I'm joining a Pathfinder game! (it's D&D 3.X in spirit, it fits in this thread). Just starting up, session 0 this Sunday, and I'm taking the chance to play a class that has no 5e parallel - the Summoner. Haven't actually played the class before, but I skimmed a few guides and browsed Pinterest for a few hours, searching for images that inspired me, and finally came across this one and went oh shit, I like that! Spoiler: image within (source here) I mean, confident, pretty half-orc with a decorative spear, signs of living in the forest? And that dragon-butterfly perched on her hand, that could so be a low-level eidolon - especially since there's the avian shape to give it flight from the start. I can imagine how that eidolon might evolve through the levels, especially if we get up into the high levels... Even came across art from a trading card game of a huge butterfly-dragon that has me seriously considering whether there's any good spells for summoning swarms, just to replicate this effect with the butterflies and all. Spoiler: image within not MtG, but for sure trading card game art And like, I'm enthusiastic for this idea. I've been jotting down notes and checking through the various traits and feats and whatnot to come up with a build that isn't quite optimized for KILL IT FAST combat, but is pretty optimized toward reflecting the background and strengths I think she's starting with. Half-orc quarter-human quarter-elf from a forested cliff region, dropping most of the default racial traits for things that reflect that background (Rock Climber, Cliffside Racer, Highlander)... Taking Draconic for a bonus language and Knowledge Arcana to give the impression of a kid who was so into dragons as a tiny that her magic potential just externalized into a little dragon, just for her, and reflecting her orcish heritage into it with a feat to imply the orc ferocity transferred to her eidolon (Resilient Eidolon). Adding onto that orcish heritage with the Blood God Disciple, a subclass of Summoner that loses all the Summon Monster spell-like ability per day effects, but lets the eidolon gift her a fragment of its power whenever it feeds off their kills, so she'll be able to gain dragon scales or wings or whatnot in battles with enough mooks to go around. All in all, makes for a longspear-wielding half-orc who charges into combat, keeping enemies at range while her eidolon weaves in and out around her to give her an AC bonus and such, and eventually it'll grow into a solid tag teamer. Did some tiny scribble sketches of what her home region might be like, even did a bigger doodle of what her eidolon might start out looking like, one of the first times I've wanted to art and been pretty happy with the effect in a while! The light orange, red, dark red, and blue pens worked nicely together, even if I'm increasingly aware that the shape of the wings is a little off. Spoiler: Image of orange/red/blue dragon-butterfly But then, earlier, I realized. Something about this whole concept was very familiar to me. A dragon-themed duo, where the smaller flying partner gathers energy from fallen foes to share with the main character, while the main character charges into combat...? Where I have I played that before...? Spoiler: "Oh" - image So I'm just living with that knowledge, and deciding whether to lean into it when I pick their names, or lean very far away from it...
Last session I learned a very valuable life lesson, which is that casting multiple Fire Bolts from the back of a horse is only a good idea if you are riding a battle-trained horse that is used to that kind of thing, and not some poor rented riding horse from the local tavern-stable a person with any experience riding horses, or at least with an animal handling of more than zero not about to roll a natural 1 for animal handling.....................and.... not riding double with a friend who just passed you the reins to draw her bow and will now join you in the mud as your horse freaks the fuck out I get the feeling our Ranger won't be handing control of the reins to my little gnomish Sorcerer again any time soon! But hey, we didn't die of goblin ambush, we live to see Level 2, so I consider that a victory no matter how bruised, muddy and full of arrows we arrived at the next town over. :D
we've been having some trouble lining up schedules, so our most recent session was mostly shopping and decorating the party's personal rooms at our home base the monk decided he wanted a conspiracy corkboard to keep track of our various quest threads (and non-quest tangent threads).... and then actually went and "illustrated" it
offtopic but there needs to be a website that lets you make virtual conspiracy boards. the closest thing I can think of is realtimeboard but it's not the same without the cork background
I did a little looking around and came up with Pinup, though the features don't feel super intuitive to me. You can see the quick 2 image & 1 post it note one I made as a test here.
We obliterated a chimera today! Or 'holy shit i nearly damage matched our wizard's fireball. Because ranger at lvl 5 (so extra attack) plus hunters mark, plus bracers of archery means i smacked that thing for 28hp, our wizard for 30, and our fighter (who also got extra attack) with acrossbow landed two solid hits too. End result: chimera down before it got a single hit in on any of us.
Omg where do I even begin! I live here now, I guess So it's been a long running joke in our campaign to make our dm name an elf character elrond (because he's a huge lotr fan and so are most of us). When I say long running joke I mean a looong running joke. We've been making attempts since... God I don't even remember, about a year now? Anyways, he let down his guard and let the group choose a pool of names for an elf priest because we wanted Chad the Bro Priest and he was like "please no". We secretly added elrond and another running joke to a list, had him roll his Judgement Dice (basically a nice metal set he has that we've all agreed means no take backsies) and it landed on elrond! It was made even better when we decided to modify it to el rond and he look exactly like The Rock. Everyone cheered, it was great.
