Character Concepts & Campaign Info

I was aiming for Adan. Wanted that catchpole back. Shucks.

Thanks. Looking forward to helping out and some awesome adventures.
That was a nice weapon indeed. I know it's not the same, but you could always pick up a glaive or halberd, to put your Polearm Master to work. That reach is nice to have, not to mention the opportunity attack whenever someone enters your reach.

Oh, most assuredly. Of course, now that we might be on the run and poking around dungeons, it may be difficult to replace. Looking forward to trying, though!

So, hopefully I'm not putting up too much text. Much like in real life, I'm not good at being succinct, and when I write within the context of PbP, I rather enjoy it. If it's too much, I can try to scale it back.

Why didn't we have Martjan tell us where to find the sphere while we still had the chance? D: I'm sure we all knew this would happen...

Yeah, I suspected it would happen for dramatic reasons. I should've just made her tell me, but then the DM gets to paint an even bigger target on the party.

I think the only problem with too much text is if there's a lot of speech. Too much speaking in one post (and I'm talking like multiple paragraphs) makes it harder to follow the flow of conversation, whereas shorter sections of speech allow more interaction/natural conversation to happen I think. That also allows an easier recap if I'm coming back to the game after a couple of days and want to remind myself what's going on (bolding the text as we've been doing also helps with this).
Longer sections of internal thoughts are OK as that can all be skipped over if I'm just scanning through to refresh my memory.
But anyway, yeah, so far so good! Look forward to adventuring you and rescuing any precious relics that belong in a museum!

@notinventedhere: As far as the text length, I get what you're saying. Make sense.

As far as rescuing precious relics, based on the direction the adventure is already headed, I'm guessing we won't have to go out of our way to do so. Looking back on the adventure, Vhezyen would have been most interested in that 'Goblin City' from the Badgerways, and getting an up close and personal look at their culture, even if it meant doing so in a 'merciless conquistador, kind of way (which, given that they're goblins, seems a guaranteed outcome).

There was soooo much content left behind in the Badgerways. I really wish you guys had gone looking for Wormfellow. And there's probably only like a 33% chance you're going to meet my new favorite minor character in chapter 5, and if you don't meet him then, you probably ever will. Oh well...

Watching players miss out on or rush past the things you love as the DM is always so tough...

Most definitely, but giving them the freedom to do so is wonderful.

Besides, maybe we'll get a chance to explore the Badgerways again. It would be nice to find some time to do so, although it would seem the plot itself is demanding attention elsewhere. Either way, I'm certain we have more to look forward to.

All the content that goes down the memory hole gets made up by the stuff I never thought I'd have to come up with (but do anyway) because of players acting in unexpected ways. Chapter 4 is like 25% longer than I intended it to be thanks to you guys...

Testing something.

That worked for me.

All I see is
"bulloctorok sent a note to nubs"
which is probably what it's supposed to do, so it works!

An excellent tool, one of my favorites. Used judiciously, it helps lend some mystery to the game. I got carried away with it when I first started using it, and the result was just an unnecessary exchange of posts as players repeated the contents of their personal 'notes' to share info with the group. The lesson was quickly learned.

BTW, everyone, this chapter will be over pretty soon, so you all (except for Vhezyen, who already has 5 levels) can go ahead and start leveling up and updating your character sheets. Also, feel free to purchase any new gear you need, you can buy whatever's in the PHB for the prices listed there.

Zangua will take the average HP increase and buy a quarterstaff.

It should never go down the memory hole! Keep it around, find a way to use it somewhere else, mix it in when it seems right. It took me a while to learn as a DM that the content the players never saw the first time around would be just as good somewhere else.


Anyways, speaking of leveling up, I have a question - I was reviewing Sage Advice a few days ago, and one of the questions was about the Jack of All Trades class feature for Bards, and anyways, this intrigued me:
And I was a little blown away by the implications of Initiative being something a character could be proficient in (although it makes sense, in the context of how 5e distinguishes between Ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws), and just was curious if anyone else had noted that possibility. I have to admit, there are still lots of implications of the 5e ruleset I'm still figuring out, and I remain a little flummoxed by some ends of the proficiency system - especially people being "double proficient" with certain things.

I don't think it's necessarily that you're proficient in Initiative or Dexterity. It's more that you now have a feature which allows you to apply the modifier to your ability check, whereas normally you could not. The line about "isn't already adding his or her proficiency bonus" applies if you have another rule that lets you do this; you can only apply one/once, not both/twice.