Session Roundup #6

This week was less intense-- character creation for Shieldhaven's upcoming Mage:The Awakening game, and a second round of Samhaine's Dresden Files game, which turned out to be a contextless combat run. So, onto the stuff:

Mage: I found World of Darkness style character creation kind of frustrating. They try very hard to make stuff available-- most of what you need to know is printed right on the character sheet-- but at the same time, WoD's got some entry barriers, which I've not fully sorted through. I think it's largely that they have this huge and shifting lexicon of terms you need to know, and it can sort-of short out your brain. Also, Virtues and Vices, unlike Aspects, seem to be created to simply screw you over, instead of ever being useful. That said, I really like the Orders of mages and am curious to see how it plays. I am re-upping an older character to be a Mastigos (Mind/Space) Mage. This will also be my first time actively playing a male character with this bunch, though for a very long time, I'd played nothing but. Now, to come up with a Shadow Name.

Dresden Files: Covered also here. Shieldhaven's Wizard and my Serial Killah at a GA state park, fighting Hounds and Goblins. I'm equipped with a broken soda bottle and my re-goddamn-diculous weapon score, plus 2 for using an improvised weapon. Samhaine pointed out that by taking this stunt and using the hell out of it, I was potentially scrapping the chance of getting better weapons that would do more consistent damage, but I pointed out that with my 8 Refresh remaining, I could probably buy a new stunt that gave me +2 to weapons when I got a specific Favored Weapon.

I picked up two new stunts, incidentally-- "On the Scent," which gives me +2 to investigation when stalking 'prey'; and "Grady Hospital Visitor's Room" which gives me +2 to Athletics when attempting to dodge gunfire. Niether of these were of any use in this fight, where I spent some ugly rounds trying to dodge arrow fire. Not awesome. I am going to have to cycle my Athletics up, probably dropping my Rapport to 2. But to the task at hand.

As Haven mentioned in the above-linked post, it's hard out there for a Wizard who wants to blow shit up in a sudden scrap. From what I understand, Wizards have the following big things they want to be awesome in combat: a) magic items, b) time to charge up with rituals before any fighting happens, or c) both. Otherwise, they're looking at about 4 rounds of functionality before they really start hurting. So I learned that it's important for the bruiser to keep bad guys off the Wizard, but not for the reasons I thought. The Wizard is bloody tough, and can take some damage-- if only he weren't damaging himself by casting his spells. He can't afford to also take hits from the bad guys.

Fortunately, I was very happy to spend fate points on my Aspect: The Marked Condition. The idea here is that I draw the bad guys into pummeling me, rather than trying to hit anyone else. This is a bad time for anyone whose attack is opposed by my Weapons roll (ie, anyone making a melee attack), and just fine for anyone whose attack is opposed by Athletics (ie, ranged fuckers. With arrows). As it stood, I was pretty much clocking a Hound a round with my busted up bottle, as they didn't have much in the way of armor.

The Goblins, however, were tough to tear up, as their armor prevented a lot of my damage. However, since they are fey, Cold Iron (in this universe, anything made of iron or steel) would ignore their armor entirely. Once this occurred to us, Sam (Shieldhaven's Wizard) used Alertness to declare that there was a fireplace poker hanging out by the, well, fireplace in the back of the building, what I could grab. Don't get me wrong, the -1 circumstance hit for having taken a supplemental action is a big deal, but being able to burn these dudes alive with Iron made up for it.

Now, about that circumstance stuff. You can only do one thing in a round of combat, whether it is move, attack, Declare something, or whatever. That is, unless you want to move into a zone right next to you, or say, pick up an iron poker in your zone and then swing it. If you want to do one of these, then you can take a -1 penalty to your next action, usually an attack roll.

Due to the nature of FATE dice, this is not insignificant. +/- 1 is a pretty big deal, +/- 2 is an even bigger deal. Fortunately, Consequences don't exactly hand out permanent penalties to rolls-- what they do is give the bad guys "tags" they can use against you on their next turn. Luckily, when I took consequences, Samhaine forgot to use the tags towards the end of the fight; otherwise we would have just been murdered, and it would have been very sad. And I took all 4 Consequences I had available (Reg Mild, Moderate, and Severe, plus an extra mild physical) without taking the Extreme conseqence. What this looked like in-game was a little hispanic girl with an arrow sticking out of her thigh, an arrow sticking through her left hand, glass abrasions all over her (from diving through a window to get next to the final goblin-- I spent a fate point on Buffy The Serial Killer to accomplish that trick), and numerous other small wounds. Festive!

