Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|16: An Orc Named Sue.

Greetings and welcome to 2021! Overall, I’m far too cynical to believe flipping over a calendar page magically solves every problem in the world, but there’s been a LITTLE more of a spring in my step the past few days… not gonna lie.

I’m going to briefly start with a comment on Steve’s show notes, as it pertains to roleplaying and our character backstories. I think this is a case where I’m a bit different from the rest of the party, as I was guided by listening to both shows. Since I listen to Three Ring Adventure, I know what kind of things Steve wants to include in a backstory and how he might make use of it in a game. The story elements are ultimately my own – Steve didn’t tell me WHAT to write – but knowing HOW he’s folded the 3RA backstories into the main game made it easier for me to write some elements for Basil that he could use in a similar fashion. I think the other guys just took “backstory” as “biography” and left it at that; they may or may not have written open threads to include in the current story. But ultimately, we’ll see as the story progresses.

We pick up our story where we left off, rubbing elbows with Absalom’s criminal underworld at Jeremin Hoff’s afterlife-themed party. (Not to be confused with “Afterlife”, the bar that serves as a central quest hub in Cyberpunk 2077.) And in fact, this episode starts with our first solid break in the case, as Lo Mang comes face to face (or face to shoulder, since he’s really tall) with Jeremin Hoff himself.

Most of Lo Mang’s session is small talk mixed with uncomfortable anti-immigrant sentiment, but we do get our first solid lead out of the interaction, as Hoff openly admits to sending the stonemasons from the Dragonfly Pagoda to a place called the Dreaming Palace hotel. I still feel like my info about the ochre jelly fits into whatever’s going on here, but the Dreaming Palace gives us an actual place we can investigate next. So score one for the good guys.

Now, the logical question is: what strings might be attached to this lead? The stonemasons presumably went to this hotel, disappeared, and if their tools are on sale on the black market… probably means they’re dead, right? So it seems like there are two possibilities at opposite ends of the spectrum. Either Hoff just picked this hotel at random and something else happened to them there. Or Hoff is an active participant in whatever fate the stonemasons met, and is sending us there because he’s equally unconcerned with luring US to our doom.

From there (plus a Seth interlude that didn’t do much more than solve the logic puzzle he was given… but with flair), we have to make our decision about whether to continue. At this point, we’ve got SOMETHING to go on, but there are still a few more rooms to tackle. We decide to continue since it’s all house money at this point: if we get kicked out, we still have our good lead, and we might learn something else handy. On the other hand, we do decide to stay together and tackle it as a group and choose the challenge participant based on strengths rather than each picking a room at random.

Which turns out to be a good call because the first two challenges are things that would’ve probably killed me or Gomez… including an appearance by Old Woody’s cousin Mold Woody! The first two Lo Mang challenges don’t feel like they add anything concrete. The drunken thief hints at some unspecified reason to be afraid of the Dreaming Palace, but it’s all kind of entangled with the stuff about space aliens in the Undercity, so it’s hard to take it too seriously. Similarly, the gnome madame is good roleplay flavor but doesn’t really add anything to what we have so far.

I should mention – and this applies to ALL the encounters – I feel like any or all of these may come back if you consider the entire six-book, level 1-20 arc of the story. So to say the drunk guy or the female assassin didn’t add anything… please feel free to mentally add a big neon sign reading “FOR NOW”. Maybe we’ll need to know more about gnome hookers or Red Mantis wannabe assassins, or fenced goods down the road and have to renew acquaintances with these folks. But here and now, for THIS part of our investigation… they’re dead ends.

As I listened to the other two challenges, I’m a little more attuned to opportunities missed. With the newspaper guy, I feel like we could’ve pushed for a little more information on Hoff himself or the Dreaming Palace. It seems like a guy who’s plugged into all sorts of rumors might know why the drunk guy might have found the hotel scary. On the alchemists… I think they’re probably just local flavor, but I find myself wishing I had more explicitly asked about the black goo coming out of the animals’ mouths. Maybe it’s a substance they were familiar with, maybe it’s even something THEY created. But for the moment, nothing that helps us with the current investigation.

At first, I didn’t want to do the hookah challenge out of a notion that Basil wouldn’t partake of such substances while on duty. Might contaminate any leads we got out of the interaction. But after thinking about it, I came around – I hadn’t done a challenge in the second half of the party, and smoking-related activities ARE kind of Basil’s “thing”. So even if it was a Substance of Questionable Origin, I decided to go ahead and let Basil party with the twins. Too bad it didn’t really go anywhere more fruitful.

You’ll also note that I decided to have Basil sneak out of the room when we bumped into the newspaper editor. That was a specific roleplaying decision on my part. I’ve already mentioned that Basil comes from a pretty influential family (Political Scion background), so it probably wouldn’t be good for him to be recognized at THIS particular party by the owner of the local gossip rag. There’s a difference between Basil tossing his name around to get in the door and hoping people forget it five minutes later, vs. possibly having it splashed all over the newspaper the next day. There are other reasons aside from general family reputation, but I’ll leave those to possibly come out more naturally in-game.

So, we collect all of our leads and head back to base… and when we wake up the next morning, it’s time to formally level up and get our next set of orders.  If you remember, we’ve had enough experience to level for a while; we just didn’t have the time for a long rest to cash it in.

As far as Level 3 Basil, let’s start with a brief clarification on “Skillful Lessons”. The good news, as mentioned, is that it’s a free skill feat at every odd level, which makes Basil one heck of a skill monkey overall. HOWEVER, the one refinement to that is that it has to be from an INT, WIS, or CHA based skill. Granted, that’s MOST of them, but it does rule out Acrobatics, Athletics, Stealth, and Thievery feats. So if I do want a feat from one of those – note to self – I’ll have to make sure to take it at an even level.

