Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|09: Brother From Another Mother.
First things first this week: I’d like to take a moment to welcome Mark Seifter to the extended Roll For Combat/Battlezoo family. OK, he’s doing actual WORK-work and we’re just the bozos screwing around in the basement, so it’s kinda like the guy who played Propeller Guy in Titanic congratulating James Cameron on his Oscar, but hey… I still wanted to give the guy a shout-out on his first day in the RFC treehouse. Besides… his presence means I can plant that “playable red panda ancestry” idea directly. INCEPTION!
This week we begin a new phase in the adventure… that’s right, it’s time for a good old-fashioned subsystem.
Subsystems arose out of the fact that older editions of D&D were really loose about how to handle… well… anything that wasn’t combat. You just kinda winged it, things happened, and either all worked out or people got mad at the GM and/or each other. So there was definitely some room for a system to put some structure to it, in order to tamp down on some of the bruised feelings that sometimes arose from getting too loosey-goosey with things.
That said, I tend to have a love-hate relationship with them. The problem is that some of these systems are really elegant and well done, but some of them just kinda flop around like a fish out of water. And specifically, some of these systems don’t really know what to do with non-skill-monkey characters, and leave some players with little to contribute. You even see a little of this unfold where Lo Mang doesn’t really have MUCH in the way of relevant skills. Similarly, if you go back to the Black Lodge episode where we rebuild the fort, my druid didn’t really have a lot to do because of the way the tasks were allocated. Only time will tell how this one goes.
I won’t regurgitate the whole setup, but basically, the players attempt to complete various skills challenges; if they succeed, they move closer to the goal; if they fail, they generate “awareness points” that increase the overall difficulty if you gain too many of them. And presumably, at some point, you fail entirely if you get too many awareness points.
This is further divided into a preparation phase and an execution phase, and the prepare phase lets you earn “Edge Points”. They’re basically hero points on steroids, because instead of a re-roll, they’re good for an automatic success. HOWEVER, two limitations. The first is that Edge Points are usually related to a specific activity, whereas hero points are generic. So in this first episode, Basil forges documents and gains an Edge Point, but that Edge Point can ONLY be used in a context where the documents would make a difference. The second is that if you fail, you don’t know you fail and might get a FAKE Edge Point. So then you go to use that Edge Point and it blows up in your face. Oops.
The other thing that’s picking at my brain as we start this phase of the adventure is the setup is so weird. Look, I think heist movies, as a genre, are a lot of fun and I’m intrigued to try and play through one. But I’m a little nervous about the execution.
First is that the heist movie has a central conceit that the protagonist(s) is the smartest person in the room and knows EVERYTHING he needs to know to be three steps ahead of the bad guy. It’s a little hard to replicate that dynamic when a) the players don’t know everything and b) even what they think they know, they have to roll to see if their CHARACTERS know it and can execute it properly. It seems like a heist movie tends to have REALLY tight story beats, and a system with a lot of randomnesses could cause issues.
And that’s not to say things can’t go wrong. In fact, in a lot of heist movies, that tends to be a feature: the plan is going smoothly up to a certain point when things go wrong, and our heroes have to adapt their meticulous plans on the fly. I’m not ruling it out as a plot device. I just worry if ANY gaming system is flexible enough to keep up with that.
The other problem I have is that the heist dynamic is chafing against the actual story beats. Put more simply: we’re COPS, robbing a CASINO. You’ll have to explain that one to me, Paizo.
Think about it. It’s stated that Gage Carlyle runs an honest business and doesn’t break any laws (that we know of; for all we know, he could actually turn out to be one of the Twilight Four). So you’re saying we can’t just go to him as officers of the law and say “look, someone may have stored a deadly WMD in your vault, and unless you want your casino to be Ground Zero of Absalom’s destruction, you’ll let us take a look”? He really wouldn’t go for that? That just seems goofy to me. Especially since we have a copy of the key that was legitimately given to us. I know the legal system of Absalom is not meant to be the legal system of 2022 America, but we can’t just go get a warrant?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m absolutely intrigued. It is certainly a scenario unlike anything else I’ve played in recent memory. On that basis alone, I’m willing to give it a shot. But going in, I’ve got this vibe that it’s gonna be a bit of a high-wire act and may just fall apart entirely.
In other news, we also reach Level 10, which among other things, means we get to add the free archetype variant rule. (The Three-Ring Adventure show did this a few months ago.) In my case, I’m doing a bit of a retcon: I’m making the free archetype the wizard multi-class archetype that I originally took at Level 2 anyway, which frees up my feat slots to take the Eldritch Archer archetype starting at Level 6, plus a few other extras to fill in the holes where the wizard feats used to be.
I swear, I never even conceived of adding archery to my build; I was always going to be Sherlock Holmes, and my sword cane was pretty much going to be my bread and butter. But I’ve been coming around on the bow. It’s a little feast-or-famine, but when it lands – and particularly when it CRITS – it’s a thing of beauty. First, it protects me from my own squishiness, which is a positive thing. But I noticed that ranged attacks are a LITTLE more efficient when it comes to Devise a Stratagem. If DaS fails with a melee attack, sometimes I’m not in range of another opponent and have to switch to a spell, which costs me an extra action. With the bow, I can just switch the attack to a different target a lot easier and keep on trucking.
Among other things, I see Enchanting Arrow having some really nice interactions with Devise a Stratagem. Basically, Enchanting Arrow makes your attack cost an extra action, but adds 2d6 mental damage to the shot. I figure if DaS gives me a definite (or even probable) crit, I load as much damage as possible into that shot and double that 2d6 along with everything else. If I fail the DaS, I just plink away with single-action attacks.
The other change which is going to be fun is Suspect of Opportunity. Just to refresh, an Investigator gets to declare two leads that generate bonuses on skill checks related to investigating them, and Devise a Stratagem becomes a free action against that person. But once you set your target, you’re kinda stuck with it, so my leads have usually been the big boss characters. Suspect Of Opportunity lets me add another name to the queue once an hour, preserving the leads that are already there. So if we run into an unexpected challenge, I can put the free-action bonus on them for the duration of the fight and then switch it back to the main lead once we’re done.
Lastly, I wanted to give a brief shout-out to Steve for letting me make a little use of the background material I created for Basil. When we first started the show, I wrote a whole backstory for Basil under the assumption we might try to go a little deeper on the roleplay like the Three-Ring show does. That’s kinda fallen by the wayside a little – the one time we brought Basil’s brother along, half the party just seemed annoyed about it – but it was nice to dust that off and take it for a spin. Honestly, even I’ve kind of abandoned the FULL version of it anyway: if I was still using the whole thing, Basil never would’ve gone home to ask his dad for an invitation because he’s probably in a heap of trouble by now, between dropping out of school and… something else. But it’s nice to know it’s still there and we can dig into it on occasion. And hey… got me a hero point too!
So one day in, Gomez got some gossip, Lo Mang might have a job lined up, Dougie has assessed the building security and layout, and Basil may have created some fake identities that will pass muster. Next episode, we’ll have two more days of prep, and then we get serious about infiltratin’! 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.