OOC A Tide of Discussion: the d20 ToF OOC thread

Yes, but I don't wanna lose Evelios. Who else will make me giggle with bewilderment?

*pokes Ariel closer* Hey, you're not injured and you're tougher and faster than William, go save the bard!

 

**Ariel flaps her wings...**

From WHAT?!

 

Calm down, guys. Evelios is sporting both Resist Energy and Fire Shield.

 

So somebody else died?!

 

Evelios also has 2 more HP from Skadi's stance, and Skadi has an immediate action to burn on Close Wounds if he goes to 0 HP or down. I don't think it's going to be necessary though.

 

In any case, I think it's safe to say that dragon...










... went out with a bang.

 

You were only supposed to blow the bloody wings off!

 

Called it.

Well, that was fun. Over to the gate and out of the smoke. Maybe heal up, maybe cast Create Water at-will to put out nearby fires. It depends on how pressed for time we are.

Skadi and the others should still have DR 3/evil from Mitth's spell for at least another couple of minutes, since it lasts one minute per level of the spell.

 

*round of ecstatic applause for Evelios*

 

The D&D games are back on sale, as is everything else. Also recommended: Heroes of Might & Magic bundle, King of Dragon's Pass, the Deus Ex/Thief/Anachronox bundle, the Ultima and Might & Magic bundles, Bullfrog Classics bundles, since these are all various RPGs, RPGish or RPG-based games. King of Dragon's Pass in particular is just an impressive game since it's based on Glorantha, the RPG setting of RuneQuest. Just as Middle Earth was designed by Tolkein as a way for him to experiment with fictional languages, Glorantha grew out of Greg Stafford's interest in fictional mythologies. The resulting world is certainly a thing.

 

Was Greg Stafford the guy who made Pendragon, or am I getting him mixed up with someone else? I haven't got the book in front of me, it's on the same shelf as I keep CoNtinuum, Microscope, and Burning Wheel on - the shelf marked "Awesomely flavourful systems that I will never end up playing."

 

Yes he was, but as your moderator I obligated to remind you two that we need to stay on topic.

Edit: Incidentally, I am wondering about the technical 4-1-1 here - are we looking at a slight pause for reactions, or will we be heading off immediately?

 

Pause for reactions from you guys. My next IC update will move things on, the combat stats are just there for my reference as much as yours on healing.

 

I think it's time for everyone who got a bit battered to heal up. Oi, Zanaek, bust out dem healing moves!

 

If we want to conserve spell slots, Zanaek has these two feats in addition to spells:

--Touch of Healing: As long as you have a healing spell of 2nd level or higher available to cast, you can spend a standard action to touch a target creature and heal 3 points of damage per level of the highest-level conjuration (healing) spell you have available to cast. You can use this ability only on a target that has been reduced to one-half or fewer of its total hit points. The effect ends once you've healed the subject up to half its normal maximum hit points. This ability has no effect on creatures that can't be healed by cure spells. As a secondary benefit, you gain a +1 competence bonus to your caster level when casting conjuration (healing) spells.
--Sacred Healing: You can spend a turn attempt as a full-round action to grant fast healing 3 to all living creatures within a 60-ft. burst. The fast healing lasts for a number of rounds equal to 1 + your Cha modifier (minimum 1 round).

Corrath is below half health, which means Zanaek can restore 15 HP with Touch of Healing thanks to having Mass CLW in reserve, and Fast Healing 3 for 6 rounds up to eight times today. Since it's all living things within a 60 foot burst, you can heal quite a few NPC allies as well (and enemies if they're within range, unfortunately).

After that we've still got healing belts and the like.

Do we need to do anything about the smoke and fire, such as cast Create Water or summon Water Elementals or something?

 

Well, it's your choice. Ariel can probably tell you it's a major conflagration that's burning a good 300 feet x 300 feet area, a good sixty buildings or so, and my last update should indicate to you Brindol's firefighting force (such as it is) isn't really up to stopping a fire of this magnitude now it's gotten hold. You could leave it which would allow you to pursue other activities untouched, but given the way it's burning it'll likely take out half the city before (and if) Brindol can spare enough men to put out the fire - and even if you win here, half the people of Brindol are going to be facing a miserable autumn and winter as they desperately try to rebuild half a city on top of their other supply woes.

