Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S2|09: A Penny Saved.

Welcome back to the conclusion of the great bank heist on Roll For Combat. We spent at least a month running down leads, and it finally comes down to beating down a droid…. errrrr… construct.

The first question I ask myself when playing through, and when going back and listening, is… why did this feel so (comparatively) unsatisfying? It’s like… we spent over a month figuring out the logistics of the bank robbery, we finally shut it down, and I still felt like it was kind of anticlimactic.

To answer my own question, I have two reasons.

First, not to get all Bernie Sanders on y’all, but there’s something that hits different about defending a bank vs. stopping a completely demented serial killer operating a murder hotel. I will grant that the banks of Absalom are not FDIC-insured, so a robbery could literally ruin the Penny and Sphinx, but protecting people’s lives will always feel more heroic than protecting people’s money. And the only lives at risk were arguably the customers that we put in danger by attacking before fully assessing the situation. So the Heroism Needle for this particular engagement dropped from a good solid 8 or 9 to maybe a 4 or a 5? If that makes sense.

The other thing is, these guys had some tech that was above their paygrade that made them a tough fight, but they weren’t the masterminds. The Big Bads of the Copper Hand gang AND the Skinsaw Cult are still out there. Yes, the skinstitcher and the construct were formidable opponents, but they were in the hands of a relatively minor threat… a few minions on par with the guys we beat at the docks, and the banker’s stepson. So while we beat the threat in front of us, the larger threat remains, and knowing that makes the whole thing feel like unfinished business, even as this part of the adventure draws to a close. Say what you will about the Pratchett encounter; tossing a guy into an ochre jelly definitely provides closure.

One thing I found myself struck by as we began this episode is that we probably made a bigger deal out of the caltrops than we needed to. It’s a 5-foot penalty to movement and ONE whopping point of bleed damage. That’s not going to kill anyone. And yet, here we are at the top of the steps in Tactical Analysis mode for… well, FAR longer than the threat really dictated.

Though in my case, I also wanted to clarify the rule for future use. My ancestral ability essentially works like Feather Fall: I can use my wings to fall slowly, with no real restriction on the vertical distance. But it was worth knowing whether my ability worked with a horizontal component – could I glide or just drop, but slowly? Physics 101 would suggest I should get a little bit of horizontal movement as I fell. But in this case, the fact that it was a set of stairs imposed additional considerations on the vertical side: if I fell too fast, I’d still land in caltrops, but if I fell too slowly, I’d smack my head against the descending ceiling above the stairs. (Heck, if you want to get technical, would there be enough room to fully extend my wings in a staircase?) So all in all, I think Steve’s ruling was fair – give a reflex save to account for those shifting conditions, but otherwise, give me the horizontal movement I would’ve gotten from a leap (plus maybe a little extra for the glide path).

So we get everyone downstairs, and we reveal the construct in all its glory. As expected, it hits HARD, and the ability to hold people down and drill into them is a nice cherry on the sundae. On the other hand, I guess I was a little surprised its defenses weren’t more formidable. I’d expect a construct made of metal to have some damage resistances, but no resistances and fairly easy to hit as well. The two sidekick rogues were easy pickings, and even Kolo wasn’t that tough once we got rid of some of the “noise” and were able to focus on him.

With all of the combat resolved, a picture of the full heist emerges. The crew upstairs were mostly diversionary, designed to stall any Token Guard that showed up later. The Skinstitcher held the stairs to the vault, while the machine took care of opening the vault. You figure if we hadn’t been there, either help wouldn’t have arrived at all, or it at least would’ve taken a WHILE to get there – someone would have to escape the bank and go get the Token Guard, come back, navigating through the float wreckage in both directions, and dealing with the guys upstairs.

There are still unanswered questions. First, what role did Kolo play? Is he actually a cultist, or just someone’s greedy Useful Idiot? I think it’s the latter, but you never know. I do wonder which attackers were cultists and which were Copper Hand, though that’s mostly about vindicating our handling of the upstairs. If they were Copper Hand, maybe we could’ve negotiated with them. If they were Skinsaw Cultists, they would’ve started killing as soon as they had what they needed anyway, so we just cut to the chase. And of course, the big question… who’s behind it all, and how do we find them?

As the post-game starts to unfold, one thing happens that I have to comment on: Seth paying 55 gp for a single feather token that PROBABLY has zero practical use… the anchor. It’s one thing to spend a little money trying out different gear (particularly consumables); I did so myself with a couple of magic arrows. But those were only 10 gp a pop, and you could immediately see how they’d be combat-relevant. To spend 55 gp on a boat anchor, when there’s absolutely NOTHING to suggest we’ll even be leaving Absalom, much less on a boat… I’m not sure whether he’s insane or just the most dedicated roleplayer I’ve ever seen. Maybe a bit of both.

Watch, I probably just reverse-jinxed it and the Skinsaw Cult has their own boat that they’ll use as a getaway craft. Make me eat my words.

So next week… it’s hard to say what happens. We level up, so that’s always nice, but in terms of the larger story, unless we can get something from the guys we captured during the heist, I’m not sure what the next move is. Maybe Kolo saw or heard something to point us in the right direction? Maybe the wreckage of the construct contains clues? (Do those things come with a “black box”?) I guess we’ll find out next time.

As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel 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 S2|08: All Right, Everybody Be Cool, This Is a Robbery!

Before we launch into the first part of the great bank heist, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the Role of the Mole.

So yeah, Steve will sometimes use one of us players to very lightly nudge things in the direction the plot needs things to go. He won’t give spoilers, and the FINAL decision is always up to us – if we WANT to dick around and waste three hours chasing things that don’t matter, he’d probably capitulate and let us. But we’re old and we want to be in our beds by midnight so we usually go along with it.

I think if there’s one thing that drives it more than anything, it’s that we’re all in our 50s and we can only get together for three hours once a week. If you’ve got the time to play an all-night session, bumbling around in the dark for an hour can be part of the merriment and make success all that much sweeter when you finally move forward. If you’ve only got three hours to play and have to get up for work the next morning, spending a third of it fumbling in the dark looking for the plot’s light switch sucks. I’d even add the online interface to the stew; it’s one thing to lose the plot a little when you’re at a table together BS-ing about other stuff while you do it; when you’re staring at a screen at people hundreds of miles away, that time starts to feel longer and yes… starts to feel a little wasted.

Anyhow, on to the bank heist. First, as a movie reference, this whole setup reminded me of the train station scene in The Untouchables. We know someone’s coming (in the case of the movie, they were trying to stop Al Capone’s bookkeeper from leaving town), but we don’t know when and we don’t know how many, and we have to stop them when they arrive. I mean, that, and the first five minutes of Speed where Dennis Hopper gets away because Keanu Reeves won’t shoot his partner in the leg. POP QUIZ, HOTSHOT.

We feel reasonably confident we have the right bank, we definitely know the day… so how do we deploy our forces?

First, let me set the stage using a clock face. Let’s put the main doors at 12. The employee entrance is at about 2 pm, but facing the front of the building. The “airlock” to the teller area is around 4:30 or 5, and the teller space goes across the bottom to about 7:30 or 8 where the stairs to the basement vault are.

