OMG the DM is killing us!

That headline deserves an explanation, and I’m the only guy that can provide one

The new RPG group met today with two sessions, one early, then a second after a dinner break. The first session was Not Good for the party, as our Ranger player was unable to attend leaving the Rogue, my Warlock, and the NPC Bard who is still a level one character. After the second encounter we had a TPK, again. The monsters the DM keeps throwing at us don’t attack our HP, they deplete or damage attributes, which means that additional encounters are at significant disadvantage to the party, leading to frequent Total Party Killed results. These are interesting encounters, and fun to play, but the party is just so weak that we can’t handle attribute damaging monsters. It doesn’t help that under this gaming universe every other encounter is like a hentai video with all the monsters wanting to rape us.

The first encounter of the day was with flowers that depleted our Wisdom stats, which caused serious problems with the next encounter with spot and listen checks, which in turn caused our Rogue to botch Find Trap checks. This is something you don’t want, because the squishies can really get hurt when the trap is set to trigger on the second person to pass. Fortunately our squishy was third to pass that particular trap and the second character had a lot of hit points.

The next encounter was with a Giant Spider, which my character took out because he is arachnophobic and went into panic mode and fired shot after shot of Eldritch Blast combined with Orgasmic Blast, an attack that causes the victim to have an immediate full-body orgasm and be paralyzed for one round and reduced attack and defend for caster level rounds or 5 rounds for my character at this time. This is the most devastating attack my character can use at this level, and it was used over and over. This lead to a quick and decisive kill and overkill as not only did my character repeatedly blast the spider it blasted every last one of the eggs it discharged as it died until they were nothing but ash.

The next encounter was only a few feet away from the spider as we ran into a Mimic pretending to be a door. As our Rogue was checking it for traps it captured her with adhesive skin. This meant that everyone with any kind of ranged attack needed to use the Precise Shot feat to prevent hitting the Rogue. Eventually the Warlock was able to kill the Mimic and then we used her Everflowing Mug to dispense enough pure alcohol to dissolve the adhesive which remained active after the monster died. This was accompanied with yelps of pain from the Rogue as every cut and scratch she got in this encounter was flushed repeatedly with a mixture of the corrosive adhesive from the monster and the alcohol.

The next problem was trying to get through the hidden ceiling hatch over the wall area where the Mimic attacked us, as none of us were tall enough to reach it. We ended up cutting the spider apart and stacking the bits up high enough that the Rogue could find the trap door, only to have to blast the lock off the door to get it open. Doing this was Not Quiet, but the repeated blasting noises alerted monsters that there was a BAMF or two on the way that had enough power to blast through doors or walls and not worry about it.

After getting in the chamber we found on the other side of the door we encountered a slug like creature with tentacles that also turned out to be pretty vulnerable to the Eldritch/Orgasmic Blast combination but not before doing significant damage to the Rogue. After doing some minor repairs to the Rogue we found another creature locked in one of a wall full of prison cells, which ended up with all of the party PCs unconscious and the NPC flagging down another character to rescue us.

All in all, a fun afternoon/evening, if somewhat dangerous to our characters.

PSA, Opus the Poet

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Good news, bad news and an end of an era, on Wreck-Free Sunday

First the good news, Blue is back and seems to be a repairable wreck. The big problem is getting the right seat cover to replace the now-white formerly-black one that came on the bike. The ones at RANS bike store look like they were made for the later model crank-forward bikes, which means replacing the whole seat just to get one with a usable seat cover.

