Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 051: Bad Acid Trip.

I apologize in advance, but you’re going to get a pretty half-assed Talking Combat this week. I’ll try to make it up to you next week, promise. I don’t want to throw the curtains wide open on my personal business, but I had to get my daughter on a plane to England for grad school this week. So I’ve been in a bit of a whirlwind, both logistically and emotionally, and the Adventures of Tuttle and His Dumber Companions have been on a low simmer on the back burner. To say more would turn this into some sort of personal therapy session, and I’m not going to subject you that, but… there you have it.

As a brief aside, my daughter never caught the RPG bug like my son has, though maybe that’s my fault for waiting too long and introducing her to The Life when she was in the contrarian teen years. She played a few sessions of 4E, but she didn’t take it seriously and was one of those “pee in the punchbowl” players. Wanted to play an evil character, demanded all the treasure, would only begrudgingly help other party members… you know the type. She is more of a general gamer – had a WoW phase, plays an impressively cut-throat game of Ticket To Ride, we’d do family board game nights here and there. But roleplaying games never quite took hold with her.

Since I’m starting to feel the presence of an invisible man in a tweed jacket saying “Annnnnd I see that our time has expired”, let’s talk about acid.

I think the thing that stands out to me this episode is that for once, I was the dumbass who ran in without getting the lay of the land. I usually play a pretty cautious game – it’s usually John or Chris who are the ones boldly rushing in and setting off traps. OK, let’s be honest… it’s always Chris. I tend to hold back and see what’s up before I jump in. (Ezrik from Iron Gods being the one noteworthy exception; he was always the first one into the pool, because… chainsaw.) But this time… I don’t know if it was feeling useless from the last fight, feeling impatient about finding the entrance to the villain lair, or what… but I really wanted to get in there and start looking around. I think it was the presence of the corpse: I think my thought process was that the corpse represented someone trying to get in or out of the lair, so it represented a bread-crumb toward an entrance.

But I forgot the more common use of corpses: to warn parties that there’s something nearby that wants to eat your face. In this case, a tentacle-beast with mind control. And the fight gets off to a bad start. Tuttle and Mo suddenly think this guy’s their best friend, and Mo, in particular, has to deal with the Joy of Grappling (Bob Ross’ lesser-known field of expertise).

But then we catch two lucky breaks. The first is that Tuttle rolls the lesser of two evils and only dips a paw in the acid. A single die of damage in exchange for breaking the mind control? I’ll take that trade any day of the week. The next is that Tuttle gets lucky on THE BUTTON and rolls… (wait for it)… DAMAGE RESISTANCE. So, of course, that’s going to be acid, though I didn’t realize how enormously useful that would become. I figured maybe CHDRR would get splashed or he might fall in during the course of the battle.

What I didn’t expect (no, not the Spanish Inquisition) was that the opportunity for a “BIG HERO CHDRR” MOVE would arise. I realize I’m skipping a bunch of the fight, but Mo gets dunked into the acid. And stays in. And… yeah, he’s about to die – literally, one more round of even fairly minimal damage would do it. Meanwhile, I did some quick math on the fly, and… it’s really close, but it looks like, with the extra acid resistance, CHDRR would survive at least one round in the acid, even if Steve rolled max damage. Not much wiggle room for a) missing a roll to get back out, or b) the creature attacking or otherwise holding him in there for another round, but… we’ll jump off that cliff if we come to it. (Tuttle also could’ve survived the round of damage, but with his low strength, I thought the odds of him successfully pulling a full-grown vesk out were far riskier. And if Tuttle failed, half our party would then be in the acid.)

So in goes CHDRR, and one blast of the jump-jets later, we have our vesk back, while Hirogi and Rusty do the remaining work on the creature. Whew! Look for CHDRR, with a half-dead Mo draped on his back, to appear on a Wheaties box sometime in the near future.

This nicely folds into Steve’s GM tip about the application of damage. As he points out, moving the damage to the player’s turn is technically wrong – ongoing damage is technically supposed to happen on the creature’s turn. Steve’s point is that he wants to give the player a chance to do… SOMETHING… to avoid or mitigate such a situation, and moving the damage to the player’s turn (and specifically, to the END of the player’s turn) is a way to allow that to happen.

Thinking about it as impartially as I can, I think that’s a fair way to do things, as long as it’s consistent. My thinking is that combat represents six-second slices, happing semi-contemporaneously, anyway, so does it really matter SO much if you move stuff around a little bit within the round? Initiative should definitely be preserved because there’s real value to going first that someone earned by rolling high. But a DoT “tick” effect? Where that gets placed feels fairly arbitrary anyway.

As a lesser point, it’s a question of discrete vs. incremental damage. If you swing a sword, the damage happens when that sword strikes flesh. If you’re immersed in an ongoing effect… it’s not like the “tick” is a real thing where you take zero damage for five seconds and then on the 6^th second… OW! It’s a game mechanic that’s already meant to be a summary of the previous six seconds, so if that “summary damage” slips a little bit in favor of giving the player options, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over that.

I did want to dip back into the podcast just to share a chuckle at Mo landing the knowledge roll when everyone else failed. There’s a tendency to think of Mo is the mindless muscle of the group, but Mysticism is one area where he’s really no worse off than anyone else. Now Tuttle is going to have to keep pumping Mysticism at every level because he’s not going to risk being second-best to Mo at anything knowledge-related.

(As far as real names of members of the Legion of Superheroes: somehow I still remember Garth Ranzz is Lightning Lad. And Mon-El is just Mon-El. Saturn Girl is… Irma, but I don’t remember a maiden name. Can I cheat and use Irma Ranzz since they were married most of the time anyway? So… guess I’ve got some homework to do.)

Annnnnd I see that our time is up. For real this time. Next week we continue our search for the cultist base – we’ll find it one of these times, I swear – and maybe I’ll try to whip up something PLUS-ULTRA for the end of our first year. Haikus? Dirty limericks? An audio supercut of every time Steve gloats when the enemies crit? This will take some thinking. In the meantime, pop by Discord or other social media and feel free to give us your questions, comments, or other feedback. (OK, maybe not a stream of incoherent profanity. But anything else is fair game.)