One thought was to just wait in the vault room for them. “We know where they’re headed; wait for them there”. But that’s got a couple of problems. First, it ignores the potential risk to the rest of the bank and the innocent bystanders in the building. Working back from the solution, if these guys had taken hostages and started killing them while we sat in the basement playing cards, wouldn’t we have felt stupid? But it also negates the architecture of the bank as a tactical advantage… if we wait in the basement and confront them OK Corral-style when they come down the steps, that’s a BAD tactical situation for us. Imagine the initial band of robbers, the skinstitcher, and whoever’s in the basement drilling ALL coming at us at once, and they’re also between us and the only exit. That’s a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, by dispersing throughout the bank, we can use the features of the building to separate them and deal with them in pieces.

Which is roughly what happened, but it was a bit of a bumpy road getting there.

First, we get to see what happened to the missing lift that got stolen from the tannery. In this case, it elevates our “boarding party” so they can use the “accident” with the float to reach the door quickly, and in a manner that wouldn’t have attracted undue suspicion. If you think about it, if we weren’t there, any people outside would just assume it was an accident and make sure everyone in the courtyard was OK, and probably ignore the bank entirely.

Inside the bank, I have to admit, I thought we were going to take a round or two and assess our opponents before wading in – numbers, weaponry, etc. That’s actually why my first move was to retreat into the office I was using as a stakeout position. I didn’t think we’d immediately start attacking the minute they grabbed hostages, and frankly was a little caught off guard that we did so. Heck, maybe we the guys mixing in with the customers by lying on the ground wouldn’t have surprised us if we’d waited.

So now we attack and they respond by stabbing hostages and it’s on like Donkey Kong. And this is one of those fights where you can SAY “well, everyone lived” but it doesn’t feel like a huge success to me. I mean… three or four civilians got stabbed which I’m sure was really freakin’ traumatic even if they didn’t technically die. If this is an 80s cop movie, our protagonist’s captain will get called to the mayor’s office for a good chewing-out over that one.

But I say this fully admitting I don’t have a great idea what we should’ve done instead. It’s a month later, and I still can’t come up with a truly flawless Plan B. Also, I’m probably just frustrated because I was SO close to knocking that number down a couple if my sleep arrow had landed. I believe the one I shot was “the bloodthirsty one”, DC was 17, and that’s exactly what they rolled… So close. That’s where you need the reverse Hero Point where you can make an enemy re-roll, I suppose.

(Though, as I’m reading the spell, Level 1 sleep isn’t THAT great in combat, because the noise of combat allows the sleep-ee to make a Perception check to wake up, and it’s only at a -1 penalty. The Level 4 heightened version of sleep doesn’t allow for the Perception checks. So… maybe that’s kinda garbage.)

The good news is that Gomez does a FANTASTIC job keeping people alive. I give Seth a huge amount of credit for hanging in there and keeping civilians safe. The bad news is that to do so, he has to stand right out in the middle of the battlefield with a big neon STAB ME sign pointing right at him. And sure enough, the bandits take advantage of the situation and grind him down while we’re taking them out.

We finally get the first situation under control, when part two of the fight begins. We hear the drilling begin in the basement, start heading that way to investigate, and a Skinstitcher busts through the wall. Now, this feels ominous at first – it’s just a nasty looking undead abomination – but actually turns out to be a comparative pushover. First, it’s vulnerable to fire, so Gomez and I can just sit back and chuck fire at it and be fairly effective without burning (pun intended) any spell slots. Second, we generally get good dice luck, and being large, it’s fairly easy to hit, so we get a few crits to make it go down faster. So yes, it hits hard for the very brief time it exists, but we just pile the damage on and make quick work of it.

So now we’ve got noise in the basement, but we are a little roughed up, and Lo Mang discovers caltrops on the stairs. So as the session ends, we’re still in combat rounds and figuring out how we want to manage this. The good side is that the situation I described earlier has reversed itself – unless they have teleportation magic, we’re between them and the exit, so they gotta get through us to escape. But how much do we want to let them mess around down in the vault vs. getting down there and shutting this business down once and for all?

And that’s where we leave it. Next week we go down to the basement – though I’ll leave the specifics for then – and see if we can put a stop to this nonsense. 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 S2|07: You Never Know When You Need a Boat.

I’m actually going to start this week with a comment from our Discord channel because it ties nicely into the start of this week’s episode. User “MartinG” left us the following comment:

“After listening to the last episode and reading Jason’s bird’s eye view on it, I wanted to say that I really liked the situation the PCs are put in in the last episode with the banker’s son, but also with the young goblins. Not that it is very complex or anything. But it’s one of the first time I remember where they have to take a moral decision that is not “railroaded” by the badge. I get why Stephen put the badge in place (IIUC that it is his idea and it was not in the AP), but I see the little moments when they are out of that umbrella as more revealing of the PC’s different take on their job.”

The interesting thing here is that I actually agree. There are times when, if we’re being honest, the law enforcement angle of this adventure path is a fairly thin veneer. When you have a serial killer offing hotel guests, the distinction between “cops” and “dungeon crawlers” is mostly one of semantics: it still boils down to “go room to room looking for the Big Bad, and then stop him”… only it’s been determined that we’ve got Nerf Swords so it doesn’t count as lethal damage. (I mean… unless you shove him into a pit with an ochre jelly… but who’s keeping track?)

But with something like this… these are the questions where you’re really flying without a net. In this situation, it’s unclear that the son even broke a law – being reckless with money and going to a loan shark to fix the problem is not, strictly speaking, illegal. But it’s resulted in a cascading sequence of events where laws (even if they’re misdemeanors rather than felonies) have been broken, and one can see a path where having a financially corrupted bank employee could be a gateway to future criminality if the son gets in deeper with Chadaxa.

All of which is prelude to admitting I – since I kind of fell into the role of lead investigator on this one – think I made a mistake. I think this is one of those cases where we made the right call per the letter of the law, but maybe missed the mark on the spirit of the law.

The thing that rankles me after the fact is that we never took the time to get the son’s side of the story or offer him a chance to clean up his mess. We never went and asked him WHY a guy who works for a reputable bank got into a situation where he goes to a loan shark for aid. I mean, maybe the answer is he’s a deadbeat who lives outside his means and blows his money on whatever the Absalom equivalent of cryptocurrency is or something. Entirely possible. But what if he borrowed the money to pay for someone’s resurrection or something? That’s the part we never bothered to understand. For that matter, maybe our collective Spider-Sense should’ve gone off about the fact that the son couldn’t just go to his dad… Ovingott’s supposedly a community leader and a big-wig who funds entire mercenary companies; I’m pretty sure the original 25g would’ve been a drop in his bucket. Maybe that should’ve given us a hint that there was friction between the father and son that we weren’t seeing and that we should at least tread cautiously.

And OK, let’s be honest. Some of this was just impatience imposed by the main story. Part of what was going on is that we were on the eve of the main bank heist we’ve been building toward, and this was the last thing on the to-do list before we could get into that. So we had tunnel vision toward our main goal and didn’t really give this situation its proper due. I think that’s at least part of the math here as well.

Letter of the law, our final choice was technically correct and even fairly defensible. You really don’t want a guy with financial problems working at a bank, and at the end of the day, we were working for the dad in this investigation. His relationship with his son isn’t REALLY our problem; we’re not family therapists. I’ll also go a step further and say that if we HAD gone to the son and he’d been unwilling to resolve the situation, I would’ve gone to the dad with a clear conscience because, at that point, the SON would have been equally guilty of abandoning his family responsibilities. At that point, family is out of the equation and it’s telling a bank owner who hired us that he has an employee with financial difficulties handling customers’ funds: he would need to know that. But with full 20/20 hindsight, I’m disappointed we didn’t at least hear the son out first.

