drnuncheon:
"Since you apparently didn't correctly understand how elves still have to trance for four hours a day, which is functionally equivalent to sleep, and how sorcerers, like wizards, still need 8 hours of rest (so, trance plus four hours of rest, basically, for Super-Vichy) plus a brief period of concentraton in order to regain spell slots, I wouldn't talk much, ya dig?"
I'm not sure what this has to do with the price of tea in China, because we don't know how many spell slots the Duke had used up the previous day. They don't just go away spontaneously, you know. If he hadn't cast anything, then he'd be at full capacity, and there's no point in caring about whether his sleep was interrupted.
OK, good point, as far as it goes. For me, it's a twofold point 1) fusangite didn't understand how sorcerers and elves work, or else he wouldn't have said
As far as I understand elves, they don't sleep. As far as I understand sorcerors, their big mechanical advantage is that they're almost always equally prepared.
That's a fundamental
misunderstanding of how the racial feature and class ability both function; elven trance is more like sleep than not-sleep and elven arcane casters
still have to get their eight straight of rest in order to refill their spell-slots.
The ''big mechanical advantage'' that sorcerers enjoy, as we all lnow, is their ability to
cast spontaneously, not that they nearly always have a full compliment of spells at hand. These flawed understandings could very easily have informed his decisions on how the Duke was played...which was apparently as an
Uberelf super-sorcerer who needed no sleep and could take off at a moment's notice to fill in the shoes of the PCs and
Save The Day by blasting 20 vampires (or spawn...or helpless guards-it's hard to tell from his description).
Dunno about anyone else, but to me, that ain't how the game should be played; back in the day I had a few bad DMs whose idea of a good adventure was us trailing after an NPC who made us all look like chumps, while they wasted the opposition in the twitch of a nostril-hair.
Feh.
It also makes his insistance on adhering to ''the rulez'' less defensible, since he himself is wrong about some of them; I have difficulty buying the ''IMC'' explanation that he gave in his last post; it's awfully convenient.
and-
2) He busted my stones unnecessarily over the whole
haste debacle, when
he was at least as misinformed, but over the nature of sorcerers and elves instead. I would hold that to be somewhat more mission-critical to running a game than the effects of one spell upon the movement rate granted by a second spell. It's not at all apparent that's how the spell would work to begin with (hindsight being 20/20, it seems obvious now. I blame NASA and the Daughters Of The American Revolution.
).
Re: the Duke and what he was doing- According to fusangite, he was having a meeting with someone. in the middle of the night, and was apparently unconcerned about the
horrible explosion nearly at his doorstep until one of the PCs showed up. While I'm not at all keen on the idea of an NPC jumping into the mix and solving the problem for or in spite of the PCs (or very nearly doing so), the explosion coming from the area of the tower could very well have been the PCs being vaporized by the Vampires as they began to wreak their wicked undead havoc upon the City of Townsville.
See, that's another thing; he's the Duke, it's his city, and he knows the Vampires are a Big-Ass Threat™. The city had a meeting and everything that very day. Someone else already brought this up (and forgive me for not remembering who), but why wasn't the Duke already
there when the PCs showed up initially? Why would anyone
have to go get him?
In terms of the logic of the situation, as the ruler, he's the one ultimately responsible for the city's safety, and as an uber-sorcerer, he seems to have had the power to smoke a lot of the bastards; the goldpiece stops with
him. Was he being held in reserve by the DM to pull the PCs back from the brink when they got their asses kicked by the Transylvania Twenty so he could rub their noses in it?
(yeah, yeah, that's close to tinfoil-hat territory, don't think that I don't realize it)
The unfolding of events as expected by the DM were ( to paraphrase) ''PCs show up mostly-unprotected against the Vamps and risk death or undeath or at least the loss of a lot of levels'' or ''100+ people will be killed and turned into vampire-spawn and Vampires will be even
more fortified than they were before''.
They split up and that somewhat spoiled his lovely binary vision, and they were going to get wiped out because he insisted on adhering to his excessively-rushed time-table, which is what it amounts to, by offering the PCs the opportunity, as Mabel would have put it (sweetly but still unpleasantly) to achieve ''Death and Glory'' in their skivvies.
I find the fact that he suggested that they take time to put on lesser armor, cast several spells, gather up magic items to defend themselves with, saddle up the griffin, et cetera, instead of just letting them armor up and get to the scene in time to whale on the Vamps anyway suggests to me that he simply wanted to pimpslap them around without their armor (in fact, he seems unnaturally focused on that issue -- he even said that the scenario was specifically-designed to get them into the fight but without their armor). Since the party didn't have the characters whom he was counting on to be there with their turning and spell-powers that may have ultimately saved the day after much harsh correction via the Vamps, he needed another option or everyone was toast and the campaign that he'd slaved over so lovingly would go down the crapper.
So Super-Duke is pressed into service (thankfully, the stage for that had been set with his standing invite to the PCs to ''come up and see him'' anytime, so it wasn't horribly scenario-busting) and whoosh! Away he goes.