We did win, but just barely, and Sam was a curled up little ball of gibbering wizard in the corner, having conceded the fight after taking both Fugue State and Hallucinations for moderate and severe consequences, not to mention a couple of mild consequences (one mental and one physical). Good times.

I'm very curious to see how social combat works, and also how combat with a) more than just 2 players and b) against enemies that are also taking consequences instead of dying once they run out of stress boxes.

On another note, I was surprised by the number of people interested in the Middle Earth game I mentioned yesterday (from the lj poll). I'll probably be exploring both that idea and the Changeling game in future posts here.

Session Roundup #5

This week's games were largely, intentionally or not, one-shots and video games. First, we've got the Over the Edge one shot that Shieldhaven ran for a couple of out of town friends, and the Dresden Files one shot that Samhaine ran for his overarching review of FATE rules. Further, Haven's finished his playthrough of Overlord, and I'm doing another playthrough of Bioshock 2. And if I wanted to get really granular, I could talk some about Tsuro, Entanglement and the concept of games within games. We'll see where I get before I decide to fuck off for the day.

Saturday: Over the Edge.

So, for this session, Stands-in-Fire and I were playing our previous OTE characters-- he's the last surviving descendant of Ramses II turned Crime Scene Investigator, and I'm a Telepathic Evo Shandor-styles architectural engineer reincarnated from an ancient, extraplanar city. We're both currently burned CIA Agents. We fight Crime!

Usually, we have The Monkey King and Wombat with us, but since they've absconded for some fuckin' insane place, no such luck. Fortunately, we had S. and J., hitherto referred to as the Hammer, and the Elf, playing an Impression Sensitive lady from a random Corporation in Tulsa, and a pit-fighting also CIA agent dude with a hat and one hell of a beard. So that was awesome.

I'll skip a lot of the set-up and story, though I am sad of that, because it's really awesome and paranoid and spooky. Have I mentioned that I really, really love OTE? It's super Rules Light, which sometimes I like and sometimes I don't, but in this case, the rules for say, combat create the right feel to me, and are a lot of fun. So I'll focus on combat and some highlights.

We got in the first fight of the session in visiting this wealthy dude on a yacht, who frequented an unorthodox casino called the Winds of Change-- some Satanists showed up to kidnap him while we were having a very pleasant chat, in which he agreed to let us come to the Casino with as his guests. Guns being illegal in Al-Amarja, the island setting of the game, he completely denied owning the 45s that he handed to myself and Frank, and we proceeded to charge up and deal with the Satanists. They were working over his bodyguard real good, so I grabbed their attention telepathically, which mostly meant that they decided to come and start beating me with their lead pipes, instead of the bodyguard.

This is called Tanking, kids. Don't try it at home. Thank goodness I had a couple of hit points.

Fortunately, it also worked like it was supposed to-- everyone else was able to wail on the assholes with impunity, including Frank blowing holes in one of 'em by shooting him in the face.

Word to the wise-- in OTE, Guns are Brutal. This will continue to be important throughout this session. We had been staying away from using guns for the legal implications, but the real reason to do so is that Guns are awesome-- as long as you have them, and the bad guys don't. If the bad guys have them, you wind up lying there bleeding to death in the bottom of a boat...

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The thugs with lead pipes having failed to knock the gun out of my hand, I shoot the nearest thug in the belly with my gun, dropping him, mostly. The last one decides to take off, and I take off after him, after he's been stunned by a heavy piece of machinery thrown by the Elf from the deck. He gets away from my attempts to bash his head unconscious on the dock, and eventual lying on the ground being kicked, and I manage to get the skinny on who sent him and where he's going from his mind. Turns out, his boss is a dame named Nikki, who we know is CIA from the team that was sent to Al-Amarja before ours. Huh. Leaving the detail of who Nikki is exactly out of it, I give the rich dude the info on who was attacking him, and we agree to meet later. I need a nap, and everyone needs snazzier clothes.

Figuring out how much to heal and when is a bit of a pain, and I'm still not sure if there's anything more I ought to have done in the few hours between the fight and us going out to the Winds of Change to heal more. As it was, I was at a little over half health, (14 of 21 points) when I donned my stereotypical spy-bodyguard chick togs and we headed out.