In this case, Continual Recovery is the choice… Medicine is based on Wisdom, so we’re fine there. Continual Recovery the one that drops the refresh on Treat Wounds from an hour to 10 minutes. Combined with Ward Medic, that makes Basil a much more efficient after-combat healer but still does nothing for the in-combat situation. So that still leaves Seth as our main/only healer in battle, but I’ll probably add Battle Medicine at some future point just to take some of the load off him.

Read Lips was one of those things that I’ve been planning to take since Level 1; it was just a question of when I’d be able to fit it in. It’s a very investigator-flavored thing to have: if you see two ne’er-do-wells talking but can’t get close enough to hear them, you still have a chance to work out what they’re saying. If Sherlock Holmes didn’t know how to read lips, he certainly would’ve seen the value of it. As far as choosing Arcana as my skill to train… deep down I know doing my own crafting is probably a pipe dream (between magic items being easily available in stores, and the amount of TIME it takes to craft), but I figure training in Arcana will also make some of my wizard-y stuff a little easier. Among other things, I’m probably going to have to rely on learning spells by copying from scrolls, and a higher level in Arcana will make that process easier.

So we have level 3 characters, and we have our new mission… investigate the Dreaming Palace hotel. It’s the most tangible lead we have, and since Hoff openly admits the stonemasons went there, we don’t even need to engage in any subterfuge to rationalize our visit. We’re literally cops following up on the known whereabouts of missing persons… back on familiar ground.

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

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|15: Smoke ‘Em If You Got ’Em.

Welcome to the last Bird’s Eye View of 2020. Finally. (I hope we’re on the same page that I’m talking about the year and not my writing.)

I’m not going to get too far into Steve’s ongoing kerfuffle, and I sure as hell don’t want to kick off Edition Wars #3894. Though if you’ll indulge in one moment of snark, if your complaint about 2E is that you “do the same thing all the time,” feel free to Google “5E warlock memes” and get back to me. ELDRITCH BLAST! Having said that, I will offer a little player perspective on what I’ve noticed about Second Edition after having mucked about with it basically since release.

First, the meta-level. Maybe it’s just that I look at this activity differently. At a meta-level, this whole discussion comes at it from the standpoint of a “game” to be won or lost. At least within my adult life playing with friends, I have always looked at it as more of an exercise in collaborative storytelling. The game rules just happen to give it a little shape and maybe to prevent one player from dominating the action. And yes, the GM holds a little more power since they represent The Story and they arbitrate the rules, but at some level… if the rules are getting in the way of the story, that’s a conversation you need to have with your GM.

Don’t get me wrong, rules have their place. I’ve been at tables where the game ran on the rails of the GM’s whim to the point where the rules were arbitrary. You CAN go too far in the other direction. But when in doubt, put the story first and the dice-throwing second, and you’ll usually come up with the right answer.

I ABSOLUTELY echo Steve’s comments about party tactics playing a more vibrant role in Second Edition. The use of abilities is one part of it, but the one thing I didn’t see Steve mention is that this system favors movement and hit-and-run tactics. A lot of the older systems, including First Edition Pathfinder, were pretty “tank-and-spank”: your armored guys clogged up the front line, absorbed shots, and hit anything that tried to get by them with attacks of opportunity. Meanwhile, your squishies sat in the back and either healed or burned down enemies with direct damage. With attacks of opportunity being much less common and enemies commonly having a significant advantage in attack bonuses, it’s a real paradigm shift. Enemy third attacks are as viable as your second attack, so standing toe-to-toe trading three shots per round is a losing proposition, no matter how good your armor is. This was a hard-learned lesson playing the ostensibly tanky Champion class in our Plaguestone game. Marched out to meet a group of killer shrubs because that’s what the tank is supposed to do; got beat down in one round.

Similarly, with crits being easier to achieve, it’s quite often less about how you can squeeze out another die of damage and more about how you can make crits happen on offense or prevent them on defense, which has placed a new premium on status effects. One or two more dice of damage may make you feel good at the moment it hits, but giving a creature a -2 or taking away one of its actions every turn by slowing it… those are the things that win fights.

Part of what drove this lesson home for me was having Basil dip in the wizard archetype. With the wizard archetype, you get ONE spell slot per level at first (though there’s a feat to get a second slot at higher levels). And don’t get me wrong… that’s kinda frustrating. But a side effect of that is that it’s almost completely changed my thinking about how to pick Basil’s spells. If I get ONE spell, am I going to use that on ONE direct damage strike that basically gambles my entire casting reservoir on one roll of the die? Or am I going to use that on something that has a one-minute duration and can potentially impact the next 10 rounds of the fight?

Like I said, I’m not going to deep dive as much as Steve did, but those were a few thoughts that have occurred to me over the year-plus we’ve been playing 2E.

On with this week’s show… and we FINALLY make it to the party. And it’s a themed party, where the different rooms of the party are themed based on the alignment-based planes.

Now… I have to admit, I got a little flustered early on. I had concocted an entire cover based on my backstory… Basil studies law and his mom is a judge, so I thought of using a known shady lawyer who could’ve invited me so I’d have a reason to be there. I was loaded for bear, from a roleplaying standpoint. But I never really came up with a plan for the hostess, just flat-out not believing me. So that was kinda awkward.

(And OK, if the hostess wasn’t going to believe me anyway, might as well have used a fake name. On the one hand, I hope that won’t come back to bite us later; on the other, if one thinks about one’s own real-life experience with parties, do YOU take down every name you hear just in case it becomes relevant later?)

Early on, the “system” behind the party becomes apparent. Each room has a theme, a challenge (usually skill-based), and an NPC of some importance. You PROBABLY (but maybe not always) have to do the challenge to get the NPC interested in talking to you. And the description of the guards strongly suggests this shouldn’t end in combat – both for better (that wasn’t the author of the AP’s intent) and for worse (if we screw this up badly enough that it reaches combat, we WILL lose badly).

