Sunday

[dr4b]

I really, really, really, really, REALLY hate how addictive "Run To You" is. Maybe I ought to go play some PIU today later. Hmm, it's nickjong's birthday - we could drag him to D&B :)

No, so anyway, today there was Carl D&D, which went kind of annoyingly... I had a big rules debate - namely, can you make your players make saving throws when they aren't actually saving against anything? and left at the end screaming at him and walking out. Of course, after 20 minutes of pinball and thinking I realized that I suck and called him to apologize. But, the session really sucked for me. I haven't had much of an attention span lately for D&D... I dunno if it's because the groups are too big or if it's just me.

I did run into bunches of people in the UC though. Saw Roman, and ran into some PGSS people on their way to dinner.. Neil Simonetti is still doing math for them. Geez, he was one of *my* TA's, 9 years ago. Some of my students from 96-98 are various forms of TAs and reslife people, which is also sort of scary. And so on.

After all that I went to Sunday dinner. We grilled! Wheeeeeee! Also Lori's sister is in town now, which was sort of fun. Paul and Mary showed up, and I hadn't seen them since like April. Actually, I hadn't seen Ralph in a while either. It was cool to show off my ring more, and Lori lent me a bunch of wedding books. (It seems to be a theme.) The cats are huge now - not really kittens anymore. Also, turkey burgers are tastier than I thought they'd be. Ralph and Lori's one-year-old wedding cake also wasn't so bad, although I was just really really full at that point. We played a game called Gouda Gouda which involved trying to get your mice to the top of a thingy so you could get some cheese. It was a lot of dice rolling but was surprisingly complicated.

I drove home. I hate street cleaning. Hi.

Comments

Issues

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

The not telling you it was poisonous was an error on my part. :-/ Mostly you successfully found it because I panicked, thinking "Oh shit, if they run back to town for the 12th level cleric, it'll throw most of the rest of the plotline completely off. Oh good, they're going for a local solution--better make it work."

On the other hand, I cannot repent the tweaking of Dan, who almost always deserves it. He was very disappointed to learn that monsters in this world do occaisionally have Sonic resistance, since he was counting on the Monster Manual to glean general monster characteristics. :)

As a related issue, you cannot detect incubating diseases with anything less than a spectacular (25-30+) heal check, because there are no symptoms worth noting--they get lost in the general noise. Lycanthropy in particular cannot be detected at all because there are no symptoms except under certain conditions (full moon, stress of combat, etc). I probably should have explained this better, or indeed at all. :-/

Aside from that, it is not and cannot be the case that every time the player makes a save the character knows about it or feels something. The prime example is diseases: A person who doesn't know he has a major disease sneezes (covering his mouth) in the back room of a store, then comes out and shakes hands with the characters. They all make fortitude saves right then to avoid catching the disease, but the characters feel absolutely nothing until a few days later when the disease stops incubating, or if they passed, they feel nothing at all ever. The players using the logic "oops, we just had to make fort saves but nothing obvious happened--better go see the healers and get checked out" is not to be desired. This is why I was surprised when you said "If we hadn't had to make those fort saves, we wouldn't have..." even after I said you felt nothing.

Bleh. I think the solution to this is just to ask you all for save modifiers at the beginning of the session, and then roll a lot of d20s constantly.

Re: Issues

[dr4b]

The problem here is that nothing bad happened to Dan's character. I think that's what pisses me off the most about it. I guess I thought Kevin's strength was much lower - if Dan had taken the wolfsbane it probably would have drained his strength to lower than 0 and killed him. And then it would have been cosmic justice for faking out the whole party into wasting time and charges on magic weapons and getting us all scared about werewolves and shit. But the thing is, since his character doesn't get into battle, he wasn't affected by it at all.

And my character is too stupid to do anything but go along with the shit he suggests, which is the really frustrating part. I don't think I like playing a dumb character in a campaign with a munchkin. I've played dumb characters many times before, and they can be a lot of fun, but not in certain circumstances. Janthina and Elif, for example, were the perfect pair of dumb elven chick fighters, and were a LOT of fun to play. Even Michiko, the dumb bard/rogue/prostitute, was really amusing. But, I guess my last few characters have had ints of 14+, which has been nice, since I don't have to come up with stuff and then go "but my character is too stupid to figure this out".

Re: Issues

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.
This is true--Dan's character is still healthy. Must plan more carefully in the future, although probably nothing like this will happen again.
On the other hand, in the future if Dan's character makes any assertions at all ("They're Hylfigs! We can only hurt them with granite weapons!", "The mage surely won't notice us sneaking in, I'll cast this Invisibility spell!") are you going to believe him?

Feel free to air random suggestions, especially if you think you can pass them off under Wis. Stifling yourself sucks. Perhaps more opportunities to smite evil and less time chasing after elusive NPCs is also in order.

With some few exceptions like shadows, I'm sure (as in, I just looked it up (DMG 72)) that Con loss is the only one that kills you. If your Str falls to 0 you're still alive, you just can't move.