Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)

[Piratecat]

The real problem with Disjunction cast on a high level party, even the Pathfinder version, is that it stops the game cold for three hours while everyone refigures all of their stats without magic item. I'm a big fan of the spell variant where it acts like an automatic dispel for any ongoing spells, and ignores magic items unless it's cast on one specific one.

Regarding the goose/gander discussion above, I'll go out on a limb and say that as players we all agree with this. The difference in this case is that we spent a lot of time setting up a situation that we legitimately thought would be impossible to divine around in the given time. Seeing how we were wrong evaporated our frustration. Now, I know as well as you do that Sagiro wrote the explanation after the fact, so he hadn't necessarily thought through the step-by-step details ahead of time. That doesn't bother me at all. What had seemed like an unusual metagamey "this fight WILL occur!" had yanked me out of my world immersion, something that almost never happens, and the explanation settled me back in so well that I'd completely forgotten the concern until now.

 

[coyote6]

The real problem with Disjunction cast on a high level party, even the Pathfinder version, is that it stops the game cold for three hours while everyone refigures all of their stats without magic item. I'm a big fan of the spell variant where it acts like an automatic dispel for any ongoing spells, and ignores magic items unless it's cast on one specific one.

There is certainly that. And rolling saves for every magic item might take slightly less than forever, to boot. OTOH, in my high level D&D experience, the buff-dispel buff tango happens anyways, and trips everyone up, and drags everything out -- that just seems to be how high level D&D rolls.

Disjunction only ever appeared in my game as essentially a plot device -- a bad guy showed up with a scroll or two, used one (with my intention being to scare the carp out of the PCs; any magic items that got zapped would've been replaced by Newer, Better gear), and left the other one as an option to use on the artifact MacGuffin.

 

[The_Warlock]

In my long campaign, the PCs never wanted to use Disjunction, avoiding it like the plague as they perceived the give and take between high level movers and shakers to be something of a détente. Nobody REALLY wanted to use it, under the assumption that if they did, a Disjunction War might ensue.

Then, during the final conflict of the campaign, the villains out to consume the world dropped it right on the PCs.

And the party clerics fought over who was going to cast the Miracle to get all their spells and items reconstituted by next round. Which is how they avoided numbers re-crunching.

It's definitely a show stopper if the party has expended their high end resources, and I was happy to avoid it until climatically appropriate and entertaining while the PCs avoided it's use as well.

It's certainly a tough call from the DMs perspective, because it can completely ineffectualize a party that isn't prepared or has effective escape plans.

 

[Joshua Randall]

my inital reaction was to be shocked that Sagiro had been so well "Railroady" on the player for probably the first time in the whole story

I concur. It felt railroady to me when I read about it, and the "behind the scenes with the Black Circle" felt like an attempt to justify laying the tracks.

Sadly, I think this particular bit of railroading (if that's what you want to call it) may have deprived the game of going somewhere quite interesting.

Suppose the BC had not found out about the Mokad/Praska ritual and therefor didn't show up to try to stop it. Then the PCs would have deprived the BC of one of their top lieutenants (Mokad), possibly prompting the BC to panic and become desperate. And a panicked, deparate enemy can actually be extremely dangerous for the PCs!

So yeah, I was disappointed in this part of the story... at least based on what we've read so far.

 

[Quartz]

The real problem with Disjunction cast on a high level party, even the Pathfinder version, is that it stops the game cold for three hours while everyone refigures all of their stats without magic item.

Hijack alert...

I can't speak for the Pathfinder version, but otherwise I beg to differ. The key to using Disjunction is preparation. You, the GM should have a complete list of all magic items and spells active on the players and NPCs. You also have a pre-rolled sheet of D20 numbers: simply pass or fail each item and in turn. And when Disjunction is used, you do not tell the players that it is a Disjunction. Tell them only things like, 'Your sword stops glowing' and 'You fall to the floor'. And don't bother recalculating anything beyond the basics until it's actually required.

The other thing to do with Disjunction is to use it regularly as a means of churn, getting rid of items and opening the way for new ones. Heroes in fiction usually only have a choice few items; DND heroes often end up like Christmas trees unless you take active measures, and Disjunction is one such measure. PCs should be facing Disjunction from about 10th level onwards. Give the BBEG a triggered item with Disjunction in it as his ace in the hole, or have the conjured demon cast Disjunction over everyone - including the BBEG. You just need to be careful that the PCs can still win. And, of course, there are multiple ways of getting the BBEG to waste the Disjunction.

Of course, at Epic levels, everyone has Disjunction Ward or similar as permanent effects.

 

[Piratecat]

With respect, Quartz, you're describing a very different campaign than ours. I'd spend a lot of time snarling in such a game.

