Co-op game!!

[Xombie]

if anyone wants to grill something bring whatever you want

[porkchop]

we are full at work... i just found out i have to go to the lake tomorrow night because we dont have enough extra officers:(

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

So...game or no...? Hmm, too late to ask this question?

[Xombie]

Still playing, we are just missing one person,

[Xombie]

Rachel said she would dm next!!

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

Groovy!

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

Starting at higher level, DMG p. 143.

For those of you that don't have a DMG, it's really no different than rolling up a new character and then gaining a bunch of levels all at once. You pick your feats/powers/ability score increases and everything just the same. The items are a little trickier, but not much.

You get to start with 3 magic items: your level +1, your level, and your level -1 (if you're 10th level, that's an 11th lvl item, a 10th and a 9th). You also get cash equal to a magic item of your level -1 (if you're 10th, that's 9th level magic item gpv). All items are priced according to level, and all of the same level have the same value/cost. A 9th level item is worth 4200gp. So, you get 4200gp to spend on magic items, whatever you want (if you're 10th level).

I think we forgot about the extra cash when we rolled up porky's and ywing's characters--sorry, guys. If you want to spend 4200gp on extra stuff, that's cool with me if it's cool with everybody else.

Also, ywing asked if he could keep some stuff from his old character and let his new guy have it. The answer is, "sort of." You can't really keep it, but you have 3 items and 4200gp to buy more, so you can just buy the same stuff, if you want. (Oh, and if you roll a new char you only get the 4200gp once!) You might not be able to afford everything you had or everything that you want to "keep," but you get to cherry pick stuff for your dude--I think that's a more than fair trade off.

I think that Xombie is going monk and rms is going sorcerer. Good choices. Ywing said something about rolling another pally, just a slightly different flavor. Sounds good. redshirt and Gir, I believe, are sticking with what they got; also a good choice, since you guys are awesome! Porkchop wasn't at the last game, so: Porky, if you want to roll a new dude, go ahead. Talk to rms if you need help, or ask on the message board and we can all help. Shouldn't be too hard for you, though.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm doing, yet. I know I'll be a leader-type, just not sure of the flavor. Been playing around with the character builder and I've rolled a battle cleric, an ardent, and a shaman. I like the looks of the cleric, but he seems a little too similar to my db bravolord--awesome, but I want something different. The shaman looks interesting but I don't know if he can keep up with the healing. The ardent is kinda meh, but that might just be because I'm not familiar with them. Maybe a different build than what I have would be better. I might roll up a bard and a runepriest (think that's the other PHB3 leader) to see what they look like. Might end up going lazer cleric. Not sure yet.

Gir, if you need any help/advice for your game, just ask and I'll do my best to help. Looking forward to your game!

[porkchop]

i missed you guys last saturday... but i did happen upon a see through dress and boy cut undies that did take some of the pain away:)

[Gir]

May 29th good for everyone?? We might have a babysitter to keep our little dice thrower occupied! ;D

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

Apr 29, 2010 20:31:59 GMT -6 Gir said:

May 29th good for everyone?? We might have a babysitter to keep our little dice thrower occupied! ;D

Sounds good. Just make sure you provide pizza for the little dice thrower, even if she says she doesn't want any (typical woman, can't make up her mind).

I think I'm going battle cleric for my new guy. I'm not sure yet, but I've only got a month to decide so I better hurry! He should be able to keep up with healing, and he can do some interesting stuff so I won't just be a healbot.

I rolled up a bunch of leaders just so I could check em out (and because I like rolling characters and need a break from school work from time to time). The runepriest looks cool, but maybe a little too complicated starting at higher than 1st. The bard is not a good fit for this group, nor is the shaman; I don't think they could keep up with the healing. The bard is a jack of all trades, a little all over the place, if you know what I mean. I prefer the Charles Emerson Winchester approach--I do one thing, I do it very well, and then I move on. The shaman wants to turn DnD into chess, and I don't think any of us really want that. The runepriest wants to turn the game into a logic problem for me, not for the rest of the group, and while I think I would enjoy that sometimes, I don't think I'd like it all the time. I just don't think I get the ardent, but he looks like he might be cool. I think it would be better to start him at 1st. I also think I got a little too funky with him when I rolled him. I might go back and redo him, but I'm not sure, atm.

Gir, if you need any advice or constructive criticism, don't be afraid to ask. I'll try to help as much as I can, and I would bet that others can help as well (redshirt in particular, and I think ywing has a bunch of DM experience--you can ask Xombie on your own time!). You ran a really good game the last time you DMed , so I'm expecting big things! Looking forward to it!

tl;dr--5/29 is good; Imma play a battle cleric prolly; ask if you want help, Gir.

