DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Fantasy SKT: The Storm King's Thunder OOC thread

Before, sorry, forgot about your natural fire resistance. It's 5/2 (round down 2) + 10/2 = 7.

(OOC - Sigh. When the DM rolls 15+ on practically every save it makes it a very hard encounter, forget about 'buffing' the foe by doubling their stat bonuses. Note that the Giant would have failed both saves from Confusion and LB using normal Fire Giant stats. On the plus side I am glad I didn't waste the Banishment.)

Yes, Zhu hasn't had a magic item since we started the game. She'd love that Rod, especially since she is aligned with Fire and gets a bonus for Fire effects.

Well, she may be disappointed if she thinks it's such a trivial fire-related thing instead of something, maybe, more important to the whole plot?

I'll also note you succeeded on the Troll Confusion, and got lucky on the "attack a creature within reach" d10, which has done more damage than you at this point. And nobody else is fighting the giant yet, which I'm not going to blame on die rolls...

Not complaining. Just noting.

Also, the way you phrased it "Don't you want that shiny metal Rod she is holding?" Makes is sound like a magic item. Usually items that are critical to the Campaign aren't very useful to the pcs. But maybe this is an exception?

I also keep forgetting to mention that Zhu took the Rune Stones we found and had been planning to spend a few hours in the evening studying them in order to gain the Identify effect. One evening I'll remember to post about it.....

Really it's all your fault for so handily defeating my previous attempts to make hard encounters for you. The best I've done so far is knock one person unconscious for a second with some lucky crits.

Planning combat encounters for 10 is hard, which is one reason we're splitting parties after this. Combat should be more sane.

With a party this large, it was either a by-the-book fight against many foes (at least 2 Fire Giants), or some really cool homebrew content that came highly recommended from multiple sources and is, in my humble opinion... fun. You know, "the floor is lava" fun. And other things that if I were playing an online RPG and the boss did that to my character I'd laugh even as I died.

I really hope you're going to enjoy this fight as much as I think I'm going to enjoy it.

(I look forward to our Bard's epic retelling of this fight ... in song ... over some ales.)

I think the hints have been pretty clear that it's a magic item.

It may not be as critical to the plot as the Letter of Recommendation you're going to get after this, and whether you find any use in it will be determined later when you figure out what it is.

Its existence is important to putting pieces of the overall story together. Gaining possession of it, less so.

But c'mon, it's shiny.

Miales - About sneaking. While from the RPing/descriptive perspective what you wanted to do adds flavor, there is no rule penalty to sneaking in D&D for the things you mentioned. Metallic weapons don't glint or rattle. Metallic armour can give you a Stealth penalty, but not weapons. However there is a penalty for drawing a weapon. It cost you your Bonus action to do so, and so it is always assumed that part of readying for potential combat includes drawing all weapons.

[[ so it is always assumed that part of readying for potential combat includes drawing all weapons. ]]

Ummm ... =all= ... at the same time?? <gd&r lmao>

It's not (normally) an action (bonus or otherwise) to draw one weapon. But it will (normally) cost an action to draw a second weapon on the same turn.

You do get one free object interaction per turn, though, like opening up a door or picking up a rock to hand to your invisible servant. Or drawing one weapon.

Here's the specific quotes from the rules

This also technically includes switching weapons because you'd have the interaction to sheath/stow one, and the interaction to draw the other. You can sort-of get around this by dropping the first one instead of stowing it (which isn't an interaction) and then picking it up to stow it on the next turn. This is one bending of the rules that I will allow if it's at the beginning or end of a turn, but not in the middle.

However, if you have the Dual Wielder feat (which Pavel does):

So Pavel could draw both weapons in one turn as an object interaction without expending an action. (And I actually don't think you could use a bonus action for this.)

