Ephesos

Duh, non-stick coating.

*ding* Oh, and I promise to add all the quotes to my site soonish. I need to do a big refactor on it anyway. Click to reveal.. (Harosh, L6) Name: Harosh (Level 6) Occupation: Disciple of Orlis Race: Lacewing Deity: Liea Strength: 3 Dexterity: 4 Intelligence: 5 Health: 16/24 (+3) Stamina: 3/10 Magic (Transmutation): 6 Magic (Divination): 1 Martial (Shovel): 3 (+1) Perception: 3 (+1) History: 3 Thievery: 1 Nature: 1

Columbines are awesome. ...so are roses.

*salutes* I wish you well, good sir.

Yup, time for a new thread. I don't feel like taking the test right now, but I have drifted down and left a bit over the years.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Yeah, that's right. Hitler. I'll let you think about that for a bit. I know, man. I didn't think you'd land that far south of him.

Boooooooooo

(is still way way way too busy to do a contest)

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Can you say, "publicity stunt"? Every time I hear about someone claiming to receive the direct word of God, it always turns out to be some raving lunatic crying out for attention. See: G.W. Bush Every time a thread like this is made in ironic protest, Glenn Beck gains more followers. So, to wit:

I know that exact feeling.

Originally Posted By: Lilith One problem with having wounds incapacitate a character is that it leads to death spiral syndrome: whoever gets the first serious hit landed on them is at a disadvantage for the rest of the fight, which leads to more wounds, which leads to further disadvantage. That may be realistic but it's not great for dramatic tension -- at least not if every fight is to the death, anyway. Agreed... this is one of my few issues with the Deadlands system. It's fun and gritty, but we had a party member who basically kept making really stupid decisions, culminating in getting a leg shot off... penalizing all of his rolls by 4 until he retired from the game. Which wasn't very long after that. And with the critical/fumble thing... yeah, I agree that it can get a little crazy at times, but I kinda like it. It's very fun, even if it puts some burden on me as the DM. And I'm still not going to let people succeed at everything on a 20, like when Nixak shouted for Rikkla to not come and fight everyone... it wasn't going to work fully. But stall a little, making it easier for the party to escape? Yeah, sure. Mind you, someone could by all means DM in a way that every single 1 failed catastrophically, and every 20 succeeded catastrophically, but I like leaving that difference up to the DM. So I am not inclined to add a confirmation roll.

Hey all, it's about time I posted the LOG of the final Selos session. So there it was, in that previous sentence. Now, quotes! Click to reveal.. (Ultiquotes?) Boregloaf: "All right, let's finish this and go home." Kundak: "If someone wants this to be more comical, I can make us trip on marbles." Lanrezac: "Sliros won't allow this destruction to continue!" Nixak: "No one enters my mind!" Chak-Tha: "Little bugs, little bugs, walking on the sand. Little bugs, little bugs, crushed beneath my hand... Do you hear the footsteps? Do you feel the burn? Little bugs, little bugs, soon you all will learn!" Vitze: "There's only one person who can burn me and get away with it, and it's sure as hells not you." So that's it! The Selos campaign is complete! As always, the logs will be available here. Remember, the FINALE of the Blood Marsh campaign will be Friday, May 28th, 6:30pm CDT. Be there.

