Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|13: I’m Attacking the Darkness!

Well, let’s start this week with a discussion of shield, since Steve called me out by name. You know what… I’m willing to accept the criticism as valid. I’ll throw myself on the mercy of the court since I just got my wizard abilities this level and I’m using the spell for the first time, but he’s right… I should know what my spells do. Especially since I have so few of them.

I think I got a little turned around because there’s casting the shield, which is an action, but then there’s blocking a blow, which is a REaction. I think one of two things happened; either I momentarily got those two tangled up in my brain, or maybe I figured since shield was only a one-action spell, it made a little sense to have to raise it to be the separate (second) action that almost every other spell seems to have. So… fine. Learning curve.

Of course, there’s a second smaller mistake we made that I just noticed on re-listening. There’s a place where I take like 5 attacks in a row, and I use the shield spell to block the fourth attack because I was pretty low on hit points. Well if you want to get technical, that block should’ve expended the shield since it only has a hardness of 5, so the shield should not have been available for the final attack. I don’t think it would’ve made a difference, but still… we’ll get this right as we go forward. Promise.

Moving on… I’m getting worried that this “secret” underground passage is turning out to be so well-trafficked. We’ve got a gelatinous cube, ghouls, and now not one but two different groups of humanoids just loitering about. I mean, I don’t want to put on my metagame hat, but I’m starting to worry that we’ll have to expend all our resources just getting to the club, but then if we face a combat encounter IN the club, we’re gonna be so screwed. I figured MAYBE one fight, just to keep us on our toes. But this is turning out to be a full day dungeon crawl, isn’t it?

We actually start slow this week, with some healing and then a non-combat interaction with a group of ysoki produce merchants. Excuse me? I mean, I know the existence of the undercity is supposed to be a thing, but it’s still a little weird that you’ve got produce merchants just hanging out down here. And they just HAPPENED to stumble upon the ghouls? Something seems off about this whole interaction. But this gets into the whole “are we adventurers or are we on a mission” vibe? Lacking any real crime to investigate, we probably ought to just move on and get to the party right?

Well… maybe not, as we stumble on our next combat encounter (#3 for this part of the adventure, for those of you scoring at home). I don’t get a sense of exactly what creatures these guys are supposed to be – smallish feathery humanoids… but not fellow tengu because I suspect Steve would’ve made a bigger deal of me being attacked by my fellow countrymen.

And they can cast darkness… or maybe they have it as an innate ancestry ability. Oh, crap.

Darkness is one of those things that’s either hit or miss. If you’re playing an ancestry with darkvision, the base version of the spell is almost trivial, and even the heightened version of the spell just grants concealment. But if you didn’t take that darkvision, the real sizzle to the steak is that darkness overpowers ALL non-magical light sources and even magical ones of the same level or lower. Adding insult to injury, this seems to be the one party where we haven’t taken light as a spell. Technically, I have access to it, but I didn’t equip it because I didn’t have time to take a long rest and change out my spells. So yeah… we’re TOTALLY in the dark now.

As an aside, I’m usually paranoid about darkness because of a bad Emerald Spire experience. There’s an entire level of that dungeon that was both shrouded in magical darkness as well as almost entirely difficult terrain, and it was awful. Ever since that game (also playing a tengu, coincidentally), I usually either take some sort of darkvision or at least Blind Fight. Somehow this is the ONE character where I didn’t bother doing that because I expected most of our adventures to be above-ground. Sigh.

Looking at the battlefield, you have the map in front of you, we came south down a staircase to a T intersection; at least two of the bad guys were to the east, but one went to the west, and the darkness seemed like it was centered at the bottom of the stairs. Based on what parts of the map we’d already come from, the east seemed like it was mostly a dead end, and the west would be the way we’d want to go to proceed further. I thought about going west and trying to get out of the darkness, but once Dougie and Lo Mang went east, I decided I’d rather stay with the group, even if it meant piling into the darkness even further.

Now… at the risk of giving Steve ideas, I thought there were a couple of places where he could’ve actually made this more challenging by throwing in the risk of friendly fire. There were a couple of times where we were maneuvering past each other, and it’s questionable whether we would’ve known if it was a good guy or a bad guy who was standing next to us. Lo Mang was off by himself in the corner of the room so he was fairly safe, but Dougie and I crisscrossed more than once. I suppose you can hand-wave that and say we were able to know friend from foe by sound or that we knew their relative position by responding to where the attacks came from. But if Steve wanted to be cruel, he probably could’ve had us start attacking each other a few times by accident.

The other thing that was a little nasty was that “flashbang” effect when they died. I mean, having them do damage when they died would’ve been worse, but still – the blindness effect meant that even if you managed to stumble out of the darkness, you STILL had all the same penalties. That came into play toward the end when the last enemy was outside the darkness, but I couldn’t see him anyway.

We finally get the fight under control and finish them off, when we get our first hint that things weren’t quite what they seemed. One of the people we’re fighting asks if we’re with them… implying that the rat-folk and these guys had some sort of business deal that went sour, and maybe the ysoki weren’t the innocent produce vendors they pretended to be. But again… is that something we should really be looking into right now when we’ve got something like 20 missing persons to investigate?

As we end the episode, I think the vibe within the group is to at least figure out how much more dungeon we have left to explore. I think once we get a sense of how close to the finish line we are, maybe we could go back and deal with the ysoki, or maybe we just let them slide and continue our mission. So for now… back to work. And that’s where we leave things for this week.

