Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|20: Cone of Coal.

I apologize that this week’s column is arriving late: it’s been one of those weeks, both good (Steve actually visiting Pittsburgh along with several other long-time friends, kids’ birthdays falling this week) and bad (procrastinating on doing my taxes because I knew I owed for the first time in years, getting a little too obsessive about assembling my initial Diamond Dynasty squad in MLB The Show). But I finally added Jack Leiter last night as my missing fifth starter, and I knocked out my taxes this morning (grumble grumble), so I’m good to return to the world of Pathfinder minutiae.

(And yes, I know I lost some non-zero portion of you with the baseball talk, but I gotta be me. Can I win you back by pointing out that my team is the “Countryside Burninators” and I used the logo editor to make my team logo a picture of Trogdor? YES, I USED CONSUMMATE V’S.)

As an aside, Steve brought a copy of the Battlezoo Bestiary book with him on his trip into town because he figured I’d like to see it, and it’s BEAUTIFUL. I won’t be doing a formal review because that’s all sorts of conflict of interests, but it turned out really well.

This episode is a little weird because it’s almost like an episode of the circus show, as I’m ALMOST a spectator to the action. I talked about this a little last week, but it’s really on display this week: I was so busy shooting arrows from a safe distance last week, that the whole fight took a left turn and ran off to the north and left me all by myself back in the central bath chamber. Therefore, at least within the flow of this episode, I’m not doing a lot – I basically have to burn two whole rounds just to get back into a position where I’m even able to fight, and by that point, John and Chris have done most of the hard work. The first move got me onto a straight line with the fight, but there was an elevation change that prevented me from getting line of sight, so the second round was moving up to a point where I could see into the room to shoot. (But at that point I had to just move into the room and use my sword-cane anyway.)

I console myself by saying that it’s not cowardice, it’s just editing. This whole sequence is a running fight that spans the next 3 or 4 episodes (depending on whether the Franca fight becomes one big episode or two smaller ones). I was busy last week, I’ll be busy next week, but based on where Steve cut the action, this week I happen to just be along for the ride.

Meanwhile, Chris starts the action this week by providing us with some broad physical comedy, blowing through not one but TWO acid traps in his pursuit of the remaining lizardfolk. Now… part of me just wants to make fun of him for his hubris, but let’s be fair that some of that is built into his character. When you’ve got a metric ton of hit points and take feats that can turn saves into critical saves, maybe blowing through traps without a care in the world is just playing to the strengths of your build. Though let’s be honest, the comedic effect is still akin to the Cape Fear parody episode of The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes over and over.

For a good chunk of the episode, the battle remains a matter of cleanup. Yes, there’s a room where the lizardfolk are keeping more FBI Guys, but our melees are better than their melees, and we should be able to make fairly quick work of them. And then…

CONE OF COAL. And yes, I’m envious of John for coming up with that line. Yes, I tried to keep up with “Revenge is a dish best served coal”, but no… too wordy. John nailed it on the first take. Sometimes you take the L with grace and move on.

Turns out the cone of coal isn’t the real problem, though. It was a nasty little surprise — and made for a heck of an entrance — but the real danger is the EXPLODING crossbow bolts Franca is firing. A one-shot of area damage… eh, you can power through it. Multiple bursts of area damage every round? That’s going to be an issue.

Though don’t think Basil isn’t taking notes. Down the line, if Basil can put some area damage on his arrows… yeah, that’ll be a good time. But that’s an item for the Christmas list; for the moment, we gotta stop her and separate her from the bomb.

As an aside, I suspect the bomb isn’t down here directly – if it’s gotta disperse, setting it off underground BELOW all your victims doesn’t seem to make any sense. So I assume it’s more like we defeat her and she TELLS us where the bomb is.

So the boss fight is engaged. We don’t get very far into it before the episode break, but we start to at least do some feeling out. There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that once we close to within melee range, she drops the crossbow, so no more area damage. And her base melee attacks don’t hit especially hard. She may have other special abilities, so I’m not declaring victory just yet, but it’s a promising sign. The bad news is that she’s shaping up as hard to hit – I think it took a mid-30s roll to hit, and our attack bonuses are in the +20 neighborhood, so that’s looking like a 15, 16 on-die to hit, maybe even higher for some things like spell DCs and saving throws. So while it looks like we can survive whatever she’s going to throw at us, it may also be a little tough for us to score damage on her, and we’re pretty much only critting on a Nat-20. And it’s also picking at the back of my brain that I’m a little worried if she runs for it and this turns into a pursuit situation – she seems kind of rouge-ish in her build, so a bunch of chase mechanics may not favor us.