On the other hand, we got a cool rune out of it. It’s not one Basil personally needs – I can just leave the sheath on the sword cane if I want to switch to bludgeoning – but it’s nice to be able to switch typed damage. Much as I love Dougie’s Hot Maul Action, Dougie’s Hot Greatsword Action would be equally entertaining and the crits would be just as massive.

Meanwhile, despite all that time I spent on the B-plot, we’ve got a robbery to plan for. A lot of the nuts-and-bolts of how we’ll set up will be in next week’s show, but the one thing that’s sticking out for me is we’re missing SOMETHING about the role the lift is going to be playing. It’s becoming clear that a direct attack through the roof would be pointless; so it’s not about getting the bad guys onto the roof. So what is it then?

Maybe opening the vault? The four keys are spread wide apart and some of them are off the floor. Could they be using the lift to reach all four keyholes at the same time? Maybe, but that would require bringing the lift hardware INTO the bank during the robbery, and it’s not like you can just sneak it in. So that feels like it would require a full-frontal assault by a LARGE group.

Or maybe the lift isn’t part of this at all? Maybe it’s a red herring after all.

You’ll also note I spend a lot of time reflecting on snares. I’m just thinking, there are four of us, at least two entrances to cover (and that’s assuming they don’t somehow make their own), and lots of building features that impede sightlines. I’m feeling like we can’t possibly monitor every inch of the bank, so snares would be a bit of an equalizer here. We don’t necessarily have to do big damage with them, but if we can use them to let us know if there are unseen enemies around, maybe apply some side effects that slow them down a little… that would be a big help.

However, snares require the specific feat of Snare Crafting, and none of us have that. I think kobolds get it as an ancestry perk, though I don’t remember if it’s automatic or one of their ancestry feats, and I’m pretty sure rangers can get it fairly easily as well. But for tomorrow, we’re out of luck unless we find a magic item that does the same basic thing.

The same thought process went into my arrow purchases. 10+ gold for a magic arrow is a bit steep, but the Sleep Arrow and Vine Arrow both have the capability to take an opponent almost completely out of the fight if they get bad luck on the save, so maybe it’s worth the spend. If you think of them as scrolls a non-caster can use, the price point makes a LITTLE more sense, but I’m not sure magic arrows will ever be more than situationally useful. Better to just beat them down with direct damage.

So next week, we should do our final planning, and the great heist will begin. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show (as you can see above, we do see your comments!). Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S2|06: I’m Mary Poppins Y’all.

I’d like to start this week’s column by thanking Steve for ruining simulation gaming for me forever.

OK, not really. But he raises an interesting point in his pre-show notes, one I wanted to dwell on for a few minutes, and it’s the ability of gaming to “dress up” the rather mundane tasks people do on a day-to-day basis and repackage them as something different and entertaining. Particularly when it comes to simulation-based gaming. Put me in front of an Excel spreadsheet of random numbers, I’ll doze off in five minutes. But if those numbers represent, say, the salary and scoring numbers for free agent left wings for my fictional hockey team, I can spend an hour rolling them around my brain and possibly even dream about them in my sleep.

Think about the granddaddy of them all… Civilization. In its premise, you’re a world leader building your people up from the Stone Age all the way to space travel. I AM CAESAR. WITNESS THE POWER OF THE WHEEL! But if you really boil down the essence of what you’re doing, you’re mostly managing resources and queuing jobs: time, money, and other build resources. That’s right… Sid Meier managed to put a really fancy front-end onto Microsoft Project. (OK, Sid gets some credit for doing this before Project even existed, so props for that, but still… at the end of the day, he built an entire genre around making busy-work engaging.)

And so we come to the first part of this week’s episode. In moments of calm, one could quibble that in a high-fantasy medieval setting, a police station probably wouldn’t have an hours-long queue to get information on a prisoner. Heck, the modern service-oriented economy hadn’t been invented yet, so they probably wouldn’t even have desk sergeants and file clerks waiting to deal with requests from the public. It would probably just be a bunch of random soldiers in a glorified barracks with some cells in the basement and you’d just go tackle whichever guard was free at the moment.

But this being a game, we’re gonna play with the premise of modern bureaucracy. In return, we actually get something cool and amusing out of it, as poor Lo Mang wastes an entire day to find out the Token Guard let Quidley the goblin go. Don’t get me wrong… I wanted to find that goblin because he represented our best chance to firm up the Penny and Sphinx as the target of the robbery. But maybe the fact that he already got sprung implies he had friends – dare I say “accomplices” — come get him… even if it’s to keep him from talking. In a sense, maybe the fact that he got sprung so quickly reinforces the idea that this is our guy.

Meanwhile, the other major thrust of this episode involves pretty much ruling out Ovingott’s as the target. We finally decide to suck it up and pull an all-nighter, and it turns out the vandalism is just a couple of kids who were paid to do it by… wait for it… Chadaxa. After a little poop-related humor, we come to find out that the banker’s son got in over his head with a loan and hasn’t paid it back, and so they’re sending the son a message.

First… I have to admit I kinda forgot the banker had a son. Or perhaps, I got confused because the Penny and Sphinx guy ALSO has a (step-)son. Nepotism, man. Maybe I mixed up the two in my head. Or maybe we just got a little bit of tunnel vision and locked in on the institution of the bank rather than the people that worked there. But I’ll admit I hadn’t considered the son as the source of the hijinx so it’s good to have that resolved.

As an adventure design thing, this kind of illustrates the “most roads lead to Rome” approach. If you think about the six leads we were originally given, #5 was Chadaxa herself, and #1 (vandalism at Ovingott’s) and #6 (dealing with the smuggling ring) would’ve led back to her anyway. So fully half the leads wound up at the same basic place, and if a party had decided to tackle them in a different order, they still would’ve wound up in roughly the same place.

So now the question is how should we handle the Ovingott situation. It’s a little more of a grey area because we’re not actually the officers with jurisdiction here. We were hired because THOSE guys didn’t do their job. In this context, we’re almost more like private investigators, just ones that also happen to be real cops. And at its heart, the crimes being committed are minor and the REAL issue is a family matter between the father and son.

Turning it over to the Token Guard would accomplish nothing; at most, they’d focus on the vandalism and cause trouble for Chadaxa and the kids while doing nothing about the core issue of the son’s debt. We can honor our deal with the father and tell him what’s going on. Or we can let the whole matter slide and hope the son pays Chadaxa back. Right now I’m leaning toward just telling the dad, though maybe that’s more Basil talking than Jason. Basil’s about the law and you can’t really run a bank and have an embezzlement risk working for you. Also, some of it is just impatience to get it off the books once and for all, and we can get on to protecting the Penny and Sphinx.

(As a reminder: the whole point of the visit to the third bank was to show that it had badass security and was pretty much impervious to attack. If they can stop creatures that can plane-shift, pretty sure grunt-level humanoids won’t pose much of a threat to them.)

So next week, we’ll clean up the situation at Ovingott’s and get ready for the final heist. I have to admit I’m excited… you just get the feeling this is going to be another big set-piece with lots of weird twists and turns to it. They stole an elevator, they have access to weird demon shit… pretty sure it’s not just going to be three guys in trench coats running in and saying “gimme all your money!”.

But we’ll find out for real next week. (Or MAYBE the week after… at the risk of giving a minor spoiler, there may or may not be a full episode of material before the heist starts, depending on how Steve edits things.) While you’re waiting, feel free to come 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 S2|05: They Never Miss…

Is Steve calling us stupid? I think he’s calling us stupid.