Creeping Death:
Well, using my own anecdotal evidence, I can tell you that I prolly couldn't have done that; one summer night, not that many years ago in our fair nation's capitol, my lady wife and I were fast asleep in our cozy bed, when out in the entryway of our ungated apartment complex, there arose a thunderous roaring staccato burst of explosions, sounding for all the world like every Chuck Norris machine-gun scene rolled into one, with at least one from Bruce Willis.
Of course, I reacted as any red-blooded American male would; I fell out of bed flat on my face, already lightly stunned; my wife, being more level-headed, rolled off and ducked behind the bed . In the once-again still night air, we heard the sonorous tones of our flatmate's nocturnal wood-sawing activity, unabated by the Wrath Of God-like noise from the hallway.
She'd slept right tjrough it. Recovering my senses and bludgeoned dignity, I resolutely made my way to the door to the hall, and screwing up my manly courage to the sticking-place (for about 10 minutes), flung wide the door to-
-the remains of what appeared to be a ginormous string of Chinese fire-crackers; some doofus had notheing better to do than find an unsuspecting apartment-building to play this prank upon. Our luck had it that the antechamber had the right acoustic properties to transform the basically-harmless ''crack-crack-crack'' of the diminuitive explosives into very din of war.
Now, I'm not a 12th-level battle-hardened veteran, but I think that ''YMMV'' is the phrase that I'm scraping after.
fusangite said:
Because of this new tone of civility in the thread, I'm going to do my best to be restrained in replying to the latest set of comments by Scarbonac. It's clear this individual is taking an absurdly contrary position
You meant to say ''I don't have any good answers to his questions, he isn't going to shower me with unconditional acceptance & affirmation, so I'll pretend to ignore him after I make an insult or two.''
Heard it all before.
What's clear is that you've almost run out of rationalizations, if you can't face me on-point.
Originally posted by fusangite: the fact that he finds it implausible that evil NPCs meet with other evil NPCs at night
I had no idea
who or
what he was meeting with, let alone that he was meeting with an evil NPC. For all that
I knew his Mom could have been there to wish him ''Happy Birthday''.
Originally posted by fusangite: that permission to see someone might not include permission to interrupt their meeting is just the latest indication of this.
Hmmm, this:
Originally posted by fusangite: Well, I've repeatedly stated (a) the palace is guarded; (b) the guards had standing orders to allow the characters to see the duke.
And this:
Originally posted by fusangite: (the character had already been given the duke's blessing to come to see him whenever he wished)
Would imply something different. Seems almost chummy, that.
Plus, there was the
horrible explosion only a few seconds previouslly about 120 yards away from where the guards were standing, in the direction of
The Evil Tower Of Bikini Vampire Archmages™.
Why should they think that it might be important that the guy, whom the Boss apparently gave
carte blance to come and see him
at any time, 5 hours after a city meeting on the subject of the Looming Vampire Menace™,
seconds after a
horrible explosion (
your term, not mine) that was loud enough to rouse the sleeping party-members (but apparently, not their servants, nor did it seem to pique the interest of the guards, the Duke, or anyone else in the bloody city) that issued from the direction of the Looming Vampire Menace's Tower Of Doom™, get in to see the Boss, especially if he says it's an emergency?
They must have figured that he was there to get some parking-tickets fixed.
Originally posted by fusangiteThere seems little point in continuing the point by point debate here, except to clarify something about my understanding of elven sorcerors: sorcerors, like wizards, need 8 hours of rest to re-memorize spells. Not 8 hours of rest every night. So, if a sorceror didn't cast any spells the day before, there is absolutely no reason he would need 8 hours of rest. Furthermore, I reject the idea that an elven trance is as incapacitating as human sleep; such a trance is a form of meditation -- thus, is usually performed sitting up or standing, while the elf is fully conscious. The elves in my games typically perform this trance fully dressed.
That's not what you said;
this is what you said:
Originally posted by fusangite: As far as I understand elves, they don't sleep.
Backpedal much?
1) Not knowing whether he
actually cast any spells, my best guess would be that if he's a sorcerer, is an elf, runs a city, has a fair number of reasonably-powerful enemies, is evil and probably has several good reasons to fear for his life on a daily basis, he's probably cast some spell or spells during the period when he's awake, if only to gather information on the opposition or to have some sort of protective magic up in case someone tries to cack him.
That seems a perfectly reasonable assumption to me, but I know that as a DM there's a tendency to play our NPCs with a full complement of spells, regardless of the logic involved.
2) We don't play in your games; you can reject anything that you choose, but we don't know all of your house rules, so we can only assume the default unless otherwise informed -- elven trance is defined in the PHB as
deep meditation, filled with dreams/reflexive mental exercises; in other words, a 4-hour period of sleep with elven flavor text.
IMC, there are a
few minor differences, such as I let an elf trance in the saddle and allow them to ''wake up'' a bit more quickly in the presence of potentially-threatening external stimuli than I do the other PC races. *shrug* That's more for flavor than anything else, and if a player specifically states that his elf is less likely to be able to do those things than other elves, for whatever reason, then he don't get to do 'em.
*sigh*
) Not by fudging the rules, as thats the rarely used last resort, but by improvising something as I go by.
