Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|05: Snake Eyes.

Welcome back to another week of Talking Combat: Innocent Bystander Edition. The relentless pace continues as we’re up to our fifth and sixth encounters (not necessarily all combat) since the first circus performance ended – poison spores in Myron’s trailer, bear, water mephits, cockatrice, and now dancing grigs and snakes. (Let me know if I’m forgetting any).

The first thing we have to address, even if it’s a little out of order, is Steve’s interesting vocal choice for the snake. Look, I’m not going to make fun of Steve because I can’t do voices at all, except for a really bad Sean Connery. And Ross Perot, which hasn’t been topical for almost 30 years. So I would absolutely NEVER say that it sounded like The Count from Sesame Street and Borat had a love-child. That would be unkind and possibly hypocritical of me.

Steve remarked on it, but I’m going to amplify what he said – I thought the choices in the grig encounter were interesting because they covered a bunch of different scenarios. First, I’m impressed they resolved it without bloodshed: our Black Lodge group probably would’ve just gone running in weapons-hot. But I also appreciate that they each took an approach that worked for their character. We had Darius going with brute force, picking people up by the head (I was immediately struck with the imagery of those crane games they have in Chuck E. Cheese) and rushing the center of the circle through sheer brawn. Ateran went with a knowledge check – fairly standard plan for your designated Smart Person. We had Alhara going more roguelike and attempting to get up high to do some general recon. And then Hap, in some ways made the most interesting choice, using Performance to “go with the flow” and dance her way to the middle.

The situation itself resolves peacefully: it turns out the grigs just want to party and didn’t realize what effect their music was having. But I still wonder – was this coincidence, or did someone send the grigs that way to create more chaos? If the murderer is really a druid type that can control rats and interact with nature, they might have it in them to influence the grigs to say “hey, go party over there”. But things resolve peacefully, and the party gets what we later find out is a potency crystal for their troubles.

By the way, we here at Roll For Combat are HUGE fans of potency crystals. Just want that on the record.

Anyone who was disappointed they didn’t get a fight out of the grigs didn’t have long to wait as the party stumbles on a group of snakes. The battle gets off to a rough start for our heroes as Hap wanders face-first into the minion snakes and loses almost her entire health bar in one shot. Alhara has problems of a different kind dealing with the boss – her best attacks are powered up by panache, but she tanks her roll and just flops in a heap right in front of the Boss Snake. Meanwhile, Darius is still down an action because of the Slowed condition. Things are looking a little dicey for a while, particularly for poor Hap, but the team pulls it together, thanks in part to Ateran blowing his big-gun Level 1 spells and better rolls from the Varus siblings.

In the aftermath of this battle, I have to admit I was really enjoying Loren’s roleplay of Hap, who is out to an early lead as my favorite character. Whether it was the emotional reaction of being attacked by the snakes she normally considered friends, or throwing what amounted to a tantrum at being asked to identify the potency crystal, Loren really nailed the “sulky teenager” vibe. (I should know. I have one of those at home.)

I think one thing I like about it is that it’s a fun but fairly realistic way of making the character unpredictable. “Wild card” characters are one of those things that sound great on paper – there are some great examples in film, TV, and literature of such characters – but they can be tough to do in a compelling way, and if done wrong, can come across as peeing in the punchbowl. An example of the worst case is someone who creates an “evil” character and then interprets that as “do the opposite of what the rest of the party is doing just to get a rise out of people”. “You open the door on the left? I open the door on the… RIGHT!” (And an entire table does a group facepalm.)

I’m going to draw a contrast here between Hap and Mister Peepers from the Black Lodge. This isn’t meant as a criticism of John – it’s just that game is more of a low-roleplay environment and the expectations are different. John is playing Mister Peepers as unpredictable, but since that group is fairly low-roleplay, there’s not really any rhyme or reason to WHY Peepers acts the way he does. It just comes across as random Brownian motion, bumping into things until something happens. That’s fine for that game, but compared to this game, it’s a little hollow. Here, Loren’s managing to take Hap and make her unpredictable in a way that is really relatable – she’s only a teenager, so of course she’s not always going to have the Rational Adult Reaction to situations. I know you can argue teenagers were basically adults in a medieval fantasy setting, but still… kids are kids, they don’t always do what you’d expect in a given situation. I think Loren’s doing that really well so far, and I’m interested to see where she takes it from here.

So everyone’s blown their spells, Darius is still slow, so it’s pretty much unavoidable that a long rest will be coming up soon. The mystery of Myron’s murder is still languishing in the “to-do” column but we’re making some headway, and it feels like we’re nearing the end of the line on the rat tracks, even if it’s just by process of elimination. Hopefully next week will bring some resolution. While you’re waiting, feel free to duck into our ongoing Discord mayhem 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 Three Ring Adventure S1|04: Man of the Mountain.

