OOC

I hate to bring this topic up, but well... few weeks ago I decided to quit this game if the first battle will take more than a month. First roll of initiative were on FEB-1, so we are just two working days (4 calendar days) away from a MAR-1 and we still have two enemies at full HP and one more who could technically be waked by other NPC.
Anyway
- if DM has any idea how to boost battle encounters I am more than happy to stay
- I am OK to stay in the game a bit longer to allow you find a replacement
- I want to propose to try schedule 1 hour per week online session (using roll20 only and only for battle encounters). I believe a non boss battle for lvl 1 PCs should take about 30 min online.

P.S. My excuse is this - I do want to play ToD. I don't believe we will be able to play even 20% of the first book at the current pace before "life will happen" and game will stop. Not to mention that month is long enough to forget the story plot or PC .

Greyword playing by post I notice in general it takes a lot of time.
I do not know how to make battles to go faster and using turns... it would be nice to play together online and if its possible, I do not know others, if they can.

I already told you...I am lucky to have players with experience, so you can advice me to become better and we can play with more fun and I accept criticism :)

I will throw in one more hint applicable not only for PHP:enemies should try to run away when they understand they are loosing the fight. That would be both reasonable end effective from game-time prospective.

Only undead and oozes don't have self preservation instincts, I believe.

The big issue with that is that not all enemies are reasonable. For example, fighting zealous cultists that are willing to die for their god/worship source/whatever. They would be so fanatical they don't care if they live or die. Likewise with relatively unintelligent creatures. Some enemies do logically flee, but it is bad for immersiveness in the environment for every non-undead and non-ooze to just run. Not to mention characters arent always going to let them run. In our current combat, for example, Brommyr is uninterested in letting these cultists run away to ransack another village. So he would give chase if they tried to run.

The biggest "speeds up play" in pbp ive noticed is having players act in any order. You do lose some of the rigid turn based things, but it vastly improves pace. Typically how I've seen it is situations like we have, where players are all one after the other, let them post their actions in any order and as a DM you can tweak the action order to make narrative sense. Players can certainly specify some options there (like I try to Warhammer kobold a but Hunter kills him first. So I say my secondary target is kobold c. Then you resolve it appropriately). But it makes it where instead of 3 to 4 days to go through one round, it can usually resolve in a day or so.

Scheduled live play is 100% not an option for me. I primarily play PBP because I can't specify a block of time for guaranteed availability (my in person game we have a session once or twice every 3 months because of scheduling difficulty).

And as much as I love the roll20 side, I know for me it does add effort and time to the combat. Rolling and detailing everything in GP streamlines that, even if using Roll20 just for map visuals (because it is better for that). I don't mind the effort, but bouncing between the two makes it more jarring as a player.

Right. I'm throwing int too much ideas that may not work. It would be great if DM assume extra effort and responsibility to tweak player actions submitted in order other than execution order.
Theoretically that changes battle turn from 10 step process DM->P1 -> DM->P2 -> DM->P3 -> DM->P4 -> DM->P5 in two step process DM->AllPlayers. The benefit is obvious.

ok guys lets try this method then... two steps... enemy turn and all players have one day to post their turns in any order.

Actually I would like to have some recap or guidance from DM on the current situation. I'm confused about two things. First is the same question Dramasailor asked in game chat:
Conclusion: Either the cultist magically turned into a guard or our PCs just going crazy. Guards are good guys and cultists are bad guys we don't want to mix them up do we?
Question: Do our PCs understand how it is possible that a cultist fell asleep but what we see now is a guard ? Could roll arcana or something to understand how cultist turned into guard?
Question: does this mean woman just got into the building that's set ablaze? Or is it only "haystacks and barns" that could as target buildings ?

its just haystacks and barns burning down....

I do not understand your other questions...
of course guards are the good ones and cultists are the bad ones
why are you confused on the guards and cultists? I wrote cultist that you tied up and awake

Here's the point where my confusion is stemming from:



Here, you state there is an unarmed cultist and a sleepy guard.

From there, Jaelyn asks the unarmed cultist to surrender and then states they are tying up a sleeping cultist (which is the start of the confusion I think, because we now have a description of 1 cultist and 1 guard. But are now tying up an undescribed additional sleeping party).



Xarathon readies his firebolt for the cultist being asked to surrender.

From there, I ask the following (as pointed out by GreyWord):


Which you confirmed as yes, we have 1 hostile (the cultist being asked to stand down) and 1 town guard that we wouldn't want to tie up.


I come over and add my presence to the threat, and you describe:


Here, you describe them again as a guard, but this time tied up. Now, they are speaking as a cultist but defined as a guard. Brommyr would react very differently if they are visually the same as the cultists (because known threat). But someone that appears to be a town guard now acting like a cultist is a different matter and possibly someone that is not in their right mind.

This is why I'm confused. The person has been described several times and confirmed as a friendly town guard that was put to sleep.

This is one of my concerns with having the Roll20 piece as well as the forum in terms of "what is the source of truth" for who is who on the map. Personally, descriptions written in the forum (for me) are the unarguable truth of the story. Roll20 should only ever give a visual reflection of what we've described here not the other way around.

ok my mistake I meant cultist....I corrected it

Sorry I haven't posted quite as much. This week was pretty crazy.

Could you please clarify those contradicting statement - is the moon gone, are dim light not sufficient to see creatures at 60 feet or are there other reasons DM mention that only PCs with dark vision would notice enemies?


Also. Why no NPC react to my PC suggestion to use magic stones? Do they choose to ignore my PC talking? Should I repeat the suggestion in game thread ? I do think magic stone could be super useful with weak NPCs such as children, because they could throw stones at the enemies and I can imbue 3 stones each turn.

I ignored it, because they are commoners, they dont fight... and I am trying Greyword...I just thought, you would have trouble seeing...:-/ ok let me correct it...to : you are all seeing them, as shadows to the distance through smoke

Guys something important, because I am going to add people on roll20 to play this campaign twice per month.
For now on, the chat on roll20 will be busy.

So I suggest the attack rolls and every roll to be written here and to use the map only for visual and moving tokens.

I'm perfectly happy to roll everything here on gamersplane.
Still I'm a bit worried about two teams sharing tha same roll20 game rather than having a separate game copy each.
Could you please explain/confirm:
1. We will not see tokens of the other team or tokens of the monsters the other team is fighting
2. We will not see the maps of the other team
3. You do not plan to prevent us seeing enemy rolls, so it could spoil types of enemies to be faced and their attacks.

P.S. Maybe we could totally abandon roll20 and you could show us map on gamersplane just us in any other gamersplane game?

yeah....good points....I was just going to copy maps, so no worries everything you said is not interfering with your map....just ignore the chat and the rolls...

well if we abandon roll20 then I will just need to screen shot and using it only by myself...whatever you like

and just avoid log in for no spoilers, when we were going to play every Wednesday between 17:00 until 22:00 Greece time