[Gir]

I'm expecting big things too! ;D I've pretty much got it all in my head... I just don't know what to throw out there for treasure... and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to do the battles... but I'm gonna try and if I have to fudge it a little then so be it!

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

May 3, 2010 19:50:40 GMT -6 Gir said:

I'm expecting big things too! ;D I've pretty much got it all in my head... I just don't know what to throw out there for treasure... and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to do the battles... but I'm gonna try and if I have to fudge it a little then so be it!

I'm sure you'll do fine. Having it all in your head is a method I need to try a little more; I tend to overwrite shit. Writing is fun, but then I feel as if I have to follow the script. I used to be able to ad lib like a grandmaster. Now, not so much.

Don't worry so much about treasure. If somebody has something listed on a wishlist on the board (in the wishlist thread), then you might give em a goodie. Otherwise, don't worry about it. Random stuff is good. Or no treasure is good, too.

The problem with running combat in DnD--for me, anyway--is that I tend to forget all the cool stuff that the bad guys can do. Fortunately, the critters in 4e have way fewer abilities than any character. But then, you'll be DMing many critters whereas you play only one character. Eh, you'll do fine.

For fudging, check out page 42 of the DMG. Good fudging guidelines there. Unless you mean that you plan to just make everything up as you go along. If you plan to do that, just remember that fudging is fine so long as it's "fair." No DC 80 skill checks, no Demogorgon showing up just cause he's cool, and no rocks fall everybody dies.

If you need help, just ask.

And I'm still looking forward to your game! ;D

[Gir]

For fudging, check out page 42 of the DMG. Good fudging guidelines there. Unless you mean that you plan to just make everything up as you go along. If you plan to do that, just remember that fudging is fine so long as it's "fair." No DC 80 skill checks, no Demogorgon showing up just cause he's cool, and no rocks fall everybody dies.

Not to worry... I wont be THAT unfair... hehehe... if it plays out for real like it is in my head it should be very fun.

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

May 4, 2010 19:44:32 GMT -6 Gir said:

For fudging, check out page 42 of the DMG. Good fudging guidelines there. Unless you mean that you plan to just make everything up as you go along. If you plan to do that, just remember that fudging is fine so long as it's "fair." No DC 80 skill checks, no Demogorgon showing up just cause he's cool, and no rocks fall everybody dies.

Not to worry... I wont be THAT unfair... hehehe... if it plays out for real like it is in my head it should be very fun.

Your slinky sig makes me think that you're not being entirely honest.

[porkchop]

i wll be slightly older on our next game:( the 29th looks good so far... so long as something at the lake doesnt come up... we have a lot of concerts and things this year... im hoping i gan make it happen cap'n

[Gir]

Your slinky sig makes me think that you're not being entirely honest.

hey! that only means I might enjoy pushing someone down a flight of stairs... but I'd be totally honest about it!

i wll be slightly older on our next game:(

don't feel bad porkchop! You're the youngest one in the group... if you don't count Jamie. ;D (you took my place as youngest!)

[Gir]

I have some bad news... for those of you who are changing characters I will reqire you to do some homework... ;D Come up with an explanation as to why your current character is leaving and where you are going, you will be starting the game with your current character... and we will still be in the town we were in last... Winterhaven (I think that was it...) also you will need an intro for your new character... be creative, there may be bonus XP if I am pleased.

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

May 10, 2010 19:28:38 GMT -6 Gir said:

I have some bad news... for those of you who are changing characters I will reqire you to do some homework... ;D Come up with an explanation as to why your current character is leaving and where you are going, you will be starting the game with your current character... and we will still be in the town we were in last... Winterhaven (I think that was it...) also you will need an intro for your new character... be creative, there may be bonus XP if I am pleased.

You mean, like, in writing? MLA format, 12 point Times New Roman font, double spaced, first and second drafts peer-edited, final draft with in-text citations and works cited page? Must my thesis statement be in the first paragraph, or can may I ramble on? I do like to ramble on. I promise to use semi-colons sparingly and colons correctly. And I promise not to trust the spell-checker on MS Word.

(One more day of classes this session then done for two weeks!! ;D ;D ;D)

(And my DnD combat tracker for my Visual Basic class sucks, but it sure is pretty. I got some oohs and ahhs, but I kinda think they were somewhat sarcastic. The teacher asked me how long it took me to program it. More sarcasm? Okay, that's it. My next VB project is a program that will activate the orbiting death ray satellite platform and KILL THEM ALL!!!11!one!!1!)

(Just kidding about the killing them all thing. [maybe... ] And even though my insecurity demands that I interpret any praise as being maybe somewhat sarcastic, at least my program worked. There were several final programs that didn't. Seriously? Your final program and presentation of such is 20% of your grade and you can't make it do anything?! For fuck's sake, people, at least copy/paste from the shit we did in class! The sad thing is that they'll prolly get credit for writing a program that didn't do anything. What has our society come to? Shut up, Joey, you already did a political screed, today...)

