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Kai Tave posted:THACOG = (Strength score + Lift subscore)x2 + (Constitution score + 1/2 Willpower score rounded up) + an additional value based on your current experience point total, plus any additional modifiers that may come into play such as with the Strong Back Improvement (which counter-intuitively does not actually modify your Lift subscore, though a lot of people houserule it so it works that way). The part that I've bolded there? It caused so many arguments at my table. This is the only spot in the core rules--so notwithstanding the Digesting Duck in Terror Tome V--that says to round a number without specifying what you're rounding to. My group was split among treating it like most instances of rounding-up in Quest Squires (round to the next 1/3); rounding to the next whole number; and, since no method was specified, rounding up to any number the player wanted. We never could come to an agreement, and ultimately settled on each player doing whichever they were most comfortable with. It turned out for the best, because the party never would have been able to survive the QM's brief obsession with "rivers of molten acid" if Scott's grease-halfling didn't have a good enough THACOG to carry the rest of the party while he was in flight. (He had been bitten by a werepterodactyl early in the campaign.) Comrade Gorbash posted:Sure it means everyone's going to get killed by Z11, but frankly the game goes completely off the rails after that point anyways, and you kick every shade of rear end until then. Did you enough encounters with shades of rear end for that to really matter? My QM had a religious objection to every Unliving [Spectral/Embodying] monster in the Ætherical Codex, so we never faced them.
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Feb 22, 2013 02:47
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:40 |
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So, uh, I need to categorically apologize to everyone who has ever lost a character in Questing Module 19: Diners of Dapthogg. It's probably my fault. One of the unusual things about the first few printings of Quest Squires is that they do not give magic-classes the option of "schools" of magic, just broad class spell lists--a wizard does wizard magic; a knight-ensorcellist does knight-ensorcellist magic; a sorcero-knight does sorcero-knight magic; etc. There's no incentive, beyond character concept, to specialize in fire-spells or illusion-spells or goat-spells. Meanwhile, the options for martial style specialization are incredibly elaborated, with 14 fight-schools in the core rules alone, and a handful added in most sourcebooks. Some of the fight-schools were ridiculously overpowered, "balanced" by things like the narrow selection of races and classes that could take them. This kind of "balance" led--at least at my table--to things like entire parties of Yeti Fighters and Frost-Halfling Barbaribjorns, because Snow Boxing was so powerful. Every barehanded attack deals freeze-type damage, thereby inflicting Shameful Shrinkage? Hell yes. But we would have abandoned Snow Boxing in a second, if we could have used the absolute pinnacle of death-dealing fight-school: Calamitous Cutlery Juggling. Simultaneously wield every knife and dagger you can carry? And attack with each one, every round? Sweet holy gently caress.  But there was a small problem: by the rules, Calamitous Cutlery Juggling was effectively impossible. Per the player book, any character who "holds firmly in hand part of a bird, root, or inanimate thing is treated as grasping it entire". We took the words to heart. Every one of our characters who expected to handle a bladed weapon of any type invested in heavy gauntlets so that they didn't cut off their own fingers, since holding the hilt meant, per the rules, also holding onto the blade. I was delighted, years later, to learn that this was the overwhelming majority interpretation of and in-game reaction to that rule. But to use Calamitous Cutlery Juggling, a character could not be wearing any kind of hand-covering. As far as we could tell, the rules made it impossible for this fight-school to even have been invented in Dragynrealm, let alone for our characters to learn it. It's fair to call Quigley notorious for his nearly absolute refusal to confess the existence of any error in Quest Squires. This would extend to claiming that simple typos, obvious composition mistakes, and quirky mechanical interactions were not only intentional, but were, in point of fact, absolutely necessary inclusions. If anyone is unfamiliar with it, the most infamous case is probably that of the map-creation guidelines in the first printing of The Tome of the Quest Master, which had the conversion scale backward: as printed, it instructed QMs to draw each inch of territory on ten miles of paper. When not a few people brought this to Tim's attention on the Quest Squires newsgroup--USENET being one of two reliable