Paragons, pt. 2

[James McMurray]

This is the second session of our paragon campaign. The first session can be found on RPG.net. I forgot to post it here, but if you want to talk about part 1, this thread is cool for that too. .

The characters are: Dragonborn Paladin / Champion of Order, Human Wizard / Blood Mage, Halfling Rogue / Daggermaster, Dwarven Paladin / Radiant Servant, and Human Paladin / Justiciar (NPC, played in combat by me).

Unlike last session, which was almost completely combat, this one only had one fight. It was a big and nasty fight, but we played for ~8 hours and the fight was less than 1/4 that time (if my messed up time sense is trustable). While I don't provide direct quotes, it's only because note-taking is easier when I can write "the thief bluffs him" instead of copying down the paragraph he actually said. The following is the underlying mechanics of the in character interactions.

The session started where we'd left off, in the inn getting comfortable for the night, and about to talk to Ismark the Lesser, son of the recently deceased burgermeister. We were hoping to get some information out of him about what's going on, and it turned into our first skill challenge. We needed 8 successes before we got 5 failures, and the base DC for most things was 26. The primary skills were Diplomacy, Bluff, and Insight. We got our asses kicked.

The suggested DC for our level (26) was very high compared to our skills in those areas. Our best users of those skills needed 13+ to succeed. You can use other skills in a skill challenge if you can explain how it helps, but even then our highest skills only hav a 50/50 chance. And usually those secondary skills won't count as a success, but instead give someone else +2 to their next check. There are some skill challenges where the DC is only 10 for the "Aid Another"-like action, but this wasn't one of them. Here's how it played out:

The cleric used insight to try to give himself +2 to his next check on Diplomacy. I think he wasn't clear on how this worked, because Insight was a primary skill and the success he got would have counted for an actual success (and prevented us from being skunked ). He may have been trying to avoid a failure and gotten lucky. I don't know what his Insight check is.

Next the fighter moves up and stands menacingly next to me, impressing upon the noble that he might want to listen to me (and giving me +2 to my next roll). The thief used bluff to try to convince Ismark that he cares about eh area's plight and failed (despite having a high skill and being given +2 to the roll by the GM). I use History to try to give myself a +2 to my next check by learning something of interest about the guy's past, and fail.

The cleric tries to use kindness and Insight, but fails. The fighter tries to assess the man's health to see if there's anything we can help him with, but fails. The thief uses acrobatics to lighten the mood in the inn and succeeds, giving several +2s and ingratiating himself with the Vistani. I fail again at Insight, racking up our 4th failure and ending the challenge with 0 successes, 4 failures. Needless to say, we got no useful info or XP.

We sleep the night, with the cleric sleeping alone outside and waking to a halfling Vistani woman poking at him. Those inside take watches to avoid being bothered by the gypsies we don't trust. In the morning both myself and the cleric notice that wounds around some of our bites aren't healing, and are instead necrotizing. He uses his Heal skill to fix the disease, which we assume will turn us into zombies in true horror movie fashion.

We set out to find Madame Eva to learn about the whereabouts of the sunsword, and decide to sneak out of the city rather than fight. Another Skill challenge! The complexity on this is lower, and it involves skills more of us have plus the ability to actuall Aid Another instead of pseudo-Aid Another with a 22+ DC. The primary skills are Stealth, Atheltics, and Acrobatics. We win, but barely.

The rogue takes point and finds us a path (+1), while the fighter sprints from cover to cover (-1). The priest uses Perception to give the Rogue +2 by acting as a zombie spotter and I use Religion to figure out behavioral patterns of zombies to determine where they're most likely to be. I succeed, giving the rogue another +2 to his next roll, and also opening up Bluff as a primary skill, usable to distract the zombies who we learn react primarily and single-mindedly to sight and sound. The halfing uses this knowledge to break a window far from us, and gets us our second success (+2).