One thing I idly wonder about is the initial judging. Is there a method to the madness? Are the initial challenges assigned randomly? Could it be based on alignment? Does Steve pick them based on what would fit our skills or make for good storytelling? It did seem – whether pre-ordained or luck of the draw – that most of us got challenges that aligned reasonably well with our abilities. Gomez gets a riddle, Dougie a wrestling match… heck, even though I got chomped by the griffin, my problem was more the low rolls than that the challenge tested the wrong skills.

But I love the concept… an afterlife themed party with different rooms representing the different planes? It’s just so cool. Too bad the guest list is all thugs and gangsters.

The one other thing that stuck out about this episode was Dougie’s almost complete lack of guile while on this mission. I’m still trying to figure out what Dougie’s “deal” is, from a roleplaying standpoint. Is he Forrest Gump, but a cop? Is he Clark Kent, hiding a much more savvy form beneath a cloddish exterior? All I know is I half expected him to just come out and admit to the assassin that he was a cop, so… kudos to John for some solid roleplay there.

As we do our initial information-gathering, we don’t learn a lot (yet… still plenty more rooms), but there are a few interesting nuggets. First, there’s the hint about “people wanting to leave their old lives behind”. That may or may not apply to the stonemasons, but that fits the menagerie owner and the veterinarian who are having an affair to a T. Also… the ochre jelly. I know the cover story is “garbage disposal” but that IMMEDIATELY sounds like a way to dispose of bodies. And I feel like we’re going to be fighting it at some future point, as soon as we figure out who bought it and where it currently lives. But if you’re looking for “Colonel Mustard, in the study, with the lead pipe” levels of clarity… we’re not there yet.

But like I said, plenty more rooms to search; we’ll just have to do it in 2021.

As this is the last column of the year, I just wanted to give a special thanks for listening to our show this year. One thing 2020 has done is made me more philosophical about things. It’s been such a rough year for so many, and we all search for little moments of normalcy however we can get them. If Roll For Combat has provided a little bit of that for you… I’m truly touched that we can do our small part to make a weird year a little more pleasant around the edges.

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 both next week AND next year.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|14: Kiss of Death.

I wanted to start with a brief plug which I mentioned in The Sideshow but wanted to also mention here because I don’t know who reads one column or the other (or both). RFC’s own Vanessa Hoskins has a new show debuting called “Super SmashFinder”, and the first episode is dropping tonight at 9 pm. My understanding is it’s what you would expect from the title: Second Edition Pathfinder in an arena-style combat setting. So if you enjoy our shenanigans, or even just if you’re curious about seeing Second Edition in a slightly different, more bloodthirsty context… you might want to check it out.

On to this week’s show, and my first point is to give the player perspective of Steve’s GM notes. Especially since he’s talking about things “players hate”.

First, let’s talk about traps. Overall, I like traps. I’ll do one better… I LOVE traps. Heck, I bought all of the Grimtooth’s Traps compendiums as a kid, just because the coolest traps in those were diabolically fun. (A little too fixated on killing people on the toilet, but we’ll unpack that some other time.) Done well, a trap is a nice way to break up monster fight after monster fight and test the party’s ability to do something other than swing swords and huck fireballs.

However, I do ask two things from my traps.

First, I ask that they be used sparingly enough to still be a surprise. WAY back in my teenage years, I played a dungeon where every room was a trap, and that just reached a point of over-saturation. The game reduced to a boring slog, as we poked every surface with 10-foot poles, double-checked every door handle and lock for traps… ugh. Some people got WAY too fixated on Tomb Of Horrors as a kid and it shows.

I also like inventive traps or traps that fit the feel and setting of the dungeon more than generic “ohbytheyway, the floor is gone and there are spikes below” filler traps that are just filling the role of A Challenge That Is Not Combat. WHO BUILDS A CASTLE BALLROOM WITH COLLAPSIBLE FLOORS? PEOPLE DANCE THERE! Adjacent to that, I prefer traps that challenge the party rather than just try to kill them outright. It’s far more interesting to me when the trap represents a puzzle to be solved, rather than just dumping a bunch of damage on you and draining your healing resources.

Now… poison, disease, and such… I think what frustrates me about those is that the effects seem to be asymmetrical: whether true or just a matter of perception, it always feels like they’re less effective when the party uses them, compared to when the bad guys do. Part of it is that enemies generally have higher saves than the players, making it SO hard to get a poison or disease effect to really stick in the heat of combat. The other half of the equation is the “stickiness” of status effects – the party has to live through the long tail of getting rid of the thing, whereas the GM just gets to roll in a truckload of new monsters that don’t have it. Put those two together, and it’s a case where Your Poison and My Poison don’t seem to be equally matched, and THAT’s what I find frustrating. If my poison killed monsters as effectively as it kills us… cool!

Having dispensed with Steve’s pre-game for the week, let’s turn to live-action, and I have to start with a confession. I forgot entirely about the worm. I remembered the body in the pit, but I forgot we had to fight the worm to reach it; I thought it was just an abandoned corpse in a pool of water. I mean, it was a quick fight, so it’s sort of understandable, but still. Hey, at least Basil got the kill shot, so there’s that.

Now, there’s some debate over whether this mage is the one who went missing (Kemenelis? – the kid looking for his mentor… that guy), but my gut says no. First, it may not have been clear from how Steve phrased it, but it looks like this body has been dead longer than Kemenelis has been missing, so PROBABLY not him. Also, at a more meta-game level, Paizo tends to be a bit more obvious with their breadcrumbs; I feel like if this was the guy, there’d be a journal or a spellbook or he’d be wearing an “I’m An Important NPC” T-shirt. So most likely just another John Doe, fallin’ prey to the mean streets. (Feel free to imagine Basil lighting a cigarette and adjusting a non-existent fedora while saying that.)