The Casino bit was really cool, and involved a Rumblestiltzkin, "what's-my-name?" puzzle about the Casino's enigmatic owner. Of course, she has a bauble that makes her immune to telepathy, but I wasn't going to even try to read her anyway. The setting and Haven's style of running games (here's a problem-- what do you do?) work together quite well to instill total paranoia on such matters, and I don't want my brains fried or et. Hammer wound up solving the puzzle with her psychometry, which was super cool, actually. We collected the session McGuffin, a large and red-glassy gem of a sort familiar to me and Frank at least, and headed back to the Island.

The second fight was a full-on speed-boat gun battle as we headed back from the casino, after having achieved the session objective, more or less. Gun battles SUCK for both sides, but in a kind of awesome way. Also, I need kevlar, because I got shot all to hell. Well, after blowing up someone's head with telepathy after trying to get them to drive their boat into another of the attackers' boats. But I digress.

Kevlar is as illegal as guns in Al-Amarja, as the Peace Force are the only ones who are supposed to have guns-- so if you've got kevlar, you obviously mean to fight the Peace Force, amirite?

Riiiite.

However, being ex-CIA, we don't really cotton to that sort of thing-- at least, the smart ones don't. Which is why I was lying bleeding on the bottom of a boat, and Frank was Just Fine. Anyway, why I like guns-will-fuck-you-up here:

What you're doing is pretty much an 'explain how you're attacking' combat system, and the d6 contests feel very fair. Guns multiply results like woah, and speed up combat a lot. So you and the other team have tools in the form of warm bodies to be targets for these guns. You've got to hurry up and take out the other guys before you get taken out yourself, which is nicely tense. We did manage to survive, and I was healed up at the end. Hammer's character went back home after a couple of days, giving us the plot mcGuffin, and the Elf's character signed on with a security company. Everyone wins!

Tuesday: Dresden Files

We're pretty much playing this so that Samhaine can do a more detailed review of the FATE system for his blog, but that's all right by me. Also, you can read Shieldhaven's write up of the session here, if you haven't already.

My character is pretty much a mashup of Dexter Morgan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Batman, with a dash of Il Duce from Boondock Saints tossed in, in a 5'2" half-black, half-mexican body. She's a normal human, mostly because I know absolutely nothing about the Dresden Files setting, and that was... curiously the right choice. I mean, I never play just normal, no powers characters, so this was actually a major change for me.

Really curiously-- I liked it.

Now, my character is pretty much a sociopath-- she's got the Dexter-style compulsion, but the Buffy/Batman fixation on killing monsters and just monsters. The toggle switch here is whether any given creature in front of her looks to her like a monster. Now, she also has another potential off-switch here in the form of one of her aspects-- "Double or Nothing" This means that any given monster can potentially re-direct her wrath by giving her a better, more monstrous target. Also, if there's likely to be a lot of a thing around, she can be talked into letting something live to learn more about it, and kill it better later. Further, Shieldhaven's character took "Violence is My Last Resort" as an aspect, to potentially give him a lever to calm down myself and Wombat's character, as we're the loose cannons of the party. This worked to great effect to avoid any real combat this session. Stands-in-Fire played a Malvora White-Court Vampire-- basically, psychically feeds on fear. These guys are the primary cause of Gertrudis (my char's) Double or Nothing aspect-- she hates their guts, but they were willing to offer her a sweet deal, working for them and killing worse monsters. Stands-in-Fire's dude, Will, is pretty much the least offensive incarnation of a Malvora-- seriously, he's a horror novelist. So that wound up working really nicely.

We wound up skipping the City Creation bit to play in 2000's ATL, which was the cause for numerous jokes-- both the ATL part and the 2000 part. I mean... remember AOL and Altavista and Bluelight and Napster? I knew you did. :D Also, my character got to make a lot of jokes about riding MARTA to meet the rest of the team. Funtimes.

So, what I like about FATE are the skills and the aspects, much for the same reason I like skill challenges in 4e. It's pretty much this:

1) identify what you want to do

2) identify a skill that should help you do it

3) describe how you want to apply said skill

4) roll

5) succeed or fail in some specific way based on 1 & 3.

