Twilight Sparkle: I rolled a Nat 20 on initiative!
DM: And I didn't. Go for it.
Twilight Sparkle: These are probably minions, and there's no reason not to burn our Dailies, right? I cast Fountain of Flame! Centered on the door so no one else can sneak up behind us!
DM: Those are all hits! A zone of raging fire occupies the doorway.
Rarity: You put that a little… close to us.
Twilight Sparkle: I use my move action to get away.
DM: Next up at bat is… Fluttershy, somehow.
Fluttershy: Oh. Um… I use Eagle's Splendor on Pinkie Pie? So she gets a bonus to Charisma and Will?
Pinkie Pie: Sweet!
Fluttershy: Then, um… Sorry, it's been a while, give me a second… That was my minor action, so… I use Sudden Overgrowth for… 12 damage all around me. And now I have an aura 1 until the encounter's over? Difficult terrain for enemies and they grant combat advantage.
DM: Nice tactics, Fluttershy! Of course, you might become a priority target now…
Fluttershy: Eep.
Couple things to keep in mind for this fight sequence going forward:
1) I've omitted the <roll> effects and the values of many dice to keep the pace up. What matters is hits, misses, and high or low damage.
2) Time in D&D combat is a little wonky - it's assumed everyone's actions overlap during the round, but turns are taken sequentially. So you might see some little rewinds here and there as other players' actions repeat their consequences in the background. Hard to avoid when you're portraying the table side of combat semi-realistically, though I think it makes for an interesting portrayal of what it's like inside the game. <shrug>
Got more Dusk City Outlaws/Tales of New Dunhaven today, too.
Session 11 - The Birthday Job, Part 1: LibsynYouTube
Notice: Guest comic submissions are still open until this arc is finished! Guidelines here.
In my D&D group the primary targets tend to be the fighter, the ranger, and the druid because we're the most deadly. Even though we have two wizards and a sorcerer in the group. Yeah, our arcane casters aren't too threatening.
My brother in a 5e game I'm in plays a half-elf dragon-blood sorcerer (fire based). His Armor Class is almost as good as me playing a paladin with +2 full plate and a +1 shield. He welcomes people trying to attack him. And he does an insane amount of damage. Also his hit points are really high.
It is similar to how I played Wizards with Staff of Defense in 4e. Most of the time my AC was higher than any tank class can get. So I tended to basically walk right in and tank for the group. Being a priority target is my goal.
Not to say I assume the FiD group is necessarily optimized, but (at least in 4E) if your enemies basically ever have a chance to chose who they get to focus on, then your controller/s and defender/s aren't doing their jobs.
If it's Tuesday, Dawn is probably in trouble again.
Also... Yeah... I've been in combat encounters where I was both spellcaster and priority target BEFORE the surprise round ended and I could cast a spell.
Sadly, and funnily enough, this was 3.5 and there was a scythe crit. I didn't contribute much to that fight. ;P
Be glad your game mechanics aren't based off of RuneQuest.
No roll for initiative, as strike order was based upon one of the player stats (been too many years for me to remember) -- though we did tend to modify the actual rules a bit; rather than having lowest stat (fastest response) announce and act first, we considered having the highest stat (slowest response) announce intent first. This allowed the faster reactions to adjust for what they "saw" the others were doing.
THEN came the dice rolling... lots of dice rolling, and table consultations... %ile for attack success, %ile for defence (parry/dodge) success, D12 for hit location, D<whatevers> for damage. Tables if either %ile was in the fumble range.
Yes, it was possible for one to successfully parry a fumbled attack! In which case the attacking weapon would take damage. It was also possible to do maximum damage to an already damaged arm or leg, or fail to get through the armor...
The most ridiculous resolution system I've ever seen is FASA's Doctor Who RPG, which features a massive table that adjudicates EVERY SINGLE ACTION YOU TAKE. It's pretty much impossible to memorize, so everyone has to have their own copy in front of them.
Personally, I don't like games to overly resemble math homework.
But I did much prefer RuneQuest's "reality" (the fumble table supposedly incorporated things that actually occurred in SCA melee fights) over the AD&D concept (in which putting on enough armor to make one sluggish made one harder to hit -- but if hit one took full damage; RQ armor reduced damage, but didn't really make one harder to hit).
