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Week 46 - None of this actually happened; and: high-tension high-wire.

Click here to skip this rant.

For those faithful fans of this blog (hey: drop me a line at pmurray at bigpond dot com, subject “Age of Worms”, and let me know that you’re reading it - I don’t have a guestbook app), our new wizard - Lazaroo - has an alter-ego “Steve” who also used to play Tom. Steve’s characters always bear closer inspection, as he tends to get enthusiastic over character creation, and sometimes is a little lax ensuring that his characters are valid, leaving it up to others to check.

A case in point is a gestalt Rogue/Warlock he used to play, where - because a warlock’s Eldrich Blast is a ranged touch - Steve felt that the warlock should get multiple attacks per round according to his BAB. Never mind that this broke one of the core mechanics of the game: everyone does roughly one damage die per level per round. Of course, Eldrich Blast is an extaordinary ability, not a melee attack, and the full-round attack action simply doesn’t apply. He also was applying sneak attack damage to flanked enemies. Once again, an eldrich blast is not a melee attack, does not threaten, and does not flank (although you get SA damage from flat-footed enemies, being invisible, etc. If ranged attacks flanked, pairs of rogue archers would pwn the game.)

Even now, however, Steve says that we went out of our way to gimp his character, that he had no reasonable way of knowing that his 11th level character shouldn’t have been doing 24d6 per round, every round, with a ranged touch attack that bypasses energy resistance (6d6 eldrich blast, 6d6 sneak attack, 2 attacks per round).

Anyway. The game aspect in question this week is the Shapechange spell.

For those faithful fans of this blog (hey: drop me a line at pmurray at bigpond dot com, subject “Age of Worms”, and let me know that you’re reading it - I don’t have a guestbook app), we have another rules dispute, concerning the Shapechange spell. Owing to Lazaroo being played incorrectly, some of the things that happened this week actually did not happen.

  • Shapechange does not affect your hitpoints, except by changing your Constitution score.
  • Yes, this means that you can die if you change into something big, take damage, and change (or are forced to change) back. If Con drain can kill a monster by this mechanism, then it can kill you.
  • Your changed Con and Dex affect your Fort and Reflex saves.
  • Shapechange grants you the
    1. Extraordinary abilities (Ex)
    2. Supernatural abilities (Su)
    3. type - Dragon, Magical Beast, etc - and subtype - (Aquatic), (Shapechanger), etc
    of your new form.
  • You do not gain spells, class abilities, or Spell-like (Sp) abilities.

Spell-like abilities include a Maralith’s Align Weapon, Blade Barrier, Greater Teleport, etc and a Planetar’s See Invisibility, True Seeing, Power Word Stun, etc. According to the Eberron Campaign supplement, the spell effect of a living spell becomes a supernatural ability, so it’s ok. Also, the Maralith’s True Seeing is a Su ability.

Personally, I thought it was weird that an arcane spell should be able to create supernatural effects, after all: a vampire’s ability to drain levels is not something that comes by virtue of the Vampire’s shape. But that’s what’s in the book. I also thought it was weird that Shapechange, in combination with the living spell template, effectively allows you to cast any area-effect spell an unlimited number of times for three hours. Disjunction? Check. Storm of Vengeance? Check. Bloody absurd. The Spell Compendium makes it even worse. How about Shapechanging into a living Sphere of Ultimate Destruction, then we can all go home and watch TV on a Friday evening?

So I checked on the web and looked for a ruling.

Beginning on February 23, 2006, the following items will become restricted from the RPGA’s Mark of Heroes campaign. These restrictions will be included in the upcoming Mark of Heroes Campaign Standards v.2.0.

  • Spells: alter self, polymorph, polymorph any object, shapechange.
  • Psionic Powers: greater metamorphosis, metamorphosis.
  • Prestige Classes: master of many forms (Complete Adventurer), master transmogrifist (Complete Arcane)

This restriction is made based on feedback from players and DMs since 2000, and aims to improve the overall play experience of the Mark of Heroes environment. By restricting a small subset of overly complex, overpowered spells (and by extension, game elements that depend on those spells) from the game, we believe that gameplay will be accelerated and a wider range of options for spellcasting characters will become viable.

If you’ve found these game elements to be problematic in your home game, we recommend that you implement the same change.