To be fair, he’s not totally wrong. Collectively as a group, we’re very much about moving the plot from A to Z, and sometimes we kinda get impatient and blow through the exposition scenes. To borrow the appropriate Seinfeld reference, we “yada yada yada” a bit more than we should. Guilty as charged. The part about showing up at a final boss fight not really remembering why we’re supposed to be there… yes, that has totally happened before.

To be fair, part of the issue is that Bob Markee was traditionally our dedicated scribe and Plot Summarizer, so I’ve been pushed into a new role on the fly here. Bob was meticulously on the ball and could often summarize the action better than Steve could. Me… not so much. So at the risk of sounding defensive, I would like to say that I DO take notes; I feel like it dovetails with Basil’s role of “investigator” to do so. However, I think there have been times where maybe I haven’t latched on to what’s important about a particular conversation, so sometimes my notes are a little incomplete or focus on the wrong things. Also, as a secondary logistical thing, sometimes Steve just dumps stuff in the “handouts” channel in Discord, and rather than copy them to my Word doc, I just leave them there, which works… but there’s a delay while I realize that was one of the Discord notes instead of Word-Doc notes and I have to go looking for it.

So… yes we’re idiots. But we’re also trying to do better. Like Mr. Data, I’m attempting to evolve beyond my programming. Honest.

This week’s episode gives us the continuation of the warehouse fight. One of the main things that frustrates me about this episode was Pierson Droan being able to destroy the evidence before we reached him. But the reason I was frustrated when I was playing and the reason I was frustrated when listening were totally different.

When we were playing, I’ll admit that I felt like we should’ve gotten the evidence, and not doing so was at least a partial failure. But going back and thinking about it, I think I’m more frustrated at the mission design; that there wasn’t really a good chance to even GET the journals the way the encounter was set up. MAYBE if we’d gone in one of the side doors and gotten directly to Droan’s office, we could’ve done it, but with a frontal assault, there was just too much to fight. Also, an off-handed clue about “check out the globe in this dude’s office” kinda undersold the importance of the evidence; “hey, he keeps two sets of books and if we could recover those, dude would pretty much go away for life” might have put more of a spotlight on the books and suggested a totally different tactical approach.

Let’s say we know more explicitly that there’s evidence we want to preserve. If that’s the case, maybe we look for one of the doors that’s not guarded and try to sneak in that way. Or Dougie goes in as part of a stealth mission or Gomez goes in as part of a schmooze mission (Bluff/Intimidate/etc.) and tries to figure out where Droan’s office is before we rush the joint. So part of this is the guard captain’s fault for basically hiring us to be muscle instead of explaining it as a finesse job.

At the end of the day, we did the job we were contracted to do. We knocked some heads. It’s just the job itself could’ve been defined more clearly.

When it came to Seth’s line of interrogation… I can see both sides of this one, and it really comes down to whether this is a regular business that happens to be run by crooks, or more of an organized crime operation that happens to have some civilians working there. If it’s more of a business operation… people have shit to do and they’re not always where you think they’re going to be. To pick an example, at my job, I have an intern bullpen and a makerspace near my office, but I couldn’t tell you how many people were in either place. On the other hand, if it’s got more of an organized military bearing, yes, I’d expect Delta Team to know that Alpha Team has the docks tonight, Echo is patrolling the exterior, and Bravo is out on a delivery. And yeah, they’d probably know if their boss was in the building.

That said, I could’ve done without Seth throwing us under the bus with the “you guys aren’t coming up with any questions” when Steve overruled his line of questioning. For me, it got back to our role as muscle; we were there to arrest bad guys, so other than “where are the bad guys?” I didn’t really have any questions. Figured the guard captain would handle that stuff once we cleared the place out.

The remaining fights themselves weren’t that rough, especially once we healed back up to full. Droan was a little tough to hit, but he didn’t seem to have the same corresponding nastiness on offense. (I mean, yeah, he hit well, but no lightning or acid or crap like that.) So… numbers ultimately win out and it’s a pinata party. With the fight on the docks, the surprise appearance of the bunyip was really the only thing that added a wrinkle; otherwise, it was just another round of the grunt-level smugglers we’d dealt with fairly effectively up to that point. Though, OK, I love the fact that the bunyip was also named “Dougie”. It clearly needs to replace Sharky as the group mascot.

So we finish our task with aplomb, and even though Droan burns the books, we still get full credit for the assignment. Chadaxa is going to get her clean slate to work the festival, and hopefully, she’ll give us some information that will prove useful to our investigation of the bank job. (See. I DO pay attention.) But that… will be next week’s adventure. As always, feel free to stop 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 S2|04: Crit-O-Matic.

I suppose I have to start this week with a mild apology for the delays of the last few weeks. Last week was a bit of a technical glitch – I thought I had sent the column in but something went haywire and it didn’t send. So I spent all day thinking I sent it, and Steve was too polite to nag me. This week, it’s vaccine-related: I got my second vaccine last Thursday which slapped me around for a couple of days and then spent Sunday and Monday playing catchup on multiple fronts. (Though I did think about antagonizing Steve by claiming I was at the Mets game.) So… unless I disturbed some ancient burial grounds and this is a permanent state of affairs, hopefully we’ll get things back to normal in the coming weeks.

This week’s episode is one of my favorites: the Chaotic Running Battle, and as I go back and listen to this, what strikes me about this fight is the way in which Second Edition shines as opposed to First Edition. Remember how much Attacks of Opportunity just DOMINATED the conversation in First Edition? You have this big battlefield… characters with mobility feats… and in First Edition it all goes to waste because neither side wants to give up free attacks. So the two teams line up face to face – melees up front, casters in the back – and plink away until someone drops. If you’re lucky, MAYBE one or two characters slowly make their way around the edges of the fight to threaten the flanks, but not too often.

Meanwhile, put this same fight into Second Edition it’s just… glorious chaos. Bad guys fleeing in and out of different exits as they start taking damage, Lo Mang using all his leaping feats… it’s both sides are operating in “find someone and punch ‘em” bar-room brawl mode. Even as I’m focusing on ranged damage in this fight, with (likely) no Attacks of Opportunity to disrupt me, I can wander the battlefield finding better firing positions in a way I wouldn’t previously have done. In First Edition, the golden rule would ALWAYS have been to keep a meat shield between me and the bad guys.

It’s true that, yes, we’re entering the levels where Attacks Of Opportunity are starting to come into play of our opponents, but I remember doing a skim of one of the Bestiary books, and AoOs seem to operate similarly for monsters as they do for player characters. At level 6, it becomes a LITTLE more common, but still mostly for characters that were “tanky” and melee-forward. So when it comes to humanoids (or putting it in terms of this fight), the boss or sub-boss might have access to an Attack of Opportunity, but an archer or caster humanoid probably still won’t have them.

As the fight unfolds, the good news there’s still a distinct power advantage over the grunts: they’re getting lucky with their damage (particularly on Dougie), but even that’s just letting them keep things close; they’re not really in any danger of winning. Eventually, the dice luck starts to even out, and we clear the first room in pretty good shape.

So we decide to go for the next, larger room, and things get more interesting as the boss and his bugbear bodyguard join the fray. If you’re following the action, Dougie is basically toe-to-toe with Overseer Kepse, Lo Mang is basically dealing with goblin adds, and the boss is off to the north… at first, not doing THAT much beyond the initial smokestick. Speaking of which, the other issue is that between that smokestick and the shape of the room (with extensions that go off to the east and north), Gomez and I have to manage sightline issues to stay relevant in the fight. It never takes us out of the fight entirely but there were rounds where we didn’t have a lot of choices in terms of how we could help out.