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 050: Never Tell Me The Odds.

You guys don’t realize it, but you dodged a bullet. As I’m sitting down to write this week’s Talking, we just wrapped up our fantasy football draft, and you were this close to getting a full column on THAT because I’m tired and want to go to bed. It’s not officially an RFC league, but all five members of RFC are in the league, as are two guys who have been part of our gaming group over the years but have not (yet) appeared on the show. So RFC at least has a quorum, which means I could’ve found a paper-thin rationalization to talk your ear off on that, but… nope. As the DEFENDING CHAMPION, I shall be magnanimous and move on.

(And yes, I threw that last bit in just so Steve would have to read that when he edits this. He knows he’d do the same.)

As Steve mentions, it’s Episode 50 of RFC, but I have to admit that doesn’t mean as much to me as the time-based milestones do. I think it’s because of the way the editing process works: as we’re going back and listening now it’s a milestone event, but at the time it was just another session. It’s like the M. Bison “it was a Tuesday” scene from Street Fighter – it means something now, but it didn’t while we were putting it on “tape”. At least when we hit the one-year mark in a week or two, we’ll know it as it happens and maybe we’ll break out the party hats in quasi-real-time.

The above having been said, if we have any amateur goldsmiths in the crowd that WANT to commission a solid gold statue of Tuttle and CHDRR to mark the occasion, I won’t stop you. Just don’t ask where it is a few weeks from now when I’m posting pictures of my new Tesla on the Discord channel.

In-game, it’s a combat episode and a rough one as it’s basically Operative vs. Operative, both with the exact same cloaking effect. I won’t lie: as it first started, it was pretty amusing to realize that the enemy was pretty much working from the exact same toolbox Hirogi was. But the novelty wore off as the combat dragged on, and it became kind of frustrating. First, because it was so hard to land hits with the 50% miss chance. It really sucks to land a hit and then have it wiped off the board. (And Steve was maybe a touch TOO gleeful about erasing Mo’s crit… no, you really don’t need to tell us it would’ve been 38 points of damage.) The other half of the equation is that the enemy only took the penalty if he attacked Hirogi; if he … hypothetically… dropped a bunch of grenades on the rest of us, we weren’t nearly as lucky. For us, it was Operative vs. Operative; for the bad guy, it was Operative vs. Fish In A Barrel.

As an aside, I loved the moment when the big semi-sentient hunk of metal hit its reflex save and the supposedly racially-nimble mouse-creature did not. Fannnnnntastic. That was the grenade that hit for almost minimum damage, but I still thought it was funny. Images of CHDRR busting out his best parkour moves or doing Matrix-esque bullet-time flashed through my mind for a few seconds.

On the bright side, the riding saddle got its first real use, and while it wasn’t the game-changer I thought it would be, it was fairly handy, and at least saved me some of the two-step shuffle. I think it’ll get even better if I can add some movement improvements to CHDRR at future levels to leverage it better – upgrade those jump jets to full flight, greater ground speed, something like that. (So what I’m saying is Level 20 CHDRR will have his own drift engine.) If you were listening closely, I thought about kicking in the jump jets at one point early in the fight, but I realized it wouldn’t cover the vertical distance anyway and would leave me halfway up the cliff wall with a big target painted on my back. So I decided to go around the long way, even if it cost me a few rounds.

This fight did underscore the feeling that I need an offensive upgrade soon. The first time we went shopping, I went armor because it was like a +3 or +4 to both ACs. The next big shopping trip was mostly about utility; making Tuttle a little more versatile. In both cases, going from a d4 to a d6 on a primary weapon was all I could afford on the gun side, which didn’t seem like good bang for the buck (pun fully intended).

But when Mo is thumping guys for double digits on every hit and Hirogi has his trick attack (when he lands it), it’s a little awkward to still be chipping away with the cheapest gun in the game. Even applying Overcharge only adds an extra d6, and since (at least temporarily) I’m not wearing the recharge upgrade in my armor slot, I have to pick my spots with that move. (There’s an improved Overcharge, but I don’t think that’s even available for a few more levels.)

Truth told, I’m a little envious of that fancy sniper rifle we pulled off the enemy. Not envious enough to take sniper rifle proficiency as a feat, but envious. Long arms on the other hand? Maybe. I’ve always felt “Tuttle With A Shotgun” has some serious comedic potential, even if half of it is having recoil toss him across the room in zero or low gravity situations like a cartoon character.

The X-Factor on the weapon front is CHDRR. Steve has been keeping the specifics of CHDRR secret to preserve the surprise, but he has said that some of CHDRR’s abilities scale as he levels up. So I’m torn – I could upgrade CHDRR and have it be a “waste” of money if he gets something next level that renders it moot. Or I could leave him as is waiting for the goblin upgrades to kick in, and continue to be underpowered until that happens. Best of both worlds would be to find a weapon that I could use as a free upgrade.

It’s halfway between show notes and Steve’s GM tip, but I found the ongoing gamesmanship involved with the d100 roles kind of amusing on re-listen. I get that for all our debate, there’s no “right” answer. (Next week’s Etiquette Corner: we debate the pronunciation of GIF – “gif” or “jif”?) Personally, I’m a classic “high is good, low is bad” guy – keep it consistent with everything else. But I can respect John’s stubbornness on sticking with low numbers (maybe that’s how they do it in WoW?), and Bob’s decision to go for the middle was an inspired bit of lunacy that should please fans of the standard normal distribution everywhere. On the other hand, such tomfoolery clearly displeased the Dice Gods, who rewarded him with that insultingly close 77.