The second fight is a bit more interesting and DEFINITELY more completely unnecessary. I guess I sort of agree with the prevailing rationale that we can’t leave bound prisoners behind when there may be a threat to their well-being, but still. Continuing to explore when we basically knew where the entrance to the party was bordered on “Adventurers Not Cops” mode for me and felt a little bit off. But I also didn’t want to sit and argue about it for 20 minutes, so… sometimes you go along with it.

So we go south when all the merriment is coming from the north, and we draw one more fight, this time against vargouilles. I can’t find a Second Edition reference for them (new in the adventure path, maybe?), but in First Edition, the book on them is they’re not very powerful (less than 20 hit points) but have a lot of special abilities that can make your life suck. A scream that causes paralysis, poison, and a disease that eventually turns the victim into a vargouille (hence all the jokes about Seth’s head detaching). And sure enough, the scream puts half the party out of action, but we’re still able to take care of business fairly efficiently, with Basil even getting the kill shot on one of them. (Between that and the worm, it was a good night for Basil’s Devise A Stratagem.) Granted, we still might have to worry about Gomez turning on us, but we can figure that out AFTER the party. In the meantime… in the words of gym teachers everywhere… walk it off.

So… a little prestidigitation, stash any gear that’s too obvious to hide, and it’s FINALLY time to rub elbows with the Who’s Who of Absalom’s underground element. As I’ve hinted before, this had better not end in actual combat, because we’ve burned through a lot of resources just getting here. I have a kinda-sorta plan for myself, but I’m not sure what the rest of the party is going to do. Particularly Dougie… never sure which way that wind is gonna blow. I guess we’ll find out what happens 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 S1|13: I’m Attacking the Darkness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At any rate, next week, we resume our journey and HOPEFULLY finally get to join the party. (But maybe not… always fuzzy how Steve cuts these episodes.) Feel free to drop by Discord and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|12: Taking A Bite Out Of Crimefighters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’ll be an adventure for another time. For this week, we survive to continue our investigation. Can we get where we’re going without further incident? Will Dougie know how to conduct himself in the underbelly of high society? You’ll have to come back next week to find out. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|11: The More You Know.

Time to throw off the glorious lethargy of a long holiday weekend and write up a review for this week’s show. This week’s episode is a bit of an oddity – it’s not TOTALLY a downtime episode, but we do kind of drop out of character and go into book-keeping mode for a chunk of it. We also TRY to do a little roleplaying, but it doesn’t really go very far. And I think there’s a couple of different reasons for that.

The first is what Steve mentioned in his show notes: the stylistic question of whether you consider yourself the character, or whether you consider yourself the narrator of your character’s actions. Our group – and I generally include myself in this – has traditionally played more from the narrator standpoint. I don’t think either’s wrong exactly, but I think the narrator method DOES tend to move things along a little faster because it’s easier to drop in and out of character to navigate game information that you’d have to “act your way through” in more of a traditional roleplay game. Add up 20 or 30 moments where we just say The Thing and the Extinction Curse group performs The Thing, and it’s not hard to see how our game might move a little more briskly.

The other way to look at it is internal vs. external. I find our group is just as willing to act out interactions with external entities: NPCs and such. Seth in particular really gets into character when it comes to verbally jousting with Steve, but all of us do to some extent. But it’s almost entirely outward-focused. To use an IT analogy, think of the GM screen as a firewall. We roleplay when we’re going through the firewall and interacting with one of the game challenges Steve is presenting. If we’re just talking amongst ourselves, that’s inside the firewall, and we don’t really roleplay that.

(And yes, I’m fully aware that I just took an already-nerdy topic and explained it in terms that are even nerdier. “Tune in next week when I explain Lay On Hands in terms of hard drive defragmentation!”)

So why did I decide to zig when everyone else was zagging this time around? Why did I stay more in character while everyone else was going RP-lite? I’m not nominating myself for any prizes here, but I think part of what’s going on is that listening to the Extinction Curse shows as our designated blogger has me inspired to try and bring a little bit of that energy over to this side of the fence. They sound like they’re having a lot of fun with it, so what the heck – let’s dip into their bag of tricks. I wrote a decent amount of backstory for Basil, let’s see if we can use some of it. Besides, if they’re gonna start dropping pop culture references like “flameo, hotman” into their show, turnabout is fair play.

Well… back to the show, where we’re dealing with a bit of a mixed message. On one hand, we have to go infiltrate a fancy after-hours club, which argues that we should largely stow our weapons and dress for high society. On the other hand, to get there, we have to sneak in through an underground back entrance that basically amounts to a dungeon crawl. I suppose we could have it both ways: wear our fighting gear until we get close and then change into party garb. Times like these, I’m glad to have a sword-cane… works in BOTH settings. I guess if there’s a silver lining to our squishy party composition, it’s that we’re not especially armor-and-weapon-dependent: Gomez is a caster, Lo Mang punches things, I have an innately concealable weapon. Really the only one who might struggle is Dougie: they probably make you check your maul and chainmail at the door of parties like these. But then again, since he’s a rogue, maybe he should be using his dagger anyway.

Speaking of which… this ongoing debate about which weapon Dougie should use continues to vex us. On one hand, it FEELS like the dagger would be the better weapon (or at least SOME weapon with a crit specialization) for Dougie to use because then he gets precision damage AND crit specialization damage against most foes. But then again, thinking ahead to the end of this week when we run up against a gelatinous cube… you can’t always count on those “extra” sources of damage, whereas rolling a bigger die will really never totally fail you. You can either take this as a mild spoiler for next week, or a thing we learned over in Extinction Curse, but anything in the ooze family is immune to precision damage, and they also don’t have blood, so bleeding doesn’t really matter either. And OK, at the risk of providing a veiled critique of our tactics, you can’t get the most out of it if nobody is around to give you flanking, and neither Chris nor I are the most reliable in that regard. Having said all that, sometimes it feels like John is being stubborn for the sake of being contrary… “I’m going to keep using this maul because everyone keeps telling me not to”… or so Dougie can be more distinct from Mister Peepers. I don’t know.