But that will be next week (and maybe the week after). For this week, we’ve found our target and it’s time to bring her to justice. 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 Agents of Edgewatch S3|19: Danger Close.

It’s going to be a short column this week. It’s already a pretty short episode (under an hour) and it’s also one of those episodes where it’s all kinda up there on the “screen” – there’s not a lot of extra insight I can provide beyond pointing out that yes, three crits in a row is pretty dang cool. And unlikely to ever happen again. And yes, I did burn a hero point to try for a fourth, but at that point the session was ending in 5 or 10 minutes and I was going to lose it anyway.

I suppose that does mean I have time to take a brief detour into deeper RPG waters (and the show notes/discussions on the Battlezoo side of the house) and give my own thoughts on Paizo publishing a 5E conversion of Abomination Vaults.

Despite the fact that we’ve been doing this podcast for almost five years and part of that has involved rubbing elbows with Paizo types on occasion, I don’t consider myself any sort of “industry insider”. At best I’m like the “honorary captain” they send out for the coin toss at the start of a football game: you can put a jersey on me, but I’m not tackling Gronk in the open field. So all of this is just the perspective of a long-time player who has played and enjoyed both systems. (But if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose one, I’d probably pick PF2E.)

To me, this is only a bad thing if you’re hard wired to view the edition wars as a zero-sum game where somebody has to win and someone has to lose. Look, whether it’s serendipity, the silky-smooth voice of Matt Mercer, or wheelbarrows of Hasbro marketing dollars, the reality is that D&D has reclaimed its place as the top dog in TTRPGs. If we’re being honest, they probably never really lost it, though 4E was enough of a misstep that it opened the door for Pathfinder’s existence in the first place. But it’s equally true that Paizo probably isn’t going anywhere even if the brand never penetrates like D&D does. The bigger positive for the industry as a whole is that the D&D nerds of the 70s and 80s a) aged into a demographic where we have disposable income and b) some of us became creatives that were able to go out into film and TV and sell the general public on the POSITIVES of our hobby instead of presenting it as the punchline of a joke. I mean, hell, if Henry Cavill can make videos of himself painting Warhammer minis and not lose his career, we’re living in the salad days. Overall, that’s the proverbial rising tide that raises all ships.

So rather than worry about a competition they can likely never really “win”, it strikes me that Paizo is trying to use their strengths to their advantage. They’ve done a lot of good work building out their Golarion setting, and as Steve has discussed on the Battlezoo side, going from comparatively rules-heavy (Pathfinder) to comparatively rules-light (5E) is an easier conversion than the other way around. So why not repurpose something you already made – I assume it’s cheaper and quicker-to-market than doing new content — and tap into a piece of that larger player base? At worst, it’s a little extra revenue stream coming in to keep funding Pathfinder and Starfinder; at best, maybe a few players become curious enough to give PF2 a try on its own merits.

Even just thinking about my 5E home game, I’m not sure there’s a lot of enthusiasm for learning a whole new system… YET. But if I can put Abomination Vaults in front of them and they like it, THEN you can sell that next step. Well, if you liked that… take the red pill, let me show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes, and you still have two actions left. So it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out; whether it’s a one-off or whether they keep releasing 5E conversions. But for now, I think it’s a generally positive move.

So anyway… I suppose I should say SOMETHING about the episode, shouldn’t I?

I guess I’ll talk about blind-fight a little bit. On one hand, I absolutely love blind-fight as a concept, and particularly in First Edition, blindness penalties sucked. But I have to admit, I also feel like it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure.