Getting to Steve’s point, it’s weird. That little bit of choice and agency – choosing low, high, or ridiculous – doesn’t feel like it should matter that much. It’s not even real physical dice in this case. Steve could literally put a rock in one hand and have us say “left” or “right” and the net effect would be the same. But it still feels like you’re doing something to choose the outcome when you pick the range you want to use. I guess the phenomenon is similar to the slot machines in a casino – they’re going to land where they’re going to land, they technically don’t even need to put buttons on the thing and could just resolve the spin when you put your money in. But putting buttons or a handle on the machine gives you an illusionary veneer of control – “I chose to stop the machine right here”.

So basically, we’re all just filthy degenerate gamblers, is what I’m saying.

In other news, the hint-dropping on Rusty’s condition continues, and it’s a little awkward because here’s where I have to embrace roleplay and split my duties of Jason, Writer of Paizo Book Reviews vs. Jason, Player of Tuttle. Having reviewed the Armory (mild spoiler), there’s something in there that sounds a WHOLE lot like what Rusty is going through, but in the context of this game, there’s no way Tuttle would know that without making some skill rolls (Life Science, Medicine, maybe Mysticism), and I haven’t really pushed too hard on that front. Though I suppose it’s also a partial attempt on my part to embrace the idea that being undead isn’t THAT big a deal in the Starfinder universe. I as the player still think undead are creepy and are going to turn on us at a moment’s notice, but Tuttle lives in a world where they’re normal. (As are talking rats, for that matter.) Just as long as Rusty doesn’t turn full demon in the middle of a fight, we’re cool.

I think that’s about it for this week: tune in next time when we continue to bounce around low-gravity, flop around in the space dust, and try to find the cultists’ base of operations. Well, we’ll try to, anyway. We haven’t seen the last of trouble, and trouble hasn’t seen the last of us. In the meantime, feel free to drop by the Discord and join the fun happenings there.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 049: A Pirate’s Life For Me.

This week’s episode starts with a bit of an “I KNEW IT” moment.

When we originally saw that a ship was approaching, it seemed like starship combat was a foregone conclusion. You just had that sort of feeling. But then things took a left turn at Albuquerque, and it turned into more of a roleplay/light social encounter with the pirates, which… OK. That works too. It’s not a bad thing if the story keeps you guessing occasionally.

But then Steve revealed in the post-episode comments that there actually was supposed to be ship combat, and he took it out: some combination of “didn’t serve the story all that well” and “takes a little less time to reach the same result”. It sounds like the battle was supposed to reach some sort of stalemate, and then we’d get roughly the same information in the post-fight negotiations. (I also wonder if it factored in that we didn’t take the opportunity to upgrade our ship before starting the mission. Maybe we were outgunned? I doubt it, but you never know.)

As an aside, I generally enjoy ship combat, but I’ll admit the roles can be a little uneven. Some roles have a lot to do – Tuttle bouncing back and forth between Engineer and Science Officer is genuinely fun. Pilot was fun the one time I did it at PaizoCon because it’s very strategic. On the other hand, I tried Captain during an offline Society game and found it underwhelming, and just manning a gun, while certainly necessary, is close to busywork.

Turning back to this game, I probably would’ve preferred Steve kept the battle in there. Selfishly, Tuttle doesn’t have much of a role to play in social encounters, whereas ship combat gives me a lot to do. That said, I agree with Steve’s larger point. As a player, you kind of want that binary win-or-lose resolution and a battle that winds up at the same destination whether you “win” or “lose” it is underwhelming. Why did we just do that again?

Should Steve have been “allowed” to do that? Absolutely. The GM knows the game, and he knows what his players will be interested in. (And in this case, I guess you the audience factor in as well.) If the GM is changing the story because he knows his players will be more entertained, that’s not just fair, it’s arguably the best reason to do something. Though “tailoring it for my players” does also sound a little like he’s making allowances for our idiocy: “there’s about a 30% chance they’ll refuse to accept the surrender, blow up the pirates, and paint the story into a corner”.

So, OK, no fight. We parley with the pirates, exchange information, help repair their ship, and…. hooo boy, this is awkward; Rusty’s channeling his inner James T. Kirk. I’m not offended or prudish or anything but I will admit it was a bit unexpected. Our group doesn’t tend to… errrrr… ummm… “explore emotional themes” in our gameplay. I suppose if you’re the Envoy – particularly Bob’s rougish take on Rusty – it’s well within the character concept, but still. Not exactly where I expected that encounter to end up. Tuttle will just be over here, awkward calibrating the engines.

(For the record, it’s now part of my head-canon that this is going to lead to Rusty fathering a bastard child that will somehow pass through a temporal anomaly and return as an adult to become a long-term enemy of the party, kind of like Commander Sela in TNG. If not, I’m totally stealing that for the origin of my next character.)

So the pirates point us in the direction of the cultists, and we find an asteroid that could be the right size to serve as a base of operations. And for once, I’m actually looking forward to the environmental challenge du jour. Zero gravity sucked, but we were doing it wrong. Jungle heat just sucked, and we were doing that correctly. LOW gravity, on the other hand, sounds pretty fun. Bouncing around like rabbits, extra carrying capacity… I fail to see the downside. OK, I guess there’s “thin air”, but that didn’t sound like it would be too much of a problem. At least not for Tuttle; might be more of a hassle for the guys more dependent on physical skills (cough-Mo-cough). You just know this means I’m going to eat those words later, though. Probably after we get stranded out there for another two weeks.

Annnnd as we disembark and start exploring, CLIFFHANGER! Guess we’ll leave it there for next week.

So let’s talk about boss fights for a second.

I think Steve is on to something when he talks about dropping hints about boss battles, though I feel like he’s emphasizing the wrong side of the equation. The thrust of his argument is that you should be dropping hints that the boss is coming so your players are logistically prepared to fight, but I think it’s more fundamental than that. I think it’s more important to do so as a matter of good storytelling.

It’s not necessarily a great crime to go into a fight un (or under) prepared. Even setting aside boss fights, you can get into that situation while clearing trash fights; you kick one more door than you should and end up in a sticky situation. Those are the risks of playing these games.

