Shattered Honor – Part Twenty-Two
Chapter: Season Ten
Brett isn’t playing around, y’all.
It helps if you read the “as per” line in the email voice of Janice from H.R. when she is all “Well, as per my previous email…”
Here is a link to the spell Sam is talking about too:
… I have this odd suspicion that the idea Brett has, is to START with a TPK … _and the players keep going_.
I mean, look at the Dwarf spectre. Hell, listen to him: the dead do not rest easy in those halls.
This is gonna be “d20 Thriller”, possibly complete with the Vincent rice voiceover.
Not that it changes the outcome at all, but I have a question. Is the acid damage for swallowed creatures at the beginning of the graverot’s action or at the start of the swallowed creature’s action? In the previous page it was the latter, but in this page it is at the start of the graverot’s action instead.
My impression from the previous page was that the graverot would act first and then Annabelle would die. Shrug. Either way Annabelle is toast as soon as she takes the damage while unconscious which was either going to happen first or second in a round.
And yes, _Pax_ … I think you might well be on to something there.
It isn’t a Brian boo-boo (which I am subject to, but not in this case). You’re paying attention and I love it. It is an intentional shift in action for the story and you’ll see what comes from it.
Thanks for the response! Your stories for Karthun have been great. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Forged beat me to it. You dinged Annabelle for acid damage twice in one turn sequence (hers and the worm’s). I think it’s one or the other.
And Brian already addressed it:
I love how Brett is coming into his own here. Not grudgy, not powertripping, not trying to match the previous DMing styles, just good old fashioned hardball. Winner takes all the marbles.
Is this really happening? I want to disbelieve the dungeon.
Make a Wisdom saving throw.
Aw, man, I got “Hufflepuff”
Man, if I were in a game where the GM was coming so hard I died before I even got to act in the first fight, I think I’d be more than a little pissed-off.
It must be a testament to how tight-knit these guys are that they’re trusting in Brett to bring something satisfying with this.
Lol the main person in the group that would get angry and argue is the one running the game and that was the old Bret not this one.
Sometimes things like this happen, and tempers can flare. The trick is to direct the anger at the game and not one another, and to make sure everybody understands that.
A bit ago in one of my 5e sessions we were battling a Revenant as a 4th level party while trying to protect its vengeance target. The encounter was balanced around having 2 divine casters- me, the cleric, and the group newcomer, a Celestial Sorcerer. That went out the window when the Revenant successfully cast Charm Person on the Sorc, who then proceeded to mop the floor with the rest of us while the Rev killed the target. Lord knows I was pissed, but not at either of them because the DM and the Sorc were just playing the game and “letting the dice fall” as Sam and company would say.
I was mad as hell at the book, because with no way to break out from under that spell unless the caster slaps you it was an infuriating way to lose the fight, but I made damn sure to be clear where that anger was directed and things went okay (plus it was good fuel for how my cleric felt in the aftermath).
Yeah, I can totally see where it would happen. But speaking as someone who’s run a few games of my own, it also falls to the GM to “read the room” and sometimes fudge where the dice are falling, so to speak, if the game is proving to be so punishing that the players aren’t having any fun.
Death has to be a constant threat in any RPG, but part of the fun in playing is feeling like you’re capable enough to handle death-defying situations. If something comes in and just crushes you in one to two hits, that tends to feel not terribly heroic.
And there is something of a difference between feeling like the environment or the antagonist is bringing the pain, and feeling like the GM is. Trevor himself said that Brett was hunting him, not the dungeon. And Brett’s being pretty hardcase, not being comedic or joking or wincing or commiserating, anything that would put him on his players’ side. The last time he smiled was when springing the trap on the players, and it was a wonderful, foreboding smile of wicked fun. Ever since, he’s just been stating cold facts and dropping the hammer. Heck, he didn’t even smile when helping Charlie with his awesome reveal.
Granted, having read this comic for some time, I fully believe there’s a method to his madness and we’ll see where it goes. It just makes me ponder the role of the GM, and etc.
I hate to open up what might be an old wound (or come across as being pedantic), but that’s not how Charm Person works. All that spell (and Charm Monster) don’t turn the target into an ally of the caster – they just make the target friendly to the caster. Given that, it makes sense that the target wouldn’t get to make a save until the caster or one of their allies damages the target.
So, worst cast, the Sorcerer would have sat out the combat.
I bring this up because *I* used the higher-level version of this spell (Charm Monster) and we treated it the way you described, and it was only *after* the encounter that I looked more closely at the spell and realized how it worked.
Yeah, in 3.5 you could use charisma checks to force people to do things after charming them, but not in 5e. And even then, if you were doing charisma checks I imagine a sorcerer would have a pretty decent chance lol.
Well, whether or not it was correct, that’s how it was played. *shrug*
I’m just going to pop in here and say that chats like this make me wish I had opened up a forum back in the day. It’s nice to see folks just chatting about gaming and their campaigns and experiences.
So, are surprise rounds different in 5e? I’ve never really seen anything about people being surprised due to not meeting a threshold on their initiative, in my experience it’s just been whether each person was aware of a threat, unless they had a specific class feature to prevent them being surprised or something. But all my 5e experience is watching streams of people playing, not playing myself, so I dunno if the rules changed. I could certainly see something like that at least being a homerule or something, like, if you roll high enough you’ve got good enough reflexes to act on the first round or something. Not that Annabelle being surprised as well would really have changed things I suppose, lol.
In 5e, a surprised character can’t move or take an action on their first turn of combat. The character also can’t take a reaction until the turn ends.
So basically Annabelle was the only character that could have acted and she was swallowed and then immediately unconscious from the acid.
Brian made an interesting choice having the GM ask the first player (Sam) of the surprised characters what his character is going to do, but I believe it was to highlight how screwed Annabelle was and that they did have a revivify to use after the fact if they can finish the battle fast enough. Given the lack of meaningful options/discussion points afterward, I’m guessing that is why we didn’t get a panel of each having to pass because they are surprised.
I’ll only add to what forged said to say that you’re basically correct about how surprise works; Annabelle wasn’t surprised because of her passive perception. Everyone else was. It’s unlucky that despite rolling pretty well on her initiative, the worm rolled higher, and Annabelle got eaten during the first round, when nobody else could act.
A fun explainer for anyone looking for more surprise examples: http://dmsworkshop.com/2018/07/13/things-you-didnt-know-about-dd-5e-the-surprise-round/
To elaborate a little, Surprise isn’t related to initiative directly. It’s more of a story-telling thing and is dependent on the circumstances- you still roll initiative even when surprised, you just lose a turn while you shit yourself and clean out your undies.