RAW, given no penalty to stealth for drawn weapons, and combat imminent, it's just not a good idea to walk around with weapons sheathed unless you really need your hands for something else or are trying to send a message of peace to your opponent. And having at least one weapon drawn will allow for opportunity attacks for fly-by mephits that don't involve just punching them.

But as I told Miales, as long as we follow the rules on the impact of the spells (damage, dropped, disadvantage, etc.) I'm totally fine with flavoring the description any way that makes more logical sense to the player. Because it's hard to pick up rocks to hand to invisible servants while dual weilding long pointy things, but the rules allow it.

OK. I knew he used two weapons. Didn't realize he had the Dual-Wielder Feat.

Are the Mephits going to maintain concentration on dropped items, by the by?

Yep, for a minute at least, unless something else breaks their concentration first, or they return to the elemental plane from whence they came.

So I'm always trying to guess what the PCs are going to do, and got to Davroar in my considerings. Who's still a Giant Frog.

And I had the thought, "What possible threat can a frog be to a fire giant?"

So I looked up the stat block. Sure enough, a measly 1d6+1 piercing damage from a bite. But wait... what's the rest of that? "and the target is grappled (escape DC 11). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the frog can't bite another target."

The mental image this conveys...

Go Davroar!

Kriv dropped his hammer in order to cast somatically. Should only be one lot of damage. Relevant post link here.

You are, of course, correct and I thought I had thought of that. Obviously not! Ignore the second (11) die/5 damage

I'm heading on a trip for about 3 weeks. That may mean some delays in posting, or, if I'm anticipating being away I'll post ahead of my turn to keep the dice rolls queued up.

TLDR: the following is a long and rambling reminiscence of mine unrelated to the game (mostly). It spans 3 decades. Skip if you want, but I'm feeling nostalgic today.

And the prompt for the reminiscence is "Magic Missile".

Many DreamLyrics denizens arrived here from the CompuServe GAMERS forum. I recall the year or so I spent there, but only because the MPGAMES forum, where I had spent nearly a decade, shut down first and you all were welcoming to us refugees. "Us" includes many but at least Mackey and JimZ and probably others that I didn't interact with as closely. I remember feeling welcomed... and then still part of a larger group looking for a new home (here!) as the AOL acquisition took away many things we'd taken for granted. Old technology that cost too much to maintain and didn't make a profit in the new model.

One of the games that MPGAMES provided a forum for was British Legends, the CompuServe flavor of MUD1 by Richard Bartle. Ah, those were the days. I attained the rank of Wizard there, earning a tombstone in the game while that was still a thing (you could walk through the cemetary and random gravestones appeared). "A periscope peers up from the steel tomb of AquaDyne the Wizard" was immortally enshrined in the game. And yes, you can still play it here and even try to make Wizard!

While MUD1 was the first MUD, within a few years, there were many other similar offerings, but some of the most popular ones were based on the D&D rules. After "beating the game" at BL, many of us migrated to one of these new games. From a player perspective it was simple... go around and hack and slash.... but it introduced me to the D&D classes, and how much many people liked to hack and slash while I couldn't care less... but realized those warriors needed healers and became a cleric. Ah, the good old days of being popular because 4 or 5 people wanted to go slay <insert boss here> and I just had to accompany and spam-heal, no tactics involved, but lots of XP. (Hello Aubric!)

Anyway, I was one of the first couple of players to "beat" the game, and they invented a feature to do it again, which I did again. Yay. Whee. SO of course, another player who'd beat it before me had started his own game. I wished him the best of luck, but was starting to get disenchanted with the whole notion of rolling dice and gaining XP just for ... well, being there.

But then came a moment that would change my life. I didn't know it then, of course.

My friend's game was a Diku/ROM-based MUD (you don't have to look it up) but it was based on the rule set of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D, what you might call D&D 2e). I'd dabbled in the original version in high school as a player, but this was my first exposure to the details of the new rules. It automated everything, including the spells... to a point. But was limited. Specifically, "Magic Missile" was hardcoded to a fixed number of targets.

