Yeah, rolz was glitching for me last night too - I used invisiblecastle as a backup. I don’t think we really have to worry about anyone cheating their rolls, but just use whatever works when you do it. On invisiblecastle you can post under your character’s name.
Anyway, as a strategy we can either send a runner to try to get guards or recruit fighting men (I tried to use my booming voice thaumaturgy to this effect) or we can just try to fight them as groups in some sort of order of priority. My suggestion for a plan is to find the most vulnerable group of innocents currently under attack and save them, and keep killing the fish heads in small groups. As long as we don’t take on more than about 6 at a time I think we’ll be okay.
What are we picturing here? There are about 30 sahuagin that we can see, and we have reason to suppose what we can see is about all there are, because although we didn’t spot the first assault on the boats, we did see them stride onto the beach. So if they’re only going to nearby buildings, how many of those are there and how close to shore? In what numbers are they clustering, how far apart? This matters not only for the effectiveness of my Sleep spell, but for the ability to rally a resistance against them.
I may be overthinking it. My guess is that something like this has to work like Improv Comedy – everybody throws out premises (here, within the limits of the rule set) and other people react to that and don’t try to undermine it. This is to deal with the near impossibility of the DM being able to feed us all the information we could want to make an informed decision. We assume the freedom to make up some details.
Here’s where we stand:
Rinzo (Human Bard, Johnny Angel): viciously mocking one Sahuagin, to death, probably, but failing to taunt the rest into concentrating on me.
Hukthak (Half-orc Barbarian, Budget Player Cadet) rushing at the highest concentration he can find
Thoradin (Dwarven Cleric, SenorBeef) shouts a general alarm and is now looking for the greatest number of civilians in trouble
Morath (Elven Rogue, The Hamster King) is rallying the general populace to help defend their town
Hualdor (Dwarven Fighter, Frylock) is looking to see if any of the enemy have ranged weapons
If we look at all these things as what each person is trying to do in the same 6-second interval, it all looks like chaos that will never cohere into a solid route. But if we look it as a series of incidents happening about the same time, like cinematic cutscenes. Here’s my own interpretating of the action, adding whatever details seem appropriate but including junctures where we actually need to make rolls:
The heroes charge forward, fanning out to meet the spreading host.
Cut to: Hukthak charges a cluster of sahuagin tormenting a scrimshander barricaded in his shack. He brings down his polearm with the force of his downhill run and… (make an attack roll)
Cut to: Thoradin make out his call of alarm
Cut to: men-at-arms throughout the town hastily fumble with weapons and armor as they run.
Cut to: Thoradin finishes his alarm to see a cluster of sahuagin chasing a fishwife and two children. He charges with his axe reared back…
Cut to: Morath looks at a wall bristling with the kinds of poles that any seafaring town is going to be full of. He plucks one and tosses it to a cowering civilian. “You saw how they run from a fight. Let’s give them a fight.”
Cut to: Rinzo sees the fishwife and children running up the hill (I keep imagining the docs as being somewhat downhill). He attempts to use his music to annoy them into turning on him instead, but the chase proceeds past him as Thoradin collides with the beasts perpendicular to their course.
Cut to: Thoradin swings his axe at a sahuagin (roll to hit)
Cut to: Rinzo spouts vile invective against the trailing sahuagin, and it grasps its head trying to resist the psychic damage of a curse it can’t even comprehend (roll will save)
Cut to: Fishwife and children running, pan back to see Hualdor watching the lead Sahuagin swinging a net. Time slows, and we hear only a heart beat as he looses his arrow (roll attack)
Cut to: Sahuagin raiders, hands occupied carrying away baskets of fish, hear a cacophany of yells. The turn to see Morath leading a band of plucky townsfolk charging poles-first into their ranks.
Cut to: Fish tumbling through the air
[Then depending on how many of the representative rolls succeed we can have a comic interval of Rinzo realizing he has to make as many as 3 acrobatics checks as Sahuagin corpses come rolling down the hill toward him]
Right, that’s the sort of co-operative storytelling in post 118. There are lots of player-DM interactions that fill out the picture of the environment but that require a lot of small DM interactions, so I figured we could, as far as details of the combat go, sort of make it up cooperatively as we go along.
