Oh, also, you forgot to tell us the armor class of the raiders, and what hit roll constitutes a hit. I have a post written up with a first attack, but my hit roll is 12 and I’m not sure if that’s successful.
Oh, and one more thing - rather than posting the link to the result of every roll in spoiler boxes on our action, we could just use rolz.org and label our rolls with a comment. Like type 1D20+1 #initiative roll. A # or / after the roll acts as a comment. That way we still have verification, but not the hassle of having to post a link to every roll.
My intention with this setup was to make initiative more about acting before/after the bad guys and less about the actual turn order of players, since waiting on turn order is going to slow things down considerably.
You’re correct about the rest. You can narrate the monsters as seems appropriate. In more complex encounters, I might give specific instructions (the dire wolves will make an immediate charge attack at any hero who moves away from them), or I might pull back and do traditional turn order for more important fights, with me rolling for them.
At the end of the day, this may be MORE awkward than just doing regular turn orders for fights, and if that’s the case we’ll do that instead and treat low-stakes fights like quicktime events in video games rather than playing them out in detail. We shall see!
Also, you were right about their Armor Class. They are AC 11.
Playing them out in detail works for me, just wanted to make sure I understood your intentions as far as mechanics.
I like the idea of labelling our posts with our name and class, just until everyone gets the hang of it. I was thinking that perhaps for the enemy’s turn, if you’re not around to take it, someone can simply label their posts [combat turn] or something and then roll and narrate the action for the enemies in the encounter. You’d post guidelines about their general behavior (and special stats/spells/weapons they might have), and then whoever felt like it at the time could process the enemy turn.
Whoever did that would have to paint a picture, in terms of any movement or layout changes, so everyone would have a good mental image of how the battle was going down. If I’m around at the right times, I’d be happy to do this part.
The concern I have for the combat is that it’s hard to have creative solutions without a lot of player/dm interaction. Like “are they standing close enough to the pit that thunderwave might knock them in?” or “Is anyone standing under the big chanadlier so I can try to cause it to fall on them?” or “is there anything near the creature that would let me scale it to jump on his head?” - with 3 GM posts a week, we couldn’t really afford to pause the combat to resolve those sorts of things.
I guess one way to do it would be to be very descriptive about the environment and we’d take it from there, anticipate what sort of checks we’d need to make, and just go for it.
And as far as initiative goes - if there are people not posting in a timely manner, I suggest we’d just eventually keep going and they can make up their turn when need be. Or if we’re going to move at the speed of the slowest player, people will have to be posting daily at the very least.
I also didn’t see any rules about firing into melee, so go ahead and do it with impunity. You do get disadvantage (roll twice, take the lower result) if you fire a ranged attack while an enemy is in melee range.
Alright, so Budget Card Player and Frylock need to roll their initiative. If it’s 10 or above, take your action, otherwise post to either thread (in here, a simple statement, in the game thread, some flavor text as to why you’re too slow to attack). Once everyone has rung in, I (or someone else, if you want) will take the turn of the enemy characters, and then we’ll move onto round 2.
If you have any questions about how this will work, go ahead and post them here, but let’s get this thing going at a reasonably steady pace, ideally everyone will post a few times a day during combat. Or this thing will crawl.
I’m going to be traveling for the next 24 hours (LA to Brighton, UK – it’s complicated) If I don’t post, please continue without me.
I’m pretty sure I rolled a 10 on my initiative (8+2 dex bonus?), and then basically no matter what completely flubbed my attack roll. I dunno if attacks of opportunity are still a thing here, but ranged weapons are pretty neat.
Update on the spreadsheet. I haven’t written over what was already written, but I’ve fronted it with an example of what the spreadsheet can now generate. Needs some correction already, but I’m using the system used in the stat blocks in the books where you get listings for actions and reactions. Filling in gear and spell lists is another headache.
Note that there are some things I have added to the character just to demonstrate how differently it displays expertise in a skill over mere proficiency, and I added Dual Wielder to show how it adjusts the AC for the configuration in which there is a light weapon in each hand.