The fighter tries to climb to a rooftop and fails (-2). The cleric uses insight for +2 and I fail my perception check to spot zombies(not a true failure, just not +2. The thief neaks us to a new spot (+3). The fighter succeeds on a perception roll (+4) and the cleric succeeds on a Nature roll to check the wind direction in case the zombies have good noses (+5). The thief, in the 5-to-2 make or break roll uses Stealth to successfully pull us to the edge of the town where our horses wait, still safe.

With two Skill Challenges under our belt, I have to say that if it'sa challenge where you can't just use DC 10 for Aid Another, we're very likely to fail. Our skills are laid out so that we've got everything covered, but there isn't a ton of overlap. This means that a social challenge has one guy with 50/50 on the primary, and the others with 25/75. We're better overall at physical skills, but not by much. If the Aid Another with a secondary skill is only DC 10 we're probably good to go. You've got to think of a way your skill could apply to the situation, but we seemed to be pretty good at that.

More in a little while. There's still a fight and a skill-less RPing encounter to go.

 

[James McMurray]

I pointed the rest of the group to the thread and the cleric (Maltz)'s player clarified his thinking during the first skill challenge.

WIth the GM enforcing that Insight could only be used "with empathy" (other wise Diplomacy or Intimidate being needed - neither of which the Cleric has) for interacting with the Lesser, and Maltz not really wanting to brown nose the obviously arrogant bastard, my decision to use Insight for a bonus by gathering info from the rest of the normal downtrodden rabble was more of a RP thing (even if I didn't say "verily") than naivety of the Skill Challenge rules (though yes, we were all trying to wrap our heads about how to best deal with the new SC rules - and I was trying to not think along the lines of Scion Social Combat).

As a note, I think it is easier to handle non-social skill challenges - in other circumstances I feel it is easier to "aid another." In a social setting (such as the first one with the Lesser), I find it more difficult to think of ways that one character can truly aid another character - especially when it setting is such that it was indicated that we couldn't overtly help each other without in fact incurring a penalty for being "obvious" (my take). That the numbers were stacked against us was just the hammer that drove in the nail of failure on that task. Escaping the town was, IMHO, a task that was better suited to co-operative skill stacking.

 

[James McMurray]

Note: I say "NPC Paladin," "Thief / Rogue," etc. It's not because we don't have names, but because when I'm reading these things I sometimes get the cast of characters confused and have to scroll up every now and then to figure out who Adrian was, etc. In a remarkable display of projection, I assume others may have that problem as well and try to avoid it.

We mounted up and headed out (our horses having been mysteriously unmolested overnight, despite being tied up right outside the town's fence). A couple of hours down the road we cross a bridge over a huge chasm and enter into a forest. The cleric spots some beady red eyes watching us from the shadows and tells us. I look around and see many more. I slam a magic missile into a tree to scare them off, and they leave but come back shortly after. We discuss it and amongst our skill decide that they may be shadow hounds, creatures from the Shadowfell that can come through rifts or be summoned. They're used as hunters and trakers by despicable power mongers. I resolve to learn that ritual.

We leave the forests and travel down the road farther, having been shadowed but not attacked. Ahead in a graveyard we see and hear a dragonborn wearing a symbol of the Raven Queen fighting off 3 flying wraiths. At one point during the fight the GM called them spectres, but I don't know if that was a generic term or their name in the MM.

We join the fight to protect the paladin, who turns out to be very close statwise to our own Dragonborn Glaive-wielding Paladin of Pelor. I take over Ashlyn (the NPC Paladin of Pelor) and our DB's player takes over the NPC Paladin of the Raven Queen. One thing this taught me is that playing two characters is a lot harder in 4e than it was in prior editions (or even in Rolemaster, where we routinely played 2 PCs each). I typed up and printed out a power tracker sheet for the paladin, but was unfamiliar with her and so made several blunders. It would have been easier had I made both characters, but it was still a ton of stuff to track. At one point I was halfway through the paladin's turn before I was reminded that it was actually my wizard's turn.