Results are mixed at first. On the good side, Lo Mang is taking care of the adds pretty easily, and they’re not putting much damage on him. On the flip side, Dougie not only gets dropped, but then I arguably play it too cautious and fail a flat check to apply Battle Medicine to him. We’re at a point where things could go either way: if we can get Dougie up, it mostly becomes a 4-v-1 pinata party, but if the bugbear can get into us squishies, we may need to send someone running for the theoretical cavalry waiting outside.

And then, I finally get a big round where all my tricks come together, and it almost singlehandedly takes Kepse out of the fight. My first ever cast of Color Spray puts Kepse on her heels (stunned and blind), and then a successful fight and a dose of spider venom applies a d10 of damage every round.. above-and-beyond making her flat-footed to everyone for the foreseeable future. Which is… however long it takes Dougie to get back onto his feet and smack her out of the fight for good.

At this point, the momentum swings for good. We go through another round of combat… and when the wheel comes back to me… I don’t know if it’s meta-gamey, or just acknowledging the swing in the action – consider that he just missed me three times and then I critted him —  but since Kepse was described in our mission briefing as the “bodyguard”, I figured maybe this “boss” isn’t that great a fighter and might surrender if we offer him the chance. So… offer made… and after a final encouraging zap from Gomez, he accepts. Victory!

That doesn’t mean the overall is totally over. There are several rooms that haven’t been explored yet, and this guy isn’t the named boss (Pierson Droan) with the “interesting globe” in his office. Nor have we found any proof of the smuggling that’s going on… if you want to get technical. But this fight was at least taxing enough we’ll take a real short rest before tackling the rest of the complex. Gotta at least slap some duct tape on Dougie’s wounds.

And I guess that’s where we’ll pick it up next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel 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 S2|03: Yak Shaving.

So I guess Basil’s an archer now! That’s… unexpected.

It’s not that I have anything against archery – beyond maybe a little bit of concern about encumbrance given Basil’s low strength – but there were two dynamics at work that made me a little hesitant to step up and claim it at first.

The first is I didn’t want to be greedy within the party. Basil just got Pratchett’s sword-cane, which was the single best piece of loot from the last adventure… a potency AND a striking rune, plus the ability to apply poison. Now we have a second magic weapon, and I’m going to take that too? It felt like a little bit much. Doubly so when I already have multiple (ammo-free) ranged options from magic: I’ve got Ray of Frost as my Wizard cantrip, Electric Arc as an ancestry ability, and Produce Flame as long as I have a hand free to use the Staff of Fire. That’s already a fair number of ammo-free options available to me.

(And OK… less altruistically, if an armor rune or a property rune for the sword-cane comes up later, it would be nice to be able to say “well, I haven’t gotten any new loot since the sword cane”. Always keep an eye on the long game.)

The other thing – and this is where we get into the more meta-conversation of the week – is it wasn’t particularly part of The Plan for Basil. When I see Basil in my brain, I see much closer to a brain-based swashbuckler, bobbing in and out of melee range, stabbing things with his sword cane, and that was going to be 90% of his job. Honestly, I’m not sure I really planned for a ranged attack beyond that Electric Arc I got from my ancestry feat. Even choosing to archetype into Wizard was a reluctant concession to the idea that we didn’t have much flexibility with three melee-dominant characters and only poor Gomez doing all the caster duties.

Thinking about my modus operandi in past gaming systems (First Edition, 5E, etc.), I don’t hard-plan every feat I’m going to take, but I do have a “mind’s eye” idea of the destination, and that tends to inform the choices en route. Now, rumor has it Chris Beemer will sometimes build his character from 1-20 before the adventure even starts, and I don’t go THAT far. But I do tend to “build backwards” from what I think the Level 20 character is “supposed” to look like. Endgame Basil wasn’t shooting arrows at people, so a bow didn’t seem “right” at first glance here at Level 5.

But I don’t know if it’s a function of Second Edition or I’m just changing as a gamer, but I’ve found myself to be far more flexible when it comes to 2E character builds. Back in Plaguestone, I was sure Brixley was going to go with the divine weapon option because it was the most immediately useful (free property rune…? Yes, please!) but then the adventure handed me the perfect steed in Ember (as long as I could handle the flames). Here… I didn’t think Basil would be shooting arrows at people, but the more I started thinking about it, it’s another damage option, and I am kind of the logical one to use it: Dougie and Lo Mang are supposed to be up front in melee and Gomez has slotted in as the healer and utility caster. That makes me DPS Guy, so how I apply that damage is kinda up to me. So I’ll at least take it for now; if it’s not helping, we can always transfer the rune and sell the bow.

The one other reason I decided to give it a try is that there are different types of ammo that can apply different statuses. They’re kind of expensive, and the DCs aren’t great, but keeping a few different “special” arrows in the quiver might be a way to pick up some added flexibility; think of them like scrolls that you don’t have to stop attacking to use. No giant boxing-glove arrow, though. Leave that one for the comics.

Now, skipping ahead to the end of the episode, I do realize we botch the rules on Devise A Stratagem at first. Basically, I stopped reading the text in parentheses a little too early. I got as far as “which must be agile or finesse”, got pouty, and didn’t finish reading out to “if it’s a melee weapon with the thrown trait”. So if you’re shooting a ranged weapon with ammo, Devise A Stratagem is fine (Bard v. Smaug is upheld); if you’re using something like a throwing axe or javelin, the weapon has to be agile/finesse. Don’t worry, though: if I remember out-of-game events correctly, I stew about it between sessions, re-read the passage, realize my mistake, whine at Steve, and we get it right going forward next week. (Spoilers!)

Meanwhile, more happened than JUST me getting a cool piece of loot. Honest.

The xill attack turns out to be a fairly easy fight just because we’ve got numbers. He doesn’t particularly have much in the way of special abilities, so it’s a slugfest, and while the xill’s attacks are no joke, Dougie’s maul tends to win those. The main takeaway of this fight is that we start to realize that this bank is PROBABLY not the one to get hit. If they have magical wards strong enough to keep extra-planar creatures from getting out of their vault, they’ve probably other equally nasty wards to take care of more pedestrian threats. It’s still a hunch for now, but we’re moving it down the list compared to the other two.

Our next task is tracking down the non-bank leads, starting with the (cue the Big Yellow Highlighter) WASTE OF TIME. And as we investigate, we get the “or so it seems” moment, where the fire was really designed to distract from the theft of a mechanical lift that was part of a float being stored there. (Said lift being too heavy for one person to move, which further rules out the ex.) It certainly sounds like such a lift COULD be incorporated into a bank heist, though it’s a little fuzzy exactly how it would work. Getting over the outer hedges at the second bank? An attack from the roof?

Now, the rest of the party seemed disinterested in sorting out the domestic situation and getting the husband to forgive his ex-wife, but that feels like Doing the Job instead of just playing Adventurers Who Are Also Cops. To me, convincing this guy to stop dumping his emotional baggage on his ex and local law enforcement seems like part of our responsibility, even if it doesn’t directly impact catching the bank robbers, whereas the others were mostly “got the info, let’s move on”. But we finally talk the guy down, he accepts that his ex didn’t REALLY burn down his barn, and we can move along.

