kingandy | D&D, burglar alarms, christmas hols, pants

Avid readers will know that last night was the regular Forgotten Realms game. It was good, though

arwel refuses to accept that resting up would have been a better plan than immediately attacking the enemy stronghold, low on health and out of spells. There was something to be said for striking while the iron was hot, but there's also something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie. Plus - if they were dead set on assaulting the stronghold they would have done well to take the whole party and not run away at the first sign of reinforcements. If you're going to do it, you might at least do it right... give the enemy some actual wounds to lick rather than lead them right to our own poorly-fortified lair (we broke into it last week) so they can immediately attack in force. Luckily they only had CR2 soldiers (albeit equipped with heavy plate armour). We killed 27, and next week there will be 15 more to deal with at the bottom of the tower (I think).

Of course, the plan and execution was all perfectly in character for Dorn Thunderhammer.

samharber spent a considerable amount of time looking up rules that could be used against himself, and insisting that he should be at a disadvantage, when even the DM was saying "No, I don't care, you're fine." I think that means he's Lawful. That, or he's really keen on his back-up character concept.

Burglar alarm went off last night. This was my fault, for not ensuring the (interior) kitchen door was firmly bolted before going to bed - the bolt slipped out and the door swung open at about 3AM, setting the alarm off. Pathetically I then got the alarm code wrong about twenty or thirty times before remembering that it was not, in fact, the code I was mindlessly trying over and over and over - I could remember the shape of the buttons alright but had got the double-press in the wrong place. As if to punish me for my stupidity, the landing light chose that moment to explode, taking all the downstairs lights with it. It was like my own personal slice of hell, the Hell of Noise and Darkness.

Katy helped with candles and was mercifully unoffended. I think she started off a bit annoyed by her sleep being interrupted ("Andyyyy," she moaned plaintively as she pulled her door open after the first couple of minutes of hellish wailing, as though it was my fault or I was doing it on purpose to annoy her, which I thought was a little bit harsh because we didn't know it was my fault at that point and I might have failed to turn the alarm off on account of being stabbed by burglars). Eventually I got my head together, and we flipped the fusebox switches, left the alarm off and went back to bed.

Apparently Katy doesn't bother with the alarm when she is alone, because, I don't know, she likes the idea of strange men wandering around the house or something. And I thought she left it off because she knew I'd be home late ... oh well.

I have booked 24th December - 2nd January off work. Unfortunately most of my friends have not.

arwel has, though, so we shall spend that week together, getting into japes and seeing who has the largest christmas presents.

Last night we got into a discussion about the button fly jean. I maintain that it is contrary to the point of a fly, at least on man's pants, which is to allow ease of urination by enabling tackle access without necessitating the removal of aforementioned pants. (Woman's pants have a fly so that they can get the relatively narrow waist aperture around the wide, childbearing hips. Obviously man's pants share this facility but the primary function is urinatory.) No belts need to be undone and there is no risk of pantfalldownage. I have owned a button fly jean in the past, and I found it most uncomfortable as I was worrying about said falldownage.

arwel maintained that the only true, manly way to urinate is to undo all and sundry and let belt and trouser flap freely while you go about your business. (Perhaps it is a size issue, I can see certain related logistical points.)

ghostbritain interjected with the point that, all urination aside, button flys have the advantage of rapid-trouser-removal for the purposes of nookie, plus it is sexy to tear trousers off. While this is an excellent point, I remain firm in my belief that the button fly is wholly and fundamentally wrong. For one thing all sexiness goes out of the window if you get the angle slightly wrong and get stuck at the first button.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

nattydreadi.livejournal.com

I agree with

ghostbritain - button flies can be undone by firmly grasping with teeth and pulling. Very very much fun when a lady does that (or even a gent if you prefer that sort of thing)

From:

icklejo

"For one thing all sexiness goes out of the window if you get the angle slightly wrong and get stuck at the first button"

I belive even more sexiness would be out the window if you overenthusiastically undid a zip fly at the wrong angle. Ouch.

From:

stsquad.livejournal.com

I too used to be a supporter of the zip fly and found the button fly cumbersome. However experience has since persuaded me to the button flys ways. You only have to do it once to realise the zip fly doesn't always fail safe and what is more is prone to silent slippage and therefor public embarrassment.

Once you have gotten used to the button fly you'll find miss-alignment becomes exceptionally infrequent. I find I can handle the buttons at near zip speed.