I didn't keep tight records of this fight, as I was having too much fun and there was too much tension. A few things:

1) Being dominated sucks. These things had touches that could stun you if they had combat advantage, and an area blast of maddening screams that could also stun you. If you're stunned then one of them could dive inside and possess you, at which point you're dazed and they're making you use your At Will powers to beat up your friends.

2) Justiciars are great. There's a lot of talk about them sucking, primarily based on their low damage output, but we'd have had a TPK on our hands if the NPC hadn't had the ability to let everyone adjacent to her reroll one save at the end of their turn.

3) Lurkers are rough. We came up on a fight with 3 specters and unloaded on them, not with all dailies, but with some heavy guns. Later on a bunch more came out of the shadows and attacked, after we'd already used a lot of our nukes.

4) Contrary to the final fight in the previous encounter, Turn Undead and Solar Wrath weren't very useful this time. Last time the cleric rolled great and stunned over ten enemies. This time he rolled poorly and only hit two. It still helped a lot, but shows how a bad string of dice can really rough you up.

5) Bolstering Blood and ongoing effects is nasty. At one point I had a Flaming Sphere rolling around dealing 1d4 + 25 fire damage (halved because they were insubstantial). I also had a Bigby's Grasping Fist that was doing 2d8 + 30, but I let it go because the sphere was nicer. The sphere didn't take my standard action, and didn't need an attack roll to deal damage, so I could toss other spells as well. Sphere + Ray of Frost + Orb did 3d4 + 75 damage to one of the specters.

6) Resistance (Wizard Utility 10) is great. The specters dealt Necrotic damage with their paralyzing touch, but once I had Resistance 16 going they had to crit to hurt me. Their blast and possession dealt psychic damage, and that still slapped me around, but the touch never hurt me. If we fight them again I'll have a hard time deciding between stopping all touch damage or lowering the rest by a big chunk.

Several people dropped and were healed, many more were dominated and saved against it. We won and nobody died, but I wasn't sure it would turn out that way There were a few tough times when people were down and the healers around them were either dominated or about to be.

After the fight we talked with Sir Uric, the paladin we'd helped. He was in search of the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind, which he believes to be in the area. Since entering Barovia he's been under constant attack, almost as if the land itself didn't want him here. Ashlyn (the other NPC paladin) had mentioned something similar. He said the Vistani didn't much care for him, but weren't hostile. They were also apparent safe from the predations of the land. Apparently Barovia doesn't like holy knights. The cleric and both NPC paladins had the Gentle Repose ritual, so we spent the next few hours consecrating the graveyard. The thief found some names and dates, and asked me if they were important. My history check told me of an ancient bandit king who had disappeared ~600 years ago, and whose grave was nearby. Apparently he'd come here to hide from enemies and been hung.

The two NPCs headed back to the village, the newest to rest and the older one to help him get past the zombies. We continued on to the Vistani camp. When we got to a crosroads, we noticed that a road whose sign said it led to Castle Ravenloft went in the opposite direction from where we could see a castle on a ridge. Thinking either the sign had been fiddled with or the road twisted a lot, we continued on.

At the camp we road in and some Vistani around a huge fire told us that Madame Eva's tent was "over there." We went in and her response was basically "you're finally here." We spoke for a bit, and she took a shine to me. She read our fortunes and we each took turns asking a question. My arcana sensed no magic, but I knew it might not show up, and my Insight didn't point to her being a con artist (at least not in regards to the fortunes).

Me: "Where can I find the werewolves?" I asked this because my reason for being in Barovia had nothing to do with the Sun Blade, Symbol of Ravenkind, or anything like that. I'm looking for a trapper who disappeared in what is believed to be Werewolf country. Her (typically cryptic) response: "where water rains from above on earth, wood, and itself." I plan to ask around in town for a local map, to see if there are any lakes with islands, waterfalls, etc. in the area. She apologized for the vagueness, saying she can't always understand the words she is given to speak.

