Hey, a pleasant nature’s probably a huge plus for Haley. After all, she’s spent most of her life surrounded by crooks, liars, and thieves.
Yay!
Ha, “we’ve all gotten used to you by now”.
Oooh! Roy got in a buuuuurrrrrnnnn!!
Roy made a funny!
Burlew made a point of putting Haley somewhere where her glibness spell wouldn’t work. I sense a complication in the breakout in the near future.
I dunno; they’ve got enough firepower on their side now that they can basically just fight their way out if needed, and then once they’re out tell everyone that those guards committed suicide or something. Unless you mean bluffing to Roy and Belkar? Even assuming she’s planning on doing so, her own natural ranks in Bluff are plenty to pull that off.
If it was going to go according to Haley’s plan - break in; contact Roy, Belkar, and her father; escape - then there would have been no reason for Burlew to make a point of the cell being in a no-magic area where her glibness potion would temporarily not work. That’s a huge red flag that she’s going to get into a situation where she will want to use that glibness and won’t be able.
I see three likely possibilities:
- Guards and/or Tarquin show up. Haley will be unable to bluff them.
- Roy wants to stick to the original plan and refuses to leave. Haley can’t convince him to go.
- Ian refuses to leave. He probably will feel his escape will endanger Haley. Again, Haley will be unable to change his mind. (This is my pick.)
They do? Let’s see, they’ve got Haley with a bow, Elan with a rapier, Roy & Belkar with wooden daggers. The bow’s icy blast wont work, I presume. Neither will the rapier’s +5, assuming it’s magical. Is that a lot of firepower?
Two of your three suggestions boil down to “Idiot Plot!”
They’ve got four high level adventurers. Yes, that’s a lot of firepower.
I think that the question is, did the AM zone just temporarily neutralize the glibness potion while she’s in it, or cancel it permanently?
And yes, four high level adventurers is a lot of firepower. Remember, almost everyone is 0 level. The guards MIGHT be first or second level, unless they are above Sergeant. Tarquin is high level, and I imagine Malack (sp?) is too. However, it’s unlikely that Tarquin and Malack will decide to patrol the holding cells…unless the story calls for it.
Well, the way Haley talks about the zone in panel 4, it implies that the effect was just suppressed.
And I’m not sure the zone has any “special effect” on the plot. Its suppression of the philter may just be a consequence of the logical placement of the zone on the area. (What I mean is, any decent dungeon in this world would have an anti-magic field on it. Thus, this one would, especially with someone as genre savvy as Tarquin running it. Therefore, it would be suppressing the philter whether it’s plot relevant or not. Make sense?)
It’d be helpful if you would tell me which two.
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Guards are always a problem. In this case, we’ve seen they’re a problem that was specifically neutralized by the glibness potion - which is now ineffective. And we’ve seen Tarquin is cliche-savvy. He won’t allow a situation where the PC’s can use their regular advantages against NPC.
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Roy has frequently argued with Haley in the past. One of Roy’s flaws is that he’s too headstrong - when he convinces himself his lawful good way is the right way he has a hard time listening to other points of view. Haley’s had troubles in the past convincing Roy to listen to her when she’s suspicious about something.
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Ian’s been surviving in the gladiator pool for a long time. He may feel it’s safer for both Haley and himself to lay low rather than go along with Haley’s spontaneous escape plan.
Any Campaign I ran never had level 1 and 2 guards. The game quickly goes to hell once the PCs realize, they can just wipe through the town like kindergarten. My rule of thumb was unless it’s a lawless town, you only have about three minutes to be well into your escape or you will be overwhelmed.l
Five, probably. Ian might not be quite as high as the Order, but then again, he might, and you don’t get to be head of a thieves’ guild and then survive the gladiator pens for years without packing on some XP. And they’re also all of them (with the possible exception of Elan, though Dashing Swordsman might be ex) classes that function just fine in an AMF.
Generally, anti-magic zones suppress magic effects, not dispell them, so the potion should still be working when they leave, assuming it’s duration hasn’t expired.
Question: is the bluff permanent or does it end after a time? I mean will the guard believe forever that he’s a wallaby, or is there a time limit, after which he’ll stop believing?
Bluff doesn’t really have a time limit. Generally, a successful Bluff check lasts until the target has reason to rethink what he’s been told. If a PC bluffs his way past a guard by pretending to be the palace pool cleaner, the guard will stay under that impression until someone points out to him (or he figures out on his own) that the palace doesn’t have a pool. If nothing ever causes the guard to question the bluff, it’s effects are essentially permanent.
The way Bluff is being used in the strip is something that I wouldn’t allow as a GM. (I doubt Rich would allow it, either, but it’s a good gag, so who cares?) The potion isn’t a mind control device. It doesn’t directly effect the guards in anyway, it just makes Haley sound really, really convincing. But there are some things that, no matter how good the speaker makes them sound, are never going to be believed. You should not be able to bluff someone into thinking they’re a different species, for example. Similarly, you can’t bluff someone into doing or thinking something that they know isn’t true, or is counter to their intrinsic nature. All the potions in the world wouldn’t give you a high enough bluff skill to convince me that Obama was born in Kenya, for example, or that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, or that gay marriage is a bad idea.
I think Haley’s first bluff, the “We’re just testing to see if you’ve read the guard manual!” bluff, is a believable example of what a +30 Bluff bonus can let you get away with. The wallaby bluff would never work, because all the guy has to do is look at his feet to see that he is not, in fact, any species of marsupial. In a real D&D game, that bluff would never work in the first place, so I’m not sure how long it would last in the OotS world, because OotS fundamental operating principle is, “What would be funniest?” not, “What would be the most realistic way of depicting this real life action in a set of game rules?”
What does Belkar spend his skill points on, anyway? As a ranger he gets a reasonable number of them, and we know for a fact that he’s not spending them on Spot, Listen, or Survival. I think it’s also a safe guess that Diplomacy and all the various Knowledge fields are out. I guess we know that he has a few ranks in Profession (Chef), but that can’t account for all of the skill points.
Keep in mind that what might be an impossible bluff in this world isn’t necessarily impossible in Stickworld (or in fact, any D&D-based world). In our world, if someone told me I were a wallaby, a glance at my feet would, indeed, disprove the claim. In a D&D-based world, though, it really is possible that the dude was born as a marsupial and got magically transformed into a human, just as he deduces.
That said, though, when DMed well, all a Bluff check convinces someone of is that you’re telling what you think is true. An equally-valid reaction to Haley telling the guard that he was a wallaby was to conclude that Haley was insane, or under the influence of some sort of magic that distorts her perception.
Oh, and we do know that Belkar has pretty good stealth skills, though that still leaves a lot of points unaccounted-for. My guess is that he just never finished filling out his character sheet, and could some time realize that and suddenly dump a load of points into Spot (or whatever else would be useful at the moment).