Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 090: Stop & Shop.

I think the moral of this week’s episode is “stop and smell the flowers”. And not just because the Sunrise Maiden has a cargo hold full of them. (Or the Kish equivalent.)

I think sometimes we get so involved with getting from Point A to Point B that sometimes we short-change the “story” side of the game. Not so much “we = Team RFC” (though that’s also true to an extent) but “we = players of role-playing games”. Where’s the next bread crumb? Who do we kill next? This episode – or at least the first 20 or 30 minutes – was more about storytelling and the relaxed banter of the table, and you need a little of that in a campaign.

Which is also a nice dove-tail with Steve’s point about introducing kids to the game, now that I think of it. One of the cool things about bringing kids into this world of roleplaying tomfoolery is that they DON’T see it the same way we do. They don’t immediately reach for that mental manila folder marked BEST PRACTICES every time a situation arises. Yes, sometimes that means that they do “stupid” things from a tactical point of view that make the experienced player in me grind my teeth in frustration (cough-flying 40 feet in the air at Level 1 when there are archers around, and now we know falls from that height are fatal, don’t we?-cough), but they also do stuff that’s FUN because they’re doing it for the pure exuberance of the game. Which is why you don’t want to kill that by focusing too much on the rules.

Which brings me to “Oppressive Snail”. Yes, a potential band name if I ever practice my guitar enough to get any good, but oh so much more. When my son was MUCH younger… probably five or six… we were playing a 4E game, and he was playing a dragonborn fighter named (fitting, for a little kid) “Burns”. He just wanted to hit stuff with a sword and breath fire. But somewhere along the way, he decided for himself that Burns should have a spell called “Oppressive Snail”. Apparently, Oppressive Snail could summon a snail that could attack for him. BEHOLD THE SIX-YEAR-OLD MIND IN ACTION. Now I could’ve sat there and said “the fighter doesn’t have spells and doesn’t work that way”, but when the universe gives you shit like that to work with, you run with it. So basically, we turned it into some minor damage spell on par with his breath weapon, so basically, he could just use that or his breath weapon.

More generally, I agree with Steve about sanding some of the rough edges off the learning curve until they’re definitely hooked. In my Dads-n-Kids game, I’ve sometimes discussed, we don’t sweat encumbrance, or material components for spells, or even memorizing specific spells – we actually use more of an MMO mana system where you have mana cards that you can use to cast whatever spell you want. Yeah, purists will be angry that we gave wizards all the benefits of a sorcerer or arcane caster, but the point here is to get the kids to dig the game, so if letting them just cast Magic Missile 3 or 4 times does that… cool. As they get used to it, we do start to say… “hey, if you ever sit down at someone else’s table, the actual rule is THIS” so they don’t get caught unaware, but in the short term, get them to love the game first, and then focus on the nitty-gritty of rules.

SON, TODAY YOU ARE A MAN. (Pulls out a copy of 3.5 grappling rules.)

So, back to this week’s show. We party down with the Kish for a while. Hirogi gets sainted (for the love of FSM, WHY are you people saying “All Hail Hirogi” on the Discord? That’ll just go to Chris’ head…), Rusty has a harem waiting for him if he ever comes back (also assuming we save the universe and there’s a planet to come back to), and Tuttle at least gets acknowledged as a supernatural being (though I’d like to register a complaint that they spent their time hailing Talavet instead of Tuttle himself). Mo? Good at kids’ birthday parties. Which… the way John has played him, he’s a simple, uncomplicated, little-bit-world-weary guy… that’s probably a fitting legacy for the big lunk.

Now we have to decide whether we have time to go back to Absalom. I think the right answer here is yes.

There are two forces at work here, but they’re pulling in opposite directions. On one hand, yes the cultists have a head start on us. (As does the Corpse Fleet… have we heard from them recently?) That head start could be days, weeks… probably not months, but… “defense will stipulate” as the courtroom shows say. On the other hand, they have to figure everything out when they get where they’re going whereas we have to just show up and beat some ass. To use an analogy from academia (Tuttle would approve), the cultists have to actually do experiments and write a dissertation; we just have to show up and read the finished paper. That gets back SOME of the time we lost on the front end.