Thief: "I wanna be rich." That's why I hang out with the little guy. She tells him that riches can be found where the river flies, but the outcome is hazy. He will either get his reward or be doomed to eternity in a hell of his own devising.

The (PC) Paladin asks how to stop the undead incursion into Barovia. That was his reason for coming to this land. She tells him that death was caused by a first death, and he must end the source and undesecrate (my made up word) the church. Something's presence .. something .. (I must have gotten distraced and missed part of it, because that's all my note says). The safest entrance is from where the living have not tread, so I'm guessing there's an underground mausoleum or graveyard we should sneak in through.

The Cleric had meant to ask about the undead as well, but took the opportunity to ask about the Sun Bldae. It's probably a good thing, or the NPC paladin would have been really pissed off. She says that it is a blade of light and vengeance. It can be found where the wilds reach close to town and chaos threatens order. The light of the blade sleeps elsewhere, and it must be brought to the castle to wake it. His (presumably meaning the castle Lord's) source is life.

She hid a crystal ball under a cloth and giggled. She tells the cleric that his letter (the quest trigger) is a forgery. When asked who forged it she says she does not know, but holds open a curtain so that only the castle on the ridge can be seen. I'm pretty sure that the ball is a crystal ball being used to spy on her by the lord, but roll poorly on both Arcana checks and so don't get any confirmation.

We've learned a lot about what's going on in the area, some of which I've probably forgotten to include. We've never heard the name Strahd von Zarovich, but we've all read and played in Ravenloft so we have OOC info. I've gotten enough clues to guess that the lord is some sort of undead that feeds on the living, but not enough to know in character that he's a vampire.

On the way out of the camp we noticed some Cormyrian wine casks that belong to the private stock of the nobility. To have stolen them requires major connections inside Cormyr, not just good banditry skills. We don't say anything about it to the Vistani, but if given a chance outside of the prying eyes of our churchier friends I'll ask to try a glass.

Back in the village the barricades have moved away from the inn and the lights near the inn are doused. It looks like the zombies are attracted to light, so there's a no lamps policy in effect. We head into the shop after being checked for signs of infection by the kid outside the door, and check the "private stock." There's a bunch of magic items for sale, much of which looks very useful, and almost none of which we can afford. A Circlet of Authority would be a big help to the cleric (who's about to get Diplomacy for those social skill challenges), but at 2,000gp I'm the only one that can afford it. Being the unaligned mercenary that I am, I offer to loan the priest the money at a mere 10% interest, which is a big risk since apparently monsters don't believe in coins in this country. He says no. I'll ask him again after we fail the next social challenge.

It's 3am by this point, so we wrap it up for the night.

 

[Lord Sessadore]

Man, that looks like a lot of fun. I was toying with the idea of modifying Expedition to Castle Ravenloft to run my group through when I get back after the summer, myself. Not sure if I'll do it though, might be tiresome - we were running that adventure pretty much all year.

Paragon is looking like a lot of fun though Any favorite/least favorite parts so far?

 

[James McMurray]

Conversion: We've played two sessions and the GM has converted it with little to no trouble, at least as far as I can tell. I've asked him about it, so hopefully there'll be more info shortly.

Favorites

1) As with all of our 4e sessions (we've also played the first chunk of KotS), every fight has been dynamic and exciting. The fights themselves have taken about the same amount of real time, but every round involves thought and action instead of "hit/miss/hit/miss" repetition.

2) The physical skill challenge was a lot of fun. Figuring out how to make my nonphysical wizard useful in the situation was cool, and I got lucky and got some info that opened up a whole new skill for the challenge. It felt like some older physical challenges in previous editions, but a lot more free form. Instead of "ok, everyone make a jump check. strength to catch the wizard who fell. now climb three times (you fall 30')" it was up to us to figure out how we were going to handle it, and there was enough leeway that we could fall on our strengths with a little bit of thought.

