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Axiem posted:Maybe there's a Contingency True Res on the room they're in, so when Roy succumbs to everyone being a dominated jerk, he suddenly comes back at full strength and...something something... True Res still needs the undead form to be destroyed first. It would have to be some special Epic Resurrection spell, which would feel like a bit of an rear end-pull. Or the payoff could include a trap of some kind to insta-destroy Durkula, that triggers before the resurrection spell, but it would have to be some pretty hardcore stuff to reliably dust a powerful vampire cleric. Some way of suddenly lighting up the cavern with sunlight would work, but he still has the staff for that.
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Jul 17, 2018 21:34
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I wasn't thinking it would trigger on Durkon. I was thinking it would trigger on Roy.
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Jul 17, 2018 21:58
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NihilCredo posted:True Res still needs the undead form to be destroyed first. It would have to be some special Epic Resurrection spell, which would feel like a bit of an rear end-pull. Didn't he leave his staff behind for his "successor" back at the Godsmoot, though, which subsequently got broken by Roy?
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Jul 17, 2018 22:17
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Colonel Cool posted:And all dice get rolled out in the open so everyone can see everything's above board too. But then you can't roll a dice for no reason whatsoever behind the screen and then go "hmm... INT-eresting."
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Jul 17, 2018 23:14
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World Famous W posted:I fudge a lot of rolls as dm because rerolling characters for the group will kill the evening and life makes it hard enough to meet up as often as we would like anyways. I basically just have everything happen whenever I want and just pretend to roll dice. Monsters hit and miss whenever I feel it would be most dramatic and fun, I add or subtract tons of HP on the fly, I just generally make poo poo up. I've gotten tons of compliments on my games.
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Jul 17, 2018 23:17
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Phenotype posted:If you guys are running a real DnD session, do you end up fudging things to avoid a TPK most of the time? I've never played more than a handful of times, but I'm thinking of Baldur's Gate or other video games where they're satisfyingly difficult, but I'll take a few Game Overs before I finish because I didn't play quite right. How would you handle a RL situation where your party forgot to immediately restore Protection from Evil and 4 of them failed their Domination saves and killed the other two? Part of what I think is cool about DnD is how lethal it is, but in practice how can you create challenging encounters without starting the campaign over or rolling up new characters every time they mess up? We open roll, so sometimes people just die. We enjoy the tension, but I do avoid using the more powerful spells or abilities when the party is on the ropes due to a series of bad rolls and could do with a breather. Also, like others have said, the party being defeated does not necessarily mean death happened. Often it just means they didn't stop the bad dudes from doing a bad thing, or maybe they're now prisoners. That said, I've had two TPK's in 14 years of running games (not counting one-shots, where that has definitely happened more, specially when the purpose of those was to stress test the combat), so it happens.
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Jul 17, 2018 23:41
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The Bhaalspawn has died, the chain of destiny has been broken. Would you like to continue to play in the doomed world you have created?
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Jul 17, 2018 23:48
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The way I see it, fudging a dice roll is like disposing of a corpse. The question isn't whether or not you should be doing it, it's how you avoid getting into the situation where it's necessary.
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Jul 18, 2018 00:12
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Honestly, the risk of a TPK is just part of playing D&D. If you don't want to deal with that there's lots of other systems where PC death isn't really on the table, no cheating required.
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Jul 18, 2018 00:16
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Or it's cool if ya say gently caress the rules as long as your players have fun
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Jul 18, 2018 01:43
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I try to keep to an "everyone has their own way to play, quirks, motivations, etc" philosophy. With some groups and for some games, high lethality and dice falling where they may is a good fit. For others, you fudge a bit. In some games the systems deliberately work to cushion or redirect failures in order to keep the story alive, and in others the game rules are the cold laws of probability grinding the just and unjust alike. But anyway - man, that Durkon memory, what's the deal? What I don't get is how showing the vampire the memory can possibly help. I don't think it's really in Durkon's character to want to gloat, so I don't expect he's showing the vampire this long memory just so that when some trap goes off he'll know just how and why he's screwed. At the same time the vampire's already made such a big deal about how he knows Durkon's got an ulterior motive and is on high alert for tricks. If this was just a short sequence, like one double-page update, and Durkon showed him just the tail end of a memory to rub something in his face - maybe. This much buildup though I assume there's some payoff for Durkon to showing the memory but I can't figure out what it could be.
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Jul 18, 2018 04:43
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Yeah I'd never play in a game where the GM was fudging dice. But if it works for your group then more power to ya.
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Jul 18, 2018 06:31
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There are much better, non-player facing ways to fudge fights. I usually plan out enemies to certain abilities that I can just not use if the fight is turning out to go badly against the players, or use those abilities more often if they're having an easy time. Minions are a big one, but just fudging how often a dragon is allowed to use it's breath weapon or what the exact spells a caster has prepared can help you ensure a fight is closer to the right level of challenging, without the players even needing to know.
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Jul 18, 2018 07:01
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It seems to me that Durkula is being lulled into doing the classic villain leader mistake of letting his minions fight for him while he mostly stands in front of a throne and taunts the heroes, and its because Durkon is showing him this very long memory. Why isn't he up in Roy's face meleeing him to death? Maybe that's the point of the memory.
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Jul 18, 2018 07:17
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I thought the memories were supposed to be more or less instant.
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Jul 18, 2018 07:41
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They unravel at the speed of plot.
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Jul 18, 2018 07:48
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Well we’ve also only seen what, four or five rounds of combat so far? That’s barely 30 seconds. Close enough to instant in my book. Though by that same token, a GM who takes 4-5 rounds to complete an instantaneous ability is clearly playing it fast and loose. The breakdown between combat time and noncombat time is always weird.