Numbers and role play, gets me every time. Incidentally, I like a lot of OTE for the same reason. It's very neat to focus on what your character is all about based on these aspects... it's a very good set of tools for figuring out how one should respond to pretty much any situation. In Gertrudis's case, the answer is probably, "smother it with ether and burn it alive."

So, the quick summation of our game is that a local Malvora had summoned some Goblins from the Nevernever to spread fear that he could feed upon. We were chasing the goblins, who spoke in completely awesome rhyme, and in the final confrontation with them, Shieldhaven's wizard convinced Wombat and me to back off from jumping the critters so we could solve this diplomatically. This was mostly okay for two reasons, one gameist and one simulationist:

Gameist: As a normal human who had not bought many stunts, I had 10 refresh. Seriously, I can buy off a compel here. Even if the GM had decided to compel all 3 possible aspects (Buffy the Serial Killer, Are You A Monster?, and The Marked Condition-- guess what all of those do!?), I could have afforded to just keep buying them off, as I hadn't needed them for anything else. Also, since Shieldhaven's character was a Wizard, he only had 3 refresh, and he might concievably need them for something before we were done.

Simulationist: Again, Double or Nothing. As soon as the goblins let us know that they'd been summoned by someone else, that person became my Preferred Prey, and I'd be happy just sending the Goblins elsewhere if it meant I'd get my pound of flesh-- or ash, whatever (another aspect is, "Are you better than Fire?")-- from this Malvora. And he's a rogue Malvora, my favorite enemy. I do love killing wise guys, I do.

In a storyboarded denouement (it was getting late as shit), Will beat this dude in a social challenge before the local Court, bringing him down in disgrace. I like to think that Gertrudis then went to his house, etherized him, then poured gasoline all over his place and set it on fire with him tied up inside. At least, that's what she would liked to do, though probably wasn't permitted.

To skim through the rest of the week's gaming, Bioshock 2 on Medium is a lot harder than I was prepared for, because frankly, I suck at Shooters. Oh well. I'm still having fun. I need to not play Entanglement so much, and I really like Tsuro-- the multiplayer board version-- we're going to be using an altered version of it in Dust to Dust. Speaking of which, patch notes tonight!

Whee!

Session Roundup #3

The only gaming this week would have been the run of my game, in which we finished up an encounter that had been called in the previous session on account of snow.

It was a pretty darn elaborate set-up, and I tried a lot of fiddly moving parts for it. There was a big stage with a dias about 3 feet up, and large stone pillars. Two members of the party (The Rogue and the Avenger, my trouble twins) had been sucked into performing as the "Hero" Wizard who had built the dungeon and his sidekick, while the rest of the party were stuck in the audience. They could affect various things by making skill checks to interact with the Shadow Attendants who worked as stagehands.

In the meantime, the two actors made skill checks to carry out tasks narrated by a booming, invisible voice, in sort of a 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?' way. Successes gave them bonuses to successive checks, or affected the outcome of the play. Also, I had given them stage swords, which (though they weren't entirely aware of it), ignored the Insubstantial quality. This would be important later.

Or, pretty immediately, as they were attacked by shadowy-wererat minions pretty quickly. Yes, that means dire rats with the Insubstantial quality (though they did not regenerate). Fun! They dispatched them all right, and then were sucked into a plot where the Hero-Wizard was dragged off and forced to become engaged to a Shadow-Actor "Rat Queen," much to the Dismay of her "Royal Vizier".

According to the narrator, the Wizard had crafted a magic wedding-ring, which turned the Queen into a beautiful Eladrin woman, causing her to scream and faint dead away, and the Vizier (an Elite) to be pissed as all hell.

Roll for initiative.

The rest of the party then Diplomacied a Shadow Stagehand to take them to the greenroom, so they could "join the play".

Okay, so the setup.

First of all, many thanks to Shieldhaven for writing up the statblocks for me, as I was creating this stuff at the very last minute. Also, everything I've described so far happened in the previous session, more than a month ago. Yippee!

Anyway. There were more stage weapons available at the sides of the stage, which would solve the Insubstantial problem for the weapon users. The implement users however had a real problem. My solution was to have three spotlights, which moved around the stage, which allowed magic to do full damage. Also, I decided (though this could just be the case) that insubstantial meant that the minions just didn't take damage from normal weapons. Bad times.

The problem was getting the players to figure this out. Some really amazing Arcana checks hinted at it strongly, and one of the wererats was a standard Leader, who also had to stand in the spotlight to use any of his abilities The Vizier alone didn't have this problem. It wound up not mattering for the Vizier, for a couple of reasons.