The Full List, so far:

Seat cover/new seat
Rear derailler
New tire tubes
New shifters
New Chain
New rear cluster
Computer battery
Brake pads
Taillight (requires fabricating another bracket to install)

Rough estimate on costs for repairs is $300 doing it cheap, and $600 doing it the way Blue deserves to have it done. Yeah, I think I found a new candidate for the steel-toed boots and shin guards, bike thief…

Now about that “end of an era” in the headline. Yesterday was the last game for the RPG group as we lost both of our GMs. One will be leaving Texas tomorrow for OH, and the other will be leaving for OK sometime in the next two weeks. This is the same group I have been playing with since 01/2011 and I still have my original character from that first game, a D&D3.5 Warlock that is now 9th level after surviving several low XP adventures. My Eldritch Blast is raised to 7d6 after finding a Chaucible of Eldritch Power on a dungeon crawl (some critter was using it to keep warm in the dungeon). My second 3.5 Warlock was up to 7th level after many target-rich adventures in a short span, and buying another Chaucible in an actual magick shoppe at 6th level has a 5d6 damage Eldritch Blast. I created several other characters for other game systems along the way, but Sparrow and his son Sparrow Jr. were my first two since I started playing again for the first time in about 25 years. So, I have a little sorrow about no longer playing those characters.

And I think this has been an emotional enough trip through the weekend, so I’m stopping it here.

PSA, Opus the (unkillable badass) Poet

It was a good day yesterday, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Yesterday was the last day for a veggie restaurant owned by a friend of the family as the building was sold out from under them and they lost their lease. They had an all-you-care-to-eat lunch buffet to close things down and I did my best to make sure they didn’t have any leftovers. After I waddled out of the restaurant I went to the RPG where I had to level up Jr. for the quest for the scepter game. Sparrow Jr. is now a 7th level Warlock with the ability to see normally in total darkness as well as see invisible creatures (unless they are using Greater Invisibility). With the gold he has found in this quest he purchased a Chasuble of Fell Power that adds 2d6 to his Eldrich Blast and Eldrich Spear, during the restock run in the major city after leveling up. This means that he has the firepower of a 9th level Warlock or several archers with strength bonuses on their bows (and Sparrow is much more likely to hit as the Eldrich Blast and Spear are both ranged touch attacks).

That item buff and tactics came in handy in yesterday’s encounter as we finally hacked our way to the center of the lost city and found the statue we have been looking for since we started this quest to lead us to the next clue to find the scepter that could destroy the world in the wrong hands. All we can find out about this scepter is that it is currently lost, but we are racing a litch to get to it. The kicker is that the clues are only available to characters of Good alignment, which categorically excludes all litches.

When we got to the statue we found what at first seemed like a magic ritual, but after observation turned out to be a religious service to an evil god. Among the “faithful” were 6 Mind Flayers. Since we couldn’t get to the statue with the people worshipping an evil god there we busted up the service. There were two problems here. Some of the Mind Flayers have Spell Resistance so we magic users were up the proverbial creek battling them, but there were enough of the ones without Spell Resistance that we still could get a few hits in. And by a “few hits” I really mean “hitting with enough damage that they go so negative in hit points they explode”. I made one blow up and one of the other magic users did the same thing to another. And one of our melee fighters did the same to one of the ones that had Spell Resistance. Others were taken out with somewhat less spectacular ends, but none of them were able to get any of their attacks off because one of our magic users managed to get a web spell off against the human worshippers that effectively took them out of the battle, and then another one of our spell-casters used other area-effect spells to keep the humans “otherwise occupied” than with us.

After the battle we found the statue we had been looking for, but could not figure out how to read the clue because the clue was under the knee of the kneeling statue until my character walked up to ask if he could help. The statue stood up and recited the clue to my character. It turns out Sparrow Jr. is the only good-aligned member of the party, and the clues are only available to characters of Good alignment. The rest of the crew did the usual loot and then burn the bodies to dispose of them. Since my character has detect magic at will all items were run by me to separate magic items from mere baubles but we had to end the session before we could find out what we had won from the battle.

So, it was a good Saturday for me, and then I got a whole bunch of things taken care of after morning services before I came home. I paid the $0.04 monthly premium on my Obamacare insurance after I picked up the weekly transit pass for Mrs. the Poet to make it to her last week of school at her job taking the flavor out of the kids’ food. Add to the really great service at church this morning (not worshiping an evil god 😉 ) and my Sunday has been really good. And there were lots of races today, IndyCar from Belle Isle Detroit, Sprint Cup from Dover, and NHRA Summernationals from Englishtown NJ. That’s a lot of racing. And the drag racers are still at it.