[/derailment of thread]

I'm on it, Gir!!

[Gir]

You mean, like, in writing? MLA format, 12 point Times New Roman font, double spaced, first and second drafts peer-edited, final draft with in-text citations and works cited page? Must my thesis statement be in the first paragraph, or can may I ramble on? I do like to ramble on. I promise to use semi-colons sparingly and colons correctly. And I promise not to trust the spell-checker on MS Word.

Yes!! Exactly! I will be checking your grammar and use of punctuation as well. There may even be a quizz later.

[Gir]

My next VB project is a program that will activate the orbiting death ray satellite platform and KILL THEM ALL!

If it works... I have a few targets I'd really appreciate you hitting with that wonderful sounding death ray... I'd even pay... or grant bonus XP... ;D

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

May 11, 2010 19:15:09 GMT -6 Gir said:

My next VB project is a program that will activate the orbiting death ray satellite platform and KILL THEM ALL!

If it works... I have a few targets I'd really appreciate you hitting with that wonderful sounding death ray... I'd even pay... or grant bonus XP... ;D

Cash or bonus XP, either is fine.

[porkchop]

Well... Memorial Weekend is one of the biggest of the year... guess where ill prolly be?...

thorn has a severe catnip addiction and had to leave the group temporarily for rehab... or somesuch:)

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

Dammit! Well, that just means that you'll miss the debut of Brother Guathak, Battle Priest of Kord. And you really don't want to miss that, do you? (The correct answer is "no.")

[porkchop]

not only no... but HELL NO!... if i could id prolly pull Roger and Joey for lake time... well... maybe not... it doesnt look like this memorial day would be too bad... BUT... still got you be there... but ill see if i can get out of it

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

May 26, 2010 20:23:09 GMT -6 porkchop said:

... if i could id prolly pull Roger and Joey for lake time...

That would be a shocking abuse of power! And despite the fact that I would suffer, I would also approve.

Wait, no I wouldn't!

[Gir]

I'll be sad if anyone misses this game! It's going to be the most awesomest game ever!!! ;D Plan to show up somewhere between 1-2... we're thinking Pizza night? Ummm... if anyone needs to be late that's fine, I can fit you in cause I'm nice like that. (plus we have baby sitters to watch the little monster so we can play later! yay!!)

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

I won't miss this game!

I should have had my background done by now, but you know, I tend to go overboard. I'll have it by gametime.

Pizza sounds good to me.

I had planned to be there about noon, but 1-2 sounds good. I might try to be there a little earlier just to grace you with my presence. You know you want to be graced!

Babysitter? Nice! Allows more time for Brother Gauthak to be awesome!

May 27, 2010 15:25:46 GMT -6 Gir said:

It's going to be the most awesomest game ever!!!

After this statement, it better be! ;D

Looking forward to it. See ya tomorrow!

[rmsgamer]

Yeah...what he said!!!

;D

[Ixos 2: the Sequel]

Good game tonight! You did a really good job, Gir! I liked the flow of the adventure. I thought it was cool to be running around to different places on our quest to find the "holy relic" (what a misnomer that is!). The puzzles were challenging, but I liked em. (It might have been better to have the puzzles be more "character based" than "player based" but I didn't have a problem with it.) Vecna showing up was made of awesome and win. I like it!

At first I wasn't so sure about Sariel hanging out with the group while you DMed; I assumed it would be too much for you to try to keep track of but the reveal at the end was a big pay-off. I liked that, too! redshirt and I did something like that in a 3.x game, but I had him be the doppleganger. Lance did the same thing in one of his games--Adam was the doppleganger/traitor, and we freaked the fuck out at the reveal when Lance asked who Adam was targeting and Adam said, "Ront." He then proceeded to go balls-out supernova on the poor little half orc. Time stop was involved along with a bunch of save-or-dies and high end damage spells. Ah, good times.

The adventure seemed very frustrating, but I think that was because most of us had new characters and wanted to show them off but the damn dice wouldn't cooperate! Seriously, I think I rolled above a 10 maybe a dozen times, and three of those were for init! I can't remember dice ever being that cold or widespread. It was an epidemic! Ywing's dice didn't seem too bad, but rms and me were simply disgusting. I think your encounters were good math-wise; for me, I think I needed 10-12 minimum to hit most of your stuff, but I just kept rolling 9s. I was worried that my to hit would be a little low, but it seems okay if my dice will cooperate (I should hit about half the time, which is what it should be). Guess I'm gonna have to buy another set and maybe the 20sider in it will be a decent one.

