Friendship is Dragons
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Page 429 - Class Warfare
Author Notes:
Guest Author’s Note: "Loosely inspired by the Halo HeroClix line from years ago.
"As Yogi Berra once said, 'It ain't over 'til it's over.' Until your entire team is dead, there's always that one-in-a-million chance that you can turn things around and come out smelling like roses. Story Time today is tell us about last-minute saves."
Newbiespud's Note: As an alternate Story Time (2 for 1 today!), tell a story about "buyer's remorse" - a feat choice or class feature that someone else got that made you want it, or one that you got and regretted later.
As for the question I could understand, every single game I have ever bought for my younger brother.
To what the DM replied "You do realise you're in the city of STAIRS, right ? Your horse won't be able to get in the city, there are stairs everywhere."
It took us around half an hour to stop laughing and manage to get on with the game. And after that, we mostly travelled using either ships, train or teleport spell. XD
I had a character level up right before one of Paizo's big multi-table events and felt my sorcerer was a little lacking in attack power, so I bought a Wand of Fireballs and took the Burning Palms spell.
Then I find out that practically every enemy in the campaign is immune to fire spells and the one that wasn't was fought in such close quarters that using the wand would've been more likely to cause a TPK than kill the enemy.
On the other side of the coin, I once managed to lob a live grenade into a closing elevator that had a werewolf inside it. The blast by itself would hurt, but most werewolves we fought would survive the explosion. THIS TIME the werewolf was in an enclosed metal box where the blastwave couldn't escape the confines of the elevator. Chunky Salsa indeed!
So, let's do a Q&A.
Today on the heating booth, we got the girlfriend here.
Say hello to DoubleCross.
I've got to ask. Where did you come up with the name?
Mind's just something I improvised when I noticed there was already another Colin commenting - I saw a "Luna's Loyal Subject," was reminded of an overly angsty OC of mine who absolutely hates Celestia, but tends to agree with her, leading to borderline tsundere behavior, and voila.
My current username comes from the way I sign my real initials. A combination of lines forms what can be interpreted as a pair of crosses. It's somewhat helpful for reading it that 'double-cross' is an actual word, though its meaning is not being taken seriously.
My old username was a jumble of stuff I made up as a 12- or 13-year-old that I used for a long, long time, but then I started reading about cultural appropriation and in particular a long, long post about nikkeijin and realised, yeah, having a Japanese word for a username when I'm not Japanese was not really a good idea.
My username is pretty simple. Detroit Red Wings, the number for Pavel Datsyuk, and the number for Henrik Zetterberg. I'm a big hockey fan.
What about you, ANW? What does your username mean?
I came up with it on the fly when I first began playing halo 2 and was prompted to choose a profile name. It stuck with me ever since.
Specter- A ghost or phantom that is seen as the object or person the observer fears.
However, to my knowledge, few ever see the ghost since it watches from places people do not generally look.
Fun fact: One way to write ghost in the U.S. is Specter, in the U.K. it is Spectre
I ended up using it for my improv class name, and it was the first thing that came to mind for a username
It was an Earthdawn game and I was a T'skrang swordmaster. The party was exploring a ruin and down below we get ambushed by the undead. A lot of undead. I'm talking "Cue Jackson's Thriller Theme" mob of undead. We fought valiently, but the party was quickly taken down except for me and one of the mages. I quickly had the mage back up to the stairs while I got the undead to surround me at the base of the stairwell. The mage continued to shot bolts at whatever undead was closest up the stairs while I just wailed on the others around me. The mounting bodies of slain undead piled up and bottlenecked the undead to where we managed to finish them all off! We then did just a qucik cursory looting before we dragged the rest of the team out and to a healer (paid for by the found loot). The mage and I leveled up that day and became best buds.
Buyer's Remorse?
I can't remember a time I personally had it, but my local group all have had such experiences. The silliest case of Buyer's Remorse was because of treasure they got after slaying a black dragon in a swamp temple. They all found some nice magical weapons, but after several battles none of them liked what they were using, yet they liked what each other had. They started taking downtime calculating what they'd have to sell just to get similar weapons to what each other had. I interrupted them and asky why they didn't just trade with each other?
The look on their faces...
This doubles for buyers remorse - for the GM for making me take reckless...
Don't feel too enthusiastic about it, but I could not help but feel the hairs on my neck strain while reading this.
I also give you +2 luck with a no plan stradegy. (but you recive -1 wisdom for 5 minutes when you use it.)