The rest of the episode… Steve describes this as “Yak Shaving”. My analogy of choice is the Star Trek DS9 episode where Jake and Nog attempt to sell a case of self-sealing stembolts: they have to trade it to person A, but person A really wants something person B has, who really wants something person C has and so on. In this case, Chadaxa the money-lender is willing to help us out if we clear up some of her legal woes, but her legal woes are controlled by the same guard captain who needs our help with the smuggling ring (which was also Task #6 on our list anyway). So if we clear out the smuggler’s den, she’ll clear Chadaxa to operate during the festival, who will sort through our leads and give us some clearer guidance (we hope). It’s also another example of “all roads lead to Rome” by the game designers: if you somehow skipped Chadaxa and dealt with the smugglers first, you’d help disperse the smuggling ring, at which point the captain would owe you a favor; then when you went to Chadaxa, you’d already have the favor in-pocket and just need to call it in.

So of course we’re gonna go fight some smugglers. Even though “bugbear bodyguard” is one of those phrases you’d rather not hear in a mission brief. But hey… this is what we do. Only now one of us does it with arrows!

And that’s where we pick it up next week. While you’re waiting, 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 S2|02: The Game’s Afoot!

My first reaction to this week’s episode is one of logistical amusement: specifically, at my off-hand remark that this was the first session of 2021. I was thinking about it, and this may be the furthest ahead we’ve ever gotten in terms of the difference between the record date and air date. For most of Dead Suns, and pretty much all of Black Lodge, it felt like 4-6 weeks was the sweet spot but here we are three… almost FOUR… months ahead. (I cheated and looked in my email, and I sent my Level 5 Basil to Steve on the 18^th of January. Yes, that’s late in the month to be a “first” session, but to be fair, Steve and Seth both took vacations one right after the other).

Were we better about playing regularly because COVID took other options off the table? Has Steve gotten better on the post-production side in terms of turning raw footage into usable show content? Or is it just one of these “you flip a coin sometimes, every once in a while you still get 8 heads” coincidences?  Still… I knew we were out ahead a little ways, but I didn’t realize the gap had grown this large.

I suppose that explains why I’ve started to forget some pieces of these shows. Including the fact that Steve just gave us Level 5 for free. He doesn’t say this in his show notes, but I think it came down to re-establishing the flow of the show after the holidays. If you think about it, we were coming back off an almost month-long break from recording. We were PROBABLY only one or two encounters from leveling anyway, and when we level, it sometimes means we have to end that session early so we can do our N+1 characters. So I assume Steve probably decided that getting back into the rhythm was worth the “freebie” of making the next one or two encounters a little easier than they were originally going to be.

So we get Level 5, which is a big level… depending on how you define “big”. If you’re into major changes that redefine how your character plays, it’s actually not that dramatic – I’m looking at Basil, and his changes were an “only” skill feat and an ancestry feat. On the other hand, the cool thing about Level 5 is that the fundamentals all get stronger: you get your first set of ability score bumps, I think it’s the level at which you can start taking skills to Expert, and in Basil’s case, he gets an extra die of precision damage on Devise A Stratagem. (Also, casters get access to third-level spells, but since Basil is an archetype caster instead of it being his base class, his spells come later.) So everything still plays roughly the same; you’re just generally better at doing stuff across the board.

(Speaking of which, if there’s one thing I’ve been secretly excited for, it’s that a 12 Strength lets Basil wear better armor. When crits are so important to determining battle outcomes, every little bit of AC helps. Though on a fashion level, it’s a little disappointing to leave Pratchett’s tailored leather armor behind in favor of the Kirkland brand Chain Shirt.)

So we begin the detective work that’s going to shape the next several episodes. This is one of those things that – getting back to Steve’s show notes – I’m interested to see how it’s going to unfold. The Dreaming Palace was MOSTLY linear: Clue A led to Clue B which led to the hotel, which was a dungeon crawl. This mystery is a lot more open-ended and it’s more on us to choose which way to go and what questions to ask. Now… on a meta-level, there’s a sense that the game can’t afford to have us miss the clues entirely, so my Meta-Game Spidey-Sense thinks “all roads lead to Rome” eventually. On the other hand, when the whole backbone of the adventure path is an investigation, you can’t just hand-feed the answers to the party either because that’s an unsatisfying outcome. (Especially for me personally, as the Investigator… this is what my character was built for.)

Lacking any real sense that one clue was more important than the other, we decide to visit the banks in the order suggested by our boss. (If nothing else, it makes it easier to remember where we are across session breaks… just keep moving down the list.) So first we have Orvington Moneychangers, which is currently besieged by giant bees when we arrive. (AKA The encounter that might have leveled us up anyway.) This has all the feel of a classic warm-up fight. New book? Potentially new level? Start with a warm-up fight so you can get used to the new versions of your characters.

Now, I’ve made a few comments in this space in the past about teasing fellow players at the table, and here, we basically all crap on Chris for running away. So… does that make me a big hypocrite? And I’ll start by saying “maybe just a little”. But I’ll also offer a twofold partial defense. First, this is a long-running thing going back many campaigns and many characters – Chris has ALWAYS had a bit of a “self-preservation streak”, and we’ve ALWAYS teased him about it a little. I’d argue that a gaming group defines its own acceptable behavior over time, and Chris has had DECADES to say something if he’s bothered by it. (If anything, he usually laughs along with it and offers some variation of “of course I’m going to save myself”.) Second, I think it’s fair when it’s about Chris’ character actions, not about him as a person. Lo Mang is supposed to be this brave, tough monk, and Chris literally has him peace out mid-fight… I think that’s fair game for some gentle ribbing. I think if it crossed the line into attacks on Chris himself, that would be inappropriate, but commenting on the choices his character makes is just part of the game.

Having said all of that, I do think one still has to be careful… especially when bringing someone new into a group that might react differently than you expect… but I think in this case, given this is a group that’s been playing together a while and knows it’s all in jest, we’re on the safe side of whatever that line is.

Sorry… back to the bees. With the bees dealt with, we talk to the owner of the bank, and… it’s kinda hard to see this as the target of our investigation. The things going on here sound like petty vandalism, and if you were going to rob a bank, would you REALLY attract the attention of the authorities by vandalizing it first? It still might be worth further investigation to rule it out – or maybe the vandalism was a way of probing the bank’s defenses — but probably worth checking out the other two banks first.

Bank #2 is the Penny & Sphinx Trust, and here we stumble on something that seems like more of a clue, as they had a thwarted break-in fairly recently. Multiple people tried to break into the employee entrance, and a goblin named Quidley was even caught. I mean… THAT’S a lead worth following up on. If that’s not enough, there’s a ladder left lying around, which… OK, it could’ve been left by the gardener, but may have also been a way to get over the walls. Just eyeballing it, this feels like the stronger lead of the first two. On to the third.

The Stonesworn Savings And Loan seems pretty badass. In fact, you can almost talk yourself into the idea that the encounter with the spiders was designed to show off the magical wards and at least suggest this bank shouldn’t have any problem defending itself. However, just when we’re patting ourselves on the back for our ability to use a Comprehend Languages scroll well, we trip the second part of the encounter… an angry xill. I have vague memories of fighting a xill in one of our Starfinder Society games, and my recollection is that it wasn’t much fun.

How will the PF2 xill compare with the Starfinder one? Which bank should we focus our energy on? What about these other three leads? All good questions… but all questions we’ll have to come back to next week. While you wait, 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 S1|28: Food Glorious Food!

