to head into the more functional area of the keep. We’ve got some fountains (that nagging doubt about the water supply just kicked into overdrive), and that’s pretty much where we leave things for next week. While you’re waiting, feel free to drop by the Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show; always lots of good stuff happening there. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.