At each quarter of health, the Vizier summoned 8 or so wererat minions and 2 standards-- a skirmisher and a Leader. So that was fun. The Vizier managed to do his first summon just before the rest of the party made it to the stage, which created some problems with the rats having advantage of position, and the newcomers not having stage weapons yet.

For starters, the Rogue used a sneaky trick, concentrating on a magic necklace in her possession, and changed into the fainted Rat Queen, bluffing the Vizier into believing that she was really said Queen. His insight bonus being all right, but not awesome, he fell for it hook, line and sinker. They managed to interrupt combat, and convince him to send the Real Rat Queen off for questioning with two of the standards, and to dismiss the minions. It also gave the Cleric time to filch some stage weapons for all the magic users. Once that was done, they got back in a fight and beat him down pretty hard, which piffed his bloodied summon of minions, and brought down the curtain on the first act.

Now, Minions that can't be killed are a pain in the ass-- since no one in the party figured out the spotlights in time to use them. However, I made a punt when the party entered the stage that wound up sort of invalidating, quite by accident, my previous mechanic.

So when the party came on stage, they wanted to wear costumes, which were available, though I had no idea what should be. I rolled on a random list of dungeon dressing for inspiration. The Invoker got a fiery gown (from rolling 'matches'), the Artificer got a cloud (from rolling 'pillow'), and the Cleric got a sort of faunish, leafy thing (from rolling 'pipes'). Once they were on stage, their costumes made them seem like elementals, and I decided that damage sources that worked with their costumes would ignore insubstantial.

Yeah, so the invoker can deal full fire damage, and the Artificer with the Lightning Spheres cam do full thunder/lightning. So... yeah.

After a short rest, they went back out for the second act, which involved fighting the Rat Queen-- a level 4 (I think) Solo. She got off one attack and a summon of a bunch of minions before the Rogue changed back to herself and convinced her, through bluffing hard, that really, all she wanted to do really was marry her, and the Vizier was a traitor. The Rat Queen's insight being even worse than the Vizier's, I gave them a round of skill checks to extract themselves from the battle. Yeah, everyone rolled like, 25s on each skill they used. Fully. So the end of the play had the Wizard-Hero properly marry the queen, and granted them a magic item of rat summoning pipes. It also gave them enough xp to level them to 4th.

Went pretty well, for being 2 sessions with a month in between, and the party really liked being able to get out of combat with a skill check. I do not have the crazy skill-check fu that Stands-In-Fire has, so I'm sure there were ways to make it a bit smoother. But once again, I do so love using skills in 4e.

Apart from that I've mostly been playing Fallout: New Vegas or watching Shieldhaven play Overlord, which are good times both. Sadly, since I am a sniveling, console-monkey weakling, I have to be content with the slim playlist offered by New Vegas radio and the few other stations offered by the game, and the damn bug that replays, "Ain't That a Kick In the Head?" all the time, when I'd rather hear "Mad About the Boy" or the one about the Ranger with the Big Bar on His Hip.

Tonight is another DtD Update, which is cool, as people seem to dig getting LARP rules/website patch notes. Who knew! Software Development Practices are awesome!

Session Roundup #1

Partially for my own benefit, and partially to satisfy my own nonsensical desire to order the universe, I am going to try, each Thursday, writing up a brief rundown of the previous week's games. It is possible that All My Gaming will be changing up soon, which makes me very sad. Also there's been some breaks in the schedule of late, but the past two sessions of various games have been worth mentioning.

B's Game, last Tuesday-- We finished up a storyline in which, from the little we could tell, the Raven Queen sent her minions after Hane, my Revenant Assassin. We didn't find out much of what was going on, but she'd taken over the Imperial Palace, and we had the Crown Prince (a 6th level warlord) with us. We had him wait outside the door to the throne room while we tackled a couple of Ebony Guard and two Gawd Awful Hounds with a nasty fear aura, that dropped our attacks by 2 when we were in aura 5. Yeah, bad times.

On top of that, after we'd committed to wiping out the Guard as fast as possible (so we could deal with the hounds, which we'd fought before and which have unholy hit points), a Revenant Lurker showed up, with poison daggers and an eye towards making our lives bloody miserable. Fortunately, (though the player wasn't there, we had a Bard.