In terms of sexiness of zip vs button I'll have to leave that to the ladies to answer. I'm available as a test subject for very reasonable rates ;-p

From:

kingandy

I can just about accept the notion of button flys by themselves (though the trouser flapping would be an annoyance at the toilet); it's when combined with a belt that I really find them annoying. I like belts. I don't want to have to undo them everytime I want a wee, and they weigh the trews down so it is that much more likely that they will slump to the floor.

Besides, sexiness of removal has never been a major factor in my clothes-selection process...

From:

arwel.livejournal.com

Flapping is solved by left hand clutching both trousers and undies preventing unecessary exposure or excess pressure.

From:

kingandy

And the belt?

besides, maybe I need both hands.

From:

nattydreadi.livejournal.com

I personally keep the belt fastened and undo just 2 or 3 buttons. Makes the embarassment trew dropping unlikely but also gives the required level of access. I will agree that in this situation the refastening becomes cumbersome but still it can be done.

From:

arwel.livejournal.com

We'd have all got 6 HP(or was it 12) back for resting 8 hours. Pretty pointless, especially since we couldn't afford to let the bad guys dictate the situation. Sleeping 18 hours so that we could be healed up was insane given the IC situation, we're not playing a computer game and lives were at risk. The bad guys knew where we were already, so attacking them couldn't have given away our position. Lamo and Dorn did say it was pointless sleeping now and we were off to have a look at house and poke it after a word with our prisoner. I hardly think that killing half a dozen people as part of a scouting operation is pointless. Not our fault that the cowards went to bed.

I don't care what Nook or anyone else says, it was the right thing to do IC, we did it, and we triumphed. Raaa!

As far as I can remember of Nook's description 15 were sent out to kill us, and now they're all dead.

From:

kingandy

I still don't think they knew where we were or that we were still alive. The squad we killed earlier had been sent out to get the ex-Marshall and told to keep an eye out for us if were were still kicking. That particular squad's lack of return would maybe have set them on guard, but wouldn't have told them exactly where we were, as attacking did.

I don't honestly know whether the 15 we killed at the top, coming over the rooftops, were the same 15 who were at the front door waiting to come through the burned-down barricade. I thought they were a seperate squad performing a flanking maneuver - as we did last session, remember, distraction at the front while the others come in the sides - but it's possible they were the same ones. I certainly didn't ask.

And you didn't only leave the sleeping characters behind, you hared off without telling me, either. I assumed you were off on some side trip, since there were only three of you. Seriously, I had no idea what you were doing...

Anyway, like I say, perfectly IC for Dorn. :)

From:

arwel.livejournal.com

As far as I could tell, we killed the bad guys right in front of the building they came from and retired rather noisily into the guard house, only a hundred and fifty feet or so from the bad guys building, after striping their bodies of all valuables and stacking them on a cart. They may not have been watching, but I thought it was a safe assumption from Dorn's perspective.

From what I remember of Nook's description we saw 15 men go out of the building we were keeping watch on, burn our barricade and slink off somewhere. If there are more, we're all dead.

I did assume that Woodrun was following us out and we were only missing Nim and Talindra.

From:

samharber.livejournal.com

Let me think.... Nook wants a fatality or two, we're still all alive.
The fire at the front should have died down by about now. Personally I'm expecting the dulcet tones of 15 or so heavily armed mercenaries running up the stairs. We can take care of them quite easily by throwing desks down the stairs to slow them, so we only have 2 or 3 to deal with at any one time. As long as Helzig can remain standing and Woodrun can roll his murder stat... we're fine.

From:

ghostbritain.livejournal.com

I'd also like to point out that i could have been much much harsher to you, and probably should have.

From:

arwel.livejournal.com

Harsh? I don't understand. Surely you should just be fair. Saying things like that just make it all seem rather pointless.

From:

kingandy

Yes ... if you really wanted to kill us you could drop rocks from the sky. As it is you came close to killing us without actually doing so, which is always the desired result. Shows a well-balanced game, precision judgement and forward planning and um ... charisma and ... er ... rugged good looks. So don't kill us.

From:

ghostbritain.livejournal.com

Harsh is a word (like Grease).

What i probably should have said is - The outcome of you entering the Commission Building as you did was actually different from the outcome if you'd entered with a few more hit points, with Nym & Talindra, and possibly Woodrun too, back on full spells and with the full group.

This may be down to me being a bad GM. It probably is. There are several things that could have happened that didn't. You could have gotten further than you did, gained more xp and really fucked Mike & Al off, seeing as you'd gone on this adventure as soon as they'd gone off to meditate.
You could have taken a lot more damage, in fact you should have, but i forgot about the guards with cross bows for a round, by which it was too late. Additionally the reinforcements could have arrived a lot sooner, seeing as you started battering in the door for some 30 seconds, then had a fight for another minute. Gemma's LJ illustrates that Helzig was only conscious through the luck of the dice.

