The twist was that he was dead the whole time! The voice you heard was just a kobold with unusually strong lungs performing a prank.

I fucking knew it!

I gotta speak up more often about these things. I knew there was no way you'd let us wipe on a final boss like that, but I didn't figure you for such a softie, Pang.

It is less that I am a softie and more that I have a rich appreciation for anticlimax.

Not quite, Pang. Let the record show that you have an equal preference!

1 - Dungeon of Doom - Dragon fight (climactic!)
2 - Crusader - HBA confrontation (anticlimactic!)
3 - Haunting of Hargast - Von Versteckt (climactic!)
4 - All in the Same Boat - Warforged fight (anticlimactic!)
5 - Delicious and Moist - Orc thief (climactic!)
6 - Secret Cow Level - Murkelmor the dead (anticlimactic!)

"Kill a single orc minion, take his stuff" is pretty far from a climactic conclusion.

You could say the same thing about "lol, reaper bails us out again", but it was intended to be a climactic finish so I'll grant you that one.

Furthermore, the negotiations at the HBA are not a climax but merely a denouement; the climax was the nighttime ambush by the doppelganger bandit.

So I would therefore rate the adventures as CCCAAA rather than your judgement of CACACA.

(Not that there is an intentional pattern either way).


Addendum: looks like it's down to whether Acer wants to go on another boat ride or visit the theatre

However you care to slice the patterns, we're due for a climactic confrontation! :)

I could've sworn you yourself described the way the HBA negotiations ended as "anticlimactic"

I think this just proves that Zerg is full of caca

QUICK ADMINISTER MOUNTAIN DEW

All in the same boat was only an anticlimax because Deni got shuffled out of the party so we had run out of people willing to start on every npc we met, rather than opt for the puzzle solving and discourse option. I'm sure the fight would have been plenty climatic if it had kicked off.

Next time, if it looks like ending in an anticlimax, just set fire to whoever you're talking to or something, that tends to liven up conversations.

Alright Acer, time's up. Nothing personal but if I'm going to throw people out on the basis that they're delaying the game I have to be fair about it. First warning.

With no votes from Acer, the play adventure wins the vote and a new thread should be up sometime later today.

Fair enough. To prevent this from happening I'd like to put some motivations of Gordok on the table. Gordok doesn't really care too much about money. He likes the super shiny expensive stuff like jewels and other stuff that can go back to his bugbear family. So I propose that Skills gets control over Gordok's money and can spend it how he deems proper on either Glock or Gordok. I've kind of been hinting at it over the game by having Gordok store his gold pieces in Glock.

I looked over the stores and items but none of them seem very appealing and of course neither do their prices for what you get. I'd rather have Skills use that on whatever misc. junk he needs to make fun stuff than spend 1k just so I can have an additional +1 defense that burns an AP triggered from a rare encounter circumstance. The only thing I could see Gordok using are some health potions that his new hand buddy could give him during desperate situations.

I was going to put most of my points towards the theater so cool I guess.

So yeah sorry about that. I had a busy weekend and I've been trying to figure out this encoding business in preparation for Friday's Drink-On so I put D&D on bottom of priorities. I should have at least told you what points I'd be spending so you could have spent some time writing up a new adventure thread for the play. My bad, Pang.

Ahahahha more work for Skills, Approved

also hey Skills you're evidently waffling on that shield depending on the post-discount price, it's 578 GP after haggling you buyin' or not

Nah, I'm good. Pass.

Hm, an adventure title with Lovecraftian overtones.

Note to self: Listen to Shin next time.

Wouldn't "Are we being ambushed?" be a passive skill check, and as such not something you need to roll for yourself, but rather something Pang rolls?

Otherwise you'd want to be making that roll every time you moved location just in case and if you wanted to actively check to see if you're being ambushed, you wouldn't make a skill roll, you'd go and pop your head round the corner and have a look. It's not like searching for treasure or traps where your character has a basic level of searching skills and observational powers that determine whether you succeed, you're rolling on the general awareness which as I always understood it is something that goes on in the background, rather than acting like some kind of focused spider sense (lol). Having an elf in the party grants a bonus to everyone's passive perception, but doesn't help them specifically search for shit, they're two completely different things aren't they?

