Clubhouse: The Shearing Pen

[PJSlavner]

Hello all,

We will be in San Diego for three days while my wife is at a teachers' conference. The hotel room we will be staying in has high speed Internet access. I have a fairly new laptop computer, and I have no experience staying in hotel rooms with it. What do I have to bring besides the computer and a cord to plug it in? Do I need to bring a modem, or is the ethernet cord sufficient?

Thank you for your assistance.

 

[Infiniti2000]

The ethernet cable is sufficient. You will be charge some number of dollars (or fraction thereof) per minute. If your laptop has wireless and the hotel supports wireless (many do), then you don't even need the ethernet cable, but it can't hurt to bring it just to be sure.

 

[ugulu]

Could be just a cost/day instead of per minute, depending on the hotel. And ya, worth taking patch cable - had a hotel actually charge additional rental for one even though they didn't supply one in the room.

 

[PJSlavner]

The hotel says the rooms have free access. Thank you for your help.

 

[Greybar]

Interesting thing from the Exhibition Arena that I'll freely mention since both sides are doing it.

Many creatures have extensive SLA buffs at-will, or with multiple-minute durations. It occurs to me that if a GM presents such a creature in a prepared state, there are a lot of things to layer on the stat block. One of which that was not obvious to me was that if you have an ability that will last for 10 minutes, and you can cast it at will, then you might as well throw on a couple layers of it incase of dispel. I envision a platoon of teleport-capable demons, for instance, about to launch off and attack heroes who threaten their infernal aims. They easily have 5 minutes to prep before their boss gives the word to "JUMP" - that's 50 spells, many of whom will last 5 minutes post-Jump even if cast first, longer than any expected D&D combat.

It would be a real service to GMs if fully-loaded "5 minute prep" stat blocks were available for such creatures, which perhaps represent at least a quarter of all those over CR10. It seems to be even more critical the higher you go in CR. I wonder if any publisher out there has looked into that, or if people would actually pay smallbucks for such as a download.

On a related note, I think that this might emphasis some creatures that are popularly considered "under-CR" such as planetars with their 17th lvl cleric abilities at CR16. The general counter-argument is that abilities which are powerful for PCs aren't as powerful for NPCs since they only exist in-story for a few rounds. Depth of power isn't important if you only live long enough to cast 4 spells - who cares if you have 20 more spells in your arsenal. Similarly, if a PC could convince their GM to get them "cure minor wounds at will", they'd suddenly be able to heal the entire party between encounters (for many values of level).

anyway, rambling done... thoughts?

 

[Greybar]

Follow-up on the argument in the Elysium Arena on Sunder and Full Attack.

I'm fine with house-ruling this either way. In a campaign setting, making it harder to destroy the PC's hard-worn loot might be desirable. I just feel the default should be to work from what WoTC says the rules are, and vary from there to taste.

 

[Gansk]

Regarding the buffs, the 3.0 module Bastion of Broken Souls introduced the term 'buff suite' - a list of spells and abilities that someone activates before entering battle. I agree that a list for high CR creatures would be desirable, which is why I was disappointed that so few MM monsters ended up with a round by round tactics section after WotC plugged it as one of the new features of the book.

Regarding Sunder, I would have been fine if they fixed it in the errata, which would admit that the table is a mistake, but instead they try to defend the way the table is written with irrelevant babble. I don't get it.

I am also glad you recognize how nasty a full attack sunder is in a typical campaign. Hill giants become sunder machines - the first thing they do is target the party's weapons. They might as well be rust monsters!

 

[Infiniti2000]

If you say that text straight from WoTC, the publisher of the rules, is wrong then I don't have a counter argument.

Yes, that is what I say. The only thing I personally accept as a Rule from WotC are the books I purchased and the errata they publish for them. Nothing else modifies the rules. The FAQ and RotG are useful aids in interpreting the rules, but where they are proven to contradict the actual rules (as in this case), I cannot support them.

You're saying that several items in a FAQ published less than a month ago is wrong because a line doesn't exist in a table? Even though WoTC's errata also says you should disregard secondary sources (tables) when they seem to be in conflict with primary sources (text).

I'm saying several items in the FAQ are wrong and it certainly wouldn't be the first time and it won't be the last. You'll note that for the Primary Source Rule to take effect, you actually have to have disagreement first. It's obvious that there's no disagreement because there's no errata. As I explicitly mentioned, and as you mentioned, the Sunder description does not in fact denote an action type. The only thing that does is the table. By claiming that Sunder is not a standard action, the FAQ writer is essentially claiming that the table is in error, both the Standard Actions table and the Miscellaneous Actions table. Those are two not-insignificant errors necessary for the FAQ's stance.

 

[Greybar]

So I understand the ground rules: trip and disarm can be used multiple times in a Full Attack, right?

Maybe this ties into something else I didn't understand recently - is this why Haman chose to Fall Prone, so as to avoid being tripped out of his control?

 

[Infiniti2000]

So I understand the ground rules: trip and disarm can be used multiple times in a Full Attack, right?

Disarm can be used by any weapon, or even unarmed. A creature with natural weapons can then disarm once per natural weapon, or use unarmed attacks (provoking an AoO) to use iterative attacks. Trip must be either unarmed (provoking) or with a trip weapon. Natural weapons are not trip weapons, so you cannot trip with them. Unarmed attacks also have your normal reach, so a Gargantuan dragon (30ft reach with tail) cannot trip with his tail (though it could be described as such for flavor), he would trip at 15ft reach only (his natural, long-not-tall reach). Note that this example occurred in the LG arena when I had provided the AoO possibilities for Max (he wanted to trip and thus would delay the AoO until Haman came closer and only would take the tail slap if he would not have a chance to trip).

Maybe this ties into something else I didn't understand recently - is this why Haman chose to Fall Prone, so as to avoid being tripped out of his control?

Haman took a full attack and failed to achieve half-speed while in the air. Even if he had hover, he would have to use a Move Action to hover to not stall. I had considered it a possibility, but had to account for what I thought the most likely scenario, for Haman to go after Aesther.