And the Bard had Insult to Passivity.

Insult To Passivity basically dazes an enemy until their are attacked. This is important-- they can take damage and stay dazed, so long as they're not attacked. Enter My Assassin's Shroud, and the feat that allows me to deal shroud damage without removing the shrouds when I use my Dark Reaping racial ability.

So this chick was super unhappy, trying to get close enough to hit us with daggers on her next turn, and eventually trying to run off... but we got there first and shut the doors on her. So sad for her, not having phasing. Finally, after we'd (well, mostly I'd) been wrecked by the hounds, and pretty much put them down, Our Mageblade went and started wailing on her, so she could finally use her powers. Which were pretty brutal-- she immediately went invis on us and hid behind some tapistries.

Shame I'd put Hunter's Eye on her, since she was my shroud target, and thus could find her no matter where she went. It also gave me +2 to attack her, but that's neither here nor there. Also, Norman-the-Runepriest-Barbarian-Hybrid-Dwarf (Also my Assassin's descendant) had Earthsense, and could tell where she went.

Oops.

So we wrecked her pretty hard, and that was awesome. I have to say, this was a really cool fight, and everyone got a chance to feel pretty awesome. Our Mageblade has specialized in AC improving stuff, and the things that targeted AC were balanced in such a way that while they could get most of us, they couldn't get him, most of the time. Norman also did some splendid damage, combined with healing like a madman, and our Wizard was... well, our wizard. But enough about Magic Missile in 4e. Because we wrecked her so hard, we didn't find out much more about what was going on, but the Crown Prince and the Emperor were very happy with us, the Raven Queen's shroud went away, and we all were extremely satisfied to leave the encounter with pretty much nothing left but at-wills.

Chessenta, monday-- Chessenta: Book of Serpents is run by He Who Stands in Fire, and is the most brutal game in which I play. This session was no different.

As of last session, we wound up in the town where we'd received our first quest-- we had the Axe that we were supposed to return to the town's church, and had, uh... gotten sidetracked helping out some Brass Dragons before taking it back. Of course, when we get there, the entire town's been swallowed by the Shadowfell.

Oops.

We made our way into the Shadow-Copy of the town last session, via a pretty darn neat gating system which stuck each of us in a black room with a horrible monster. For me, this meant sitting there trying not stay alive while my poor Shaman was wailed upon brutally. The others killed their monsters and teleported to another of the four rooms. Naturally, they got to me last.

But I was just fine.

Anyway, after I was rescued by my buddies, we found ourselves attempting to sneak through a city full of undead and shadow creatures towards a church. It was really just one of those sessions where we could not pass a skill challenge to save our hides. The sheer quantity of 1s rolled on 20 sided die were staggering. Thus, we wound up in two really quite brutal encounters with shadow creatures and horrible undead fleshy-monsters, one of which dropped some interesting papers. The second encounter involved these dudes who not only were able to turn invisible (and threw poisoned daggers), they created huge freaking zones of total darkness. Ultimately, we had to just frigging run away, and then try to lay in wait for them, hoping that they'd go back visible. That worked all right, and once we could, you know, hit them, we did so with much vigor. Also, our combat rolls suddenly got better. We then got to the church, rescued the mayor of the real town, and realised that we were going to have to go into the creepy sewers beneath the shadow town after all. The best part was hanging the axe back up in the church, which got us a happy quest reward: all of our weapons now do Radiant Damage as long as we're in the Shadowfell.

Hurrah super useful quest rewards!

You're gonna hear electric music/Solid Walls of Sound.

Deck of Many Things returns this week to discuss a spell. This spell can be found in Monty Cook's Arcana Evolved game. It is called Wall of Sound, and the fucker is broken as hell.

(*Note* there is apparently errata which makes it less broken, but I'll deal with that at the end of this post.)

So, about the circumstances under which I employed this spell for the first time in the campaign. I was playing my Magister, Basel (11th level at the time), who was frustrated with the limited nature of her 6th level spell options. She had memorised Vitrification, Shaped Strike, and Wall of Sound for the day-- nevemind that we were in a field of crystal and fighting crystal monsters, so Vitrification was fair useless. A little bit about these crystal monsters, by the by:

1) They had spell resistance.
2) They were immune to fire and cold (so much for shaped strike, which is a fire spell).
3) They were resistant to Electric Energy (which is one of my energy templates).
4) They could refract damage spells so that they bounced in a random direction, potentially hitting me or my allies (so much for most of my damage-- considering the changes of hitting either of the Large-Size Giants in the party, or the hit-point shy Faen, or the Human who is pretty much the main tank... yeah).
5) ...They were vulnerable to Sonic Energy.