As we reach the end of the episode, we begin to work our way toward the party, when Gomez’s greed gets the better of him and he goes running right down a hallway into a gelatinous cube. Still one of my favorite monsters of all time, by the way – there’s something about the contrast of being so unlike any sort of normal lifeform, but that it still has the wherewithal to form itself into a sensible geometric shape. I think what I like is that it was one of the first creatures that really got outside the Tolkien box of dragons and humanoid bad guys, and took things in a strange new direction.

So next week, we fight a gelatinous cube! Cool! If you want a sneak preview of how that might go, the Extinction Curse crew fought two of them a few weeks ago, so go listen to those episodes or read the right episode of The Sideshow. While you’re waiting for next week’s episode, feel free to drop by Discord 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|10: We’re Sending Somebody In To Negotiate!

Since I don’t know how many people read one column or the other, or even both, so I wanted to start by wishing you all a happy Thanksgiving in advance. I know it’s likely to be a little rough and scaled-back this year because of all this COVID stuff happening, but I do hope you have some good things to celebrate and some good people in your life to celebrate it with. (And if you happen to read both columns, you’ll get a bonus dose of positivity on Thursday. Ain’t nothing wrong with sending out more good vibes into the world.)

Since we’re talking about the holidays, I wanted to also start this week with a general show note. This is the time of year where our recording schedule gets a little sporadic because of the holidays. Both episodes have plenty of material in the can, so the broadcasts will continue without interruption – no worries on that front. But for those of you who subscribe to the Patreon and listen live, things can sometimes get a little weird between now and the end of the year. Sometimes we move the shows around during the week; occasionally we even cancel entirely. Happens pretty much every year. It is known, Khaleesi.

This week, we finally resolve the hostage situation at the Dragonfly Pagoda, and rather than a big boss fight, it’s more of a chance to talk our way through the situation, with Gomez taking center stage for the first part, and Basil getting a little bit of work in the second half of the episode. We finally make our way to the non-crazy kobold (Shirek) the site manager mentioned when we started all of this.

Now, I haven’t really looked at Gomez’s character sheet, so I don’t know for certain, but it feels like Seth and I kind of split the “face of the party” duties depending on the context. As a sorcerer, I’m SURE he has a higher Charisma score than I do, so he’s likely to do better with the pure social skills like Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate. So I think in a GENERAL setting, Seth probably gets first crack at things. But I think there are a few contexts in which Basil would shine. First, Society is an INT-based skill and I also have the “Political Scion” background from the adventure path, so when it comes to mingling with fancy-folk, I might actually be able to do a little better than him. Also, if it’s an interrogation setting and we need to get specific information that’s being withheld, I have my Investigator’s “spider-sense”, which might let me notice a few things and offset a few points in Charisma. (And at higher levels, I can take feats that double-down on that.) If we really need someone to apply a little muscle, we’ve already got Lo Mang for that. Dougie… eh, he can go get the coffee.

So we get up to the top of the pagoda where the hostages are being held, and it’s Seth’s time to shine. And I have to admit, it’s nice to see this side of Seth as a neat little window to get to know him better as a person. I’ve gamed with him, I’ve gotten a sense of his taste in pop culture, but this was a chance to see him in a different context. I was really impressed by how quickly he came up with different angles and counter-arguments and navigated the negotiations. I mean, I never in a million years would have come up with “third-party mediation”.

That said, I do think the scenario as a whole teetered on the edge of “out of our pay grade”. We KIND of negotiated a plea bargain on the spot which would normally be the role of judges and lawyers and added a labor negotiation as a cherry on the sundae. Those don’t seem like normal “beat cops” tasks. But if the Lawbreaker Badge didn’t throw a tantrum, I guess we were allowed to do it. Also, if you’re totally rigid about what cadets fresh out of the academy should and shouldn’t be doing while unsupervised, this could run the risk of being the most boring adventure path ever. Sometimes you gotta bend “reality” for the sake of story.

As you hear in the episode, I got a little turned around – I thought the missing stonemasons WERE the hostages, and that rescuing them from the kobolds closed out this little chapter. But it turns out that we had to take care of the hostage crisis before we were even able to begin our investigation of the other situation. My bad there.

So, back at the station, we got to do more of an interrogation, and as I mentioned above, this turned out to be a better chance for Basil to take the lead. Though it actually turned out that my Society knowledge ended up being as useful as my investigative skills, as the next breadcrumb is a speakeasy-type establishment run by Jeremin Hoff, an influential but mildly shady character. So it sounds like our next stretch of adventure is going to be more of a social encounter, and one where Basil may be in clue-gathering mode. So I’m excited.

And we’re already getting close to Level 3! I’m a little surprised at how fast we’re managing to plow through the first two levels. Certainly in terms of game days – this is day TWO in-game time – but also in terms of show episodes. I went through my blog posts and tried to figure out how far along we were by Episode 9. We were Level 1 in Black Lodge, but that’s Society, so you level differently anyway. Not sure that’s a fair comparison. Plaguestone was also at the tail end of Level 1 – we fought Hallod in Episode 9, and would’ve leveled right after that. In Extinction Curse, I believe they had reached Level 2 – it was the battle against the demon that came down to Ateran’s last spell cast. I even went back to Dead Suns, and… OK, totally different game system, but Episode 9 was where we leveled up to Level 2. Yet, here we are, well past Level 2 and may hit 3 soon. Crazy.