First, it feels like sometimes I’m fudging the distinction between a specific combat skill and generally ignoring conditions that should still create perception issues and Steve lets me get away with it. Like… yes, the rules say I don’t have to take the penalty for concealment, but if I walk into a room, the underlying environmental conditions still exist. Darkness, for example. If I walk into a pitch-black room, it’s one thing to say I can sense an attack and respond; it’s another thing to say “I know there are three enemies and I know exactly where in the room they are”. Feels like I ought to still make some sort of perception check to even know there’s an enemy there, but then be able to make the attack without penalty.

And that brings me to my more specific point. I feel like blind-fight maybe ought to apply only to melee attacks. I’ve read the rule, and it just says “attacks”, but I feel like the spirit of blind-fight is that you use your other senses to compensate, kinda like the comic-book character Daredevil. You can fight an opponent because you can hear their footsteps, feel wind currents when they move, smell their scent… all that jazz. But how do you use your other senses to compensate when you’re firing a bow from 50 or 100 feet away and they’re in a different room? (Speaking of which, how does Daredevil hear a freakin’ laser beam coming at him? IT’S LIGHT. LIGHT DOESN’T MAKE NOISE.) So, I’m not going to aggressively lobby Paizo to nerf my character, but if it ever DID happen, I’d probably be forced to admit it was a fair change.

The other thing I briefly wanted to touch on was the “cheat” at the end, where Chris moved into the next room, revealing more enemies, but then realized he didn’t have enough actions to move there and had to rescind his move. So now on some level, we know we’re going to run into a trap, but we still have to pretend we don’t know that.

I’m not really going to talk about that specifically – mistakes happen – but the more general question of how you deal with “spoilers” like that because they do come up from time to time. In my case, one of the major causes ends up being the circus show. Sometimes the circus crew will fight a monster, I’ll hear all the nasty abilities it has, and then we’ll fight that same monster a few weeks later, and I have knowledge I probably shouldn’t have. One example… not a monster, but a spell… was dimension door. The circus folks fought a succubus that had dimension door in its power-set, so as part of writing my piece, I looked up the spell and found out there’s two different version. The low-level one just moves it anywhere the caster can see within 120 feet… combat repositioning. The higher-level version is an escape spell: anywhere within a mile, but can’t be cast for an hour. So then WE fought a creature with dimension door, and it teleported out, and Jason the person knows that means the fight is likely over but Basil the character isn’t supposed to know that yet.

In general, this is going to sound corny, but the biggest thing is to remind yourself that you don’t want to win THAT way. Yes, you want to win the fights and follow the story to completion, but there’s a right way to do it, and do you want the story you tell about it later to be “well, I cheated because the GM slipped up and told us about the ambush and we went a different way”?

At least in the case of creatures and spells, it also makes a good case for solid note-taking. If you play this game enough, especially if you also GM, you’re going to reach a point where you know all the creatures and their abilities anyway. So it’s not the worst idea of making a list of the creatures and abilities your character has already seen, so you can be fair about how they would react in a given situation. A “fair” reaction would be like we had with oozes: the first time we fought one, we didn’t know they split when hit with slashing; the second time we fought them, we not only knew it, but used it to our advantage. (Split them, and then hit them with area damage.)

But that’s really all I got for this week. Next week we are, one way or another, going to trip that ambush that’s (wink-wink) totally not waiting for us in the next room. Though at the risk of being self-serving, it won’t have to be Basil, because I stayed behind to shoot arrows: I’m still a full round of movement away from the fight. 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 Agents of Edgewatch S3|18: Backstage at the Big Show.

I’m gonna start this week with the briefest of tabletop-adjacent reviews. You are hereby ordered… OK, more of a suggestion, maybe… to check out Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands if you’re also a video gamer. It’s a D&D/Skyrim-type game set inside the world of the Borderlands series (basically the premise is Borderlands characters playing a TTRPG to kill time after crashing their ship), and it’s a cheeky-but-affectionate send-up of all of our favorite TTRPG tropes. The only “bad” news is that it’s still ultimately a shooter with guns as the primary combat mechanism, but they managed to replicate most of the other TTRPG trappings, with magic filling the role that consumables might otherwise have played. It was enough fun that it ate up a good chunk of my weekend, so… my suggestion is to pick it up or at least watch a more complete review and see if it’s something you might be interested in. If nothing else, it’s far less frustrating than dying over and over in Elden Ring.

OK, that’s over with. On with the show.