So, after trapping one of them in stasis for a round with Dreaded Freeze, This Rabbit goes and looks up Wall of Sound. According to the original printing, the spell has the following attributes:

1) Simple (which means almost anyone can cast it)
2) Spell Resistance: No (later fixed in the Errata, but that may not matter, depending on what is being resisted.)
3) covers a number of 5X5 squares up to your spell level. (Mine at the time was 13, having cast a Heightened Greater Enhanced Magical Flow)
4) Is not bound by gravity, and need not be vertical.
5) Can be made in about any shape you want.
6) has hit points equal to 50 X your spell level.
7) deals Sonic damage equal to 1 X spell level at 20 feet away, and I forget how many d4 of damage (1d4 X spell level with a limit?) at 10 feet away. Half damage on a fort save at 10 feet, no damage on a fort save (I think) at 20.
8) has a duration of 10 rounds per level.

Sounded fantastic to me, esp as we were fighting 10 foot tall crystal critters. My first thought was to create a ceiling of sound over the one fighting my companions, but could not do so in a way that would not hit my allies. So Bo, the Winter Witch, came up with another suggestion.

"Hey Basel, why don't you box the one you Froze in the Wall?"

Well, why didn't I? I could put the wall entirely around the dude, and I could place it at such a height that crawling under it or jumping over it were both problematic, and so that, even if it did get out, it was going to take stupid damage first. Beating on the Wall, at 650 Hp, wasn't really going to do it much good either. So that's what I did. The crystal tenatacle thing (did I mention the tentacles? Yeah. Crystal Effing Tentacles. WOULD I MAKE THIS UP?) shook to death in a handful of rounds, by which time we'd murdered the hell out of his friend.

At which point, Bo very sensibly says something like,

"Yeah, just wait till that's used on us."

Hm, a valid point. The general rule of AE is that anything we can do, the NPCs can do better. And this spell, used with a bare minimum of creativity, is pretty much a Win Button.

Now, it is 6th level, and it is apparently subject to spell resistance, but I'm going to have to look up exactly how that works to see if that just means you don't take damage from it, or if you ignore the wall entirely. Because if it's the former, then that still means dude is trapped in what is basically a force wall with 650 hit points.

Still not hot, particularly if you have angry bow-fighters and magisters ringed around you, and you have any exposed bits at all. Otherwise... well, you're stuck in a box that will let the party get away long before it fades off of you. Suck.

The best ways out of this situation, assuming there's no ceiling on it, is to be able to fly, or maybe to dispel magic, so far as I can see. Otherwise, I think I'll be avoiding using this spell overmuch, as believe it or not, I am not a big fan of The Win Button. I like there to be more than one Right Answer possible in the main of situations.

Ask me about 4e Artificers and Magic Weapon sometime, when you've got a few hours.

Semi-weekly maunderings.

So today is (likely) B's Game, meaning that there's been one episode of the same, a Chessenta game, and an Eberron Game since the last time I posted on tabletop. Also a session of mine. And yet, my thoughts on such are all that is scattered and lame. But.

A thing to which I wish to give more thought-- probably aided by intense scrutiny of the monster manuals-- is keeping controllers alive. In my last game, I wound up doubling an encounter because (though they had very good plot reasons to do so), the players pretty much alpha struck the Controller before she could do any of the cool things she could have done to wreck them. On the one hand, this is good-- do the players really need to know how awful the controller's stuff is? This being something that my players ran into in their very first encounter, when they let the Goblin Hexer hang out and do horrible things to them through its allies. Alpha striking necromancers = absolutely the right thing to do.

On the other hand, there's something... I dunno, weak? About the alpha strike being too easy to pull off. There's a balance there, or a right set of additional baddies that are just nasty enough to protect the Controller by drawing off aggro, without just rolling the party hard. As last weekend's LARP reminded me-- if the GM wants dead players, they can always have them. It's not that hard. What's hard is live PCs who feel like they were actually at risk of dying horribly.

Anyway, it's a lowby something to think about, but something I am thinking about RightNowThisMinute.