Originally Posted By: Nioca As for untrained skill checks: Personally, I've been employing a "No Attribute Bonus" penalty to those. Yeah, I've been toying with a flat -5 penalty on untrained checks. Might go that route, because I do see the obvious problem of "well, having 1 rank is pretty useless". Originally Posted By: Rowen Negative note is that font size does matter with how the grid shows up to the players. Maybe we can make some sort of default font to get around this? I hope that the battle-grids are here to stay. I believe they are here to stay, and I would like to figure out what's making them display weird for some people. I might just end up changing fonts and seeing if it helps. Originally Posted By: Rowen This problem might be from how green behind the ears I am but I know that I most likely wont be rolling anything unless the GM tells me to from now on. Probably not a bad idea, really. Unless you're really feeling lucky, or you want to use your awesome modifiers. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Greenspun's Tenth Rule ...yeah, I hope to death to avoid that. I want transparency, and elegance. The whole point of this system is for us to be able to play quickly with minimal rules conflict, and for there to be as low of a learning curve as humanly possible. Though I understand where the idea is coming from, I want AIMhack to be an exception to the rule (hah, famous last words). Originally Posted By: Sarachim ...we've failed to account for the differences between the tabletop roleplaying we're basing this system on and an AIM chat... On the contrary, I keep that in mind with everything I make. I know there are some things that will work well, and some things that just can't work quite right (chasing Chak-Tha, for one, would've worked much better with a physical board in front of everyone). In part, these campaigns were meant to stress-test what all we can do over AIM. And you're right in that it's certainly cleaner than in Labyrinth, even if that means less calamari for the party. Originally Posted By: Dantius I'll probably come back and edit this post later after I finish up BM. I'm unwilling to speak my piece quite right now. First, please don't just edit it, because I will never see it. This thread got 15 new posts just while I was at work today, so I'm not going back to read old posts. Also, to be perfectly honest, you have made your opinions pretty clear to me, between in-session conduct and the facets of the Imperium system. Originally Posted By: Triumph Lanrezac failed to raise his combat skills to anything like par with the other characters...and the effect of this was that he seemed to be by far the least useful in the final battle, since everyone else's combat abilities/key attribute (INT or STR) so far dwarfed him. I actually saw Lanrezac's endgame performance as an issue of tactics. His use of Scramble was great for the ritual circle segments, and was something I hadn't actually accounted for in my plans, so kudos there. But in the final fight, Locking Spell was not the best shot he had... Mirror Gauntlet and Bridge Repair would've had interesting defensive uses. Playing Abjuration as an offensive school is also not terribly effective. But overall, I'd actually have to commend Lanrezac's skill distribution... it was far closer to what I would like to see in the future, as it let me make history tidbits available, and let me do diplomacy challenges (which failed for entirely different reasons). But overall, strong character concepts tend to lead to balanced-ish skills, in my opinion. Originally Posted By: Nalyd I've managed to avoid the pretty much completely by detailing exactly what Sawbones does when he attacks, making it as awesome as I can, and imagining that it makes a difference. Amen to that. I have certainly enjoyed and appreciated Sawbones's combat presence. Originally Posted By: Monroe Originally Posted By: Lilith Actually, come to think of it, is there any real reason we can't get rid of stats altogether and just have skills? This is how the World rp works. There don't seem to be any stats at all, not even health. Just different abilities that you have to use cleverly along with a role of the dice. Yeah, the World RP works like that, in theory. But there is zero transparency in how it works. At that point, the only control you have over your actions is the d20... particularly since your choices are frequently rather constrained. I prefer the open path AIMhack has taken... everyone is 100% able to haggle out abilities with me, so that they make sense for both parties. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Another possibility is splitting up combat and non-combat skills, and making every character level up in both for each level. This way no character is over or under powered in combat, and every character is useful outside of it. See, originally attack bonus was supposed to partially depend on level anyway. But then people started pumping attack stats to 10, and that fell by the wayside. If we can make leveling up more sane, we can make attack/defense scale with level again. Originally Posted By: A Bunch of People FIX LEVELING UP Yeah yeah yeah yeah, I know... it's crazy-inelegant right now. I've been considering a lot of other approaches, and Sarachim's idea of leveling up less frequently is definitely one I like. I know everyone likes leveling up, but it is definitely one of the bigger weaknesses in the system right now. With that in mind, here's a potential solution: For each level, level up a main stat by 1. Then, take 5 skill points and go nuts. New skills cost 2 for the first rank. ...I dunno, we'll see. Thank you everyone for the feedback so far!