Wizards addresses the problem simply by admitting that it can’t be fixed, so they have been removing references to polymorph from the other rulebooks. They have banned the polymorph subschool in Mark of Heroes, and they recommend that home games ban it too.

What will I do? The choices are:

  1. Try to run a game with one of my players walking over all the encounters all the time.
  2. Have my player not use this by-the-book power, except when it really matters, which boils down to not appearing to break the campaign by actually doing it.
  3. Ban polymorph myself and put up with the sulking (the player in question still claims that we “gimped” his gestalt Rogue/Warlock, when all we did was insist it be played by the rules).
  4. Have everyone come to a reasoned adult agreement that Wizards are right to ban the polymorph subschool, that it breaks the game at high levels, and that we will all enjoy our Friday night game better without it.
  5. Drop some enemy wizards with Shapechange into the game, and play “Living Sphere of Annihilation vs Living Mordankainen’s Disjunction Deathmatch”.
  6. Give up.

My preference is option 4, followed by option 3 as a distant second. And then perhaps option 5.

And I haven’t even started bitching about this fucking module yet, written by Greg A. Vaughan, that’s “Greg A. Vaughan”, if you didn’t get it the first time, whose idea of plotting an urban adventure seems to be mentioning a couple of NPCs names and then … nothing. There’s a king - Achaime Sivereye. He’s a venerable cloud giant. He runs the south end of the city (well, actually his deputy more or less runs it as he is old). What’s his attitude to the party? I don’t know. What does he say when the party go to meet him? I don’t know. Will he even meet them at all? I don’t know. Not a mention of it. There’s some buildings. There’s some giants in them. There’s guy wires. There’s some ballistae scattered around the city. And? And? Well … that’s it. And it’s not like there’s a map of any of this stuff- just a rough drawing with some place names on it. See that map on the right of this page? Aside from the actual dungeon areas, that’s it. That’s all we get. And the colour text is useless - no separation of player information and DM information. The guy designed a module, but didn’t do the final step of putting it into a form that you can run on game nght.

I mean, the description of the citadel and it’s inhabitants seems … I’ll bitch about it next week. (You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to build a life-size model of some D&D dungeon maps, so that people can walk through them and get a feel for just how bizzare the quoted dimensions are. And this author loves 3-d environments, which seems cool, but the game just doesn’t accommodate them well.). There is nothing in the module relevant to the way this is going to pan out with my players and their characters. The characters have just fought off five dragons crossing the bridge, and the guys in the citadel saw it. What are they going to do? I mean … the party goes to the king. The king says “help us fight off the dragons”. The party says “ok”, and kills a whole bunch of them. What then? Does Dragotha show up?

The core problem with this module is that nothing moves the story along. In fact there is no story in the module, it’s all just scene-setting and then nothing. I’m going to have to railroad it. And how do you do that, without “here’s an encounter, for no particular reason, and here’s another one”. Story is the difference between D&D and skirmish. Hey, it’s an “open-ended” module! You are free to improvise your own plot! Well buddy, I didn’t download a module created by a professional module writer so as to be free to improvise my own plot, you know?

Or is the DM supposed to sit back, run the environment, and let the players twist in the wind? “You are the heroes, you tell me how you are going to find the phylactery.” Probably. Ain’t going to work with my players, though, perhaps on account of we all have jobs to worry about and are not exactly hard-core players.

And then there’s the organisation of the module as it is printed, which doesn’t follow the course of events at all. I’m flicking back and forth all night long, trying to find shit. Description of the city is page 58-60. Stats for the dragons that hang out in the various parts of the city are on page 65, except for Necrozyte on page 61. Not helped by the fact that key information is buried in a single paragraph tucked away between two enormous stat-blocks. The way that Necrozyte’s stats go overleaf on pages 61/62, Gazziflek’s on page 63/64, the way that the battle groups are statted on page 65 but their tactics on page 66 - it’s just all dreadful. You’d think a company that specialises in printing glossy magazines would be able to get something like that right. Enormous stat blocks belong at the back of the module in an appendix, or at least all on one page. Paizo, please put big long stat blocks in their own columns. If a little space is left over at the bottom of the column - sell it!