I have to admit, I was honestly surprised this week’s episode managed to be an entire episode. On one hand, the Adventures of Seth and Vanessa (primarily) richly deserved the spotlight, but the rest of the surrounding episode was just so weird and random, I didn’t think there was enough meat on those bones to put a full episode together.

Speaking of which, I fully expect this to be the first episode of our show ever to be banned by PETA, given our obvious delight in the eating of animals. Even fictional ones. Coincidentally, I nominate “It’s not cannibalism if you sell it to other people instead of eating it yourself.” for our next T-shirt quote.

But let’s rewind. We start with a very short bit of real business, as we have to retrieve the remaining loot. And… OK, let’s be honest, Steve ends up just giving us a mulligan on this one by having the ochre jelly spit the remains out on the floor outside the pit.

And sure enough, despite the ribbing from John and Chris, it’s upgrade time for Basil. MY SWORD-CANE!

First, there’s getting the striking rune for free; that’s almost good enough right there. Saves me, what… 130 gold or so? But then there’s the fact that it also has a poison reservoir. Granted, I took a look at the poison table and poisons can get pretty pricy – the more you spend the more damage you do AND the higher the DC to save against the poison – so it’ll probably have to be a trick for special occasions, but added damages and status bonuses could come in handy. The ability to strike with the scabbard is nice, but without the extra feats to use multi-attack without penalty, that’s mostly going to be good for mixing up damage types. And just as a point of pride… it’s a unique weapon. No one else in this multiverse version of Golarion will ever have this particular weapon. OK, it’s not an artifact on the level of the Hand of Vecna or Baba Yaga’s Hut, but it’s still kinda neat that it’s the only one of its kind.

For the record… I was sincere that I wanted to be fair about the issue. I did also get the +1 healer’s kit AND Pratchett’s spellbook, so I didn’t want to be greedy. But let’s draw some boundaries around that: my offer was more “what do I have to give up to make sure I get this?” rather than “one of you guys can have it”. I was absolutely going to walk out with that sword-cane. Fortunately though, despite their early razzing, the rest of the team was cool about the fact that it was my signature weapon, and therefore I had dibs.

Though… gotta say, I wouldn’t mind having the suit as well, though that’s more for aesthetics than practical value. Just seems useful to be able to hide the fact that you’re wearing armor and blend in, given our adventures so far. Having said that, whenever we hit Level 5, I’m going to bump my STR, which will give me access to heavier armor anyway, so I wouldn’t have it for very long anyway. So maybe it’s not that important.

After we get done with the official business… well, the show basically just jumps the rails for the duration. That’s not meant as a complaint; actually, it was kind of fun. There are times where I feel like our group is a little TOO goal-oriented and it would do us some good to let our collective hair down a little. It was also the closest we’ve come to capturing the spirit of the Three-Ring show, which isn’t surprising considering Vanessa (along with Seth) was one of the two ringleaders of the merriment.

Now, you’ll note I was kinda quiet for this part. Part of it was that when people first started talking about food, I got hungry and got up to get a snack. You’ll note there’s a part where Steve asks for my help coming up with names and I don’t respond: I’m pretty sure I was in the kitchen making a PB&J sandwich at the time (aka The Snack of the Gods). For the rest of it, I think Steve kinda pegged it in the intro: this dungeon had been so mentally taxing that once we were done, I just kinda crashed mentally, put it on auto-pilot, and was content to “bask in our victory” or whatever. (Ignore those scurrilous rumors that I was selfishly thinking up names for my new blade!)

Also, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor with roleplay. Sometimes, if someone else is really feeling it and you don’t necessarily know what you’d add to the scene, sometimes you just sit back and let them go off and appreciate the performance. Some of my passivity was that too – Seth and Vanessa were on such a roll I became a listener in real-time.

Now, I remembered most of Seth and Vanessa’s main in-character riff on different foods and such, and the general emphasis on Frying All The Things. What I forgot was the side conversation. You know: the one that dabbled in bugbear cannibalism and ostensibly humane treatment of livestock that actually sounds WORSE than just killing animals for food. Yeah, we’ll just cut pieces off the animal and heal it; I’m sure that won’t be physically traumatic or emotionally scarring in any way. And hey, we even got our first bleeped word in – I don’t THINK “ever”; I feel like Steve might have done it once or twice back in Dead Suns – but it definitely hasn’t happened in a long time.

Once the Fryer-Fest has run its course, we head back to the station, and it’s time to get our final attaboy from the boss and say goodbye to Sharky – at least for now. Keep in mind, there was never a formal endgame for Sharky, so the idea to make Sharky a cook was all off the top of Vanessa’s head. SOLD! Sharky’s going to learn to cook. I’m not sure if we’ll be bringing Sharky back someday, but both Bob and Vanessa added a fun little dimension to the show while they stopped by.

So there it is… Book One is in the… well… books. We managed to hit Level 4 and should be well on our way to Level 5 and – as we’ve mentioned before – it only took like 3 or 4 days of in-game time. So we’re kind of badass. Next week, we’ll get started on a brand new chapter in the adventure, with new challenges that ought to get us to Level 10 by the middle of next week in-game. That’s how this works, right? 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 S1|27: Come up to the Lab and See What’s on the Slab.

It’s Big Bad Week on Roll For Combat, as we finally confront Hendrid Pratchett and put an end to his evil deeds! It’s rare that I really hate-hate-HATE an NPC – more often we’re fighting a guy because that’s what the story says we do – but the nature of this guy’s crimes got me there.

I wanted to start by briefly ducking into Steve’s pre-show notes to talk about other boss encounters, and suggest you check out the last… 4-ish episodes of the Dead Suns show if you want to see a boss fight with stages in action. If you somehow joined for Pathfinder and missed that show, the setup is that we’re infiltrating the bridge of an enemy flagship to stop the doomsday device. The BBEG boss is the captain of the ship: as a tactical note, I’ll mention he’s a caster who threw down greater invisibility while we were messing around in the antechamber. For the first “stage” he throws fairly passive spells that don’t give away his presence and lets his minions (and meat-shield second-in-command) do most of the work. Then when we start whittling away his minions, he becomes a more active participant and starts attacking us directly. Then in a third stage, gravity goes haywire in the ship, and we have to deal with changing gravity conditions each round while still managing combat. The in the fourth stage, we had to participate in a starship battle with the rest of the undead fleet. And then the final part is “get off the ship before it blows” where we aren’t worrying about combat at all anymore.

So… on to our CURRENT show and our first item of business: a new performer for Sharky this week. I didn’t mention Bob would be leaving because I wanted to keep things a surprise, but this week the Wonder-Mimic powers take the form of… VANESSA HOSKINS! Since Vanessa probably has the most airtime of anyone outside the original Dead Suns group (Celes in Plaguestone, Alhara in Three-Ring, Mama Millcent in Black Lodge) I assume a full introduction is superfluous. Heck, within the parameters of our show, she’s well on her way to one-name status like Prince and Madonna. She’s Vanessa!

As an aside, this was pretty much always the plan with Sharky. We figured it’s a mimic. If the creature itself can change, why can’t the person playing it? As a side benefit, it lets us capture some of that “special guest” energy from the Black Lodge show that we’d been missing a bit. (If you want to be cynical and a spoilsport, one could also argue that it was around the holidays and it was tough getting anyone to commit to multiple episodes.)