A boss fight is something special because it represents a culmination of the story. It’s about building dramatic tension over the course of an adventure path and then releasing that tension. If you don’t build that tension properly and characters don’t know they’re in The Big Heroic Moment… you’ve lost something that you can’t get back. Yes, part of the problem is logistical – you’d like the characters to realize that it’s time to go from 70% effort to 100% effort and burn off all their spells for the day so they’ll survive the encounter. But you also want the characters to recognize they’re in The Big Heroic Moment so that they’ll appreciate it as it’s happening and so that they’ll rise to the occasion and DO the big heroic things the story hopes they’ll do. The second worst thing behind wiping in a boss fight is that the party wins it by nickel-and-diming it to death and there’s no great story to tell afterward.

I want people leaping off cliffs for the chance to land the killing blow. I want players setting off fireballs on their own position because it’ll take out the Big Bad with them. I want people taking a chance on that magic item they never had a chance to identify because they’ve run out of other options. You might not get those hero moments you remember months later if the players spend 2/3rds of the fight thinking it’s just another battle.

To the other half of his point: I find it really hard to run as a player. I’ll do it I have to – at the end of the day, I’m not suicidal. But there’s something deeply unsatisfying about having to retreat and come back later to finish the job. I mean, I guess it worked for The Magnificent Seven, but overall, I don’t like it. Particularly if it breaks the immersion of the story – to pick an example, if the villain has a time-sensitive plan, it’s not like he’s going to sit around for 2-3 days AFTER the first time the heroes attack; if anything, he’d probably want to speed up his timetable.

So next week, we’ll renew acquaintances with the evil cultists (don’t think that’s a huge spoiler… we are invading their “home”), and we’ll see if we can figure out where that transmission from Castrovel ended up. In the meantime, feel free to join us on Discord or other social media and let us know how you’re enjoying the show. I have to admit I got a particular kick out of Steve describing me as a Beetlejuice-like figure – “say his name three times, and he’ll appear”. I’ve been a bit busy the last few weeks – my day job is in higher ed, so back-to-school time is a little crazy for me – but I do try to poke my head in at least once a day.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 048: Belter Skelter.

Well, let’s start with the obvious – I’m not going to recap the recap. Other than giving me an opening to make a few lame Inception jokes, that doesn’t really get us anything. And you’re fooling yourselves if you think I can’t fit those in elsewhere.

I suppose let’s actually start with Level 5 Tuttle and CHDRR. I think I touched on this in an earlier Talking, but you’re starting to see the shift from pure survivability to utility at work. Generally, my first few levels are almost entirely about “does this help us win fights and stay alive?”. More hit points, more damage, better armor – I almost never take a utility power at low levels unless there are literally no other options. You can’t roleplay if you’re dead.

This was the level where I really started to break out of that. Yes, the stats stay fairly conservative – Intelligence, Dexterity, and Constitution were obvious combat-focused choices, and then it came down to Strength (carrying capacity, throwing grenades) vs. Charisma (not being quite so useless in social challenges). Somehow Wisdom never really entered into it.

But the choices for feats got more esoteric and were more about adding flavor.

Technomancer spells – two cantrips and one level 1 spell. Not world-changing, but gives me a few nice little utility powers. Telepathy and Psychokinetic Hand (aka Mage Hand for you Pathfinder holdouts) always end up having their uses, and when we’re dealing with alien cultures, a chance to suss out an alien language for free with Comprehend Languages seems like a worthwhile add. As a roleplaying choice, I do think Tuttle would be intrigued to try and understand magic a little better, so it feels like a good fit.

Climbing suckers – OK, there’s a little bit of “solving the last problem we faced”, but as I said in the podcast, Tuttle will NEVER be good at climbing, so unless I solve this with equipment, it’s always going to be somewhat of an issue. Now it’s not.

And of course the RIDING SADDLE. At a nuts-and-bolts level, I feel like it could help with some of the issues related to sharing movement between the two characters, but deep down that’s just a rationalization. When it really comes down to it, I just love the flavor. Tuttle riding into battle on CHDRR is going to be freakin’ awesome. I think I was always going to take it at some point; the question was just when. Well… question answered.

I don’t take too much note of what the other guys are doing with their characters, but Hirogi’s cloaking device did sound pretty cool. Or maybe I’m just easily swayed by comparisons to Predator since it’s on my short list of “I know this isn’t great film-making, but screw it, it’s fun” movies.

I noticed Bob get a little frustrated around the edges about not wanting to do any more shopping, and I wanted to say a few things about that. Some of that is just Bob’s general role as the person to keep us on task, but there is also some history there. In our gaming history prior to starting this podcast, we’ve had a few sessions where everyone was supposed to shop beforehand and didn’t (I freely admit to being one of the guilty parties on that), and shopping ended up consuming our entire session. So I can somewhat sympathize with the desire to stay on task and not do Shopping 2.0 after everyone was supposed to have done Shopping 1.0 offline.

On the other hand, every plan has to adapt to new information, and if we get new data about where we’re going – in this case, a zero or low-gravity environment – it’s not the worst thing in the world to do a little minor tweaking to our gear to account for that. I don’t think… John?… was being unreasonable in taking a quick look at some options for dealing with gravity issues. Especially not after all the environmental tort… errr… fun Ukulam put us through.

The information about upgrading the Sunrise Maiden? I’m definitely interested to see what sorts of things we can do, but at the risk of giving out a bit of a spoiler of future content, we haven’t actually gotten around to doing that yet. We’ll come back to that when we do.

I was a little surprised Chris decided to make an issue about being the Captain; I always got the sense he liked being the Pilot. I get the feeling he was just messing with Bob a little. Whether he was serious or not, it’s no skin off my nose. Tuttle has his well-defined niche as Science Rat, and I’ve developed a certain comfort level switching between the Engineer and Science Officer role. Let them fight it out amongst themselves, as far as I care.