I’m not going to go back and rehash last week’s battle too much more, except to mention one thing Steve touched on in his show notes. Flight. Steve mentioned that this battle could end up a lot different if we fought from the air, and… I should mention that I did consider it. Taking the fight vertical and plunking away with the bow from 50 feet in the air was certainly an option, but I rejected it for a few reasons.

First, this is going to be a single-day scenario, so I only get to use flight once. I have a general vibe that I want to save my flight for the final bomb encounter, especially if we get in a situation where emergency evac – ourselves, the bomb, victims — is involved. As frustrating as this fight is, it’s supposed to be non-lethal combat so let’s not waste one of our best hole cards.

Second, I’m not going to fully math out the numbers, but it’s iffy how effective it would’ve been. I get 5 minutes of flight, so… 50 rounds. Each round, I’d have to save one of my three actions just to stay in the air, so I’d have two actions to work with. Meaning two attacks that would do fairly minimal damage, or one Strategic Strike attack that might get precision damage if it hits, and probably only crits on a Nat-20. So, if the rest of the party starts falling, would I really be able to grind down four of them all by myself? And that’s the best case, assuming they don’t have any attacks that work at range. Or that they wouldn’t be clever enough to threaten to kill the rest of the party if I didn’t come down and fight. If they’re smart, they might also be ruthless too.

Also, Steve did give us that warning about playing to the crowd, and I figured flying up high and shooting arrows would’ve come across as cowardly and made for poor spectacle. I don’t know HOW losing the crowd might have hurt us, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

But whatever. What’s done is done. We lost, but it’s only a temporary inconvenience and a mild bruising of our collective pride. Time to get back to the meat-and-potatoes of our investigation.

I should mention, you’ll notice that some of my actions carry the assumption that we’re dealing with an airborne release. I have no special inside knowledge here, it just seems logical given the physics of the thing. If you set off a bomb that worked based on direct contact or ingestion, it would only affect the small number of people fairly close to the detonation, so I assume the general mechanism is to make it airborne to infect as many people as possible. So when I’m looking for places to get up high and let the wind carry it, it’s not like I cheated and read ahead in the adventure; it’s just a product of growing up in post-9/11 world where speculating about “dirty bombs” became dinner-table conversation for a few months there.

OK, that got a little dark there.

So we wander around… not having a lot of luck at first… until we get a possible sighting over at the animal pens. We arrive on the scene, and my first impression is “OK, something’s gonna break out of a cage and we’re going to have to fight some of these”. But fortunately that doesn’t happen.

What DOES happen is a big pile of poop. Because of course it does. It’s more evident on the circus side where they deal with animals more regularly, but this show has a track record: if Steve can make us interact with poop in some way, he will. This time, Gomez draws the short straw and has to help the head game-keeper dig through a bunch of dung to help her. But the payoff is a further lead: that Franca likes to hang out with a bunch of lizardfolk gladiators.

So we go look for those dudes. There’s another “OK, these cages are going to bust open” interaction with the trollhounds, but it’s another false alarm, and Basil finds a sorta-secret door that leads into the lower infrastructure of the stadium. And a Norgerber mark to give us a bread-crumb that we’re on the right trail. (I suppose that also firms up the theory that Franca is in league with them and not some rando who happened to stumble on the device.)

So we explore what amounts to the prehistoric locker rooms. For a long time there was little of note, though the various references to running water and hydraulics made me briefly consider that the device was going to involve a water-based release. But nope… it’s just part of the ambience; the pipes are old and out of service. Finally we stumble on a room with a standing pool of water, with a ring in the center. John briefly forgets he’s not playing Mister Peepers anymore and charges out into the middle of the room, and the proximity alarm goes off. Lizardfolk off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow.

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 Agents of Edgewatch S3|16: My Eyes! The Goggles Do Nothing!.

Things slow down a bit this week, as the heist is over and we have to regroup a little bit. You see… we succeeded… but we also failed, because while we accomplished all the goals of the infiltration, our reward was that the lockbox was empty and the bomb had already been stolen.

Before we get to that though, I actually found myself wondering: what if we had failed? What if something had gone wrong and we’d never made it to the vault or hadn’t discovered Franca Laurentz’s identity? Does the adventure just end? Do we wake up a few days later to hear about how hundreds or thousands of people were killed by the bomb we couldn’t find? How does the adventure path account for that, and/or how would Steve have handled that?