Thanks. I normally would try to negotiate or use formulate some plan, maybe distract him. I'm actually grateful to my GM - thanks to him I learned that planning is fun, but once in a while you should go with your instincts and enjoy yourself.
I believe I've mentioned my Orcish healer's bloodthirsty charge to gib the kobold that just stuck my half-drow wizard buddy, intimidate the rest of the kobolds into staring slack-jawed at me while I screamed at them, covered in gore, and then grabbed the wizard and WALKED out. And the time the same group's warblade bisected a bandit archer who'd gotten the rest of us under his mercy. Both Nat 20s at the best possible times.
So instead, today I'll tell a story from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. We're rank-and-file stormtroopers guarding a middle-of-nowhere secret research facility hidden in an asteroid field. There's 200 troops and I dunno how many scientists on the station. We get attacked by the Rebel Alliance. There's rebels running everywhere, shooting guys; stormtroopers shooting back, officers either doing the same or cowering with the scientists, grenades all over... We try to hold choke points, and when we inevitably have to fall back, we use our prior knowledge of the station (a detailed map) to circle around and hit them where it hurts. Even so, the party dwindles - Wookies wipe out a defensive emplacement, a Bothan comes out of nowhere to backstab one of us... best death any of us got was 2 guys who hijacked one of the tanks the rebels brought. After it was too damaged for the engie (me) to keep up, they charged into a landing bay that had 3 more in it and blew everyone there up. They gave me their rifles first, though, and... last man standing, versus another 130 rebels. (I guess the GM wanted us to lose; it was a one-shot.) I holed up in a hangar, fiddled with comms to lure rebels to me, and occasionally jacked a tank briefly (it's less effective without a gunner and engineer.) There were a few close calls, but lots of bacta and luck saved my sorry hide, and I won. Not a single rebel left alive on the base, and lots of incriminating evidence on their ships and equipment of who was backing them. For the Empire!
Really, that whole game was a rollercoaster of narrow saves. I'm just lucky the research facility had so much medical crap I could jury-rig.
Things might've played out differently if their tanks didn't have rapid-fire rocket-launcher turrets, given that our armor helped a tiny bit against plain ol' blasters and grenades. Really, the grenades were only a problem if we got immobilized or stuck in a tight corridor.
Strun was the Dragonborn Fighter I used because I wanted to focus on his breath weapon (lighting). His mount was either a hippogryph or a griffyn, I can't remember, and his name was Nuptup. He was quite helpful a number of times, particularly because the DM gave us a floating castle as a home base (we were level six at the time). But I did feel underwhelmed, all I wanted was one aerial combat, just one.
At least this gives me ideas for my campaign (fighting in freefall).
Sadly, the DM rules that because my companion wasn't trained for riding, I wasn't allowed to do that. By the time I was able to train Romulus for the task, I was already fourth level, which meant I was getting more mileage out of wild shape than wolfing my opponents' wolves before my wolf could get wolfed.
Now I'm starting to more understand your name.
Ehhh... I guess RISK could be a nice game... if someone tries to institute a UN and stop the fighting...
I was playing green, and was losing for sure, as I was left with a single soldier in one country section in North America. One of my opponents - who enjoyed overkill - moved a massive force of tanks, horsemen, and troops at me. Everyone around the table was certain I'd lose.
After a long sequence of unbelievable rolls, my lone soldier was left standing, and the entire enemy force - which belonged to the player in control of Europe - was wiped out.
One of the other players - who had a humorous disposition and was good at quick small art - promptly drew a tiny Risk soldier sized vest with the American flag on it, placed it on said soldier, and proclaimed him to be Captain America.
From that lone soldier, I then went on to win the game. None of us took the game seriously after that.
Our party had to take out a witness who'd seen one of our allies involved in some shady dealings that would have required us to be fugitives. Well we kinda got screwed up and captured. They were going to kill us once they found out who we were working for. Well my Ninja had plunked a lot of points into Escape Artist, managed to free herself, set the building on fire and during the chaos picked off the target and saved the party. Unfortunately we'd all been unmasked so while I got THE target we then had seven new witnesses and ended up fleeing. . .and we're living in constant fear because the Butler is apparently Walter C. Dolnaez and he's pissed I murdered Sir Integra. . .but we're dealing.
When I play wizards I take craft wand and craft basic attacking spells like fireball, lining bolt, magic missile, etc. so I can save my slots for utility spells, and ones of those I wind up using often are next up on the wand list. If I can I try and craft eternal wands if the DM allows it: they never run out of magic, but can be used only three times per day. In my opinion if you need more than three fireballs a day, something has gone horribly wrong.