Plot-wise, it’s a pretty straightforward episode – follow the trail of Tahomen’s transmission, track down the cultists, try to thwart their nefarious schemes. So we arrive in the Diaspora where we’re met with at least two problems. The first is that we have a LOT of rocks to investigate. It turns out “follow the transmission” is a lot less precise in the Starfinder world than it is in Star Trek. But the more immediate problem is that our arrival has attracted the attention of… someone. Cultists? The ubiquitous space pirates the region is known for? Or has Wahloss become a stalker and abandoned academia to follow us around the stars? I guess we’ll find out next week.

As far as Steve’s GM note… sure, I like easy fights every once in a while. What player wouldn’t? And I won’t deny that part of the allure is the visceral thrill of overpowering bad guys in a couple hits. But at the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes I like an easy fight because it allows you to get a little goofy and experiment with tactics and powers you don’t usually use. In a tough fight, you tend to stick to what works, do everything by the numbers. When you’re pretty confident you’ve got some buffer to play with, you can try things you wouldn’t try when the situation is more touch-and-go. Maybe not so much with Tuttle – he doesn’t have a lot of choice combat-wise – but with other characters in other games, I’ve used easy fights to try those goofy moves I wouldn’t risk any other time.

Well, that’s it for this week’s episode. When we return next week we’ll find out if the Diaspora’s welcoming committee comes bearing a complimentary fruit basket or a full spread of quantum torpedoes. (Or, if it’s Wahloss, omelets for everyone.) In the meantime, feel free to let us know how you feel about the first two books, what you think of the Level 5 versions of Team RFC, or anything else that’s on your mind. Drop on into Discord or social media and let us know what you think. See you next week!

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 047: Revenge of the Nerds.

The cultists are finally no more, Panellar has been dealt with – though my heart skipped a beat with the enthusiastic way Chris said “I walk right up to him…”; I swear I thought he was about to attack. Somehow we managed to convince our favorite undead elf we’re kindly scientists and not Lara Croft. Mercifully we negotiate the social minefield – despite the fact that our “face” doesn’t speak Elvish – and avoid a pummeling.

Skipping to Steve’s explanation at the end, I never really considered the possibility that Tahomen’s charm undead spell had a save he had to make to order the elf to attack. I had been assuming that either Bob had just gotten really lucky with his Bluff, or that maybe the elf was just designed to keep us from retreating – blocking off the Temple and the path leading back down the mountain. I guess we’re luckier than I thought.

The loot portion of the broadcast got a fair amount of discussion on the Discord channel. Some people were a little surprised Chris was so aggressive about claiming all the loot for himself, but this is another one of those… “that’s Chris” moments. Chris pretty much starts with the default position that he wants every piece of gear, but I should be fair and say that he does usually negotiate his way back down to something reasonable. I suppose it was a little off-putting the first couple times I played with him, but I’m used to it now. Me, I go the other direction – I pick the one or two pieces of gear I really want and pretty much make whatever concessions I need to get those. I have a bad poker face when it comes to intra-party loot negotiations.

I did miscalculate though – personally for Tuttle, I probably should’ve pushed for the gun instead of the D-Suit. I had forgotten that I had upgraded from an Estex Suit I to an Estex Suit II before we left Absalom (in fairness to me, quite a while ago). So the net gain on the suit is actually only a +1/+1 (and L instead of 1 bulk), but you’re losing upgrade slots in the process. It feels like even with the 15-foot range, the increased damage on the gun might have been a better play.

I was also amused by the inclusion of the armor upgrade that controls temperature. I’ve noticed Paizo seems to have a thing for giving you the exact tool you need AFTER you finish the challenge you would’ve needed it for. “During” would be OK too, ya know…

Next up, the mysteries of the transmitter. So we find out from the remaining emails that there’s a constellation of 12 stars that are too symmetrical to be a natural phenomenon, and it’s probably something bad – “portal to Hell” and “superweapon” are the leading candidates. Tahomen got a data dump and sent everything to a set of coordinates in the Diaspora, the lawless asteroid belt that divides the inner and outer Pact Worlds. That’s almost got to be our bread-crumb for Book Three – follow the data trail out to the Diaspora and try to disrupt the death cult before they can get any further with their plans.

And there’s money on the computer, which Chris almost erases. If you want to be a hardass, I suppose Chris’ roll should’ve counted and the money should’ve been deleted, but a) our rolls were pretty close to simultaneous (less than a second between them – his just happened to show up first in the tool), and b) if anything merits a one-time bailout, a natural 20 ought to do it. I’ll put it this way – I wouldn’t have lost any sleep if Steve had gone strict rules-as-written and taken the credits away, but I’m glad he chose not to.

I’ll pause to point out that I rolled really well this episode. Two natural 20s (the other being while we were sweet-talking Panellar), plus another fairly high roll on the initial computer check to access the emails. Science Rat to the rescue!

Once everything else is dealt with we reunite with Dr. Solstarni and Wahloss, but most of their knowledge dump just confirms Tahomen’s data about the Unspecified Destroyer of Worlds. From there, we formulate an escape plan – take the transmitter up to the top of the mountain so we can send off an evacuation request. I was a little surprised Steve punted on the cultist headcount and just told us we were done, but not really. I mean, my personal count was something like 10 or 11 out of the 15 – three at the Stargazer, three in the Temple of the Twelve, three in Tahomen’s crew, and then 1 or 2 others I can remember during creature encounters (and Solstarni was also one of the 15). So like John I assumed there could be a few left at the top, though I didn’t think it was all that likely. On the other hand, I was allowing for the possibility that the last two or three were guarding a ship so we’d have a more direct way to depart, so that was a little disappointing.

Turning to Steve’s GM tip about adding NPC’s to the party: I am generally OK with it. My only real concern is that the players still get to be the primary actors in moving the story along. The GM already has a fair amount of control of the story as it is; if the GM also takes a role on the player side and makes that character make a bunch of important decisions or gives that character a bunch of hero moments – it starts to feel like the players only exist to enable the GM’s good time. At that point… write some fanfic or something. The only NPC that even came close to that might have been Clara (the sniper from the Drift Rock), and you could sense it wasn’t intentional; she was just rolling much better than us in combat.