Alright... so I'm slowly coming out of my post-finale coma, and I'm getting to where I can actually respond to these. (On a related note, the log of the finale should go live in the next 24 hours... the past week has not been a good one for me, outside of the sessions) Originally Posted By: Triumph Also, badger major, friendly NPCs about training??? They might have something to share. Just generally don't assume NPCs are only there to advance the plot. They can be interesting, and often have a bit more going on than is immediately obvious. Er, unless it's one of those Randomly Generated Generic Shopkeepers... those are pretty much just what they seem to be. (I think Amadan bought arrows from one of those) Also, with the ending criticism, two things. First, I am taking it constructively, don't worry. Second, I'll admit I'm not 100% happy with the ending either. Note how I added a bit to the end 2 minutes after I typed it. The ending of Selos was intended to be less of an ending than a setup for potential adventuring hooks in the future. If in fact this is all some elaborate Kyrophian conspiracy, it isn't going to be solved quite in one adventure. And I kind of wish I'd done a scene with Zarusa at the end, but it would've basically just been the party re-hashing what they just did, and Zarusa saying "I have no idea what is going on, here's some gold". And I feel kinda lame making the party re-hash things they've already said/done, because it's just extra typing (it's one aspect of RP-ing that I feel doesn't translate well to the medium we're in). Shopping will now be handled in-between sessions, no question about it. It's just cleaner. Except for bigger things like spell training and major NPC interactions, as seen in Blood Marsh. Mundane stuff, though... yeah. Clutter. As for the concerns of linearity/direction, some of the concerns raised just stemmed from bad luck or bad choices. It was definitely possible to evade Trassak's guards in the city, the party just failed spectacularly at it. It was also possible to make a stealthier approach to Sarden, and to gather information without raising a ruckus. The path the party took simply involved exploding heads, and I can't control that. Sarden could've been an entirely different challenge. But generally, I understand the concern, and I'm learning to improve that in my sessions (it was even worse in Labyrinth sometimes). Nioca raises a lot of interesting mechanical/system concerns, most of which have been very much on my mind. To address them in order: 1. Magic. I do plan to condense the magic system, and make it less awful. For one, I'm thinking of just combining Enchantment and Illusion, since the line between them never quite sat right with me. But at some point, I want to explore shaking up the whole thing and making new schools, 'cause the D&D 3.0 ones were abandoned for a reason. Think of it as an experiment... and now we have results. 2a. Healing & Stamina. Agreed... this needs a revamp, and I'm looking at alternatives. I am leaning towards always costing stamina, but boosting the power. There might be a one-shot in the future to test some of this stuff out. 2b. Healing & Schools. Also agreed... I can think of ways to do healing in most of the schools, and given that I want to revamp all the schools anyway... this will be changed. 2c. Healing & Death. Yeah. Notice how close the party came to dying in the Selos finale. I'll be doing more of that, and expect even more as I refine healing mechanics. Also, watch out Blood Marsh. 3. Warriors Are Boring. Also agreed, which is why I started introducing the combat maneuvers that Boregloaf learned. I dunno about the spell slots thing... but I like giving players at least one maneuver from the start. We'll see... again, a one-shot test game might be in order. 4. Combat Combat Combat. Hey, I'm not the one who told everyone to only level up their attack skills. When people start doing that, what am I supposed to do? Keep including skill challenges that everybody always fails? A lot of the time, I would prepare the results for skill rolls that nobody ever used... and that kinda ticks me off. So as people keep investing in attack power, I tend to assume people want combat. If people hadn't scaled it up so quickly, maybe combat would've been more reasonable, and we could've had more skill usage. So that is not entirely my fault, and in fact, I would say that the majority of the problem is not my fault. I hate to sound mean, but dang... look at some of your skill ranks! If you leave your Thievery at 1, do you honestly expect me to include a bunch of Thievery checks in the game, when the rest of the party can outdo you untrained? ...sorry if that ended on a harsh note, I honestly had fun running the games. Obviously there are things I want to change for next time, but I really did have a blast doing this. Otherwise I would've quit shortly after the jungle burned down.

...on a related and significantly more awesome note... LINK Oh, and if that wasn't good enough, FREE PORTAL.