Also, detouring to Absalom is only a couple of days. This had always seemed silly and counter-intuitive to me, but then I had the sort of epiphany only an IT guy would have. Imagine a tangle of identical network cables, and you have to follow ONE of those cables end-to-end and untangle it. An annoying, possibly impossible task depending on how many cables we’re talking about. Now imagine all those cables are identical, except one that’s a high-contrast color like yellow or red. Still not easy, but becomes more doable. To me, outbound voyages or point-to-point travel are the random gray cables and returning to Absalom is the red one. Because… “magic-n-stuff”.

So we decide to go back to Absalom.

Character build? Sounds like we get into that next week, so I’ll do so then. I think Level 9 is a drone level, so it’s probably going to be anti-climactic compared to adding an ability crystal AND becoming a demi-god. Consider yourself warned.

Gear? I’m kind of settling on a jetpack and some sort of weapon fusion as the big-ticket purchases.

The jetpack because added mobility is nice and I’ve been frustrated at the number of times CHDRR’s jump jets were “right idea, but not quite good enough to do what I want”. I’d have to sacrifice one of my existing upgrades, but the environmental control is pretty situational anyway, and it can always be re-installed on short notice (I forget whether it’s 10 minutes or an hour, but either way… it’s pretty unlikely we’d get dropped into a desert by surprise.)

The weapon fusion… it’s this feeling that I can’t really afford a full upgrade, but I want to be a little more dynamic in my offensive capabilities. After poking the Armory with a stick, the Ghost Killer fusion starts to have some appeal. Incorporeal is one of those things I’m not sure we have a great answer for, and it’s always been one of my personal pet peeves. (After that battle at the security center, something that would affect swarms would also be tempting, but grenades can probably handle that.)

And then there’s poking the bear… upgrading the Sunrise Maiden. Our last outbound voyage sucked because we were seriously outgunned, and we now have two or three more levels’ worth of build points to play around with. Also at a metagame level, the writers of these adventure paths seem to love to kick things off with space combat. So… yeah, we probably ought to do that. Unless Steve were to do something crazy like re-write the beginning of the next module or something.

So we’ll come back next week and finish up the leveling process and get back out on the road. In the meantime, feel free to stop by the Discord channel and join the ongoing merriment (sigh… fine, you can say “All Hail Hirogi” if you feel strongly about it). Go out there and roll some 20s at your own tables, and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 089: He Says He’s Not Dead!.

Short episode, but a surprising amount to discuss this week.

The basics of the situation – we’re into Xavra’s resolve points, so we keep knocking him down and he keeps getting back up until someone can hit him again. Lather, rinse, repeat… and eventually, he dies.

(Pardon me while I sigh and rub my temples in frustration for a few minutes.)

It’s not that I think it’s unfair overall. If it’s a humanoid enemy with a character class, it ought to have all the same character tools we have, including, yes, resolve points. If we can get back up a certain number of times after being knocked out, so can the bad guys. On that level, fair’s fair.

Here’s the thing. There were probably two avenues for short-cutting this encounter, both of which we missed.

The first is that it’s technically GM prerogative whether to even use resolve points when the bad guy drops. In short, Steve could’ve just skipped to the end if he’d wanted to. I feel like the decision points there would be whether a) there are other enemies keeping the encounter going, and/or b) whether the overall fight is close enough that the bad guy could turn things around by using resolve points. In this case, the first wouldn’t be true, but you can make a case for the latter – Rusty was already down, Mo and I were pretty low on health, and Akiro, while healthy, had burned through his best spells. So all in all, I can see a case to be made for continuing. IF Xavra could’ve gotten back on his feet, he could’ve still been formidable.

The other thing is on us as the players – coup de grace does actually exist in Starfinder. Ummm… oops. You make a full attack that’s an automatic hit and an automatic crit, and the victim has to Fort save against instant death.