Alright, we’re waiting on Frylock to roll initiative and take his turn. But we’ve had two days and we haven’t even worked our way through the first half of the first turn of combat. So I’m going to step in and take the monster turn, while will allow those with a low initiative, and Frylock when he gets around to it, to then take their action.
If no one objects, if he doesn’t take an action by the time everyone else has taken their delayed initiative action, we’ll just move on to the next round without him taking a turn. Otherwise at this pace we’re literally going to take weeks to resolve one combat.
Hey guys, please don’t get mad and kick me out, but I am not sure I’ll be able to post multiple times a day during combat at least for the next week or so. I will try my best to do so! And I guarantee at least one post a day.
Heck listen, it’s fine with me (though I know, apologetically, that it’s not as fun for everyone) if someone after a long wait feels free to simply decide what Hualdor did. He prefers to shoot things, but he can swing an axe.
Butting my head again up against the 5e philosophy that more vague = more better. It says that you can draw a short sword as part of your attack action (PHB 193), but this is thrown out as an example without specifying what else works this way. So I’m assuming that I have to ready my spell focus as an action until I can get a ruling.
DM rules but it would seem pretty clear that if drawing a weapon can be part of an action (rather than a whole action) so can readying a focus.
Posting later tonight. Possibly tomorrow morning. Very, very busy day.
To answer a question posted in the ICC thread, I think there’s no 5 foot step in 5e. So if you move out of melee range of an attacker who has a reaction, even if it’s just 5 feet back, as Hukthak did to gain distance with his pike, you still incur an attack of opportunity. I think. I don’t think you can deliberately attempt to use the reach of a 10 foot weapon to keep your opponent’s from moving into melee range with you. It’s still useful in that you could attack someone 10 feet away from you with some form of cover or another player in your way, and I’m not sure about this, but you might be able to have a 10 foot range on your attacks of opportunity, but I think any movement out of melee range not accompanied by a disengage action if the opponent still has a reaction will provoke the attack.
I suggest we use this thread for rules issues like that, and keep the ICC thread clean with only actions and dialogue.
I’d say it won’t take up your action unless you don’t have two free hands. If you’ve got just your crossbow out, I don’t see why you can’t pull out your focus as well. If you’re using your rapier and dagger together and want to ready your focus, it might take a bit more time.
For a musical instrument, it’s pretty much always going to be a 2-handed focus, but I dropped the hand crossbow which I believe is still basically free. Otherwise then I’m ready to cast sleep. I’ll check in the other thread whether or not it’ll be needed.
My strategy to respond to the current situation is to try to rally any fighting men in town, and find the biggest group of people being attacked who are unable to fend for themselves.
My question is - since we don’t want to wait for the next DM post in 2-3 days to see if our choices or strategy is viable, are we able to essentially cooperatively tell the story of this battle by making up plausible facts about it?
For instance, could I say “Thoradin notices a group of 6 raiders attacking a storefront in which it appears 8 women and children have taken shelter.” is that acceptable? I’d be taking over some minor part of the GM’s duties by making up that fact by myself, but given the nature of our game and frequency of DM interaction, it seems like that sort of co-operative storytelling may be necessary and desirable. But I don’t want to overstep my bounds.
Otherwise I’m not sure how to proceed from here. The GM would have to respond to our questions or strategies to create a scenario for us, but that would put the game on pause until then.
For the moment I’d suggest devising a strategy amongst yourselves. Since I posted late today, my next post in the IC thread will be tomorrow. I’ll also answer, over here, any questions you may have about the specifics of the tactical situation.
I don’t want the game to run at a speed which may force players to have to post multiple times per day. A slower pacing should give you guys more time to talk to reach other, craft really excellent posts, and think. It also keeps things stress-free for me, which will hopefully result in a much more satisfying experience for everyone involved at the end of the day.
As I mentioned in my recent post in the game thread, rolz.org is acting glitchy for me. I don’t know if there is a problem with the site, or if its because I’m connecting to it through a crappy UK hotel portal, but it wouldn’t record my roll in the SevenSeas game room. Hopefully this is temporary. (It worked fine for me previously when I rolled initiative.)