Our dm is so patient with us, it's unreal. I think we've had two separate occasions where we've completely toasted a whole arc before it could even begin and instead of blowing up he just rolled with it and gave realistic in world consequences, it's great
so my pathfinder DM likes high-power games, and as a result sometimes Crazy Shit Happens relevantly, my lv20 fighter has a +4 longsword whose abilities are (partially) listed as Yes, that is a times modifier instead of plus for critting. And at lv20, between brutalizing the rules (stat points on every level,not every other) and various in-game accumulated buffs, my fighter's strength mod is 14. On any given crit-- which is roughly one third of rolls, with that extended crit range--, she deals ((5d8+14)*2)+(1d6*14) damage. And, if she doesn't move (using multiple attacks is a Full-Round Action), she can make seven attacks per turn. On Monday, DM sent our party up against three undead ancient dragons-- a reasonable challenge for a lv20 party, and flashy enough to appease his Dramatic Sensibilities. We whittled away at the first two, us melee classes chasing them around the field while our casters kept them grounded if not still enough to take advantage of our multiple attacks... mostly. The third dragon got pissed off enough at our casters to charge up to their Magical Protective Bubble and sit there throwing everything it could at it... for long enough that I could catch up with it, and finally roll all seven of my possible attacks. One miss, one normal damage, and five fucking crits. I can't claim to have one-shotted anything, but I sure as shit got the death blow in! (also, yeah, my math on that lingering fire damage is wrong, but it was late and also irrelevant after 1030 to the face.)
I miss my group's 10 hour game sessions YnY. We were so incredibly into it. Good times Anyways I remembered a goof I did during an au one-off we played during quarantine over discord, I made my character as naive as possible and it was loads of fun! A couple of examples include: Running into a party of soldier NPCs while scouting, one asked if I'd seen anything sus and I answered cheerfully "oh, you must be talking about me and my friends! We're gathered this way, come on!" Which garnered disbelief from the dm and insane laughter from my coplayers Second time was when we broke into an enemy dungeon and I immediately walked into a trap room with a big treasure chest in it and, of course, set the damn thing off. The room sealed shut and started filling with water and I went "you guys it's a swimming pool! I bet there's floaties in this box!"
The party has been trying to deal with this greater demon spider thing since June, and we've finally gotten everything lined up. We got a ring of spell storing since it's meant to store magical energy, and upgraded it so that it could hold the spell Imprisonment. Then we dealt with a warlock with a devil patron and got him to cast imprisonment in it, which came along with an extremely annoying curse that binds the ring to my paladin. (The devil is her god's evil opposite, essentially) Then we finally came up with our Very Good Argument for why the demon should let us cast a spell on her - basically, she can't leave this physical place, but we'll say the spell in the ring would work around the rules of the magic that bind her here. We go to her home and lay everything out - the empire she hates is going to war, we hate the empire too, and we're going to get her into a safe place in the empire where she can start replacing generals with her own people and cause their downfall. The arcane trickster rogue explains that it's not a teleportation spell, which the wall blocks, but actually a spell that uses an interplanar portal for travel, something we know the warlock we dealt with used. It's two part spell - the first part disguises your plane of origin and makes it seem like you belong in the plane you're travelling to, to make travel easier; the second lets you redirect any portal to the plane you actually want to travel to. Then the cleric-turned-sorcerer rolls a deception check... and gets a nat 20. 28 total with modifiers. The demon agrees that his suggestion that they use the tear to the abyss in her lair is a good idea, since it doesn't require any travel, and declares that we are now her allies... which makes us her children. And don't worry, once she's avenged herself on the empire, she'll take on the devil who tricked us. So here I am, squeaking over the idea of this demon deciding we're now her kids, when she turned to my paladin, puts one hand to her cheek, and says, "But first, renounce your god and swear your allegiance to me." I have no idea how I thought as fast as I did, but I announced that my paladin went down on one knee to the demon and said "Mother, I would do anything for you, but the devil bound this ring to Hrrkik, paladin of Astilabor, and if I renounce Her I will be unable to take you from your prison." The sorcerer adds "But you can always swear once we're out." I roll deception and get a nat 20. With that I said my paladin puts her hand over the demon's, looks her in the eye, and says "After this we'll have all the time in the worlds." The demon really likes this, and so does her god - the DM says she feels a warm spark inside and a feeling of divine approval for all her patience and sacrifice and loyalty, and now has the Blessing of Understanding. We finally make it to the tear in the abyss, the demon announces to her children that she's going to stake a foothold in the empire and she'll be back, and then I cast the spell. Unfortunately, while she didn't make her saving through, it does take a full minute to cast, so we still have to deal with a horde of demons for ten rounds next week. Excitement!
I like the "seems to heavily consider this." Seems, appears to, but who knows what's happening in that mind for real.