So… yeah, we kinda whiffed on that.

What we ended up with… well, it wasn’t difficult, but it was kind of a storytelling and logistical failing.

First, the storytelling front. Sitting there whomping on an unconscious character to finish it off doesn’t feel very… heroic. They might bury it in the appendices of the Starfinder Society Handbook, but I’m pretty sure borderline corpse desecration is still a no-no within the Pact Worlds. Gleefully hacking corpses to pieces dice roll by dice roll! You know… because we’re the good guys.

Then there’s the logistics of it. If you don’t use CdG, it’s kinda goofy that you can whomp away and they’re still “alive” because you can’t reach their negative hit points threshold for insta-death, but if you wake them up and lightly tap them, they catch the vapors and fall down again. It’s just such a weird little dance.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to lean into the absurdity of the game mechanics, this is where grenades come in really handy. If the bad guy springs right back up with one hit point, the to-hit is against the area and even a Level 1 grenade (as long as it’s typed to avoid damage resistance) can put him back down. Oh, you made your reflex save? Well, hate to break it to you, but half of death is still death. If one wanted to be a joyless min-maxer (not that I’m recommending such a course of action, but I’m not not recommending it), it’s almost worth keeping a cache of Level 1 grenades of various damage types around for just such an occasion.

Which leads into Chris’ mini-freakout the first time I hit him with what turned out to be a phantom grenade blast. First of all, it turns out I didn’t even do it wrong – Steve just put down a wider template by accident. So let the record reflect that I eye-balled it correctly. But honestly, so what if I did? Half the party is teetering on the brink of death, Chris has an almost full health bar, and he’s complaining about 1d6 of damage. I SPECIFICALLY used a Mark 1 grenade a) to not be wasteful of our better resources and b) to mitigate the effects of friendly fire if I somehow missed. I get that friendly fire offends his sensibilities as a player, but we were well past the “style points” portion of the encounter – I was just trying to get the guy to stay down.

And then there’s Mo, basically sitting out the post-credits scene entirely. I mean, yes, I get that he was pretty close to death – we don’t see each other’s exact hit points, but I’m pretty sure he was in single digits or close to it. But given that Mo generally has the best chance to hit if the encounter restarted in earnest, I kinda wish he would’ve jumped back in to help finish things up. Especially since he had reach with his pike – I had something like 15 or 20 points left, so I would’ve been more than willing to reverse roles for a round or two and be the meat shield while Mo poked him to death with the pike.

That strategy became even more relevant once Xavra had been relieved of his melee weapon and could only hit me with the gun that couldn’t do any damage. It was a shame this didn’t come into play earlier, but it was still gratifying for Aeon Tuttle’s new abilities to finally come into play in a combat-relevant way. I was a teensy bit worried it was actually going to be necrotic damage instead of cold or some such nonsense, but nope… full blast to the face, zero damage. Imagine a Nelson Muntz “HA HA!” there if you like.

At any rate, we FINALLY get Xavra down. The first reward is loot: if I wanted to be selfish, his gun and armor would both represent minor upgrades for Tuttle, but given that I just got the ability crystal upgrade and a new pistol, I don’t really feel like I HAVE to have either. Truth told I wish I could use the sword, but it’s an advanced melee weapon, and I never got past simple melee weapons. (There’s a wonderful bit of mental disconnect about Tuttle being able to resolve matters of quantum physics but not being able to figure out how to stab someone with a sword, but we’ll let it pass for now. Apparently, none of the aeons he’s now communing with ever got the “stick ‘em with the pointy end” pep talk Arya Stark got.

We also get a lore dump which fills in some blanks and sets up the sprint to the finish. Apparently, the grand destroyer of worlds we’ve been chasing is a superweapon created by the Kish’s ancestors that’s capable of rendering stars inert (GET IT? GET IT?… DEAD SUNS!), which naturally eradicates life on any planets that rely on those stars. It was used once during a war in the distant past and then sealed away in a pocket dimension, the gate to which is the cluster of identically spaced stars we first heard about back on Castrovel. Easy to see why the Cult of the Devourer (general nihilism) OR the Corpse Fleet (revenge against the living; a quick means of creating more undead) would want to get their hands on such a thing. Sooooo… guess we’d better try to stop them.