And just like Zhu's uplevel cast today, sometimes you get that extra missile. The game (in the early 1990's) didn't have that capability.

My friend asked if I could help. "Sure," I said. "Just send me the code." I got an email with the magic missile code in it, written in the C language that I didn't know. And Google wasn't a thing yet either. But I figured out how to modify the code and sent back a response.

A few more spell modifications followed. As they got more complex they realized it'd be easier if I had access to the codebase. Which I got. And a "wizbit" character to test on the game. It was all supposed to be temporary. It wasn't. It stuck. And I was creative and added more and more customizations. I added a multiclass system with exponentially increasing difficulty that made the game never really completable. Which was great for keeping the long term players. Yeah, it had that horrible THAC0 math in it, but it was written in code and auomated... maybe that's why online D&D became popular? I also added a feature to broadcast to the game when you lost a battle (usually to the boss). Of course you'd get laughed at but it was all in fun.

I realized in the process of coding for this game, how much I loved writing software. And I loved all the new tech coming out in the late 90's (dot-com boom!). I started writing lots of software in lots of places... the CompuServe chat area (CB Simulator, IYKYK) used to host trivia games and I wrote software to automate that (pretty much what Kahoot! is today) and actually made some money off it. Life was grand before Y2K.

Around this time, I'd managed to figure out this new web browser thing called "The Internet" and publish this MUD game's online player list to a website. Also around this time, a very new and creative player had joined the game. I'll come back to this in a moment, but first, an aside.

One of the features of the game was the ability to build new areas! I had written two myself, one of them based on The Princess Bride (but the book, not the movie!). You entered the area at the Cliffs of Insanity and Inigo was the first boss.... of course as one of the head wizards the six-fingered sword was a very prized item to obtain. Fezzik was easier to beat but the battle with Vizzini was essentially unwinnable without quoting the entire batte of wits scene. Seriously. But the prize for doing so was a vial of iocane powder that would insta-kill most bosses in the game. Hey, when you run the game you can make your area popular! My other area was... well, I'll just say that the first room's description said "You are on a dark desert highway. The cool wind is in your hair. Up ahead in the distance, you see a shimmering light." Pink Champagne on Ice was a nice healing potion, and yes, the beast was unkillable no matter how much you stabbed it with your steely knives. Eventually you'd give up and just find the passage back...

But back to the story. This creative player built an area called Candy Land. You'd battle licorice or pop tarts or Milk Duds. One of the big bosses was the Yellow M&M. It was hilarious seeing the game-wide broadcast when players were defeated by the Yellow M&M.

Eventually this creative area builder and I joined up for various quests/RP together. And eventually one day she was bored at work and used my fancy web thing thinking I was online, and clicked to send me an email. I wasn't (yay early cable modems that let you be online 24/7) but I did get the email and... well that started an email exchange which started meeting in person which started falling in love which started getting engaged which ... well, that was just over 25 years ago and our youngest kid is now a senior in High School. And my love for coding and doing in online gaming eventually translated to a career pivot and a wonderful (if busy) career as a software engineer.

And I'm still doing online D&D stuff and doing the math on leveling up "Magic Missile".

I've joked around at how un-cool Magic Missile is. But it really does hold a special place in my heart.

In our working with early versions we offered wizards the choice roll to hit ac 10 (essentially no armor back then) and get a 1d6+1 for damage, or take an auto hit and do a 1d4+1.

The world was a weird place.

Interesting story Aqua and a lovely glimpse into the private you. Explains a lot! But you won the best two prizes - wife and family - and a career you love. Well done!

Nice story Aqua. Very happy the game led you to your family.

So I note that only Davroar and Zhu have their "Health" Bars visible among the party and none of the foes do. Is it possible to turn them on, Aqua, so we can tell who is hurt and how badly? It can make a difference between choosing to heal a friend or deciding which enemy to attack.