3) "Ze game, she remainz ze same." The edition and rules changed, but we're still playing the same games we used to: quests, RP, tactical fights, and problem solving. Certainly not everything is the same as its ever been, but I've enjoyed most of the changes.

Least Favorites

The social skill challenge is the only thing so far that hasn't been fun. Had I been a high Charisma character with a chance of making the high DCs it wouldn't have been so bad, but we still would have failed it because everyone's successes and failures go in the same pot. The biggest problem with it was that the pseudo-Aid Another aspect was also at extreme DCs, and a failure sometimes counted as a real failure and sometimes didn't. The GM was good about letting us know DCs and when something would count or not, but with only 5 skills and needing 8 successes, everyone without high socials would have eventually run out of alternatives anyway.

We also haven't seen anything in the way of physical rewards for our encounters. Between 3 zombie fights and this one in the graveyard we've not gained a single gold piece. It was a 3.5 adventure, so I'm assuming the expected wealth per level will kick in at some point and we'll hit a nice hoard, but I like my stuffeses to flow more than spurt. It's not put me off the adventure at all, it'd just make it go from loads of fun to loads++.

I'll probably be retraining into a multi-class feat of some sort, to get myself a better shot at doing that sort of stuff, although it looks like we won't have much in the way of social challenges in the future. We also shied away from social combat in Exalted. But we still use the social skills (for instance I just failed 6 out of 8 skill checks trying to get information around town). So even if we don't have a lot more challenges, the added skill should prove useful.

 

[James McMurray]

The GM's reply about conversion:

The monsters were always the tough part. Everything else you need is cake regardless of the game system (i.e. treasure, traps, skill rolls, etc.). It's a hell of a lot easier than it was in v3.5. The DMG has awesome rules for monster creation and adjustment, though the sections could've been organized better, which is why I cut & pasted my own creation table together into one neat little .bmp. You could easily take a non-D&D game and toss out an encounter in a matter of hours. I probably only spent a good 3, maybe 4 hours, of actual work in converting everything I've put in so far for the past two sessions. I've spent alot of time converting adventures of different sources into numerous other game systems, so it may have been a quicker for me than it might be for others, but this has definitely been the quickest/easiest system I've ever had to convert to. The encounter math is pretty solid so you don't have to worry about making an unbalanced encounter on accident.

 

[Lord Sessadore]

Yeah, I think it'd be fairly easy to convert the adventure to 4e. Just not sure if my group would enjoy re-playing the adventure they just spent the last year on

As for treasure, the adventure can feel slow on that count at the beginning. My group complained about not getting any treasure in the first two sessions as well. Most of the loot they got in the early parts of the adventure (playing 3.5) was from dead comrades, haha. But, with the wealth-by-level guidelines in 3.5, the magic items on 6 or 7 level 6-8 PCs is ridiculous. Don't worry though, there's treasure around without having to kill off your buddies

 

[James McMurray]

Ah, I misunderstood the part about having already played it. I thought you'd played partway through. Yeah, I'd definitely recommend something else.

That's cool that there's treasure forthcoming. My wizard isn't a very nice guy, and while he wouldn't actively cause some rich adventurer's death, if the guy did bite it and couldn't afford a raise dead (+10% fee) he just might have a little more residuum in his pocket the next morning.

 

[Lord Sessadore]

Well ... we didn't actually finish it, but they were darned close. If we had another 3 or 4 sessions before we all dispersed for the summer they probably could have wrapped things up. Heck, if they made a bee-line for the metaphorical goal posts instead of changing their mind on what they wanted to pursue each session they probably would have finished, haha.

 

[James McMurray]

Given our typical play style, that last post might be taken as foreshadowing of our upcoming experiences in Ravenloft.