But we’ll get to that next week. We definitely get to level up to Level 9 (huzzah!), we might have some sort of close-out with the Kish villagers, and then we have to decide whether to spin back past Absalom Station or just keep going to the final destination. (Given the Sunrise Maiden is back to being held together with duct tape… maybe the latter?) While you’re waiting, feel free to drop by our Discord channel and other social media and give us your thoughts on the now-complete Book 4 of the adventure path, and we’ll see you back here next week.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 088: God Things Come in Small Packages.

This is a bit of a rushed Talking this week because I’m in the midst of packing for the annual family beach vacation. Part of me would prefer to be packing for – or at least planning a day trip to – Origins, but for something like the fourth or fifth year in a row, we have a schedule overlap. While Origins is fun (especially now that John and Bob are close enough for an in-person meetup) it’s not “Losing A Day At The Beach, Turning 10 Hours In The Car Into 16, And Spending All My Beer Money On Dice And Minis” levels of fun.

On the other hand, while I’m missing Origins, my good non-RFC news is that my Dads-N-Kids game is finally getting up and running again after being on extended hiatus. I won’t go into a deep-dive because it’s ultimately a side game you don’t care about – very basics: 5E homebrew, starting at Level 1, I’m playing a Warlock – but it might come up from time to time in a “compare and contrast” fashion.

Back in the world of RFC, the boss fight continues. It’s kinda grindy, but there are enough little moments to keep it interesting. In general, this hasn’t been quite as painful as, say, the sniper fight on Castrovel. Whether that’s because of the lack of difficult terrain or Tuttle turning into a demi-god, I leave as an exercise for the discerning reader.

The first bit of fun is that I get to make use of my Miracle Worker class skill. Frankly, I wish I’d thought of it earlier, but the truth is this fight ran multiple sessions, and this was a between-sessions inspiration. I started looking for… something… to increase my offense between sessions (since Aeon Tuttle, while very cool, doesn’t help my damage-dealing at all) and the act of re-reading my character sheet dug that up. A +2 to hit and damage doesn’t do a LOT to improve my chances, but every little bit helps.

I was incorrect about a few of the minor details. First, just as a matter of nomenclature, it’s a class skill, not a mechanic trick – every Mechanic gets it automatically at Level 7. Second, I think on the podcast I said something about it taking a resolve point, and that’s not actually the case – it just has limited uses (once per day, plus once for every 4 additional Mechanic levels). I must’ve been confusing it with the Scoutbot or something else.

Tactically, I was thinking that if I wasn’t dealing with being slowed, the smart play would’ve been to put it on Akiro’s weapon instead of my own. For one thing, it he seems like he already has a little better native chance to hit, but more importantly, hitting with that 1d20 rifle is probably worth more than me hitting with my 1d8 sonic pistol. But it would’ve taken two turns to do it AND it would’ve bunched us up more for his Solarian abilities. So… I go with the self-buff, even though it’s sub-optimal.

Second, I had almost completely forgotten about Rusty’s call for the phantom reinforcements. That was a bit of an inspired play by Bob. This is one of those cases where I credit Steve with letting a goofy idea go through when he didn’t have to. He could’ve said it was too implausible to be believed or even just made it a lesser effect where Xavra was confused for a round and stood where he was, but no… Steve let him buy it hook, line, and sinker. Tactically, it gave us a round or two to serum up and get some readied attacks going, but I enjoyed it most as a storytelling moment. It also confirms that whatever MacGuffin we need is in the records room since he did seem pretty intent on protecting whatever was in there.