I hadn't given much thought to the defences of the Commission House, but seeing as only three of you approached, i didn't make them that deadly, because i didn't think it was going to be a full scale assualt.

Had all 6 of you marched over there, then there would have been hails of arrows, possibly boiling oil, waves of guards, attacks against you as you tried to break down the door.

I guess i wasn't fair.

But then, the point of the game is to have fun, and the GM disagreeing with your logic and killing you because you're doing something he feels is dumb as fuck isn't fun.

So it's not about fairness. It's about providing a game which challenges you and you enjoy.
Hopefully i delivered that this session.

I won't really entertain arguments of 'fairness' because it's entirely subjective. I usually have to react to what the players do on the spur of the moment, and everything up to the 3 of you kicking the door in was going according to plan. After that it was all on the fly.
I reacted as best i could to challenge and entertain.
In hindsight it would have gone down differently. I'm happy with the calls i made though, and i'm happy with the results.

You're all pretty fucked, you're no better off than you were before, seeing as you still have no idea what's beyond that entrance chamber, and you'll still be hard pressed if you continue without resting, and taking a gamble if you do rest.

But, it was, in my opinion, a quality session, with quality role-playing, genuine drama and a really big fight.
Whilst i personally think it was a dumb move, that's what role-play is about. You all remained in character, and played it well.

I should probably point out that i'm very happy with the group, and the high standard of geek they produce.
Plus, any game that produces constructive heated debates is doing something interesteing, if not right...

From:

kingandy

We're much worse off than we were before...

Anyway. There is something to be said for punishig stupidity, but I similarly have little confidence in GMs who say "Oh, that was the encounter I had statted for the entire party, I was powerless to change it". I think if a subset of the players charge at something set up for the whole party (in the full knowledge of this), it should be degrossed due to the lack of players but also made slightly harsher to punish the stupidity. That is to say, rather than "challenging for 6" make it "life-threatening for 3". Which may or may not be the same number of foes as "challenging for 6", I haven't read the DC rules ever. But I imagine it, in my mind, to be fewer than "challenging for 6" but more than "challenging for 3".

Helzig may only have been standing due to the luck of the dice, but the same could be said for her opponents, with two cleave attacks per turn... one of those combats where everybody kept swiping at each other and missing.

... Oh, I may have been a bit confused about ranger feats. I don't get Manyshot until next level. I think what I did was, I looked up the manyshot feat and started working out when I'd meet the prerequisites, and then realised I'd get it next level so didn't need to buy it with my level 6 feat, then started thinking that if I didn't need to buy it that must mean I already had it ... or possibly I just got confused about being a level 6 character and only a level 5 ranger. Oh well, I only used it once in the session.

From:

myki.livejournal.com

I wouldn't say I was really fucked off by it all. It probably needs saying that when Arwel said "We go and find the Marshall to do X so we can get ready to attack the building over the road" of whatever - the action Nym saw was "We wander off up stairs" - Speaking in the third person suggests doing and not actually talking about it.

A couple of things.

1. If me and Al were the you would have tried harder to kill us? Thanks Nook, makes me feel wanted.

2. We wouldn't have to rest 18 hours... the Priest of Torm was going to be finishing his meditation 7 hours or so from then.

From:

pkgem.livejournal.com

We wouldn't have to rest 18 hours... the Priest of Torm was going to be finishing his meditation 7 hours or so from then.
But clerics of Torm pray at Dawn? Unless the cleric hadn't prayed that morning...?

From:

arwel.livejournal.com

It was a quality session. I just kind of get a little disheartened when you say stuff like "I'm going to be harsh and kill you all. Ha ha ha." Obviously I'm paraphrasing here. I think in hindsight our communications were slightly off kilter, I'd thought we'd decided that we weren't going to have a sleep and go off and keep them occupied for a bit, but obviously not all the party were aware of the IC conversations. The attack on the commision building wasn't meant to be a full scale assault, more of an information gathering opperation so we could rest a little easier until the cleric had finished meditating. It just so happens that without Nym the best form of information gathering that Dorn and Helzig can do is to beat doors down and poke our head through :)

From:

ghostbritain.livejournal.com

I very rarely mean what i say.

From:

kingandy

So .. It's not a "good size"?