So next week, we get to take a look at our level 5 characters, and we should be getting back to civilization and on to book three. All I really know is Tuttle will be happy to never set foot in a jungle again. We’ll see you next week; in the meantime, feel free to pay us a visit on social media.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 046: Caster Blaster.

I was going to preserve some limited suspense and play dumb about what’s left, but since Steve let the cat out of the bag… yeah, Tahomen is the Big Bad of Book 2 – by winning this fight, we’re basically done. Just a little bit of cleanup left next week.

And oddly, as we’ve alluded to, this is literally the first time we’re facing a bona fide caster. How did that happen? The Driftdead back on the Drift Rock had a spell-like ability or two, but that’s not really the same thing. And of course, we have no magic in our own party, so in the bigger picture, it’s pretty much our first major interaction with the magic system, period.

(At least in Dead Suns. We did get to muck around with magic in some of the Society games, but that’s a different corner of the multiverse.)

I have to admit, this is one of those times where Steve’s editing makes us sound calmer and in control than we really were. I want to pull back the curtain a little bit and share some behind-the-scenes stuff because Steve’s editing misses out on some of the extra suspense created by the recording schedule. There was actually a session break pretty much right after Tahomen throws his force disk for the first time. On the heels of that break, we actually had to take a break for a week or two because schedules weren’t working out. So basically, we had Tahomen unload for ridiculous damage, Panellar start creeping up on us from the corner of the battlefield… and then we had to stew in our own juices for an extra week or two. By the time we reconvened to play the rest of the fight, we were legitimately nervous about how things were going to go, and there was more than a grain of truth to the gallows-humor jokes about rolling new characters.

Specific to Tuttle, I didn’t really do a good job of mentioning it during the combat (I apologize; chalk it up to “fog of war”) – but CHDRR was only around half-health going into this fight, so I had that to worry about too. I don’t remember whether I just forgot to give him a rest, or whether I wanted to conserve Resolve points and chose not to do it, but CHDRR wasn’t in great shape. I wasn’t so worried about Tahomen and his goons, but I did want to keep him away from Panellar as long as possible since I figured he could probably one-shot CHDRR, or close to it. (And of course, it takes 24 hours to rebuild CHDRR, which… OK, not a huge deal once we know this is the final boss, but in the moment, it was a little worrisome.)

And then, getting back to our favorite undead elf, we caught our first break, as Panellar pretty much stayed put at the edge of the battle. I don’t know if Steve was feeling charitable if Rusty’s Bluff check really was that successful and at least made his loyalties conflicted, or maybe it’s a thing where his meta-game mission was just to keep us on the battlefield, so we couldn’t flee down the hill or back into the temple. Regardless of the details… take the undead elf out of the equation, this becomes a little more winnable fight. Now it’s just a boss fight with two squishy minions. (Note from Stephen: Tahomen failed his command roll when he ordered Panellar to attack the PCs.)

The goons go down quick – no problem there. To quote Angela Bassett’s character in the new Mission Impossible: “Yes. That’s… the job.” Then it’s just us and Mister Crazypants. It’s not easy, exactly – he still lands a Mind Thrust and another Super Happy Death Frisbee, but at some point, sheer 4.5-vs-1 numbers take over and we’re able to whittle him down. Yay us! But there are those ominous warnings about how we’re already too late… what does that mean?

Before we can get into that, we have to figure out what’s going on with Panellar, and good news… OK, he’s still not a barrel of laughs, but it’s also clear he was under some sort of mind control that’s now been removed. Yes, he’s still protective of the temple, but he downgrades from Violently Untrusting to mere Regular Untrusting. We leave it for next time to find out what that means in terms of getting Dr. Solstarni and Wahloss out of there in one piece, but for today, progress is progress.

Also on that to-do list: figuring out the communication rig they were carrying, possibly going up to the top of the hill to see what might be up there, and figuring out if there’s a way to get out of the jungle without another two-week slog.

I wanted to take a moment to tip the cap to a few role-play moments that made the final fight a little more fun. First, I thought Steve did a pretty good job injecting some crazy mustache-twirling evil into Tahomen’s personality – giving Hirogi (the only lashunta) an offer to join him; laughing at the destruction of his own guys. It almost makes me feel guilty for stealing his Wrath of Khan joke last week. Almost. But I also got a kick out of Rusty trying to bluffing Hirogi into fighting the battle instead of hiding up on the roof. Somehow that was a very fitting roleplay moment on both their parts. That’s the fun side of “Hirogi Being Hirogi” when you get little moments like that.

As far as Steve’s GM tip this week: “Preparation”? What’s that?

I kid… sort of. The fact is, at least in our online game, D20Pro takes care of most of the heavy lifting for us. In our Dads-and-Kids game, we did get in the habit of making up “flashcards” for the spells that listed all the relevant details – effect, duration, range, damage, etc. That way you don’t even need to dig in the book – just grab the card you need. I’d highly recommend something like that.

The thing about “play the character you like”: I certainly agree in general terms, but that almost deserves its own topic. Sometimes you think you’re going to like a character on paper, but then it doesn’t play the way you thought at the table. (Which is why I’m actually a fan of “you can rip up your character and re-roll anytime during first level” as a general table policy.) Sometimes you like your character at one spot on the leveling curve, but then as the character levels up and the game levels up around it, the character starts to feel different. Sometimes it’s a gear deficiency situation where your character starts to become frustrating because his or her gear isn’t keeping up – easy to remedy once you get some money and get back to a town, but in the middle of a continuous stretch of adventuring, you’re kinda stuck with it. You can even just have a bad session or a bad encounter within that session – I had a druid in Carrion Crown who was built entirely around fire and electricity spells, was a blast to play right up until we ran into a creature that was totally immune to one and resistant to the other.