I’m going to end this post now, because I’m really enjoying what a great weekend I have been having.

PSA, Opus

My student seems to have disappeared when presented with actual study material on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well, when I presented my student with an actual lesson complete with homework the desire to learn the Craft seems to have evaporated, at the very least I have heard nothing more back. Pity, I thought I was taking a very logical approach to teaching a person how to handle something potentially dangerous by teaching the safety protocols first.

Yesterday’s RPG session went well, in spite of the fact that we were all leveling up from the previous session’s extremely high CR (lots of enemies with lots of HP and firepower). This resulted in enhancing my Eldrich Blast to 2d6, +1 for the new feats I got that enhanced my attack and damage for a total damage of 2d6+1. This caused me to score a couple of spectacular hits during the session. I have the Sickening Blast invocation that I use just about every time we get into combat against creatures that can be Sickened with a very high DC against Will save (some are immune to the effect), and the combination of 3-13 damage and incapacitating for one round and diminished attack for 9 more rounds is a real help to the party. I like that, and it works well with my character’s alignment (Chaotic Good). I stop things that hurt people from hurting them, and barf jokes are funny(gross).

As we began our session we had just holed up in a wind-swept alcove as a thundersnow storm settled on us. I set up our yurt so that some of the less climate-acclimated of the party could use its insulating properties to share body warmth and get good rest, and we stationed the Warforged party member that was immune to the cold and snow outside to stand watch and also hold one of the ground cloths across as much of the cave opening as possible to block the wind from the pack animals and party members not inside the yurt. As we tried to rest an invisible creature went around the edge of the wind break to get inside the camp where it was less freezing than the outside. After detecting him and identifying him as an Imp we warned him that he would be squashed like a bug if anything was attempted against the party. The next day we all went on our journeys. The storm had left thigh-deep snow and head-high drifts, but we managed to get to lower ground and continue the trek to the ruins we were told held some answers to our quests.

We went through another high CR encounter with a pair of Harpies working in tandem against the party with lots of damage to party members and my character getting off a shot at the second one trying to escape that caused it to crash into a tree and kill itself (don’t barf and fly, you might run into a tree). As the long-range marksman of the party I really liked that one. 😉 Nothing like preventing your enemy from knowing what’s coming and allowing FUD to run rampant, like earlier when we took out a scouting party to a man and had the battle half won against the remainder of the army when we encountered them almost ready to bolt at the first Eldrich Spear from deep cover. That encounter caused us to level again so now my little Warlock is 4th level and has another Invocation, which I chose as See the Unseen, which allows me to see invisible creatures and objects as well as having normal vision in any amount of light including total darkness. That might have been useful finding the Imp we dealt with during the snow storm. As it was I knew he was there from Detect Magic showing his magical aura from the spell he was using, but being able to see him directly would have been better.

After the Harpies we completed leveling up again and selected spells and whatnot, then went looking for treasure and for a statue that is supposed to hold a clue to our quest. What we found were several place settings of fine china (or the equivalent for that world) and 3 Mimics disguised as chests. Interesting thing when you cast Sicken on a Mimic treasure chest, they barf the coins they hold instead of less appealing things. Another interesting thing about Mimics is when they are suddenly sent very negative in HP they explode violently, which can cause damage to anyone who happens to be stuck to them. Sorry, Ventus, for the 12 HP of damage I caused you when the Mimic you had managed to almost completely engulf in your arms turned into a AP bomb with gold coin shrapnel. 😉

One other bit of news, I found a pickup truck and driver to get the new bike, but won’t be able to get it before Wednesday, So Wednesday I will go to the builder and get fitted to the bike, then load it for the trip back to the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell. As of this point I have no idea what kind of personality this bike will have and therefore no idea of even the gender of the name to give it. I’m leaning towards a name like Bull or Truck because this bike is essentially a 1/4 ton truck with only 2 wheels instead of 4, and of course no ICE polluting the air.

PAS, Opus