The thing you’ll immediately notice… and we’ve used this framing before… is the difference between first-person and third-person roleplay. Vanessa is very much a first-person roleplayer… she IS the character from the minute the mic goes hot and will only break character sparingly. Meanwhile, the rest of us… except maybe Seth, sometimes… are more third-person roleplayers: “Basil does X”, “Dougie says Y”. The character is its own thing, and the player is just piloting the mech. Seth is a bit more in the middle: sometimes he goes third-person, but other times he gets on a roll and goes completely into Gomez Mode and acts things out. Neither style is wrong… just different.

Vanessa’s take on Sharky is a bit more upbeat and friendly than Bob’s, a bit more filled with joie de vivre. Bob’s take felt like it always wanted to remind us that it was still an adversary to be taken seriously; Bob’s portrayal felt like there was a little resentment at being forced to fight, so his Sharky was a little passive-aggressive about things. Vanessa’s version wants to get out of this dungeon and go experience the world, and if fighting her former boss/owner is something she has to do to reach that goal, so be it. I don’t know how much of that is intentional choice versus how much was just their different personalities, but it’s fun to see two different takes on the same basic material… which is why we did it this way in the first place.

Meanwhile… Pratchett. The episode starts with a few revelations that make the fight a bit more of a dangerous proposition. First, he’s soaked the whole room with oil, which means it’s possible we could be roasting in a bonfire on short notice. It doesn’t hold us back on offense because no one in our group is all that reliant on fire attacks, but we’ll need to watch for it on defense. The other is the last (as far as I remember*) “oh shit” moment, as the experiment with the two twin children (alluded to in the room with the papers and the spellbooks) was successful, and he’s got an undead version of them serving him. (Numbly adds “infanticide” to the list of charges.)

*=I honestly don’t remember: it’s possible we discover one more horrific thing while cleaning up the aftermath next week, but I don’t THINK so. I think the fate of the twins is the last of the awfulness.

And that doesn’t even get into the fact that Pratchett himself is a tough customer. As a melee, he hits hard with his sword cane, doesn’t seem to get a penalty for multi-attacks, and also seems to be able to apply poison with it. He also has some sort of True Strike effect that he was able to use multiple times to reroll misses, though I don’t know if it’s an innate ability or just multiple casts of the spell. (The spell is one-and-done; you re-roll once and it’s gone.) Add in a full caster’s complement of spells, and we’re dealing with a tough customer.

I’m also at least briefly struck that selfishly, this guy is Evil Basil in terms of loot. Already have his spellbook, so I can learn all his spells. Now he has a sword-cane that’s better than mine? And maybe light armor too? I know we have the whole “cop vs. adventurer” thing to square away, but when the dust settles, I feel like Basil’s getting a major gear upgrade out of this fight.

The good news is although Pratchett hits hard, we’re actually holding our own against him by rotating out our melees and giving him a different target each time. I don’t think we planned it that way, I think that’s just the way it unfolded with Sharky charging in first, then retreating a little after taking some damage, followed by Lo Mang doing the same. We also make fairly quick work of the undead twins, so it’s down to us and Pratchett pretty quickly. The bad news is his base armor class is pretty high… it’s been a while, but I feel like it was taking something like a 23 or 25 to hit him, and we weren’t rolling that well.

Brief uncomfortable conversation time: I have to admit I didn’t notice it during the fight – probably too preoccupied with planning my next move – but I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge and amplify Vanessa’s frustration with the term “man up and stop crying” (said once and then repeated by another person). Because she’s 100% right. I’ll put it this way: I don’t think joking about a teammate’s bravery (or lack thereof) is the issue – that’s about a player’s actions, which are fair game for criticism, even couched in jokes. I do think we need to push back at the notion that being stoic in the face of danger is an inherently male trait and (by implication) that women get emotional/hysterical in difficult situations. I mean, can’t we all acknowledge that there would have been no Thanos Snap if Star-Lord kept his shit together? Just Sayin’.

I’m deflecting with a joke, because the other alternative is to go even deeper and write an entire thesis that goes eight miles deep about how the only emotions our society finds acceptable out of men are the aggressive ones (lust, anger, etc.), and I’m pretty sure that would suck the life out of the room. So let’s put a pin in this and get back to kicking Pratchett’s ass, shall we? But Vanessa in particular, and our female listeners in general… I see you.

We reach a bit of a stalemate in the fight, which is where Steve’s concept of phases comes in. (Under the hood, I suspect Pratchett might have been running low on spells.) So to shake things up, Pratchett does two major things: first, he kicks over the brazier, lighting the room on fire; second, he escapes (or “yeets”, as the Young People say) out a secret door in the back of the room. (Follow-up question: could we have discovered that door from the other side and bypassed two or three rooms, or was it a one-way ticket?)

This is where I have to give Seth credit. The fun of playing with Seth is he’s NOT a min-maxer; he’s the sort of player that tries to predict the unpredictable and has something in his pocket for every situation. When it hits, as it did with “use a water mephit to put out the fire”… it’s an absolute thing of beauty. Now, I’m still a LITTLE skeptical that water would put out an oil-based fire, but whatever: chalk it up to “magical water” and give in to the Rule Of Cool. Seth had the perfect tool for the job: give him the win. (Much like in the Dead Suns campaign where I had a Teleportation Puck sit unused in my inventory for three levels until I used us to get out of a trap room with no exit.)

So while Seth is putting out the fire, the melees – myself, Lo Mang, and Dougie (plus Sharky as fast as her mimic feet could carry her) continue the pursuit. The good news is our dice luck is getting better and we’re starting to land some damage; the bad news is we’re leaving our primary source of healing behind. I think at this point, some of us still had badges and potions, but that’s about it.

And then Steve gives us an opportunity by having Pratchett retreat into the ochre jelly room. And Dougie did EXACTLY what I hoped he’d do – a bull rush attack. Remember that I could’ve gone and delayed: I was thinking of doing exactly that, but I have a Strength of 10 and if it failed, Pratchett might’ve moved away from the pit or braced himself against future attacks. So I took the chance that either Dougie or Lo Mang was on the same wavelength, and sure enough, he was. Pratchett catches the edge, and it’s my turn and…

This is where it gets interesting.

The “adventurer” answer is to stab him in the face and into the pit he goes. The only thing that makes you think twice is how you’re going to get the loot later.

But it’s a bit more cloudy as an officer of the law. In the moment, I absolutely did what I thought was the right thing, but I’ll admit; after the fact, I found myself second-guessing a little bit. Even though this guy’s crimes were heinous and he was irredeemable, should we have still tried to accept his surrender and save him? In real-world terms, this is Jeffrey Dahmer, this is Ted Bundy… don’t you still want to take him alive so he can see justice for his crimes? Or is being eaten by his own jelly justice in and of itself? But what if we pull him out of the pit and he goes on to kill one (or more) of us? Is it worth taking THAT risk?

Steaming toward 11 pm at the end of a long gaming session, and closing in on the end of a chapter of the Adventure Path, kicking him in and finishing the fight felt like a no-brainer. Later on… I still think it was a defensible decision, but it left STUFF rattling around my brain. And this is where I think Paizo did the right thing by not just knee-jerk canceling this adventure path. Because of moments like this. The value of art, even entertainment, is that it can hold up a mirror for examining your own values. Good, bad, or indifferent, roleplaying through something like this makes you pause and think.

And on that Deep Thoughts note, that’s where we’ll leave it. Next week, we clean up the aftermath (let’s be honest: recover Basil’s new sword-cane) and see where the adventure takes us next. I actually DON’T think we level because we only just leveled before coming to the basement, but you never know. As always, please 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.