From:

pkgem.livejournal.com

As per my own LJ entry. It was fun.
I'm happy about the fact that Helzig almost died. I don't want her to but the threat of it has made her realise that isn't invincible. This means she might actually stop and think about what she does a little more. She actually isn't as dumb as she acts, she's just impulsive and easily bored; she has room to grow. Maybe she will. Maybe.

From:

pkgem.livejournal.com

I think that both you and Andy have good points. I don't think we needed to rest and that scouting was a good idea. I do think we should have shared the plan with the others. To be fair, I think Dorn did mention his intentions and just presumed the others were cowardly. I just followed Dorn cos I didn't feel like sleeping at the time and there was potential killin' to be done!
In any case, it doesn't matter cos we were successful. I took a beating but that has managed to make Helzig think that Dorn may have a point when he talks about "battle tactics". I was definitely stupid when I charged into the middle of the six guards but bravery and stupidity are often one and the same thing - it depends on your perspective. Dorn is a hero. Woodrun thinks were impulsive and dumb. Helzig hit things and, apparently, isn't invincible.

But no-one is denying that it was fun!

From:

kingandy

Oh, yeah, he mentioned it. We argued back and forth for a bit and I even agreed to the assault. Because Woodrun doesn't much care what happens to the city, and accepts that Dorn has more experience with this sort of thing, so he's not going to get that worked up about it. Then Dorn said "Right, we will go and question the man!" Which Woodrun wasn't interested in. So he sat down while Lammo, Dorn and Helzig wandered off. After a bit he heard this clanging outside...

Woodrun is partly upset about being left behind, and partly annoyed that we pulled back so soon. We didn't really achieve much other than stir up the hornets. :)

From:

myki.livejournal.com

What Dorn (nor anybody else realises) is that Nym has been reading Vizlevards old spellbook and thinks he might of cracked it. Fair enough he hasn't told anybody but he wanted the rest not out of cowardice but so he could cast sleep a couple of times at people before we got into combat.

More importantly he's not trying to rid the world of bad guys... He's trying to look good with the minimum amount of effort... He hadn't been promoted in hours and nobody had told him he'd done well recently. Oh and the Ex marshall told him to go to bed... And you wanted to do it... And he wanted to get Helzig really drunk and send her off looting when he woke up in the morning..

Oh and he'd just been nearly dead for a while... he wanted the guy who could heal him to be up and ready for when he did something stupid again.

Anyway, significant things that I found out this week.

Lamo is a virgin.

In retrospect we play very different characters don't we.

From:

ghostbritain.livejournal.com

"Sleeping 18 hours so that we could be healed up was insane given the IC situation, we're not playing a computer game"

Do you remember in your Wednesday game we went for sessions and sessions at the beginning without resting, even when we were fucked? We entered that mountain and just kept going. I reckon Vanahan died cos we didn't rest at all and were in no state to fight.

The reason i didn't suggest resting was because of the above reasoning. We were on a deadline, our lives and the lives of others were at risk.

Interpret that as you will. I'm quite enjoying the discussion raised. Although it did seem like a Warrick plan...

From:

kingandy

I suspect he would have been okay with an 8-hour rest, but the fact that he had to wait until dawn may have put him off rather. It was quite a time away, and it would have been a little wasteful to fritter that time away resting up. But really, frontal assault was a bad choice.

Part of me is annoyed that Woodrun hasn't got to memorise any spells yet. He only gets one a day, and it doesn't look like he's going to be getting that any time soon... on the bright side, he hasn't yet had to decide which spell to memorise. :)

I may have to splash out on d20v3.5 soon. I would like to look up the spell memorisation rules for rangers (I seem to recall that unlike arcane casters they don't have to meditate beforehand, only pray at or soon after a predetermined time of day? But has that changed?) and also animal companions. Ah, but what to do with 3.0 ... maybe use for firewood.

From:

arwel.livejournal.com

Chech out the SRD sections on Ranger, Druid and Magic.

From:

kingandy

Oh, cool ... so you don't have to buy the rulebooks at all? Nifty.

From:

pkgem.livejournal.com

"...our own poorly-fortified lair (we broke into it last week)..."
Actually, we broke into a few hours ago... the session we did it in happened last week. ;-p

From:

kingandy

Yeah, I meant last OOC week. If we'd been there for a week IC we would have put some work in on repairing doors and stuff.

Was quite surprised about the carpet... ;)

From:

myki.livejournal.com

And the interal traps... But I suppose it's a civic building and all.

From:

anne-l-davies.livejournal.com

I finish work on the 24th, and will be back in Manchester at Chez Bennee sometime later that day. I will not be returning darn 'sarf until Saturday 3rd Jan, so I too shall be available for festive froliking with your-self and Arwel.