I know I picked on xombie for taking long turns, so I'll give half an apology; many of us had new characters so it's only natural that we take a little longer to take our turn (so many shiny new toys to play with, hard to decide on one!). And xombie seemed to be feeling undeath a little more acutely than normal (busy day and whatnot), and I can understand that. But I would also like to encourage everybody to try to think ahead a little bit about what you're going to do on your turn. I know that the battlefield can change dramatically very quickly, so I don't expect everybody to just blaze through their turns. I also understand the fact that characters are new (and some are super new like the monk), and that everybody wants to be awesome on their turn and achieve maximum effectiveness. I wholeheartedly approve of being as awesome as you can be--after all, DnD is about kicking ass, taking names, and pretty much being a sword and sorcery rock star--but a little forethought never hurt anything, either. Again, I'm not trying to pick on anybody (especially you, xombie, so don't get pissed! I'm not calling you out, bro! ).

And yeah, I know, uncooperative dice have a tendency to slow everything down....

One other little quibble is that I would like to see less meta-gaming and more RP. I know, I know, I'm just as guilty as everybody else and I'm not claiming to be a paragon of heroic epicness (see what I did there?) when it comes to total-immersion role-playing. In fact, I don't think handling everything in character would be the best thing for this group. I know I would get annoyed if I always had to speak in character. But hearing "well, he's a large creature so he's gonna have to squeeze and we'll get bonuses" and "OMG I can't believe we're facing Vecna, we're only 10th level!" kind of takes me out of the story and into the game. (Again, not picking on anybody specifically, ywing , but those are the first two examples that I thought of. Don't get pissed! ) Of course there needs to be some game-talk for tactics and whatnot, and I understand that the line is both fine and hazy, but... Well, I don't know exactly how to explain what I'm getting at. Read my mind, I guess. ;D

Couple other little tips for Gir: next time you DM, do everything you did this time (cause it was awesome!), but maybe add some interesting terrain. You know, stuff to jump on/over, stuff to hide behind, stuff to fall off of or push people off of, that kind of thing. Also, a greater variety of critters would be good, too. Artillery types seemed like a big omission, and dudes that run in and out of the fight are usually pretty interesting. Used sparingly (or even not so sparingly), controllers are interesting. I know I love to kill them cause they're so damn annoying! Not a lot of loot this adventure, but I don't have a problem with that (so long as every adventure isn't loot-free...).

I think everybody did a good job tonight. The monk is going to be really interesting to play with once xombie figures him out. Seems like there's lots of cool stuff he can do; the prone at will is just nasty! I had never really thought very highly of the artificer class, but ywing has made me reconsider that opinion with his. The class seems interesting and effective, and most importantly, cool. A 20 temp hp buff? I'd buy that for a dollar! A healing robot that can run around the battlefield saying "use me up! I'm here to help you!" is really cool! And the fiery bird/evil eye/whatever it is is so good it feels broken. redshirts dorfy fighter was his usual badass self (so long as he remembers to include his Wis bonus on OAs...). Not much more to say about that. The sorcerer suffered my cold dice affliction (goddam dice!!!), but he looks pretty cool. I'm confident that rms will get him rolling in the very near future and that much suffering of bad guys will ensue. (Actually rms, I'm almost positive that you forgot a bunch of stuff that you could have been doing to make yourself awesomer. Course, there was that dice thing; you may have had even worse luck than me, and that's saying a shitload...)

My battle cleric did everything I expecting him to do (except, of course, hit a damn monster every once in a while! ). In fact, I think he might have a bit too much healing capability. I found myself hanging on to encounter powers for a long time just because nobody needed healing! I didn't mind too much simply because righteous brand is, well, righteous. I might retrain some of that healing, but we'll see how it goes when I'm the only leader. I also need to change some tactics; I was playing Brother Gauthak pretty much the same way I play Atoran, which is to tag team with the fighter and burn down one guy really quick (while giving extra attacks to my other buds). I didn't realize just how much self-healing that dwarf has, though! But tonight me and the dwarf would work on our guy/guys while the rest of the group ran around frantically trying to stay alive and kill their guys. Think next time I'm going to let the dorf do his thing solo and I'll hang out with the monk. Me and a few strikers should be able to take down the bad guys quick enough that the dorf won't die. When we're done, I can patch the dorf up and on we go!

Anyway, good game, I had a lot of fun. I don't think we decided on a DM for the next one. I'm not going to volunteer. Maybe rms would like to try his hand? Hopefully next time Catboy will be there, especially since we're losing our 2nd leader. Honestly, I'd like to see more of the artificer in action. Guess we'll have to wait. Good luck in Oman, ywing!

[Gir]

xombie wants to DM the next game!