OOC THREAD

[tomcat]

We are back from Tennessee. I just finished my VTT game session tonight, but tomorrow you will have my post, Paul!

Sorry for my delays.

[Telcontar]

Are we still going to use the 2e journey rules? I like those.

[Eclecticon]

Yep.  I much prefer those and they will be the standard as long as I'm running the game.  I'm also increasingly in favour of using the 2E council rules over the 1E encounters, so I'll throw that over to you guys.  Any opinions one way or the other?

[Eclecticon]

My apologies - I'm still working on the next post.  I'm going to try my hardest to have it up tomorrow morning.

[Telcontar]

As I recall the Council rules were one of the areas that the fans had stated needed an overhaul.

I took a quick read through the 2e book (p104) to get a feel for the new rules. As a concept it seems sound but with two caveats. Do we have the skill levels that are indicative of our levels to handle a difficult council? And we need to take into consideration that 2e characters have more possible dice at lower levels than we may have in our current 1e characters.

Most if not all of that can be mitigated by how Paul sets the resistance so I think overall its doable. 

[Telcontar]

There is another factor as well. The only character who really excels at the skills needed for council is Arbogast. He is hands down across the board better at every single applicable skill. (Inspire, Insight, Persuade, Riddle, Song) Which presents us with a mechanical meta game problem, the best character to tackle any council is also the Lore Masters character. So either Paul spends the scenes playing both sides of a council, someone takes over one side or the other, or the supporting cast cones in.

The supporting cast has a clear line of succession as well. Hathcyn, Esgalwen, and then Gwaithlim. Hathcyn and Gwen are tied on two out of the five skills with Gwaithlim's best option is song with two dice.

Thinking out loud here maybe each character participates but tries to do it with their strongest skill spread across the five.

Or wing it and see what happens and what mood takes us. What are the chances we get another madness at a critical point? 

[Telcontar]

The special actions by stance and general action economy have come up a few times over the course of our game. The general idea being that the Stance Actions replace your standard attack action and for many of them sacrifice any attack at all. Play has demonstrated that loosing your turn to perform the action extends the overall length of the combat and decreases the value of the maneuver when a shorter combat would achieve a similar result.

I was thinking that maybe as an alternative we could use the battle rolls to offset. Normally with the Battle roll we gain an extra success die, many of us often forget we have them in the course if the fight. What if instead they allowed the character to perform a stance maneuver in addition to their basic attack action?

[tomcat]

I like it.

As Loremaster, I would allow for both - bonus dice to start the encounter, and a PC can make a Battle roll during combat to see if he can use a stance maneuver in that particular round. It would lend itself to the heroics of Tolkien's stories of how one man or woman can hold off twenty orcs.

[Eclecticon]

I like the idea, but rather than have players do a Battle roll (heh) to perform a task action as well as attacking, I'd say people can trade off bonus dice to do it on a 1:1 basis - one die buys you one action.  That keeps things interesting without potentially bogging things down with a whole bunch of extra rolls. 

[Telcontar]

Yeah that was my intent. The battle roll at the start gave you points to use for Stance Actions during the combat. Not rolling battle every time they wanted to.

[Eclecticon]

Then we are agreed.  So it shall be from this day forth.

[GandalfOfBorg]

So to recap...
1. # of successes of Battle rolls at beginning of combat will determine how many bonus die and/or bonus ("free") combat actions that a player can use during combat.
2. Players can still use combat actions per normal rules in place of a standard attack, etc.

[Telcontar]

Just need to confirm that this does or does not include combat actions like sweeping attack. Im interested to see how it will work if it does.

[Eclecticon]

Apologies for the recent radio silence.  The death of the Queen and associated things blew my work schedule to hell sideways for a bit there, but normal service should now be able to resume. 

Tom, to answer your question I would rule that the manoeuvres only need a bonus die when you're doing something non-attack-y as well as making an attack in the same round.  If you're doing a fancy attack (e.g. a called shot or using two weapons) or just rallying the companions or whatever, then just go ahead and do it.  I'm willing to hear other points of view, but I think this makes sense. 

[tomcat]

Matt - did you want a picture of your Elf on your PC sheet? Let me know.