The DM would set the table, describe the environment, move the story along, describe how he intends for the enemies to act and the environment to change, and do all the big and important stuff. But the players could plausibly make up environmental details and enemy actions during the combats to keep them flowing. Like perhaps Haulduor deciding he finds a covered position, perhaps making a perception roll of his own choice, say, DC 10, to determine that, and he describes the nature and location of the position. Or Thoradin deciding that he sees a group of 6 of them battering down the door to a shop with people inside. Those are within the bounds laid out in the initial scenario. But whether or not the city guard was alerted and comes to the rescue, or whether the enemy all group up to attack us together, is a big decision the DM would have to make.
But I figured I was overstepping my bounds so I’m just waiting to see how it plays out. Just offering suggestions. I like the idea of the co-operative storytelling with the players filling in the details of the broad strokes the DM lays out for us in each scenario though. It has potential to be really fun, and the DM can always intervene if we go against his intent or overstep our powers within the scenario.
Right, mainly I’m going to try to set parameters within which you guys can make your own narrative decisions. As a general rule, you should not create circumstances which provide your characters with advantage or other bonuses, and you shouldn’t create enemies. But helping to craft the story is definitely what I’m going for here. Just try and gauge the general tone of what I’m going for and roll with it.
As we play more, and I learn the rules better and get a better feel for how things will go, I’ll be able to do a much better job at creating parameters for each combat round that give you guys the leeway to be creative and awesome, but also set firm enough boundaries to make the combats feel interesting and ‘crunchy.’
We’ll get there, I think.
I’ll also work on creating a list of independent actions that can be done and the DCs needed to achieve them. So I might say “Hauldour can find scenery appropriate archery cover at any time by rolling x,” or something like that.
Quick clarification - were Morath and Thoradin in combat together, or separately like Huthak is? You grouped is together, but I thought that was because of our similar attempts to recruit help. Since you said we were each engaging two of them, I thought it meant two separate battles with two each, but I’m not sure if you meant we’re attacking four of them together, with two of them attacking each of us. If it’s the latter, then resolved combat too quickly with my two attackers.
If I’m indeed in a combat combined with Morath, then I’ll join his fight once he’s resolved 3 turns, as I did, since we’d both be caught up in that case.
You’re in the same melee, but for the sake of not having to worry about posting order, you’re each engaging with two enemies.
Okay. So at the end of 3 turns, if he’s still fighting, can I join in and take a turn against them? I used 3 turns of time to kill my targets, but at that point, if we’re still in the same melee, I’d be engaging whatever was left. Seems logical.
What is the Saughirwahtsits’ AC?
I think we need to know the save bonuses for monsters too. Johnny Angel in post 41 seems to be waiting for the NPCs to roll a wisdom save, but I don’t think we have that information.
sorry, good point. They have a +1 save bonus.
Since Morath is right in the thick of things, I’ll wait another day to post. If he hasn’t caught up by then, I’ll move things along.
Move things along. Last week was a business trip to the UK which totally wiped me out and today I’m playing catch-up at work.
I promise this will not be normal.
So, to run things totally independently, I’ll need to know not only the HP, but the AC, saves, etc. I have the Monster Manual, but these do not seem to have the stats found in that book. Or if they do, we’re hosed even 2-on-1.
I’ll be posting later today.
Again, think of this initial encounter as a beta test for the rest of the game. We’ll iron out all the kinks. I’m already thinking that I’m going to move to a slightly more structured combat system, even if it means I’ll have to post more frequently during combat.
Additionally, my MM won’t be coming in until sometime next week, but once it does I should be able to post better stat blocks for y’all since I won’t be cannibalizing the few existing entries from the PHB.
A couple of people have mentioned particularly busy times in their lives, so I’m hoping as we go participation will pick up.
Update inbound this morning.
Do we use this thread to ask questions about potential actions in the IC thread? When we write in the IC thread, we tend to be descriptive in a way that indicates the action is already done, so I guess it makes sense to confirm here that the action would work.
Basically, I’d want to check the guy who fell for wounds, and if he seemed fatally wounded, I’d cast cure wounds on him. Should I confirm with you here first that it’s a viable course of action, or just post the action there and not describe a reaction?
Good question. You can tell that, though he is pretty badly wounded, his wounds don’t *seem *fatal. He’s lost a lot of blood, though, and if you wanted to guarantee his safety without expending a spell you could do it with a fairly simple (DC 8) medicine check.
If you manage to fail your medicine check, then either he is worse off than you thought or you managed to exacerbate his wounds, and he will require magical assistance to save.