SoT: Unless there's a real pattern to it, it would probably be more of a pain than it would be helpful. And in BoA, it's just flat-out not worth it. And that is truly an excellent sketch. I am quite happy to say I had seen it before.

We've also got tons of Blades of Avernum scenarios that take place on the surface. A vast majority of them, actually. And I'm pretty sure that most mentions of Avernum 0 have included the First Expedition or something similar.

As someone who used to bother making this distinction in their Blades of Avernum scenarios, it's a pain. Take every single node you've written that refers to the party, multiply by two. Yes, it's all simple enough, but it builds up into a nuisance very very quickly.

Wait, tomorrow? Wow, I think I seriously spaced out thanks to the Selos finale... but I can still be there. Crap, I need to shop.

Just a reminder, as the final session of Selos and the Oracle is now complete. If the Selos folks could direct their posts to the postmortem thread, that would be awesome. I do plan to close this thread once Blood Marsh wraps up and the final log is posted. (log will follow when I can manage to process it) Originally Posted By: Khashen, the Oracle of Selos "All tales come to an end. But for every end, there are dozens of beginnings."

Originally Posted By: Khashen, the Oracle of Selos "All tales come to an end. But for every end, there are dozens of beginnings." Yes friends, it is time to draw the first of the Mote campaigns to a close. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did, and here's to many more! As of this thread's posting, Selos and the Oracle has come to a conclusion. Epicness abounded, lessons were learned, and many many fumbles were endured. There are many things to take care of now that the final die has been rolled. First and perhaps most importantly, it's time to think about character epilogues. I welcome any and all players (even those who dropped out) to submit an epilogue for their character, one which can be posted to the my site. However, you might want to bear in mind the fact that future campaigns might call for higher-level characters, such as the ones you have now. Don't write up your happily-ever-after retirement if you want to join in the next campaign... or be ready to have your vacation interrupted. Second, I welcome any and all questions and comments about the finished campaigns. Pretty much everything is fair game. I want to know what you liked, what you hated, what could be better, what intrigued you, any and all opinions. And remember that I have huge piles of .txt files crammed with campaign info, so fire away. (I reserve the right to give cryptic/unhelpful answers if you ask about things that influence future/current campaigns) Third, there are some things I intend to do for the next campaign(s) I run. These are just going to be procedural changes, but they bear mentioning:Scheduling will be taken care of by email. Some people don't check the boards enough, and the faster we can schedule sessions, the happier everyone will be. I will be compiling a page of all the player-created spells we've generated so far, to help compare things. Magic schools might be changing, because the ones I borrowed from D&D 3.0 are clunky and mesh poorly. I will be discussing this with the other DMs at some point, and don't worry, this won't invalidate past characters. Finally, and this one is kind of important, it's time to start thinking about future campaigns. I'm open to any suggestions, and while I have thoughts as to where the plots of Selos and Blood Marsh can go in the future, I am not bound to continuing them. In fact, I'd actually prefer to run at least one brand-new campaign. But, there are a few specific factors to consider with new campaigns:Character Level (affects whether past characters can join) Setting (obviously somewhere on Mote... for now) Theme (horror, gritty, survival, exploration, dungeoncrawl, intrigue, etc) Plot Requests ("Imaunte's disciples", "Land Shark hunting", "Gaunik-Da's sanctuary", "that rock over there", etc) ...so, yeah. Once more, I hope everyone enjoyed this campaign, and I hope that there are many more ahead of us.

Blades of Avernum. If you liked the original Avernum engine, and want to play a variety of scenarios by community members, it's your best bet.

Yay Mystic! You have successfully sought the meaningless approbation of your peers! (+1)

I mean, even a simple one-on-one test, maybe even not with characters in the party, can do wonders. I mean, I forced Nikki to help me test AIMhack with a one-shot back in the day.

Reminder! Today! Selos Epic Finale Of Epicness! 6:30pm CDT! Be there! Exclamation Point! Originally Posted By: Vothella, lacewing dreamthief "You would do well to lay low until this all blows over. It is terrible for business."