So I flat-out asked Steve. I figure the statute of limitations on spoilers had expired, so why not? It turns out this is one of those places where “the rest of the force” would’ve bailed you out with some sort of lead. They’re already locating Franca’s hideout; if we had failed the heist, they would’ve actually pulled some strings, gotten a warrant, and gotten ALL the information in other ways. I guess if you want to hand-wave an in-universe explanation, they always could have done that, but us doing a covert op got the information faster or something.

Now, on one hand, there’s a little piece of me that finds that unsatisfying, insofar as it suggests that the heist was ultimately a fail-proof scenario. Sounds like we could’ve done almost ANYTHING and still ended up with Franca Laurentz as our next lead after a suitable amount of time passed. On the other hand, that’s the whole point: the joy is still in the execution, and in the desire of discovering the information yourself, and the path you take to get there. And be honest: would you really want an adventure path you’ve been playing for months to just grind to a halt because a few dice rolls went sideways? No self-respecting player wants their content to be COMPLETELY spoon-fed, but I suspect a lot of players would take the occasional light-touch helping hand over throwing out months of gaming and starting over.

So here we are. We’re back from the raid, and “the force” gets us a lead, which we proceed to investigate. We roll up on her apartment, and it’s CLASSIC murder-board “plot against the city” stuff. Back when we played, the Always Sunny meme was the go-to, but now we’ve got the Riddler’s hideout from The Batman as an even more on-point reference.

The first takeaway is that Franca almost HAS to be working with the Twilight Four in some capacity, right? First there’s the general “too much coincidence” sense that there can’t possibly be TWO cult-like organizations looking to commit mass murder. She was hatching a mass murder plot, didn’t have a weapon for it, but lucky her… she happened to stumble on one at work! But there’s also a fairly specific reason for thinking they’re connected: all the planning on her murder-board looks like it would’ve taken weeks to set up (same for rigging her apartment, for that matter), but she must’ve taken the device fairly recently if we could still detect the scent of the chemicals. So… she had to know it was there, and what it does, and have been sent into retrieve it. If she’d stumbled on the bomb and taken it on an impulse and THEN started plotting uses for it, her plan wouldn’t be nearly as far along. So I’m assuming until further notice that she’s someone the Twilight Four put on the case after Maurrisa Jonne got herself banned from the Lucky Nimbus.

As for the planning, it’s an absolute treasure trove of information, and it should let us figure out her plans… if we can save it (and ourselves) from the acid. That’s right… the room is booby-trapped, and acid starts releasing from vents around the room. Now, I don’t think anyone’s worried about dying in this encounter; we have a full day of spells, and if we really have to, we can just grab as much evidence as we can and hope it’s enough. But it would be good to preserve as much of this as possible, so once we stumble on the location of the acid dispenser, it feels like trying to shut it off is the right move. Lo Mang does the heavy lifting on breaking the wall, and then we’re able to get the device turned off. We’re a little worse for wear, and we lost some of the evidence, but we have enough of a lead to keep moving forward.

After analyzing the material, we find that the target is going to be the Blood Games. That’s right… we’re off to the gladiator games! And it looks like we might have to enter as contestants to have a look around. I think the thing that immediately concerns me is the idea that it’s hinted at being a single-day event. That means no long rest once we start. We’ll have to fight one or more arena combats AND potentially fight Franca once we find her, which sounds like we’re REALLY going to have to manage our resources carefully. It would suck to waste all our good spells on fake fights and have nothing left for the real one. And presumably on top of that, there will also be some non-combat stuff to actually find the device and disable it, but that’s not as urgent because those resources shouldn’t be drained by the combat.

The good news? Level 11. So we’ll be a little more powerful for the fight to come. Thank heavens for milestone experience, because I’m really doubting that disabling one trap would’ve pushed us over the top on its own. We’ll get into the leveling next week – I know Seth started talking about his spell choices, but I’ll keep it all under one roof and discuss it when we have final characters to present. (Though at first glance, Level 11 seemed like kind of a boring one for Basil.)

As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you thought of the show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.