So Xavra finally comes back out, and we end up moving the fight back into the cube farm where we fought the previous sub-boss. The best thing about this is it gives us some room to spread out. The lower level of the records room was maybe 40 or 50 feet in each direction, and the cube farm is closer to double that in width. It also has cover (the undestroyed cubes) which may or may not be useful against his Solarian blast.

Somewhere along the line, we also decide to start using more grenades. The damage ceiling is lower, but it means you only have to hit a square instead of hitting his armor, and I don’t get the sense he has the evasion skill that would let him take zero damage. I don’t think we could burn him ALL the way down this way, but if it comes down to the last 10 or 15 points, that might be how to do it.

So the fight continues. Rusty even drops (and turns into a pile of creepy goo… what’s up with that?), everyone’s getting pretty low on hit points… and Xavra finally drops! Whew.

OR DOES HE? Cue ominous music.

Without getting into it in great detail – and believe me: next week I’ll have THOUGHTS – Xavra has resolve points, so he’s not QUITE done yet. And with a few of us teetering at death’s door, finishing him off isn’t necessarily the slam dunk you’d normally expect it to be. But that’ll be next week. For now… time for me to get ready for sun, sand, and seafood. Feel free to drop by our Discord channel and join the fun, and we’ll see you back here next time.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 087: What’s in the Box?.

I’ll try not to make this ALL about me this week, but this is a pretty big moment in Tuttle’s development as a character.

Let’s talk Aeon Tuttle, shall we?

First things first, I’m still generally astounded at the whole situation in general, even though we recorded this at least a month ago, if not longer. When I went for the loot box, all I was really hoping for was something that might make me more combat effective. Better to-hit. More damage the few times I DO hit. Or, like I said, even getting rid of the slow effect would’ve been something. I definitely did not expect to become some sort of extra-planar hybrid. And like Steve said, it’s even more mindblowing because this is the second time something like this has happened to one of my characters. So it’s like winning the lottery twice.

Elephant in the room? I know… I know…. Technically we broke the rules on this. The rules of the Loot Box of Wonder say it’s supposed to be a randomly generated subtype. We kinda blew right past that in our enthusiasm. Going back and listening to the episode, I can actually hear Steve say “random” not once but twice. So… sorry, but also not that sorry (feel free to imagine me saying that in a Larry David voice).

However, the Min-Maxers Defense League would like to present the following arguments:

1. After finding out about the mistake on the difficulty of the Xavra’s armor, I’m not apologizing for anything else during this fight. To be fair, the Starfinder rules were still being finalized as this adventure was being written, so I’m not going to get too mad about it. (Or maybe I am mad and I’m just writing this to establish plausible deniability at a later date. That’s for me to know and the rest of you to guess at.) Still… as I sit here re-listening to the fact that I missed on a 19, knowing that it was because of a glorified typo… not feeling that guilty. I’m feeling like the universe owed us a little something, and letting me choose was part of the karmic payback.
2. The downside of rolling randomly is that there are a few options on that table that could’ve really screwed up my character badly when we’re ALREADY teetering on the brink of a TPK. I joked that being incorporeal would be kind of funny, but depending on how encompassing that is, being unable to use my weapons or interact with the environment would really create problems. Below that threshold, some choices would just be… not bad, exactly, but an underwhelming reward for rolling a 00. Goblin? Bleah. If you want to be even more anticlimactic – ysoki! I feel like it’s worth bending the rules just a touch to ensure that a special occurrence is, well, special. Like getting socks for Christmas when you’re expecting the new iPhone.
3. I feel like I deserve some credit for choosing something that was fair from a roleplaying standpoint because it’s in line with who Tuttle already is as a character. Choosing something with fire immunity just to neutralize the Solarian blast would’ve been taking the lame min-max way out. I did briefly consider the good-equivalent outsider (Azata) because truespeech felt more useful, but I decided that neutral fit Tuttle’s alignment better and the feature about adding to knowledge recall checks seemed more aligned with Tuttle the Scientist. So while yes, the aeon subtype does have some cool stuff, I feel like I tried to respect the spirit of the character in my choice.