Joshua, I strongly urge you to wait for future updates before deciding whether the Black Circle attack was truly railroady, or whether it made the game go more or less interestingly! Mind you, I'm biased because this is one of my favorite fights of the entire run.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

It's hard to put yourself in the mindset of a situation that you've only read about through a different presentation, but I think I would have been in the same boat as Kibi's player. After all, XP is a permanent, highly personal resource--spending XP to cast a wish and then having that wish nerfed would feel really sucky, and it does contribute to that "why do we even try to come up with good solutions to the parts that aren't fights--we'll still have to fight them in the end" feel.

That said, I think the behind the scenes response is a hugely awesome bit of damage control. It explains why, and it shows resources being spent. Knowing that the NPCs would have dropped a miracle during the fight if it hadn't been spent on undoing the wish would make me feel a lot better. It's still rough... but it stops feeling like waving the GM Fiat wand.

As to the question of how to get the balance right... to me, the key is sometimes allowing the sorta anti-climactic victories. "Hmm... they might try to, but then... but if they... no, that won't work... ... Okay, the ritual goes off without a hitch. Congrats." The players need to know that the effort that they're spending on being clever sometimes works, even though it doesn't always. In this case, it's hard to see how the bad guys could get around it... which comes back to why the damage control is so great. It does two things: one, it establishes a plausible, reasonable way that the Black Circle could find them anyway; and two, it explicitly tells them that their effort wasn't worthless--stripping out a miracle from the enemy caster ain't nothing, especially assuming that's the only miracle he had prepared. The combination of the two goes a long way to restoring the trust. (I also think that it's key that sometimes the Company's plans really do work solidly--that makes this not just another clever plan hand-waved away, but an exceptional example of taking on well equipped and brilliant enemies. Also, the fact that the Black Circle has a strong divination focus makes the behind-the-scenes easier to swallow. Sure, the PCs used enormously powerful magic to conceal what they were doing--but they were also taking on the Black Circle in one of its core competencies.)

 

[Sagiro]

I also think that it's key that sometimes the Company's plans really do work solidly--that makes this not just another clever plan hand-waved away, but an exceptional example of taking on well equipped and brilliant enemies. ...

You mean, like when I have a glorious charge-or-sneak-through-thousands-of-goblins scenario envisioned, and the players instead figure out that Aravis can shapechange into a $#@! Digger and simply tunnel underneath the whole friggin' army?

For that matter, consider that, originally, I though it was *highly* unlikely that the party would be able to kidnap Mokad from within the BC temple. I figured they'd have to have a big battle royale inside the temple grounds, which would have been much tougher for them. But then they described the plan to sneak Dranko into temple, mind blanked, and have him hand Mokad a soul trapping item. I thought about it, and what could go wrong, and whether Mokad was likely to have true seeing up, etc., and in the end, with Dranko making his die rolls, it seemed like the plan should work. So it did.

Then I thought through what the Black Circle would do in response, and how they might overcome various obstacles, and what their resources were, etc. And when I did that, it seemed like their plan should work. So it did.

 

[coyote6]

Yeah, once PCs are casting wishes and miracles, any time they fight enemy spellcasters who are of the equal-or-better category, the players have to expect the bad guys to bust out the reality altering magic. The NPCs are almost always going to be fighting for their lives, after all; they have no reason to hold back.

In my game, during the climactic battle against the quadruple digit hp dragon, the PCs had been pounding on him for a bit, and were starting to get the upper hand, and I think anticipating finishing him. Then he rumbled out a "I wish I was in full health" -- I think every player said "oh ^*%$" or some variation. They would have loved an opportunity to force him to make a different wish.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

You mean, like when I have a glorious charge-or-sneak-through-thousands-of-goblins scenario envisioned, and the players instead figure out that Aravis can shapechange into a $#@! Digger and simply tunnel underneath the whole friggin' army?

Exactly. In case it wasn't clear, I wasn't criticizing your GMing at all--I think this sequence is in many ways you doing everything right. But it still hurts a lot to have a wish appear to just fail, which is why I think it's likely that if I had been a player, I would have felt cheated. And that in turn is why the "behind the scenes" look is so great. It's not just "trust me, this cost them real resources and they can do this," but rather it's "here's why they were able to do this."

One of the related questions is whether it's possible to avoid those moments of frustration on the players' parts while still maintaining a tense and satisfying game. My guess is no. You have to be able to hit them with what they're up against, or else the game becomes just a continuously easy romp, which would not sustain my interest (at least not for long). But that then means that sometimes the players feel frustrated when their legitimately good, but not unbeatable, plans get beaten.