I could be wrong here, I just always thought that stuff like that was down to the DM, not open to specific requests, otherwise you'd spend twenty minutes rolling dice before every conversation just in case.

My intent was to prevent from being surprised. But I do see (and acknowledge) where you're going with that slippery slope argument.

Sooo, what say you, Pang?

I don't even know what skill you would properly roll on to guess if the creepy noise approaching you is an ambush. Yeah, you can roll perception but that just tells you that, yeah, there's a noise, and it's comin' this way. No amount of perception is going to allow to to guess what the noise intends. It's all down to your own personal intuition, which is more of a roleplaying thing than something you can actually skillcheck. Insight has... nothing to do with... sigh.

What is it with you people and not understanding what Insight is for. Social interactions and identifying illusions. Okay? That's it. Seeing through deceptions and determining the motives of other intelligent persons. And that's why it matters WHICH ONE YOU'RE ROLLING, because you'll look pretty dumb standing there aggressively Not Believing in something when you ought to be searching for traps.

But yeah there's both passive and active perception checks. Passive just tells them whatever their guys notice without really even trying, but an active check could conceivably roll higher and find out more if they're specifically paranoid or curious about something. Usually there's no reason to roll active perception unless you specifically have a reason to think something's up but your passive checks haven't picked it up.

For example Bob's passive perception would say "Bob's sharp ears hear something quietly scuttling overhead", but it would take an active check to actually spot the false ceiling tile that's about to fall down and drop scorpions on his head — because someone's made an effort to hide it.

(at any rate I wouldn't be enough of a dick to rule that an encounter that you heard approaching was a "surprise")

You bet your britches I'm paranoid :O Especially of man-eating spiders.

K I edited the check to something that might sound plausible for perception.

Ah, that clarifies things somewhat. I remember an old DM when we used to play Rifts would roll dice in private a lot. Makes you fucking paranoid after a while.

Pang holy fuck Carcosa. Fantastic.

For fuck's sake, Zerg.

Hide behind me one more time and I'm lighting your horse on fire.

So then is it possible for a PC to do a preliminary insight roll as I did with the adventurers back in the underdark, or does something have to be said first for you to roll on it?

(I was thinking that perhaps a situation might be enough to raise suspicion and cause an insight roll on an NPC, rather than the words they say. Like the mage in the cave maze. Just out of the ordinary circumstances that lead a PC to believe a conversation is strange somehow)

I don't think passive insight perception is something you roll, it's something that an enemy's stealth check would have to beat. Like armor, but for sneakiness.

EDIT: Also Pang, is it even possible for the G-Unit to call in the favor from the criminal syndicate? I didn't think anyone from that adventure was left, and i find it highly unlikely that said criminal syndicate is going to believe a bunch of random adventurers saying that the syndicate owed their predecessors, most of whom have disappeared to the mists of time, a favor and they've come to collect.

Well, arguably if the situation is strange enough that you think what you're seeing might be an illusion that would be an Insight check, yeah. But if you just think it's suspicious in a mundane way then you'd just use Perception to look around for anything incriminating.

Stealth is also opposed by Perception and not Insight. I know I'm making Insight seem kind of useless here but at least it comes in handy more often than Streetwise :(

The favor is actually owed TO the syndicate BY the Horde, but either way as you say the Horde no longer really exists and as such that plot thread is pretty much snipped (unless I wanted to do a subplot about Argumentus' farm being hassled for protection money or something).

I suspect the Argumentus plot thread would only work so long as Garrmondo remains in the party. The rest wouldn't know Mr. Hamfist from Adam.

In a similar vein of in-game knowledge, I'm still a bit puzzled why Glock would find Gabe's cousin "awfully familiar", but I digress...