This week represents a return to familiar ground, as it’s a mostly combat-oriented episode, featuring not one, not two, but THREE different battles.

OK, the first is a little out of the ordinary as they’re fighting against the circus’ own bear, so they don’t want to hurt it too badly in the process. I have to admit I thought it was mildly amusing to watch the party try to use every skill-related trick in the book to avoid having to fight the bear, only to have it punch Darius in the face anyway. (Would a Society check work? Can we shame the bear for pairing the wrong wine with its dinner?) I also thought the imagery of tiny Hap trying to shove Darius out of the way was pretty darn hilarious. We need a special Patreon level where you can inject an Nat-20 or Nat-1 into the proceedings – it would’ve been funny to have Hap send Darius flying across the trailer. Ironically, the combat is ultimately resolved by, well, not fighting. The minute Darius steps back and gives the bear some room, it immediately calms down and makes amends by giving Darius some big bear kisses. (Which would be a lot handier if bear saliva had healing properties.)

I did have a thought, but it was a very after-the-fact thing – wasn’t there a bear-cloak in Myron’s trailer? Could they have calmed the bear down by wearing that? Either outright disguising themselves as him, or even just bringing something with his scent along to keep from spooking the bear.

After looking around the bear trailer, the team follows the rat tracks into our second fight of the day… a pair of water mephits down by the stream, kinda just minding their own business, hoarding rocks from the stream into a backpack. I assume mephits don’t really have “gear”, so I assume the backpack belongs to our druidic friend and the mephitis somehow found it or stole it. To metagame a little, even without Darius messing with their rock collection, the team probably needed to get that backpack and see what’s in it, since it probably belongs to Myron’s killer.

The fight starts, and looking at the mephits’ stat block, their big weapon is acid arrow (3d8 + 1d6 persistent acid damage) as an innate ability. They also have a conical breath weapon (2d8) with a randomized recharge (1d4 rounds). They are fairly “glass cannon”-y as they only have 20 hit points, but man they hit hard. As poor Alhara finds out with a vengeance, as she gets critted and dropped (fortunately, not quite reaching the insta-kill threshold, though). I’ll note that’s the second straight show we’ve had a one-shot crit – Chris’ dwarf got critted in Black Lodge, and now Alhara gets the same treatment here.

Luckily, the party is able to finish off the mephits and save Alhara, and we have some loot to move the plot forward, and some roleplay action. The loot is mainly in the form of a map with key locations on it – presumably, those would be additional places to look for the culprit. The roleplay? A little possible romantic tension between Alhara and Ateran brewing? I’m intrigued to watch this play out because it’s something our usual group doesn’t do a lot (OK… ANY). Our group might roleplay an encounter with a key NPC, but we don’t really do a lot of deep interactions within the party itself.

Once everyone’s healed, the search resumes, and we eventually end up at the third fight of the session – a battle against a cockatrice! My first reaction here is surprise more than anything. I don’t know why but I always thought a cockatrice was both bigger and higher level. I don’t know if I accidentally swapped it with a different monster or I’m just losing brain cells, but I never really thought of a cockatrice as a low-level creature. Maybe it’s the petrification ability – maybe it just SEEMS more powerful because it can turn people to stone. (Especially since in earlier editions, it was a single save.)

Ironically, the cockatrice, despite sounding like the most formidable foe, ends up being a fairly quick fight, though Darius (he’s having a rough session) manages to take a cockatrice bite and become slowed. He eventually makes the save to keep it from getting worse, but he’s still going to have the Slowed 1 condition for a day.

I wanted to run through the progression here, just for the curious. Each round you have to make a DC20 save against the petrification. Each fail adds a level of Slowed (essentially, one less action per round), and if you reach Slowed 3 (aka you lose all three actions), you’re petrified. From there, it’s a save every 24 hours: regular success means you can move again, but you’re still Slowed 1. Critical success and you’re totally back to normal. Failure means you’re paralyzed another 24 hours, and a CRITICAL failure means the petrification is permanent, and… you roll a new character, I guess. So it’s pretty fortunate Darius got off that train when he did, though being limited to two actions for an entire day is nothing to sneeze at.

For the moment, the team decides to retreat to camp – they’re pretty beat up and most of their rechargeable resources are spent. (And a tank with only two actions.) But they return to scene of turmoil… as well as a good place for a cliffhanger, as the entire circus troupe is stuck in some weird compelled dance. S-s-s-s, A-a-a-a, F-f-f-f…

And that’s where we’ll pick it up next week. Is this going to be a fourth straight combat for the team, or will they be able to finesse their way out of this? While you’re waiting for next week to bring the answer to that question, feel free to drop by the 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.