...uh oh.
Special mention goes to having a Soldier class in a game where everyone is a soldier.
Monks needed a less ridiculously overpriced way to get enhancement bonuses so UE has an item to enhance unarmed strikes at weapon prices that isn't compatible with Flurry and an armor enchantment that boosts unarmed strikes and grapple that can't go on bracers of armor.
That was a really bad quarter for monk fans.
We had entered a giant tower and got ambushed by six level 20 npcs, (2 archers, 2 rogues, 2 fighters,) an efreeti fighter, and a Great Wyrm Red Dragon with about 20 levels of sorcerer or wizard. The healer/casters were in a group at the door, the melee people had engaged the npcs elsewhere, and the dragon opened up with a potshot in the air and flanking with his efreeti. My alchemist was also separated, dealing with a couple of the archers who were killing us.
The dragon stopped time, threw up some prismatic walls between me, the fighter, and the rogue and the rest of the party, and healed his closest follower. The party needed at least one round for crowd control and to recuperate or we would wipe.
So my Alchemist had used Twin form to create a full double of himself, fluid form to increase his reach, and had the wings discovery. The double had spent the previous turn moving and drawing out a bag in one hand and a small piece of black cloth in another...
My turn comes and the double flies to the top of the wall and as a free action reaches over it and drops the portable hole into the bag of holding XD. The black hole sucked the dragon and the clone into the Astral plane, and the dragon had to spend two rounds to heal and return, in which we killed the followers and regrouped to slaughter it in two rounds.
It's a trait called motherly love. Anything cute or childlike, I cannot harm, and there's a pretty high will save to resist running over and giving it love. Yes, even if it's demonic. In addition, if I fail my will save, I will protect the cute thing as if it were my own child. Whatever splat book I got it from said it was a flaw, and it gave some pretty good bonuses, including a barbarian like rage if the cute thing was killed, which I could use to dominate on the battlefield. GM ruled that it should be a trait, not a flaw, and took away the TWO feats that the flaw gave me. My character was now very, very broken, because he also decided that I can't have the mourning rage ability with it. So it went from being a very powerful, if dangerous, flaw, to an extremely dangerous trait that put the whole party at risk. At one point, the GM tossed in a bear cub after the party had stopped to make camp. We had to fight a bear. Then he ruled that the noise woke the rest of the bears in the cave, so we had to kill eight more while low on health and spells. And I had aggro from every single one.
Yeah. I will never use that flaw again.
Unless I can keep it as a flaw, intact. Then I might once again play Urist Kittenbearer, of the mantle of many pockets, containing my many beloved kittens and other assorted cute little pets in my pockets.
Breed any good mermaids lately?
...great, now I'm actually craving carp. WASN'T TOMATO-AUGMENTED CHILI GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU, STOMACH?
That makes me wonder, what might unicorn flesh taste like?
Apparently I hop from train to train of thought even more easily than usual when it's 40 minutes later than I thought.
Why do I keep typing more then I feel like I should here?
I don't like that game for similar reasons I don't like Minecraft.
Tekkit rocks, by the way. I net around 17,000 iron per hour, then I have that automatically turned into iron blocks. After that, every other eight iron blocks are used to a single gold block, and every other eight gold blocks are used to make a single diamond block.
And this is all thanks to 40+ villagers I have moved in two tiny tiny rooms. They are held hostage and forced to construct iron golems for me to kill and harvest the iron from the corpses.
I have a chicken farm where live chickens are dropped into blenders, and proccessed into solid blocks of raw meat product. And the whole thing is powered by the fires of hell!
I know biofuel is easier to get the proper amount of power from, but then the meat wouldn't be lightly seasoned with the eternally honey roasted souls of the forsaken.
Wait! I haven't told you about how I burned off the forests to strip mine resources all the way down to bedrock, or how I trapped a whole village of desert natives in pokeballs for forced breeding in dangerous cloning machines to populate my iron farms!
Or the way I completely drained ten chunks of lava from hell powering everything until I figured out how to make it respawn at a decent rate! Or how I travel to hell and murder all the natives to mine the rich resources available, slaughtering them all with my fist mounted railgun, buzzsaw gun, and megabuster, along with a shotgun if I start to get bored!
Also how I'm building a death wagon on the moon to genocide the natives into submission before they can steal our women!