The other exciting development is getting 50g apiece for the day’s work. I know Steve is abstracting a few things, but still… that’s a LOT of money for how low-level we are. Though… we’re also burning through consumables at a painful rate too, so it evens out. Not sure how well the “party full of squishies + no healer” party composition is going to work in the long haul, but for now, we live to fight another day.

And that’s just what we’ll do. Next week, we go undercover in the world of high-society dark-money social clubs. I have a strategy for how I’m going to approach this baked into Basil’s backstory, but I think I’ll save that and talk about it next week when we arrive there. In the meantime, 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|09: Double Secret Difficult Terrain.

This week’s theme actually plays off an off-hand comment that came up in the group chat during our Among Us session. We had Loren from the Extinction Curse show; Seth, John, and I from this show, and a few of our Patreon listeners just BSing while we waited for more people to join the game. We were discussing what we like about the various shows, and I said something – half-joking, half-serious – to the effect of “even though our group’s been together longer [Edgewatch], you guys sound like you guys actually like each other better [Three Ring Adventure]”.

Now… don’t read too much into that statement. It was mostly meant to be a commentary on their roleplaying ability – that they really sound like a family unit that’s known each other for years, while there are episodes where we sound like a table thrown together at a convention. But there’s also some truth buried in there when it comes to the competitive dice-rolling side of the game. We tend to be a competitive bunch looking to squeeze every last advantage out of our characters, and SOMETIMES that creeps into evaluating (and giving the stink-eye to) choices our teammates make. That doesn’t translate into personal animosity outside the game: we’re totally different people bullshitting about movies for the 20 minutes before the “cameras” roll. But in-game? Yeah, it can get a little salty at times, and this episode felt like one of those times.

First, there was the whole back-and-forth with Seth’s readied action. I don’t know if you could tell, but I was actually kinda low-key pissed at that. Because if Seth stepped out of the way, guess who was going to be the next most logical attack target? Yours truly. I deflected with humor, as I often do, but it’s like… your “tactical brilliance” is to basically let me eat the attack for you. GREEEEEEAT. And then John did a similar thing which might have been harder to visualize on the map: I moved into the room to potentially give him flanking with the spider, and instead of taking advantage of that, he backed off to crossbow range and shot at the spider. Again, leaving me hung out to dry as the only person in melee range. No major harm done, but it was a little frustrating.

Going back to the ready-action thing, John speculated a little to the effect of “why you wouldn’t just do that all the time?”. And at first glance, it does seem handy to have a GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card for a single attack. I can think of a few downsides, though. First, the battlefield might not be conducive to it tactically; it pre-supposes walls, doors, or other cover that you could move behind to avoid the attack entirely. To pick a counter-example, if you’re fighting in a wide-open meadow, there’s nowhere to hide and at best maybe you can add a -2 range increment.  Second, paying two actions for one action you may or may not use is a pretty steep trade. But most importantly, the enemy still gets three actions on their turn. Even if you do that fancy avoidance maneuver on its first action, it still has two more and can still adapt to your new position and pummel you in other ways. So maybe that tactic isn’t the big I WIN button it might seem like at first glance.

The fight with the spider-lady unfolded in a reasonably straightforward fashion – again, kobolds themselves have NOT that much of a problem whenever we can take traps out of the equation. But then at the end of the fight, we had another little squabble about whether to leave rounds, with Seth… rage-drinking?… a potion just to assert ownership over his turn. This was also the thing Steve mentioned in the show notes: I feel like maybe Steve cut some bickering because three of us REALLY wanted to drop out of rounds and heal, while Seth REALLY wanted to stay in rounds for some reason and I recall the debate lasting longer than that. But… no harm done, I suppose. I just didn’t want him to waste the potion until after we’d burned up our free resources first.

FINALLY we get to take our short rest, and I get to test out Ward Medic for the first time. Reminder: that’s the one that lets you heal two different people in the same 10-minute interval. It’s a nice little feature, and (sneak preview) it’ll get even better down the road when I can pair it with the Continual Recovery feat that lets you drop the cooldown from an hour to 10 minutes. In the here-and-now, I managed to fail on one (me) and succeed on one (Gomez), but I wasn’t down all that far, so it wasn’t the end of the world. Especially if it’s still just kobolds the rest of the way. I figure if there’s another boss-level kobold in the final fight, I’ll pop a potion or use my badge ability.

Speaking of “the rest of the way”: as I listen to this episode, the one thing I wrestle with was whether we were supposed to deal with the bloodseekers to the south or not. This is one of those places where adventurers would have different priorities than officers of the law with a specific task to accomplish. Adventurers would do it in a heartbeat. Experience is experience, loot is loot. As a member of the local constabulary, it’s a little more muddy. On one hand, they’re still a threat to the general public safety and should be dealt with; on the other hand, the hostage situation is still the higher priority and I’d hate to lose hostages because we “wasted” resources on what amounts to a side encounter. The bloodseekers seem like the sort of thing you could call in the reserves on later – whatever the Absalom equivalent of Animal Control is. (Of course, based on the menagerie battle, WE might be Animal Control.)

Lastly, I’d like to go all the way back to the show notes and mention that whichever one of our listeners came up with the John McClane/Die Hard analogy to justify taking a short rest… you’re my new favorite. The real question is did you know I have a soft spot for Die Hard references, or did you get lucky? I mean… you can’t possibly have missed three years of me saying “SEND IN THE CAR” every time I sent CHDRR forth into melee on the Dead Suns show.

So finally, as the episode draws to a close, we’re finally sorted out and ready to make our final “assault” on the kobolds holed up in the head of the dragonfly structure. I’m still holding out hope we might get through this with negotiation – that once the battle leader is dead, cooler heads will prevail. On the other hand, if the kobolds still want to get jumpy, we can handle that too… just need to do a better job checking for traps.

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

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|08: Traps ”R” Us.