You do have several means at your disposal; Light's mentioned two. Here's my thoughts on them and one other:

(1) Create Water: There's two of you who can pull Create Water, which you can do at 20 gallons per standard action. (Zanaek and Skadi, in particular). This equates, then, to a production rate of 200 gallons per minute for one person at 20 gallons per round; 400 gallons per minute for two. That number is significant because you guys can literally conjure water out of thin air and place it with precision, unlike firefighters per se who lose massive quantities of water just getting it all in there, and extinguishing fires comes down to how many gallons of water you can apply per minute. I found this page which gives a formula for how much water you need to kill a fire in a dwelling.

For simplicity's sake, let's assume all buildings in the radius come down to 25 feet x 25 feet buildings when you average it out (smaller dwellings are balanced by larger storehouses and so on.) They're all 60% on fire, again averaging it between some buildings that've caught and others than are still catching. So per that formula it comes to (25 x 25)/3 x 0.6 = 125 gallons per minute to put out a fire. So Skadi and Zanaek working together in concert could knock out a fire every, 4 standard actions, or really every 24 seconds or so. 60 buildings x 24 seconds = 24 minutes to eliminate all the fires by themselves. There's the possibility of only taking out half the fires, and thus 30 buildings x 24 seconds = 12 minutes, and leave the rest of it to Brindol's fire squads, though that's leaving it to uncertainty and their skills that the fire doesn't get away from them again. That 12 or 24 minutes also includes the travel time to each building and then hoofing it back to wherever the company is.

(2) Summoning Water Elementals: Summoning Water Elementals is an option because Rilwen can do it. He has a Fey Heritage, which gives him Summon Nature's Ally V. That spell allows him to summon 1d3 Medium Water Elementals (or one Large, really). These bubbly little fellows will not dampen your spirits, obviously; they basically autokill a nonmagical fire less than Large size (so less than 10 feet x 10 feet) when they hit, which is to say, 19 out of 20 times since hitting a grid reference is AC 5, not to mention they can also Cleave which gets them another free attack. They don't move too fast -- 20 feet a round -- but they can charge like any other creature which will allow them to clear more ground. Sooooo ... they can kill a building fire about once per round assuming they Cleave. Let's say thus, 60 rounds for two elementals to extinguish every building fire in the town, and thus, 6 minutes, at 10 buildings per minute. Double that (120 rounds, 12 minutes, 10 buildings per minute) if only one elemental shows up.

Two drawbacks to it: spell length, and the language barrier. Water Elementals only speak glub-glub Aquan. I don't think that one was on the coursework list in Melee-Magthere, somehow. And if you can work out how to overcome that barrier, there's the fact the spell can only last a maximum of 10 rounds, absent metamagic'ing Spell-like abilities, which is possible but only with spending action points. There's repeated uses of Spell-like abilities, of course, but unlike Levitate, Mazarun only has three uses of his (Sp)s per day. Also doesn't require Mazarun to concentrate and direct them as such.

EDIT: Not to mention that two of those Spell-likes have already been burned from Dimension Door twice today. So you'd be down to direct AP spends or emulating certain feats if you were going to cast that spell more than once.

(3) Thor, God of Thunder: This one will take 10 minutes and only takes out one person. Might as well mention it since it's an option and you've already used it in the leadup to the fight. It's the crazy bard over there with a Staff of Stormclouds, which has a charge of Control Weather in it which is capable of doing a Storm Ororo and producing a torrential downpour across all of Brindol 10 minutes after the spell is cast. That'll take out all fires in the district in one hit. But like I said, the spell takes 10 minutes to cast and Evelios has to concentrate during the whole period of time, which means he and his Inspire Courage abilities are not available to you for that 10 minute period. This could or could not be crucial. You simply don't know.

All three methods of taking out the fires will also take out the smoke. It's up to you, from here, as to how you go. So: over to you.