And I pretty much do the same kinds of things in Dwarf Fortress, except with more boobytraps and menacing spikes. And intentionally becoming one of the cursed undead, so nothing can kill me. And forcibly recruiting soapmakers into my personal army in order to use them as weapon factories. See, you grab them, and pop a tooth out with your superhuman wrestling power. Then you throw that tooth at your enemies so hard their heads explode! Each follower provides the following: 32 teeth, ten fingers, ten toes, two feet, two legs, two hands, two arms, assorted bones and internal organs, a gwad, and a torso.
That's a lot of ammunition, not counting thr vomit, and the infinite blood which can be used to turn the seas into blood, thus killing all the sea monsters forever.
I lost my point. Has anybody seen it? It's probably near some broken railroad tracks and a wrecked train of thought.
Then they returned to town. They bought some potions, got their other party member, and four more hirelings. The party was now eight strong: two level one warriors, two level two warriors, a level three warrior, the level two PCs, and the warlock. They went back into the forest. The encounters remaining wore them down, and slowly picked off hirelings. When they got to the center, they found an obelisk that was the cause of the undead. At this point, everyone was down some health, and only the level three warrior and a single level two warrior remained of the hirelings. They encounter two skeletal owlbears, and a shadow. The party goes into the final fight, and a few unlucky crits from the enemies turns the fight a bit sour. First, both warriors go down. Then the sorceror, and finally the warlock. There remains a single skeletal owlbear of the enemies. The only one left conscious was the second level wizard. He had no spells remaining, three hitpoints, and seven strength. Rather than run, he charges the enemy. He manages to hit, barely, and rolls max damage. Exactly enough to kill the enemy. The players still rate that as one of the best quests, and fights, that I've done in a long time.
What really annoyed me during that battle was that I kept telling the Gunslinger and Sorcerer to shoot the metal container since they where the only ones who could damage it :/ oh well such is life.
Also, I regret buying a shortbow for my Elvish Monk.
Because nearly the same thing happened to me when I did that adventure: no dedicated healer so the DM gave us free potions, nearly TPK'd by the boss, and one lucky Acid Splash winning the fight. As soon as I got handed my Chronicle sheet, I bought a Cure Light Wounds wand.
That was it our Sorcerer usually played as a Cleric and he figured he'd play as his Gnome Sorcerer and just use the wands with him. HOWEVER he forgot to give himself the skill Use Magic Device and since no one could heal we went to 0 hp OFTEN in that game. Funny enough though nobody actually went below 0 during that mission. It was kind of a good thing that he didn't play cleric too, even though his cleric could have done everything that quest asked for if it wasn't for Acid Splash we would never of beaten that boss.
There was another time where my character was facing off against a strength build amazon, and I offer my hand for a handshake, and the amazon reaches out just as our team leader goes, "No, it's a trap!" and the DM reaches around and mimicks punching me with his other hand. And then refused to listen to reason when I start to argue, "You do realize I can almost reach the speed of light on foot, right? I should be able to dodge a human fist." 'Nope, no dodging, she has you right where she wants you.' and then wondered why my character was originally going to be a hell of a lot darker than she ended up.
I realized this part a couple of weeks ago, even though that particular game died years back, thanks to everyone going separate ways, but, my character was right on the verge of walking off the team, well, running, she didn't 'walk' for any reason because it was just insane to her that people were being killed over an old title in something that was supposed to be friendly competition. Before she joined the team, she was in track, as the team lead, and a multitude of other extra-curriculars, so, to be a part of something so seemingly unregulated was wearing on her nerves. Plus, the constantly ending up back in the hospital every other week was starting to get really old.
I don't really have any last minute saves but I do have a halo story.
It was headhunter, on Reach, I was on a mongoose, I had picked up so many skulls I no longer had a number over my head just a star. I was driving as fast as I could to the goal with everyone shooting at me and a warthog on my tail. I would never had made it had it not been for my best friend providing sniper support from across the map
And I went to click on a word to spell check it and hit post comment on accident hence this little box under my comment
So, the story progresses and his supply lines get shut down, assets frozen, essentially snowed. Some ghouls and other vampires bust into the house and start tearing the place apart. My grel is kicking ass and the other two players are holding their own. Suddenly, a turn before my buddy does something wild, the gm looks to me and says, you smell napthline (early gas) fumes from upstairs. I sat there, and grimace as he lit his house on fire, which blew the fuck out of it. Literally, the PC's only survived the massive amounts of damage by quick thinking (I hid under what amounted to a stone bar using a dead body as a meat shield) or be getting real lucky and ending up outside the kill zone.
Buyers remorse, we had a Warblade in our 3.5 game. EVERYTHING he had made me want it. Don't know what they are? They are GM bane in a bottle.