D&D Apr-15-2003
Apr. 21st, 2003 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ralphmeltonTuesday's D&D session was adequate, but not wonderful. Some of the fallout since then, on the other hand, has me gritting my teeth.
It was a mop-up session, basically; having bee-lined for the prime menace of the dungeon, they now followed back killing leftover monsters and looting. I knew ahead of time that there were not going to be any terrifying combats--particularly since the metagolem was not around to coordinate things.
The major incident of the evening was their meeting a foreign cat-man who was a prisoner of the metagolem.
Now, plan A for this NPC had involved the PCs meeting the NPC before the metagolem. I had even rearranged the dungeon so that that would be more likely if the PCs followed the left wall through the maze--but the PCs managed to subvert that by switching from 'follow the left wall' to 'follow the right wall' midway through.
So I made up plan B for this NPC. That plan got badly battered by Prolix getting a 34 on a Spellcraft check for which I had set the DC to an unreasonably high 25, and by the NPC's failing his saving throw against Prolix's detect thoughts.
So I was hastily trying to throw together a plan C, and at the same time figure out how much information detect thoughts would provide. (Does the spell transcend language barriers, for example? Is there any way to conceal anything from someone using detect thoughts?) It didn't go very well.
Afterward, I still didn't have a clear notion of how much the spell should have revealed, but I decided that Prolix should at least have been able to detect one of the cat's lies, if perhaps not the truth behind the lie. I also realized that the cat should have been more suspicious and less forthcoming about having a spellcaster go invisible and then cast two unknown spells. I sent e-mail to Dani about both points.
Dani's first response was denying that the cat-man had any reason to be suspicious, and reminding me not to let my privileged information influence the cat-man. This is one of the things that's making me cranky. I tested my interpretation with a friend who's not involved with the campaign, by describing the situation from the cat-man's perspective. He didn't guess the detect thoughts, but he did describe his reaction to the invisible spellcaster casting spells as "very suspicious". So that's how I'm going to play the cat-man's response, and I feel that Dani's being willfully naive about this.
Dani's second response was about the detected lie:
Bleah. I don't want to turn the clock back on this. But maybe I'm being unreasonable here, and being reluctant to turn the clock back because that'll wreck my feeble plan C.
Bleah. All my best-laid plans gang aft aglee. Sometimes I feel that every interesting plan I make--NPC interaction, monster interaction, or whatnot--falls apart when it meets the actual game.
(I know that I'm exaggerating things--there have been some good plans. But I'm feeling very 'bleah' right now.)
It was a mop-up session, basically; having bee-lined for the prime menace of the dungeon, they now followed back killing leftover monsters and looting. I knew ahead of time that there were not going to be any terrifying combats--particularly since the metagolem was not around to coordinate things.
The major incident of the evening was their meeting a foreign cat-man who was a prisoner of the metagolem.
Now, plan A for this NPC had involved the PCs meeting the NPC before the metagolem. I had even rearranged the dungeon so that that would be more likely if the PCs followed the left wall through the maze--but the PCs managed to subvert that by switching from 'follow the left wall' to 'follow the right wall' midway through.
So I made up plan B for this NPC. That plan got badly battered by Prolix getting a 34 on a Spellcraft check for which I had set the DC to an unreasonably high 25, and by the NPC's failing his saving throw against Prolix's detect thoughts.
So I was hastily trying to throw together a plan C, and at the same time figure out how much information detect thoughts would provide. (Does the spell transcend language barriers, for example? Is there any way to conceal anything from someone using detect thoughts?) It didn't go very well.
Afterward, I still didn't have a clear notion of how much the spell should have revealed, but I decided that Prolix should at least have been able to detect one of the cat's lies, if perhaps not the truth behind the lie. I also realized that the cat should have been more suspicious and less forthcoming about having a spellcaster go invisible and then cast two unknown spells. I sent e-mail to Dani about both points.
Dani's first response was denying that the cat-man had any reason to be suspicious, and reminding me not to let my privileged information influence the cat-man. This is one of the things that's making me cranky. I tested my interpretation with a friend who's not involved with the campaign, by describing the situation from the cat-man's perspective. He didn't guess the detect thoughts, but he did describe his reaction to the invisible spellcaster casting spells as "very suspicious". So that's how I'm going to play the cat-man's response, and I feel that Dani's being willfully naive about this.
Dani's second response was about the detected lie:
This is significant. If possible, I'd like to turn the clock back on this one: If we knew that he was lying about this, we would not have unchained him until he came clean.
Bleah. I don't want to turn the clock back on this. But maybe I'm being unreasonable here, and being reluctant to turn the clock back because that'll wreck my feeble plan C.