I wonder... in 'Too Many Pinkie Pies,' was that the reason they were all so dumb? One Pinkie Pie averaged over a few dozen bodies? And then as the amount of territory it was spread over became lessened, the ones who were left became more and more like the real Pinkie until the only one who didn't show up for the test got all of the remainder?
My take was that the mirror pool doesn't create an exact copy – just a Flanderized version with only the essence of their most exaggerated traits.
Like, if the mirror pool made a copy of me, it'd be doubting itself all the time but also constantly starting and giving up on new creative bucket-list projects at a psychotic pace. But I'm more than that. Mostly.
I took it to also have a lot to do with the intent of the pony being duplicated. Which is why the first one(s) created by Pinkie herself are pretty similar to Pinkie herself, albeit more absentminded and seemingly created without all of her knowledge and memories (as seen by her having to be told who Pinkie's friends are), as Pinkie's intent was to be able to spend time with two of her friends at once.
Whereas when the clones start making clones of themselves their intents are more and more single-minded resulting in increasingly degraded and as you say Spud, Flanderized versions of Pinkie.
Sadly, recently our party lost the Paladin and the Cleric both during the two end battles for our episode, in that order. The paladin kind of had it coming, this guy was playing him as stubborn, borderline evil, had no sense of tactics and had already lost his paladin powers once (He got them back by cutting off his own ear as penance. Squick.) He refused to back down and let a troll finish off a miniboss for us. He became the target of both of them as a result, and went down to a massive crit.
The cleric could have been entirely avoided, sadly. However the player using him was not very well versed in good cleric-ing and never memorized any utility spells like Sanctuary, Protection from Evil, or the like. Just healing. 100% healing in every spell slot with the exception of cause fear and darkness, which he never used. He also had an amulet of false life, intended to be used at the start of any given battle. Which he never used. :|
Suffice to say he became a priority target like Fluttershy did here (See? My rambling is connected to this somehow! xD) and with no way to keep himself safe while he was healing our fighters, he got cut down to -- of course -- a massive 36 damage crit when he had 7 hp and lost the initiative roll to the villain.
The moral of the story: Being a 5 foot step away from the boss as a healer is an extremely bad idea unless you're invisible or have sanctuary, or some other form of immunity from being the target of an attack.
To be fair if i was running an intelligent boss in a dnd system i'd LET an all heal cleric stand untill last, Healing is the least action efficient action possible in the game as it eats up 2 move actions and 1 standard to undo 1/4th of the damage 1 standard attack does, so by healing mid combat the cleric is actually helping the enemy more than he's helping his own party just as if he was spamming stun and entangle spells on them.
I don't know how it is in 4th ed+, but in 3.5 the rouge is a DPS MACHINE. So the Cleric keeping that guy healthy is more damage than anything he could do if they are even CLOSE to the same level.
In 3.5 healing the cleric costs the clerics standard action to cast it, and the move action of both the cleric and the rogue to get into a position where the cleric can touch the rogue. This means the rogue can't full attack that turn and looses between 1 and 6 attacks that round to get healed by less than the minimum damage of 1 attack. The cleric would literally be better off doing nothing than casting that healing spell.
Why is the Rogue moving? The Cleric is Tanky, he should be going to the Rogue to heal him, the rogue shouldn't have to disengage to get healed.
Also Cure Light heals 1d8+Caster level points; if your opponent is using longswords or less, your healing is entirely on par with damage per dice dealt. NOT literally "less than the minimum damage of 1 attack".
Couple things to keep in mind for this fight sequence going forward:
1) I've omitted the <roll> effects and the values of many dice to keep the pace up. What matters is hits, misses, and high or low damage.
2) Time in D&D combat is a little wonky - it's assumed everyone's actions overlap during the round, but turns are taken sequentially. So you might see some little rewinds here and there as other players' actions repeat their consequences in the background. Hard to avoid when you're portraying the table side of combat semi-realistically, though I think it makes for an interesting portrayal of what it's like inside the game. <shrug>
Got more Dusk City Outlaws/Tales of New Dunhaven today, too.
Session 11 - The Birthday Job, Part 1: Libsyn YouTube