Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|20: Master Blaster.
This week’s episode, for me, highlights the difference between the experience as a listener and the experience as a player.
The action in this week’s episode was… we’ll be charitable and call it slow-paced. The party’s damage was limited by the fact that the dwarves were incorporeal, while the dwarves just didn’t hit that hard: I think even their crits were topping out around 20 or 30 points. So the fight turned into a bit of a war of attrition – could the party get the dwarves down before healing resources (in particular) started to run out.
As a player, I kind of like that sort of fight. Second Edition combat is so swingy that it’s tough to fight every battle on the edge of your seat. Don’t get me wrong: those fights can be a lot of fun, but they leave you drained afterward. As a player, it’s nice to mix in the occasional fight where the stakes feel a little lower and you just have to grind it out.
As a listener though… I felt like this battle never really had any big moments, and as such, I was kind of missing the more dynamic encounters. Where’s Hap blasting dudes for 100 points of damage? Where’s Alhara dropping two or three rounds in? Plinking away for 10-15 damage at a pop… the combat side of it was a little underwhelming.
As an aside, this kind of pulled me back mentally to a similar conundrum I had in the videogame realm. Persona 5… probably one of my favorite games of all time. Persona 5 Strikers… it’s a different core mechanic where they go from turn-based JRPG combat to button-mashy fights, and every boss (or even sub-boss) fight was a joyless slog where it took like 5 minutes to go through a third of the enemy’s health bar. Which was a shame because the REST of the game – the plot, the interactions between the characters, maintaining the art direction, and so on – was totally top-notch. But I stopped playing it one or two bosses in because the core combat just felt like you were spinning your tires. I was getting a lot of similar vibes from this battle.
The good news is that our intrepid friends made up for it with the banter; in particular, the near-mutiny on multiple fronts against Steve. We had the question of tripping a ghost. We had the question of how a flying creature’s five-foot square works in three dimensions. I have recollections of other back-and-forth moments, but it was an episode where the usual tricks weren’t working, the players were trying to get creative in their workarounds, and it was getting just a little chippy around the edges.
The first thing that stuck out for me was just how generally off-guard it caught me. I’m kind of used to a little bit of back and forth in our Edgewatch group. As you know, most of that core group has been playing together for literal decades, so there’s a lot of history and some of it isn’t even game-related. In short, we shit-talk each other all the time. With this game, maybe it’s because they came together specifically for this show, but this group TENDS to be on better behavior than we are. (Well, poop jokes and double entendres notwithstanding.) So it was a little bit jarring to hear things turn a little testy around the edges.
This isn’t to say they haven’t had rules disputes before. They just tend to be more… sedate?… than they were this week.
It’s one of those eternal questions of the gaming table: how much the GM is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of the rules, versus how much the GM is supposed to be opposing the efforts of the players. And, relevant to this discussion, how much the GM is supposed (or allowed) to ENJOY opposing the players. Because it ends up being a weird dynamic at times.
At the 30-thousand foot level where the GM is just another player in the game, the GM should be allowed to have fun too. It would actually be kind of selfish of the players to treat the GM SOLELY as a stoic dispenser of the story. HOW DARE YOU HAVE FUN TOO? That said, if you think about it in sports terms, the situation forces the GM to serve as both the opponent and the referee at the same time, and context-switching between those roles at a moment’s notice. As the opponent, yes, the GM should be able to savor their big moments just as much as the players should. But that does lead to those moments where the GM-as-ref is telling you why the thing you want to try won’t work while the laughter from GM-as-player is still ringing in your ears from 30 seconds ago. And I won’t sugar-coat it; there are certain times where it can be difficult to shrug that off as a player.
For the record: using my usual pedantic keyword approach, I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be able to trip a ghost. Setting aside the general depiction of ghosts as floating and lacking feet, the incorporeal trait confers immunity from Strength-based checks unless the entity has ghost touch. And that cuts in both directions: the ghost can’t use strength-based checks on you (or the environment) and you can’t use strength-based moves on it. And Trip is most definitely Strength-based since it uses Athletics, even though the save goes against Dexterity. So… no. No tripping ghosts. [Stephen here, I checked after the episode and indeed, Jason is correct. You can’t trip a ghost since they are incorporeal and immune to all Strength-based attacks and checks.]
As far as the squares-while-flying thing, I assumed (I think Loren made this point as well) it would work like diagonals work on the two-dimensional map. That the first increment is 5 feet and the second is 15. Or, split the difference and just call it a 7.5-foot difference and apply reach based on that.
If there’s any consolation to all of this, at least incorporeal is less punishing in Second Edition than First Edition because there’s an upper bound on it. The rules have similar intent between editions (in summary: ghost touch is best/fully effective, magic damage is less effective, and non-magic damage is almost completely useless) but there’s an upper bound because 2E implements it as “no resistance/N resistance/2N resistance” whereas 1E’s implementation was “full damage/half-damage/no-damage”. So a spell that does 40 raw damage would do 30 in 2E but 20 in 1E. Melee attacks that do 40 raw damage would do 20 in 2E and NOTHING in 1E. Or looking at it another way, if Hap had landed another one of those 100-point scorching rays, 90 is getting through instead of 50.
So the battle proceeds, things calm down, and our dwarven buddies are dealt with… for now. As with all ghosts, they have the rejuvenation trait, so they’ll be back in a few days unless the party can get rid of the underlying problem. Which… I’ve got 20 bucks that says that fixing the problem with the aeon tower will free the ghosts as well. But we still don’t know how our team is going to do that yet, so I guess we’ll figure that one out 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.