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Jul 18, 2018 07:52
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So what magical effect could be triggered by the review of a memory?
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Jul 18, 2018 08:05
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I remembered Explosive Runes this morning.
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Jul 18, 2018 08:09
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pseudorandom name posted:So what magical effect could be triggered by the review of a memory? Some sort of command word? We've seen he sometimes can't help but repeat lines in the memory he's currently watching.
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Jul 18, 2018 08:11
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Durkon knows enough of Yurkon's weaknesses that there'll be some kind of payoff for sure. His whole arc this book has been to show off exactly how resourceful Durkon is in spite of being the most passive member of the OotS, by turning his passivity up to 11. And we've been shown that Yurkon can speed up the pace of the memories when he wants, like when he sat through the entire first flashback while watching a lightning strike, but he's deliberately pacing it out so Durkon can watch all his friends get murdered, because Durkula is nothing if not an extremely basic gloater in the way Xykon and Tarquin aren't.
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Jul 18, 2018 12:18
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Vorgen posted:It seems to me that Durkula is being lulled into doing the classic villain leader mistake of letting his minions fight for him while he mostly stands in front of a throne and taunts the heroes, and its because Durkon is showing him this very long memory. Why isn't he up in Roy's face meleeing him to death? Maybe that's the point of the memory. Roy is a fighter who's spent the last five or ten levels specifically optimizing himself to melee a powerful undead caster. Durkula already tried getting up in Roy's face and meleeing him to death. Roy beat him up pretty hard and he had to run away. So it makes sense that Durkula wouldn't try that again.
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Jul 19, 2018 05:30
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http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1128.html Everybody's dead! Comic is over.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:02
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This revelation must have shaken vampire Durkon's moral underpinnings to his core, causing an immediate alignment change to lawful good.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:10
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Mystic Mongol posted:http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1128.html Okay yeah this confirms what I thought. Durkon has decided to teach the vampire morality the same way he learned it. Because good and evil aren't these innate attributes of who you are, they're lessons from a lifetime of experience of others exercising morality.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:10
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Mystic Mongol posted:http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1128.html Finally! 
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Jul 19, 2018 17:11
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Mystic Mongol posted:http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1128.html Nah the cat's still alive we're good. Minrah's the only one with X'ed out eyes.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:13
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Well, that is not at all what I was expecting. From the amount of preparation we saw the OotS pull off, you could probably puzzle out that the battle would go this way, but I did not expect Durkon's last memory to be that. That's incredibly in-character, though. Goddamn Durkon has been on fire this arc.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:14
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True Resurrection wasn't too far off the mark, then. Raise Dead requires 5000 gp worth of diamonds, and there are five bodies. Those five resurrected dwarves are the friends of Durkon's mother.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:27
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I’m actually kinda sad minrah is dead
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Jul 19, 2018 17:28
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The Order got truly monstrously unlucky here. Belkar failing his domination save was kind of a given, but Haley, Elan* and (especially) Hilgya should all have pretty good Will saves, and with Hilgya handing over her baby to Durkon, I think she might have failed her save twice in a row. If any one of them had resisted domination, this fight would have gone down very differently. *Bards have high Will progression, so despite his probable low Wisdom, Elan's resistance to domination should naturally be pretty good, surprising everyone.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:33
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Gwyneth Palpate posted:Those five resurrected dwarves are the friends of Durkon's mother. What Durkon's mom did was staggering in its generosity and ramifications.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:39
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kurona_bright posted:I’m actually kinda sad minrah is dead Agreed. 
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Jul 19, 2018 17:47
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jng2058 posted:Agreed. If only any high level clerics were available
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Jul 19, 2018 17:48
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Minrah was honestly extremely brave, because there's little more overwhelming than trying to participate in a fight with high level D&D characters when you're a low level scrub. None of your stuff works and you die in one attack. Meanwhile everyone around you is summoning forcefields and transforming into elementals and suchlike.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:49
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CapnAndy posted:Yup. Check them against the crowd here: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1086.html and getting name-checked here (apart from the dark-skinned female, whose son gets addressed instead): http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1088.html. And it explains why those five are offended when Sigdi tries to pay them back for anything. I hadn't noticed how much those memories focused on the same five people. Perhaps their complexions should have been a clue that they weren't actually related. That's doubly sweet - Sigdi not only gave them lives, she gave them a family too. They might still be alive.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:57
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Android Blues posted:Minrah was honestly extremely brave, because there's little more overwhelming than trying to participate in a fight with high level D&D characters when you're a low level scrub. None of your stuff works and you die in one attack. Meanwhile everyone around you is summoning forcefields and transforming into elementals and suchlike. Well, except for the fighter.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:58
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Hi Fuego! It's been a million years. Roy at least has some house rules to help him along. Having what is effectively a high damage ranged weapon that benefits from all his specialisation feats does a lot to make him more versatile. Any other fighter would be stuck using extremely terrible throwing weapons or a bow that doesn't scale with their strength or feat bonuses.
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Jul 19, 2018 18:02
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Hey. And I meant in a general "D&D 3.x/5e hates the fighter and by extension everyone who ever plays a fighter willingly" kind of way. Roy clearly has the benefit of being a protagonist in a story, rather than a glorified pack mule.
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Jul 19, 2018 18:08
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Wait so. She had 25k gold, and spent it to rez five strangers; then proceeded to pseudo adopt them into her clan as they had no family?
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Jul 19, 2018 20:22
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