Ah yes, the week of the 1-in-8000 pain.

It’s funny because if you listen to both our shows, the same thing – three natural 20s in a row — happened (with slightly lower damage) to Vanessa in the Extinction Curse show a few weeks ago. I did the math, that is in fact a 1-in-8000 chance, and it’s happened twice within the same month-ish window. The first one, we were mathematically due after three years of shows; this time, I think we used up our allotment of luck until 2023.

Now, this trap was quite a bit nastier than the enemy Vanessa ran into because it was either 3d6 or 4d6, doubled, which made for a tense few moments for myself and Seth. (But more for Seth as he had fewer hit points to start with.) But fortunately, the Massive Damage rules say “twice your hit points from any one blow”. So three darts later mean we just barely survive.

And then I go and do something stupid. When I get healed with John’s Battle Medicine, instead of being smart and crawling off the trap mechanism, I just stand up like a moron and trigger another round of attacks. But that’s OK because the second time around, we learn how Steve lucky got the first time – it ends up being only a +4 or +5 to attack and it misses most of its attacks the second time. Whew.

Overall, I’m sticking by my original position. Between Lo Mang running across the seal and my passive Investigator ability, I thought we were safe. Even when I stood up, I guess maybe I thought it only had one shot and would either be done entirely or need some time to reset. But the fact of the matter is these traps are just kicking our butts between last week’s fight and this week’s continuation. The frustrating thing is kobolds are pretty weak overall, so if we can avoid stepping on rakes like Sideshow Bob, we should be able to handle this encounter and free the hostages.

The pursuit continues… sorta. Well, Lo Mang heads off, and I follow him, but Dougie and Gomez trail behind a little while Gomez gets back on his feet. And that leads us to the next kinda-sorta trap – I don’t know if the walkways are explicitly sabotaged or they’re just dangerous because they’re not finished yet but several of the walkway edges give way if you step on them, and it’s a 20-foot drop to the ground below. Lo Mang lucks out and plows right through to the stairs to the upper part of the complex, but I have a little more trouble and fall through, not once but twice, and the second time I miss my Grab An Edge save.

But here’s where I get to use the ace in my pocket for the first time – my Skyborn Tengu heritage! It’s not full flight (though you can take Soaring Flight at Level 9 to get that), but it’s the equivalent of Feather Fall – you can fall any distance safely without taking damage. So OK, I step on the wrong plank and fall 20 feet. For another character, that would be the point at which you wad up your character sheet and retire from Pathfinder for a while, but for Basil, it’s a minor inconvenience. I’m just down at ground level with no immediate way back up. Running all the way back to the front entrance at the “tail” of the dragonfly is an option, but eyeballing it, it looks like AT LEAST 5 or 6 rounds of doing nothing but full-round movement. So I decide to climb back up. The bad news is it’s ultimately strength-based, and my strength is 10. The good news is that the DC isn’t that hard, and the worst that can happen is I can suffer the low-grade humiliation of another zero-damage fall. Or MAYBE suffer the indignity of the rest of the guys having to lower a rope and pull me up.

So here’s where we get into the dilemma that turns into a freeform discussion. Lo Mang is fine and definitely wants to continue the chase, but the rest of us definitely need to heal – both to recover hit points, but also to remove the dying condition from people. We’ve all got the Dying condition, and Gomez (I think) also used his Hero Point. But from a story/roleplay standpoint, it strains credibility that we would break off a hot pursuit when there are hostages whose lives might be at risk. Also, some of our reasons border on meta-gamey; our characters shouldn’t know what the Dying condition is, nor would they know about Hero Points. So making choices based on those game mechanics is also kind of immersion-breaking.

Taking out the metagame stuff, I can see justifications in both directions. If you let the kobolds run, they could at worst just start killing hostages; even the “best”-case scenario is that it gives them time to fortify a defensive position and maybe meet up with reinforcements, which will make the next battle against them more difficult. The counter-argument is much simpler: you can’t rescue hostages if you’re dead yourselves. But they are just kobolds, and there’s also a sentiment that MAYBE the power dynamic will shift a little once we removed the battle leader. Remember that there’s supposed to be a “reasonable” kobold somewhere in here that the foreman actually liked. Maybe if we find her, we can still defuse things. So I think as we end the episode we’re leaning toward a 10-minute rest, but I’ll admit it feels just a little “off” around the edges.

And that’s where we’ll pick things up next week. As usual, 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|07: Enough Talk!

As requested by the Pop Culture Desk of Roll For Combat, we start this week’s Talking Combat with a brief virtual moment of silence for the passing of Sean Connery. Yeah, he’d stopped making movies a while ago, but he was a big part of our collective upbringings. The iconic James Bond… Indiana Jones’ dad… Captain Raimius… possibly even “Ramirez” from Highlander if you want to go with a deep cut. I probably won’t follow through, but when I first heard the news, I threatened to record this week’s show entirely in my Sean Connery accent as a tribute.

…

First things first, we had a good chuckle in group chat about the “podcast wars” comment. Steve, ever the provocateur, pulled the sound-byte while editing this episode and shared it with a combined chat group that included both teams. Shit was talked back and forth, good times were had by all. Me, I’m sticking by my idea that this would be fertile material for PaizoCon next year.

This week’s show is a little weird insofar as we leveled up, but we didn’t really talk about our changes. Usually, when we level, we send it around the horn and each person talks about what they took (except for Bob in the Dead Suns days, who liked to be all secretive about that stuff for roleplaying reasons). This time, we kind of just jumped right into the action. I don’t remember why – maybe we got a late start or the episode broke in a weird place. (I even kinda remember having such a conversation, but either it took place before Steve started recording, or maybe it’s in a later episode.)