I am also finding this module a little difficult to run. There is no actual story to it, just scene-setting. I rather think that the designer thinks that the players should take the initiative in the game: “You are the heroes, you tell me how you are going to find the phylactery.”, which would be easier to run if the non-dungeon parts of the game were better fleshed out. As it is, the players will just be playing twenty questions: “We go to this area.” “Ok, that’s just some buildings”, “Ok, we go to this area”, “Um, more buildingas and rubble. And some terrified bugbear slaves.”, “Now we go to this area”, “OK! You see before you ...”. Except there is no “You see before you”, as the description blocks are not separated into colour text to read to the players and DM info.

Our party uses a fair bit of diplomacy, and there’s not much clue as to what the various NPs say to the party. There’s a bit of “who knows what”, but not much “what they will tell the players”.

Many of the (long) stat blocks go overleaf instead of being put into their own columns. Clumsy. It’s all a little unfinished, missing that final step between designing an environment and turning it into a runnable module.

Oh well. This is what happened, anyway. Except for the bits that didn’t.

Drat, I left it too long to write this up. I’ll have to try and remember what happened last week - the description will be a little minimal.

Our heroes and their adoring fans head south, towards the enclave of King Silvereye. The approach to the narrow ledge between the northern and southern parts of the city is guarded by a fortified tower called “The Roundhouse”. As the party approaches it, spears come flying! This fortification is held by 8 Rift Crawler giants - members of the other faction.

There are 4 giants on the roof and 4 giants inside, hurling spears from inside cover. Lazarro Shapechanges into a Living Cloudkill, and heads inside to flush out the giants. Meanwhile, Frith summons a Celestial Roc which bull-rushes one of the giants off the roof, whom Gauthakan swiftly dispatches. Mend moves in towards the tower.

Flash casts Mass Suggestion on the 3 remaining giants on the roof, persuading them that all giants must band together against the dragons besieging their city. These giants spend the rest of the fight bellowing at their companions on the ground (flushed out by a living cloudkill), attempting to persuade them to quit the fight.

One of the giants on the ground is hit with a Power Word Blind. The other two head around the tower to engage the party. Flash catches one of them in a Solid Fog, but the other makes it through and is dispatched by Mend and Gauthakan.

And that, roughly, is what happened. A few more giants join Flash-who-is-dragon-killer’s entourage, and they proceed to a meeting with King Silvereye.

— † —

Well, King Silvereye deigns to meet the party, briefly. His attitude is essentially “Drgonslayer, eh? Good! So get out there and slay some dragons!”. He also not-very-subtly directs the party towards the third tribe of giants in Kongen-Thulnir, the Tiamikal Nul-Shada, “Slayers of the Children” of Tiamat”. They live in a fortified structure on top of a free-standing pinnacle, connected to the south side of the city via a long stone 10’ wide bridge without a railing.

The party head out to the Blood Arch and consider the 150’ long, 10’ wide slippery stone bridge over a bottomless abyss before them, noting that for a city ostensibly designed to withstand dragon siege, a more perfect setup for a dragon attack could not possibly be devised. They buff, and the fighters head on over.

And they are, of course, attacked. Two blue and two green dragons begin variously breathing on the spellcasters and attempting to bull-rush the fighters off the bridge, while the spellcasters fling Blade Barriers about and the fighters try to get some hits in as the dragons swoop. Screechy goes over, both he and the huge green dragon he grapples going over the edge. Mend’s feather token is not enough to support both of them as they fall, but Screechy fixes this by letting go. Lazaroo Shapechanges into a Planetar, and with the planetar’s True Seeing (Sp) sees an invisible huge blue dragon who has not yet joined the fray.

So he lobs a fireball or something at it. Vermiox, realising that he has been spotted, and that his minions are toast, commences to use his (pretty serious) breath weapon. Frith has cast Invisibility Purge, and so Vermiox loiters outside its range while he prepares to use his breath weapon again, then he swoops in to blast the party. But as he does so, the party fire their prepared actions. The one that does it for Vermiox is Frith’s Implosion, which leaves behind a pall of green-y blue mist which drifts down slowly to join the clouds below.

They retrieve Screechy, who is on a ledge somewhere down below the bridge, and proceed across the bridge.

— † —

Well! What reception will they get from the Tiamikal Nul-Shada? Hit the “next” link to find out!

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