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The Sideshow S3|12: Game of Throws

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|12: The Furball Special.

All right readers. Here’s my plan. I’m gonna tell Steve this column was late because I was ALSO at Pax Unplugged this weekend, but I must’ve just missed him. Repeatedly. For an entire weekend. If I really want to go next-level on this, I could find someone else’s PAX photos and Photoshop myself into them. You’ve got my back on this, right? Make sure to throw a bunch of stuff on the Discord chat about how it looks like I was having so much fun.

OK, we return to action with… well… a bit of a mismatch, as at least on the first attempt, the alchemical golem basically kicks our heroes’ asses. There’s no shame in that, really: it happens sometimes. Over in Edgewatch, we recently faced off with a high-level aberration that did half our kinda-sorta-tank’s (aka Lo Mang, if you listen to both shows) hit points in a single hit, in part because it could crit on a 14 or 15. So we ran away and came back for the rematch later when we’d added another level and figured out some better tactics.

Steve makes a good point in the show notes that I’ll amplify: I think video games (in particular) have conditioned us over the years to think challenges will automatically scale to the “right” level and be safe for parties to tackle. “There will be one boss encounter at the end that will be difficult, and everything else shall be manageable with our current resources. THIS IS THE WAY.” We’re conditioned to think of (videogame) levels and zones and assume everything will be where it’s supposed to be. (Except when some sonofabitch trains Dorn into a crowd of noobs in EverQuest.)

When you’re living in the pen-and-paper world, that’s not always going to be the case. Sometimes they just throw something tough at you to stretch your resources and see if you can handle it. I will say that usually when they include “stretch” encounters, they tend to be on non-critical paths – i.e. they’re something that’s not CENTRAL to the story and can be avoided if you have to – but they do exist. Again going back to our Edgewatch campaign, that aberration was a secondary quest goal – we could get into the main cultist lair without dealing with it, but there was a secondary quest to find a missing Graycloak captain that needed to be saved, and the aberration WAS on the critical path for THAT quest.

(And OK… sometimes in the early days of a new system — which we’re still in – adventure designers MIGHT even make the occasional mistake when scaling an encounter. Not saying that happened here, but it’s also a possibility. Heck, when we were doing Starfinder and the Dead Suns campaign, the rules technically weren’t even finalized when they started writing the AP, so there were probably some… ahem… “educated guesses” that made it into the final product.)

In this particular case, as Steve and Loren discuss, part of the issue we have is a branching story with three main paths, depending on which order the party chooses to tackle the towers in. Steve hints (or outright says) that they’ve chosen to solve that issue by writing all three towers to the middle standard: of course that means the first tower is going to be a LITTLE challenging, but theoretically a few months from now, tower three will be a little on the easy side.

So next May or whatever, we’re likely to see some xulgaths get pounded into the ground. But as Aragorn says, today shall not be that day.

Now, I hesitate to bring this up because I don’t know how long it was between sessions, and, hey, I forget stuff too. But as the Robert’s Rules folks say, POINT OF ORDER: Ateran did actually uncover a sonic vulnerability in last week’s episode when doing the initial knowledge check. But then again, the main source of sonic damage would’ve been Alhara’s staff, and she’s still dealing with enfeebled. So… 5% less chance to hit a creature that was already pretty hard to hit. Again, don’t want to be TOO aggressive about it because it’s a mistake we all make every once in a while. Hell, going AGAIN back to that Edgewatch example, I forgot the aberration could only be damaged by blunt, so I took a 150-gold aligned oil and put it on my bow and only brought regular (piercing) arrows to the fight. Oops.

The other thing we get into here is whether the mechanics of the dying condition apply to NPCs, specifically Riley. And not to get too snotty – geez, I’m doing it again, the second time this episode – but we covered this back in the Plaguestone campaign when Ember got reduced to zero. Use of the dying condition is actually explicit for players and their companions (emphasis mine), and GM discretion for “significant” NPCs – key villains, friendlies with story significance, etc.

Now, normally I am not a fan of arbitrary choices when it comes to combat mechanics. But this is ONE case where I’ll make an exception because combat is also part of the larger story, and allowing the dying condition MIGHT make the story more compelling than just “Zero hit points? Dead”. HYPOTHETICAL: you’re there to rescue the Duke’s son, but the Big Bad in his dying breath stabs the kid… if zero hit points is dead, you fail the mission despite basically doing everything right. But if you allow NPCs to cycle through the dying condition there’s a chance to save the kid and the mission as a whole; heck, maybe mopping up the remaining minions becomes more compelling because you only have a couple of rounds to do it before the kid bleeds out.

So in this ONE case, yes, I support letting the GM pick and choose when to apply dying. Besides, if he has one of the minions stabilize the Big Bad, that just gives you a prone target to whomp on some more.

All of this is prelude to the “Furball Special”. Now, we know dogs love to chase balls… but hear me out… what if the dog IS THE BALL. “Hashtag mindblown”, as the Young People say. It’s a bit outside the box to do Whirling Toss as a defensive measure, but it ends up being surprisingly effective; really the only danger is doing too much damage to Riley on the throw – a crit would take him from Dying 1 to Dying 3, and he’d croak on his next turn, depending on where in the initiative he would’ve gone. I grant that there’s probably some really dark gallows humor (and maybe a Battlezoo Bestiary 2 entry) that could be mined from that scenario, but probably better if we avoid that outcome.

Also, if I REALLY wanted to quibble, maybe Steve should’ve ruled that planning out such an intricate set of actions should’ve gone beyond the realm of a single turn. I mean, Hap was supposed to figure out that Darius was going to throw Riley, get a healing spell ready, and stand in the right place, and Vanessa was going to catch him… all in six seconds? But that also gets into the application of the Rule of Cool, as well as the fact that Riley is A Very Good Boy and his life is more important than your fancy rulebook, mister.

So the party retreats and regroups, and then the question is whether to go back to (comparative) safety and rest for the day, or whether to just load up and go again with a greater focus on sonic damage. Now… I probably would’ve gone for the full rest, but it’s worth observing that the casters are already going to be limited by the fact that it’s a golem – most of their damage spells (Hap’s fire attacks in particular) aren’t going to do anything. So to some extent, regaining spell slots other than healing are of marginal value anyway. So I guess I can sorta see the logic of taking another bite at the apple. Especially if they’re gonna stay in the room and the party can always retreat again.

The good news is if they can get past this encounter, they have a direct path right up to the aeon stone, since there’s a big vertical shaft that leads directly up. Just a matter of getting past this one room, right? I guess we’ll see what happens next time. 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.