 

Actually, Evelios has Melodic Casting, which lets him cast spells and use magic items while using a bardic performance. Inspire Courage in particular doesn't require concentration (though Inspire Competence does, but I doubt we'll need it). Plus, the staff can be used by any other member of the party with Control Weather on the spell list, such as every single full caster we have (though several probably have bigger things to take care of). Unfortunately, it'll still take 20 minutes or more for the rains to start, which is long enough for the place to burn down. Not really an option I'm interested in trying out.

How much time do we have though? Last I checked, Skadi told the troops to pull back, and then Corrath said that other enemies would be following.

I'm pretty sure William speaks Aquan. He's got full ranks in Linguistics, which was Forgery + Speak Language merged together, so he's got 13 extra languages. Given that he's a wizard, I'm pretty sure the planar tongues are among them. He can't command the elementals directly, but he can tell Maz how to say "put out fires". The elementals might make fun of his pronunciation, but it's not as though he'd be able to figure out what they're saying.

 

What about the Tiri Kitor? They got a druid .. .
Maybe we can enlist a bit of aid from them? At least for some of the area. Roasted owls would not be a good thing.

 

Hard to tell how precisely much time you have. Skadi told the troops to fall back, so they'd be here in under a minute I would have thought. They're cavalry, of course, while the Red Hand is almost entirely infantry, but you're not looking at a very long period even dealing with a force on foot, particularly if they have some sort of movement enhancer like Haste. Corrath is deducing that the Red Hand would pursue a cavalry retreat to the gate since the Red Hand, y'know, kind of wants to get inside the walls and blind Freddy can see the gates have been blasted off their hinges. It wasn't meant to suggest that she's been scoping who (or what) is coming, or precisely how far they are away as such, it's just something she figured was going to happen. At the outside I don't think you're going to have ten full minutes to work with here.

 

All I can say is that you can try. The winged owls are basically the best asset Brindol has since they allow for fast communication and transport across the city, not to mention they amount to pretty much all of Brindol's air defences absent you guys. The Red Hand has fielded manticores and chimaeras against you before, it doesn't just have dragons that can fly. The owls will have a lot of other tasks set for them.

 

Wait, what? WIlliam only speaks eight, or is the Linguistics just him working out the basics of a language from extrapolation?

 

A bit of both, really. Happy to handwave that one through. If not you, there's at least one other spell-based solution in the party to the issue.

 

Basically, when I was slapping together houserules some five years ago, one of them was consolidating the skill list, borrowing from Star Wars Saga Edition and Pathfinder, getting rid of the "one skill for the price of two" thing that plagued skills like Spot/Listen and Hide/Move Silently, and also rolled up smaller skills that didn't really justify their own existence like Gather Information and Forgery.

(As an aside, Forgery is a hilariously badly designed skill. You make a Forgery check to determine how convincing your fake documents are. When you present your fake documents to someone else, they attempt to see through the deception by... rolling a Forgery check. Guess how many classes have Forgery as a class skill? One- the rogue.)

Anyways, I followed the model of Pathfinder and rolled Forgery and Speak Language into Linguistics, and thus gives an extra language known per rank. So William, Corrath and Evelios probably have more languages than normal. This has never really come up, but I figured Corrath and Evelios knew more local languages while William had more of the planar tongues.

 

Okay, that does make sense. We can roll that way if you like - I do recall saying a while back that William wasn't much for planar languages (he couldn't understand Ariel when she spoke to him in Auran), but that can easily be explained as him not paying as much attention to the planar tongues and thus not grasping them as well as he does, say, Draconic or Alzhedo. Takes more focus for him to work out, and whatnot.

So yeah. William no speak Aquan good.

 

He probably speaks enough, as Light said, to translate "Put out fire". Or, more correctly perhaps, "Greatest and natural enemy, scion of thine opposed elemental plane, quench thus and banish from this realm/plane/place/beachhead of dry unmoisty precipiation."

EDIT: I'm also going to insist you IC the translation/instruction process out if/when we get to it, because I personally think it's going to be awesome and/or hilarious.