Commentary thread for that “Describe your game in five words” thread.

[glass]

Thursday: Death of a thousand shocks.

Well, about ten anyway. It was the last session of part 2 of my homebrew PF2 mini-campaign, and they were fighting the boss - a stygira. It was always going to be a tough fight (a level 7 creature vs a level 3 party), but it did not help that the big bad's rolling was mostly on fire, and the party's was mixed at best. On the one hand, the sorcerer hit with four attack spells in a row against his decent AC. On the other hand, the alchemist never hit him once in the entire fight. And the martials hit him about twice each before being Slowed 2 and then Petrified - they got decent damage but only a small amount of it got through his physical resistance.

The non-statue party members gave him one more round of attacks (with only the storm druid inflicting any damage), and then decided that discretion was the better part of valour and started to withdraw. What they did not know was at that point the stygira had 3 hitpoints left, and still had 2 persistent electricity damage that had been inflicted on him in the first round. He failed two more checks to remove it, and keeled over in pursuit of the surviving PCs.

_
glass.

 

[glass]

Thursday: Did our job. Called feds.

The final session of the CoC adventure that our Shattered Star GM wrote to give us a break/palette cleanser between AP chapters. We wandered around in the dark for a bit, and the (with a few luck rolls) escaped from the creepy mine and then the creepy small town that serviced it. Then, being PIs who had done what we had been hired to do, we sent a report to our client and also called the Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Prohibition (it was the 1920s). This slightly flummoxed her GM, who had expected us to go after the big bad ourselves. But as I said, we had done what we were being paid to do. Plus one of us had already nearly got killed by nasty tentacle monsters in the dark.

Anyway, a Bureau agent turned up at our office in Chicago and asked us if we wanted to go on the raid with them - against our better judgement, we all said yes except the septuagenarian priest. We rescued a bunch of prisoners, and found another entrance to the mines beneath the mayor's house. We chased him into it, and although we never caught up with him, we did find an alien artifact in a cave which was leaking weird liquid into a stream (which in turn was poisoning both the whiskey and the townsfolk). We blew it (and the whole cave it was in) up with dynamite.

_
glass.

 

[kenada]

Barbarian hired a hype man

Last session was an abbreviated session because we needed to do a rebuild of characters due to changes I had made in my homebrew system. However, we did get to play a little bit. The barbarian really wanted someone to talk about and spread her adventuring exploits in town while she was away adventuring, so she posted a notice and hired a bard as her hype man.

There were a few candidates. She went with one who was more experienced but had a quest over one who was less experience but was willing to take a standard offer. The quest is something the PCs had heard about before and are (supposedly) interested in investigating anyway. The retainer is cool with it as long as the PCs check it out before the end of autumn.

The party also wanted to hire a bunch of help for their next expedition (blazing a trail and mapping it, so they have a faster route back to their manor), so I have to figure out how that all is going to work now. The rules in OSE/BX are not very helpful when it comes to hirelings and specialists. I have some ideas though. I just need to flesh them out before next session this month.

 

[glass]

Thursday: Giants deserved it. Poor mammoths.

Following on from last week's wrapping up of CoC, we were back to Shattered Star. We teleported to outside a giant stockade, and the giants guarding it immediately moved to attack us before we could even say anything. This proved to be a mistake (could they not see we were PCs?) which is on them. But two of them were riding mammoths, and the poor mammoths were obviously caught in the crossfire.

We called the session immediately after the last giant went down, so I might have time to CLW the downed mammoths at the start of the next session....

_
glass.

 

[Yoh-01]

Swords of the Serpentine:

Session 3 for our improv game for our Bookhounds for Hire, from the Réamon clan. We started right when and where we finished last time. The rival clan has just escaped on a gondola with the cookbook, so our heroes decide to go after them by running on the banks, bridges and by climbing up buildings.

This chase took the whole session with loads of twists and turns, old rivalries set aflame between Clan Réamon and Clan Cassini, thanks to the use of "What's Best in Life" but also with the justification of the investigative skills used to pump up the Athletics rolls. Prophecy was used several times to see that the crank over there was the goal to stop that gondola. Then our teenage sorceress managed to deprive that young Cassini at the helm of his memories for a time in order to stall them a bit.

This chase was heavily suspenseful, our thief failed many rolls before resorting to their Stealth talent and popping up right next to that crank at the last minute, and the sorceress managed to snatch the cookbook away when the sentinel and the fighter had done all the chasing and the running.

The adventure finished with even more rivalry, a job well-rewarded, with our heroes copying the "eel bisque with its rouille" recipe in order to participate to that cooking championship but also to the gondola race against the Cassini Clan, who had just challenged them at the very end of our session.

But that will be a story for our next adventure.

 

[heks]

'they ate a district attorney.'
a game of 'vampire' 5e in which all the players are thinbloods and have no idea what they're doing and they wanted to turn a district attorney to help them with a harebrained scheme and they simply drained him, instead, by accident.

 

[glass]

Sunday: Undiplomatic PC's player did talking.

The sunday-night game is only two players (with suitably upgraded PCs): One had a +2 bonus to diplomacy and the other had +8, so of course the one with the +2 did all the talking.

Which is fair enough, these things happen from time to time - but with a small party like that I would never make a PC that was bad at Diplomacy in the first place. OK, the character is heavily Wisdom based (Druid//Monk), and also needs physical stats for melee (small party!) so has little incentive to invest in Cha, but they could at least have max ranks.

_
glass.

 

[Geekrampage]

My game last Friday:

Pluto. Space zombies, electric millipedes.

or, if you prefer haiju:

Rocket to Pluto
Rescue mission. Space Zombies.
Robot Millipedes.

 

[Bill Zebub]

"Against all odds we won."

With low turnout we started a new (side) D&D campaign and rolled three new 1st level characters. It was a Strahd-themed campaign the DM was excited for, and our first objective was to help a town with werewolf attacks. I assumed it would be something scaled for 1st level characters, and was a little surprised to find ourselves in a fight against 3 un-nerfed werewolves. I assumed the DM meant to kill us...and I trusted her that this was all in the name of fun...but we put up the best fight we could. And, incredibly, we won. The barbarian went down pretty quickly, but a healing word got him back up. The tabaxi death cleric (!?!?!) had started the fight in a tree, and after the werewolves saved against all my 1st level slots I misty stepped (vhuman, fey-touched) into another tree, and the fight settled into the barbarian dodging every single round while we spammed cantrips from 30' up. One werewolf did manage to climb the tree with the tabaxi...despite my raven familiar's repeated but rather feeble and quixotic attempts to Shove him out...but then rolled horribly, and even with two attacks per turn the two werewolves on the ground managed to miss the dodging barbarian (who had 1 HP this whole time) with literally every single attack. My mind sliver cantrips reduced saving throws against the tabaxi's toll the dead, and eventually we dropped one werewolf, then another. The third one fled.

Afterward the DM said she had meant to kill us (and had a great plan for what was going to happen next) but the dice do what the dice do.

It was epic. Deep into 2nd level after 1 fight.

Both the barbarian and the cleric now have lycanthropy, though.

 

[John Dallman]

. . . our first objective was to help a town with werewolf attacks.

Both the barbarian and the cleric now have lycanthropy, though.

On the bright side, you can provide plenty of additional werewolf attacks.