None of that is to absolve the player of responsibility. Even if you’re struggling with your character not living up to its billing – temporarily OR permanently – I agree with Steve that you still have an obligation to the game and to your fellow players. In the moment, you still need to respect people’s time, be prepared, and know what your character does, and work with the GM and your fellow players to address the issue between sessions if it’s really not working out.

Next week, we hopefully unravel the remaining mysteries of the Temple of the Twelve and get back to civilization. Tuttle may need to treat himself to a spa day before all of this is over. What did Tahomen mean when he said we were already too late? Is there anything worth seeing at the top of the mountain? Will Panellar finally let us into the temple without punching us? Is emergency evac a thing that exists in this corner of the Pact Worlds? All great questions that we hope to unravel next week – hopefully you’ll join us.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 045: One Is The Loneliest Number.

Before I get started on this week’s recap, I have to admit to some lingering pangs of envy – as I’m writing this, Ye Olde Social Media is buzzing with posts from GenCon, and boy it would be cool to be there. Unfortunately, GenCon tends to fall at a bad time of year work-wise, so I’m usually not able to get away – last time I went was probably 5 or 6 years ago, and even then, I got a little stink-eye from my boss at the time. In one of life’s little ironies, my son is going to be there with his mom, so perhaps he can enact my lifelong dream of diving into the dice bin at the Chessex booth like it was the ball-pit at Chuck E. Cheese.

We start this week with an unintentionally anti-climactic cliffhanger as the leader of the cultists we’re fighting blows up the roof… and mostly just succeeds in killing herself. Oops. Honestly, that’s something that’s the sort of thing that usually happens to us, so it’s nice to see it happen to the bad guys for once.

I have to admit I remembered this battle a little differently – it tends to be a few weeks between recording and air date – and thought the explosion was the climax of the fight; I actually forgot the sidekicks were still alive and the battle continued. Still, we were able to make reasonably quick work of them and Tuttle even collected a rare kill-shot.

A few observations:

First, I’m going to have to figure out some way to inject more offense into Tuttle, if that’s possible. I don’t know if that’s a new weapon, or maybe even a new weapon proficiency (longarms, maybe?), but doing 1d4 with an entry-level azimuth laser pistol is kind of a drag, and even the Overcharge doesn’t really add much. Yes, I suppose CHDRR’s damage also goes into my overall “column”, but still… I want to feel more useful than I am.

Take it with a grain of salt though – some of this is the ebb and flow of the adventure, and the restrictions of this adventure in particular. In general, challenges increase as you go through a segment of the adventure path, while your character stays the same unless you level up or find items that improve you. So there’s a little bit of truth to the idea that you get comparatively weaker as the adventure goes. Specific to this adventure, there’s no way to go back to town to spend on upgrades even if you wanted to. Nor does Amazon deliver this far out into the jungles of Castrovel.

The other main thing I wanted to ruminate on was the bad guy using suicide tactics against us. I suppose it’s fine on a roleplaying level – it makes perfect sense that an evil death cultist would blow themselves up to take you with them, especially if this is an underling and not the final boss – but I keep feeling like there’s something a little cheap about it. It’s hard to put my finger on it, something about the fact that it’s easier for GM-controlled creatures to do because the GM has quasi-limitless resources (in terms of additional encounters) whereas we don’t. If we set off an explosion that damages everyone just to take out an enemy, we have to carry the consequences until we reach the next break in the action. If the GM does it, the next encounter gets to start with a fresh slate.

On the other hand, it’s not like we can’t do it at all – remember me trying to blow up the akatas by dropping a grenade on our own position? It’s still available as a tactic; we just have to pick our spots more carefully. I also suspect “one final blast” is baked into the calculations for the encounter as a whole, so it probably helps explain why they weren’t all that hard to kill. Also, more to be fair to Steve, he also sometimes has enemies surrender instead of forcing us to grind them down to zero, so I suppose it all comes out in the wash eventually.

After dealing with the rest of the cultists, things kind of settle into investigation mode. We finally begin to get Dr. Solstarni back to normal by getting her into some climate-controlled armor and letting her talk to Wahloss, so that’s good. She gives us a little info about the cultist leader, named Tahomen, and Solstarni drops quite a few hints that he’s not actually here; that we probably have to go up the hill to the northwest to find him.

I guess I was surprised we didn’t find more… something; I figured that the Temple of the Twelve itself was the final destination. I was kind of assuming the final boss would be here in the temple (I was expecting some sort of basement with a ritual chamber or something), or we’d find something more definitively useful in the library, or (my personal pet peeve) that Dr. Solstarni would have some sort of tools for dealing with Panelliar. Instead, we get a bunch of mostly empty rooms and a trip to the ancient elven equivalent of the Hayden Planetarium. The astronomy dump seems like information that will be useful getting to the next step – meta-gaming: these feel like links to Book 3 – but doesn’t do us any good in the here and now.

And we find a trap, which Hirogi fairly easily detects and defuses. Which is kind of funny, because during the cultist fight, I actually considered looping around – through the trap area – to try and get flanking on them. I didn’t do it because I figured it would take way too many rounds and the fight would end before I got there. But if I’d done that, I probably would’ve set the trap off and melted my face off or something. Bullet dodged, figuratively and perhaps literally.

Toward the end of the episode, the gameplan seems to be to leave Solstarni and Wahloss here to start doing some research while we go up to the northwest and deal with Tahomen, the cultist leader. Maybe the ritual chamber we were expecting to find is up at the top of the hill, I guess? I guess we’ll find out next time. We seem like we’re in pretty good shape for a fight, though CHDRR took a bit of a beating and is around half-health, even with a short rest. And that seems to be where we’ll pick that up next week.