I don’t really have much to say about the potential return of Bob Markee, except to confirm – in the words of Seinfeld – “it’s real and it’s fabulous!” I don’t want to say much: first because it would involve spoilers, but also because if you’re NOT on the Patreon, it might be a little while before you get to hear him. So we’ll talk more about it when it gets closer to happening. That said, I don’t know how long he or the character he’s playing is going to be with us, but it is nice to have him back… Bob adds an interesting dimension to the group and is a lot of fun to play with.

At any rate, next week, we resume our journey and HOPEFULLY finally get to join the party. (But maybe not… always fuzzy how Steve cuts these episodes.) Feel free to drop by Discord 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 Agents of Edgewatch S1|12: Taking A Bite Out Of Crimefighters.

It’s Gelatinous Cube Week here at Roll For Combat. Part 2, if you listen to both shows.

About a month ago, the Extinction Curse crew fought not one, but TWO gelatinous cubes. To be fair, they were also higher-level than we are at this point in the story, but it was kind of funny having to pretend it was my first time ever seeing a GelCube in Second Edition when reviewing that episode. “Paralysis? I didn’t know it could do that!” In fact, at the point I wrote up that episode, it was probably only a week or two after we had fought ours, so I was chuckling the entire encounter.

Aside from the fact that there were two instead of one, the main difference between the two encounters is that their group noticed the immaculately clean walls and floors and decided to be cautious. They started throwing rocks and other loose debris down the hall until it stuck in “midair”. We were not nearly as observant. “Oh how lucky that the floors are so clean here! Oh look… treasure!” The one thing they missed is that GelCube #2 was down a side hall, so their back-line casters got hit from behind by the second one mid-fight.

The gelatinous cube continues to be a fan favorite here in RFC-land. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think a large part of its appeal is just how weird and outside the box it is compared to standard fantasy tropes like dragons and orcs. Tolkien definitely missed the boat by not including a big geometric Jell-O cube that wanders dungeons and melts stuff with acid. Cool!

But as fun as the IDEA of a gelatinous cube is, it’s surprisingly challenging to fight one. Especially with this party composition. The good news is that it’s a big squishy bag of hit points, which is so big and (other than its enveloping attack) slow-moving you almost can’t help but hit it with every attack. It’s meant to fill a corridor in a dungeon, so it’s LITERALLY like attacking a wall. On the other hand, you pretty much lose EVERY source of “extra” damage: no crits, no precision damage (which both Basil and Dougie rely on to boost their output), and it’s got a few elemental resistances as well. Add into the mix the fact that Gomez ran right into the thing and put himself in survival mode right off the bat, and we were fighting this fight at a disadvantage.

So in general, it seems you have two choices with something like this. Either EVERYONE jumps in and goes toe-to-toe and you try to grind it down as fast as possible. Three attacks per round, pedal to the metal. OR, you go the other way, spread out so it can’t hit more than one person at a time, hopefully keeping most of the party standing and avoiding the paralysis effect for as long as possible.

Now, I have to take a bit of a self-serving detour here. Some of this fight makes it sound like I’m some big coward, but I was actually trying to employ some tactics. In the southeast part of the overall chamber, there was a blocked-out area of the map that was almost like a 20×20 “pillar”, and the access points on the sides were only 5’ openings. I wasn’t sure if the GelCube could squeeze himself or not, but I was thinking that if Devise A Stratagem was basically going to be useless anyway*, I would use the narrow openings as cover and attack from relative safety: either pop out, melee, and pop back in, or if I could do a ranged attack, cast Ray of Frost and then reposition to safety. So… OK, maybe I WAS a coward, but a TACTICAL coward. Big difference.

*=As far as Devise A Strategem, being “useless”, here’s my thinking on that: you lose the precision damage because it’s part of the ooze family, but it’s so big that a +2 probably isn’t going to make any difference in terms of hitting or missing. And even using the +2 to get a crit doesn’t really matter because you lose crit damage too. So basically, you’d be burning an action for roleplay flavor. To borrow from Galaxy Quest: “It’s a cube of Jell-O, it doesn’t have a weakness!”.

So that’s my defense of my tactical brilliance. What it didn’t really account for was how long Gomez could hold his breath on the inside. As it turns out, the inside of a gelatinous cube is a pretty nasty place to be. Ongoing acid damage, suffocation… who knew? Bringing it down with one attack per round wasn’t really an option once Gomez was fighting for his life. So, after trying to be Fancy Tactical Man for one round, I pretty much abandoned that and went back to slugfest tactics. Which worked out with just enough time to spare… I think the following round, Gomez would’ve run out of air and taken whatever effects suffocation carries with it.

So we’re already dealing with a bit of a punch in the face from that battle when sounds of approaching battle hint at another encounter to come. I’m with Seth… I thought we were just going to waltz to the party, maybe there’d be a social encounter to get in, and that would be that. I did not expect ONE fight, let alone two. Steve charitably gives is a moment to down potions, and then we’ve got ghouls incoming. A paralysis double feature! Yay!

Fortunately, the fight with the ghouls seems to go a little easier, and we’re able to make quick work of them. But still… it’s going to be really awkward if the first thing we have to do upon arrival at the party is to beg for some healing. And I don’t want to even get into the possibility that we burn all our resources down in this mini-dungeon and then have to get into a fight at the party.

But that’ll be an adventure for another time. For this week, we survive to continue our investigation. Can we get where we’re going without further incident? Will Dougie know how to conduct himself in the underbelly of high society? You’ll have to come back next week to find out. 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.