Bleah. All my best-laid plans gang aft aglee. Sometimes I feel that every interesting plan I make--NPC interaction, monster interaction, or whatnot--falls apart when it meets the actual game.
(I know that I'm exaggerating things--there have been some good plans. But I'm feeling very 'bleah' right now.)
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no subject
Date: 2003-04-21 10:08 pm (UTC)The spell description also more or less encourages the GM to mix a small amount of useful information in with a lot of junk. :) Quite possibly Prolix may have only noticed the lie was a lie after some time sorting through mental noise, and then was unable to sufficiently well communicate to the rest of the group before they untied him. After all, Detect Thoughts != Detect Lies--that's a different spell altogether.
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Date: 2003-04-22 07:57 am (UTC)I appreciate the comments. Could you tell me more about the 'Detect Lies' spell? I don't see that in the SRD.
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Date: 2003-04-22 12:59 pm (UTC)Either that, or I get to search for it in the PHB when I get home.
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Date: 2003-04-22 01:48 pm (UTC)Wacky.
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Date: 2003-04-22 06:20 pm (UTC)Giant: "I'm not going to eat you or anything. Really."
Giant's thoughts: Hmm.. pepper and basil? Nah, I did that last time. Maybe lemon and rosemary would be good for this batch...
He's perhaps thinking about the fishes he just caught. Or maybe he's not. :)
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Date: 2003-04-21 10:56 pm (UTC)I at least had forgotten that the cat would actually hear Prolix casting. I think most of us did. Prolix wasn't exactly forthcoming with information to the party anyhow (or maybe he was depending on what you told him at the time but it didn't appear that way to me). There were probably enough mistakes on all sides to just let things ride with some reasonable compromise and it sounds like that has more or less already happened. His first response doesn't sound fully appropriate.
Man, I've done an awful lot of D&D geeking tonight. Sadly, I still have much more to do to prepare for next week.
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Date: 2003-04-22 08:20 am (UTC)I do agree with 'enough mistakes on all sides'. Sigh.
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Date: 2003-04-22 08:26 am (UTC)It seems like Prolix has two choices with the spell: either he was trying to be discrete, in which case he wasn't sharing his information before it was too late, or he wasn't, in which case the catman gets a chance to react. I don't recall Prolix sharing the information he was getting; in fact, I was putting effort into staying aware of the fact that I didn't know the things I was hearing you tell Dani until he said something.
What was the other spell that Prolix cast while invisible?
As for rewinds, we've had that discussion before and the conclusion has generally been "rewinds are bad". The point of a campaign is to tell an interesting story, not for some characters to "win". You had to adapt a plan on the fly, and you presumably did it in a way that will make an interesting story that won't kill anyone. I'm fine with the idea that sometimes circumstances don't work out for the PCs; ok, someone tried to detect thoughts, mostly succeeded, couldn't tell anyone quietly anyway, and only realized after the fact that something didn't seem quite right. Shrug. How many times have you changed NPC tactics because what they were going to do would have been very very bad for the PCs? (You don't have to answer that.) It cuts both ways.
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Date: 2003-04-22 09:03 am (UTC)(The other spell he cast while invisible was fly. I'm pretty sure the cat-man wouldn't expect that, and I think he might expect a more hostile spell. It's hard for me to tell.)
Thanks for the reassurance about rewinding.
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Date: 2003-04-22 11:41 am (UTC)I think the only time in recent memory that we've rewound was when my daughter Megan (who's 12) had her character cast a spell that we were none of us too familiar with. We looked it up in GURPS Magic and *thought* we calculated the fatigue cost for it correctly and I started to go on and describe what occurred after the spell was cast. Then my husband went, "That doesn't sound right..." picked up the book and realised we'd miscalculated by a factor of 10-- the spell should have cost 10x what we had figured (It was one of those 'fatigue cost is the same as for this other, simpler spell times 10' and we forgot the 'times 10' in the heat of the moment). And even that I almost let slide, because we found it confusing to remember afterward what the characters knew and didn't know. But, we realised that if we let it slide then, we'd either have to let it slide one more time, or strand her character several hundred miles from the rest of the PCs without the fatigue to get back to them. And while my players say I'm an evil GM (and love it), I'm not *that* evil.
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Date: 2003-04-22 09:38 am (UTC)Prolix turned invisible in sight of the catman, yes. I should probably have had the cat visibly notice and be concerned, but I failed to juggle enough mental balls.
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Date: 2003-04-22 10:23 am (UTC)A good thing for him to be. Arbitrarily divisible characters would be somewhat disturbing. :)
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Date: 2003-04-22 10:27 am (UTC)