So the big news of Level 2 is that I decided to have Basil do a multi-class dip into wizard. I pretty much knew I wanted to mix some magic into my build to make Basil a little more dynamic, but I considered going a couple of different directions to get there. One choice was a multi-class dip into alchemist, but that felt a little like I would be invalidating my Level 1 build: if I wanted an alchemist investigator, I should’ve just gone with the Alchemist build and taken That’s Odd as my Level 1 feat instead of the one that finds traps. I also thought about the Scroll Trickster archetype from the Advanced Player Guide – basically, that archetype lets you duct-tape together fragments of scrolls to make temporary scrolls at each long rest, and you also get Trick Magic Item with an added +2 bonus for scrolls. But I think it was Level 6 before you got even ONE Level 1 spell; in the meantime, ALL you got was Trick Magic Item, which I can get in other ways. Though I will admit Scroll Trickster is WONDERFUL on the roleplay flavor front, and it’s also neat that you can choose ANY spell of the appropriate level from the Core Rulebook at the time you make the scroll, as long as you’re trained in the right skill (and Basil has all four now). I looked at the witch for like, five seconds, but I didn’t want to be too duplicative of Ateran from the other show, and on a roleplay level, the flavor didn’t feel like it fit: I didn’t see an upper-crusty kid like Basil forging pacts with mysterious forces, and a familiar showing up out of nowhere would’ve been weird.

So I settled on wizard. In the immediate short term, there’s combat survivability. Just adding a few cantrips gives me a +1 bump to armor class as a single action and damage mitigation (shield) and another ranged damage source (ray of frost) for creatures that might be immune to my ancestral electrical ability. Also, I can swap in light if we’re doing anything more explicitly dungeon-delvish. The spell slots on a multi-class wizard aren’t great – one slot per level, though I think there’s a feat you can take in the mid-teens to get a second slot at each level – but I like the wizard’s big-picture flexibility of being able to add spells to your spellbook by transcribing them. In a game where we seem to be getting a lot of money and stores are everywhere, I feel like there will be a lot of chances to tweak my spell arsenal as we go. I also feel like it gives me roleplay flexibility as the game progresses: sure, a bunch of combat spells are probably the path of least resistance, but I have the option to choose some spells which will magically augment my core investigation skills. Comprehend languages? Knock?

So… wizard it is! If you care, I also took Nature as my skill, so now I’m trained in all four caster skills, and I took the Ward Medic feat, which lets me use Treat Wounds on two people at the same time. Still no Battle Medicine, so I’m still useless as a mid-fight healer. Leave that to Gomez and consumables, I guess.

Of course, tying this back into game action… in my excitement to unveil my new-found wizard abilities in dramatic fashion, I made a bit of a tactical mistake and forgot to call out the traps I saw when I entered the room with the kobolds. Oops. Which came back to bite us when Dougie went charging in and stepped on not one, but two, traps. Followed by an appearance of Mildly Pouty John, complaining about how he doesn’t get any help and we can just fight without him.

I’m willing to split responsibility for this down the middle. John stepping on the first trap is totally my fault for not calling it out… yeah, I screwed up. But maybe once you hit the first trap, stop and do a Perception check instead of just keep walking? Moving forward onto the second one… that’s on you man. And, OK, I’ll say it: in the moment, it almost seemed like he wanted to take the additional damage so he could add it to the list of grievances. “Fine, you’re not going to tell me where the traps are? Well, I’ll just step on ALL of them!” Contrast that with Seth having Gomez just kinda downplay getting hit by the trap and continuing to negotiate as if nothing had happened. Squeeze the water out of your robes and move on. Something about that just cracked me up.

(Somewhere in here I’m also wondering how many individual traps I could effectively call out in the span of a six-second round while also taking actions of my own. The best comparison I can think of is those war movies where they call in grid coordinates for an airstrike, and it’s not an immediate process.)

Of course, the fight eventually started despite Seth’s best efforts as peacemaker. Clearly, the level-headed female kobold we were told about (Shirek or something like that?) is not the one in charge so we’ll have to fight our way to her. Overall, they’re kobolds, so I’m not that worried: we’ve faced them in a few of the Black Lodge games, and they’ve been pretty wimpy up to this point. The boss kobold is a little trickier than the others, but once we get past the traps and focus on straight combat, I suspect this won’t be too much trouble.

And indeed, we begin to whittle their numbers down, get the boss dealt with, and the last few escape down the hall. So it’s a chase, then. (Caught myself on the edge of yelling “the game’s afoot!”) Unfortunately, the chase will have to wait until next time, as we’re out of time for this week.

In lieu of my usual reminder to visit our Discord channel (though you should still check that out), I’m going to close with a few words about tomorrow’s election for the Americans in the crowd.

First, get out and vote if you haven’t done so, if for no other reason than to preserve your right to complain about the outcome for the next four years: if you didn’t vote, it’s hard for those of us who do care to listen to the opinions of someone who didn’t even bother to grab the lowest-hanging fruit of citizenship.

I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, though I can’t pretend to be neutral, and I feel like I’ve been generous about dropping hints over the last three-plus years which side I stand on. I’d love to bust out a passionate Sorkin monologue in defense of the things I believe in, but… at the end of the day, we’re not Roll For Political Commentary. I guess I’ll have to hope y’all are either already in agreement, or pick something up through osmosis.

If I’m going to offer a message, it’s this. The situation with the pandemic has made this election weird, and there’s going to be a lot more mail-in ballots than usual that are going to take extra time to count, and each state has its own rules about when they can start processing those. We might not have a clear winner tomorrow night. Whichever side you support, see that as normal and expected, not some sinister agenda to steal the election – regardless of who appears to be winning when polls close in California. If Trump’s leading at 11 pm, you should want everyone’s vote to count. If Biden’s winning at 11 pm, you should want everyone’s vote to count. That’s democracy. That’s America.

OK, that’s all I got. See you next week.