I’m probably going to punt on Steve’s GM tip. I don’t GM much at all, so I’m not in much position to improve on the tips he offered. I’ll probably jump in next week when he talks about what the players need to do to prepare. (Step 1: put on pants. Maybe.) The one thing I will say is that I’ve always felt like the GM gets a bit of extra deference whenever a group is deciding scheduling matters, and when you hear what Steve has to do to get ready… that’s why. Steve’s the one that has to do all the heavy lifting; for the most part, we just have to show up. Wearing the aforementioned pants.

I’m going to wrap this one up early. Between getting the Starfinder Armory and Pathfinder Playtest reviews ready in time for GenCon, I did a lot of writing a lot this week. It’s not so much that Steve keeps me chained to a desk in his basement and I’m applying for martyrdom; I just have this feeling that this week’s Talking is going to get swallowed up by bigger and better things.

So… if you’re going to GenCon, have a fantastic time, and if you’re not, hop on our Discord channel and join me in pouting at all the photos people are likely to be posting. Beyond that, see you back here next week where we have to be closing in on the end of Book 2 of Dead Suns.

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 044: Dr. Solstarni, I Presume

Isn’t it nice when things actually go according to plan every once in a while?

After the rocky start with the goblin grenades, we made fairly short work of the sentry statues. They followed Hirogi up the stairs, right into a Mo-and-CHDRR meatgrinder. Mighty nice of them to be so cooperative. Even once we engaged the next batch of cultists, we were doing pretty well… at least right up until the cliffhanger ending.

Which is not to say it was an uneventful episode, just that the core combat was – for once – fairly manageable.

Going sort of chronologically, one thing that’s on full display this episode is that I’ve (finally) fully succumbed to BUTTON-Mania. As I sort of half-mumbled during the episode, now that we’ve sussed out that most of the effects are buffs, it feels like using it at the start of combat is the best way to go. And I was rewarded with fairly useful temporary weapons – a melee weapon against the statues, and then a ranged weapon against the cultists. The weapons don’t seem like they’re a LOT better than CHDRR’s native weaponry, but at least in the case of the pike, it’s a little more damage than the razor-bat and reach certainly doesn’t hurt. And selfishly, reach gives me the option of letting CHDRR attack and letting him hide behind Mo and let Mo take most of the hits. Heck, maybe I should look at upgrading CHDRR to a reach weapon permanently. Something to think about.

Skipping ahead a little: I don’t think CHDRR ever got in position to fire his temporary machine gun in the second fight, so we’ll find out later how useful that ends up being. One thing I will say is that we haven’t really gotten to see peak-efficiency Junk Cannon because we haven’t had a chance to take advantage of the weapon’s line effect. Either we’ve been fighting single targets, or they’ve been dispersed around the battlefield and I haven’t had a chance to set up a line-effect shot. But consider this your reminder that if CHDRR gets lucky and two or three bad guys form a conga line in front of him, he can put a hurtin’ on them.

Back to the statue battle, even though we ultimately won, poor Hirogi’s ongoing war with random numbers continues, even including a second less-dramatic heal of the enemy. Between this and his luck with holographic clones, it feels like he can’t buy his way into double-digits right now. Happens to us all eventually – at the risk of a minor Society spoiler, Nala gets her turn in the RNG Dunk Tank in the not-too-distant future. I’m still going on the record that it’s karmic retribution for shooting unarmed prisoners, even if most of the Discord channel is against me on this one.

After we polish off the sentries and move downstairs, we get to cross off one of our major objectives – we found Doctor Solstarni! First thing we notice is that she’s acting a little out of it. Not sure if she’s just engrossed in study, maybe the trek through the jungle was harder on her as a civilian, maybe she’s been tortured,… oh jeez, hopefully she hasn’t been brainwashed by the cultists and we’re going to have to kill her. It would suck to come all this way just for that, and I’m sure Wahloss would be devastated. No more omelets – just unbuttered toast, washed down with a glass of Wahloss’ tears.

But no… part of her weirdness is that she’s trying to tip us off that we still have company in the next wing of the temple.

Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis. (OK, Cult of the Devourer minions. Basically the same thing.)

One thing that struck me as interesting was the degree to which Steve let the cultists have fairly legitimate tactical thinking in this fight. He actually made it look like the cultists were afraid of us and were retreating, and then they counter-attacked when we took the bait and got a little reckless chasing them. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been mostly fighting animals recently (and the other cultists we fought were trapped in a dead end which didn’t give them many options) but I wasn’t expecting that.

This is one of those things I always go back and forth on – how smart should opponents be? Certainly if you’re talking about animals or low-intelligence monsters, just have them charge in and take their pummeling. But when it comes to humanoid or otherwise intelligent foes? My personal take is that they should be smart, but not too smart. The GM already has a baked-in advantage by having perfect knowledge of the battlefield, so maybe he should dumb the bad guys down a little bit to compensate. It’s one of those things where, even if you don’t use that perfect knowledge of the encounter consciously, it might creep in subconsciously, so maybe give a little something back to account for that.

Meanwhile… what was up with Hirogi wanting to parlay? We do all remember a few episodes back where he put a bullet in the head of an unarmed captive prisoner, right? We’ve since found even more ample evidence these cultists swim in the evil end of the pool, this particular crew has a machine gun… and NOW he wants to talk? Did we accidentally step into Secret Wars and he’s been replaced with Skrull Hirogi? Or is “Hirogi Being Hirogi” just adding a pacifist streak?

“Can you take the blue from the sky? Can you put the wind in your pocket? Can you catch a rainbow? No! Such is Mango… err… Hirogi!”

Hirogi’s tomfoolery aside, these guys just don’t seem all that tough. After a fairly short fight, it seems like we’ve got them on the ropes, and… oh crap… they’ve got a BUTTON of their own. Ruh roh, Raggy! (Oh god, don’t let it open the doors and pull in the undead elf from outside. Anything but that.) For the first time in a while, we end on an honest-to-goodness cliffhanger, and I guess you’re just going to have to come back next week and see what happens. In the meantime, stop by our Discord channel or visit us on other social media and let us know what you think of our ongoing antics.