If I had written a Point #4, it would’ve been this: for all the long-term potential of this moment, in the here and now, it doesn’t really do all that much to help us win this battle. I know that seems like a rather petty complaint in the grand scheme of things, but it’s true. The biggest thing we could use is more damage to make the fight shorter, and I didn’t get that. Though granted… I personally will stay alive longer. Immunity to crits has a 1-in-20 chance to be huge. Damage Resistance against fire takes some of the sting out of his Solarian blast, though I’d still better hit those saves. Full immunity to cold negates his gun entirely (though he’s only fired that once or twice). The sword still worries me, though – got nothing for that, so if he gets into melee range, I’ve got problems.

The other piece of the package are the communication upgrades, though clearly we have to survive this battle before we even get a chance to kick the tires on those. First… I can communicate telepathically with other aeons… kind of situational. More importantly and more generally useful, aeons get a Pictionary version of telepathy. You can communicate non-verbally by beaming images into the other person’s brain that show your intent. That could be a really interesting thing to explore going forward… you know, as long as we don’t die.

In closing, I’m really happy with this turn of events. It enhances Tuttle in interesting ways without drastically changing who he is or how I play him – I’m not going to be forced to run to the front to use a breath weapon or something like that. It’s not exceptionally overpowering, but it makes me a little more survivable (didn’t even have a chance to mention poison immunity) and adds some interesting wrinkles to Tuttle’s non-combat skills. And next time Gozer the Gozerian asks if I’m a god, I can plausibly say “yes”.

OK, finishing up with Aeon Tuttle, and returning to the battle as a whole, things are going as expected so far. The trash sidekicks haven’t been doing much damage: they just clog up the battlefield and make it hard to move around, but they’re more of an inconvenience than a real problem. Also as expected, Mo is the only one who can semi-consistently hit. On the other hand, he’s rolling like crap at the moment, and naturally, that has John frustrated. (The saving grace being that the Big Bad has also tanked a few rolls too.)

When it comes to John’s relationship with tanking, I’m pretty evenly split between feeling bad for him versus feeling like this is the path he chose. Back when we started all of this, he wanted to play a Soldier because I think he felt more comfortable playing a fairly simple character when breaking in a new ruleset. Unfortunately, given our party composition, this has pretty much meant that he’s the one up front taking damage while the rest of us get to bounce around the perimeter watching him get punched in the face from afar. Ninety percent of the time, he’s fine with it, but every once in a while, a little frustration bubbles over.

As the fight unfolds, I think we were JUST about to sound the retreat, but the combination of Rusty’s slow wearing off and Akiro critting for 40-some points changed our thinking and made us decide to hang in the fight a little while longer. I’m not sure it’s the right call, but I’m both the least damaged AND the least effective damage dealer at the moment, so I’m not sure my vote is the one that matters. Looking at it tactically, I don’t think retreating to rebuild CHDRR would help much here – his attack bonuses are such that he’d probably be crit-farming as well, and Xavra would be resistant to the junk cannon. (Also, it dawns on me that getting slowed again would REALLY screw up the move-sharing dynamic with CHDRR). On the other hand, Akiro having his whole complement of spells probably would be fairly handy… especially now that we’ve learned Xavra has pretty strong fire resistance, so Akiro wouldn’t have to waste any slots on fire spells. So if we want to retreat to get Akiro more spells, cool, but let’s not worry too much about CHDRR.

But whatever we decide to do, that’ll have to be next week, as it turns out this was much fight for even a super-sized episode. I know the armor thing didn’t help matters, but at the end of the day, you can’t really begrudge when Xavra fights run long; they’re supposed to test your limits as a party.

So we’ll see you back here next week. In the meantime, feel free to stop by our Discord channel and other social media and let us know what you think about the show. Which subtype would you have chosen?  Would Ghost Tuttle or Swarm Tuttle have created more problems for the campaign? Should we retreat or push on? Should John retire entirely from the tanking business? All good questions, and we’d love to hear what you think. So… see you next week, and until then, hope you roll lots of 20s.