Prophecy of the Priestess, Part 5

[Scholar & Brutalman]

Is now up on Greg Bilsland's Gleemax blog. There isn't much 4e crunch, but there's this:

The bandits continued to abuse Wilbur, and Valinae suffers a few hits, but in a string of fortuitous critical hits, the battle quickly turns. Mal employs a warlord ability that gives bonuses to his allies when they score criticals, and it turns out to be a good choice, for virtually every character strikes a critical hit at some point in battle.

The opportunistic bandits manage to keep Wilbur from taking full advantage of his fighter abilities, some of which focus on taking opportunity attacks. With Wilbur disabled, they try to make an escape. One breaks off toward the hill, but one of the two remaining caravan guards manages to catch him with an opportunity attack and deal the killing blow. Three of the bandits the come together in a perfect position for Gerhardt to employ a cone, so he heads closer to battle and sears the enemy with fire, felling one of them and bringing the other two precariously close to death. Kriv and Valinae manage to finish off the remaining bandits.

 

[GrinningBuddha]

Don't forget the gnome arcanist who "sends bursts of magical energy that target one of Wilbur’s weaker attributes."

 

[TerraDave]

The thing that stuck out to me was the ability of the arcanist to stay hidden for so long, while still casting spells (or the equivelent).

Maybe it is just (improved) invisibility, but some of the write-up seemed to imply it was the hide skill. Being able to actually use hide in a combat like that (and having rules telling you how it worked), that would be a change, at least for most tables.

 

[GrinningBuddha]

The thing that stuck out to me was the ability of the arcanist to stay hidden for so long, while still casting spells (or the equivelent).

Maybe it is just (improved) invisibility, but some of the write-up seemed to imply it was the hide skill. Being able to actually use hide in a combat like that (and having rules telling you how it worked), that would be a change, at least for most tables.

Seems an awfully high level spell considering that these are approximately 2nd/3rd level characters. I can't see a 7th level gnome wizard being used here, though it's not impossible I guess.

Looking back at the playtest report, I don't see a time where the gnome is described as attacking while hidden. He hides in between running fights with the party, but only seems to attack while being pursued.

 

[Smerg]

The hide ability could be a spell like camoflage that added +10 to hide. That alone would make it pretty difficult to locate the gnome especially if the gnome already had a +5 trained skill modifier and a bit of dexterity modifier.

It would take an extremely high perception roll to locate and an extremely poor role to be found. Even shooting would not be great enough of a problem.