ways for a member of the general public to interact with him--Tim vehemently insisted that the scale correct, and "necessary to convey the epical scope and grandeur of Dragynrealm", and furthermore that using any other scale would "render the campaign invalid" and any QM he discovered doing so would have their Quest Mastery Commission summarily revoked. (Did anyone here send in the QMC application? If you still have your Charter of Commission certificate, scan and post that thing ASAP.) In the very next printing of the TotQM, of course, the scaling factors were corrected. To explain, Quigley added a footnote saying that "perhaps in some part thanks to" the existing Quest Squires releases, "the sphere of human imagination has finally expanded to the degree that it may now recognize the majesty of Dragynrealm" even if it were mapped at a workable scale. All of this took place a few years before I had any awareness of USENET, and so I only heard the stories much later. Regardless, the tone of the books themselves conveyed the message quite effectively, and that defined how my friends and I played Quest Squires: to the very best of our ability, we used all the rules, exactly as written, to the last detail. Just like God and Tim intended. And so, none of us used any of that sweet, sweet Calamitous Cutlery Juggling. This whole situation bothered me. If the fight-school was in a book, it had to exist in Dragynrealm--and there had to be a way I could make a character who could use it. If no one I knew could figure it out, then I had to take it to the highest source: Tim "Squigley" Quigley himself. As I mentioned, this was some time before I discovered USENET; I had to contact Tim the other, slower way, using the PO box address printed in every Quest Squires book. I wrote a letter explaining the conundrum as I saw it, and asked Mr. Quigley to reconcile it all for my group--we faithful players and our commissioned Quest Master. Five months passed without reply. I had forgotten that I ever sent the letter. My QM, though, must not have forgotten how vext I had been by the Calamitous Cutlery Juggling situation. When he showed up to run our regular game, brand new Quest Module 19 in-hand, he mentioned that I would be especially pleased with it. He refused to explain, or even to hint any further, until we played through--loving Quest Master Oath.  So we played our way through the module, battling all of the horrors of Dapthogg's waitress elementals, dodging perilous falls into bottomless coffee cups, facing Grease-Halfling cook staff. Thanks to some poor decisions, we had to battle the Master of Pies and the Spoonasaur simultaneously, but we eked out a win without any PC deaths. And if we could manage that, then nothing in that diner could kill us, right? Right? That's what we all agreed, before marching our characters confidently into Dapthogg's sanctum. Our QM smiled the poo poo-eating-est,  est grin you can imagine, and read right from the module:"WHO DARES CHALLENGE DAPTHOGG, PUISSANT ON LAND AND 'NEATH WAVE? FACE NOW THE MASTER OF THE ANCIENT ART OF CALAMITOUS CUTLERY JUGGLING!" My jaw must have hit the loving floor. The QM read on, describing Dapthogg emerging from the shadows, revealing that he was a Reverse Mertopus. We had encountered Reverse Merfolk many times, but Dapthogg was the very first Reverse Mertopus to appear in Quest Squires. Where the Reverse Merfolk had always been gentle, trustworthy, allies, Dapthogg was tentacled death on two legs. The key word there being tentacled. That aforementioned rule on holding things? Read it again. Note the "holds firmly in hand". This rear end in a top hat didn't have hands! On top of that, he got a THACOG multiplier from having four limbs for carrying--not only could safely carry blades, but carry a lot of them. And as a Calamitous Cutlery Juggler, he could attack with every one of them, every turn.  The encounter was, of course, a swift TPK for us. Based on Quest Module 19's reputation, I'm guessing that the same encounter was a TPK for most of the groups that played through it. I can never be completely certain, but by timing alone, it seems likely that Dapthogg was, at least in part, a characteristically Quigleyan response to my letter. I'm sorry, everyone, for the monster I helped unleash.
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Feb 25, 2013 04:10
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 Knowing that this is even possible is giving me the rising urge to get a group together and find a QM to run us through the entire food arc, plus Q-16 and maybe even Q-11 to give the proper context. With that mystery solved, another one that's bothered me for years: What the hell was the point of the Kindervolk? They were like High Halflings in every way, except not qualifying for anything that required Halflings or High Halflings in particular.
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Mar 1, 2013 02:05
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