ravenn4544 wrote: ↑Thu Jun 13, 2024 11:01 amI must have missed something . I thought also we were hunkering down for 4 days to then travel back. I would also have thought we would save the wish for a different purpose. With that being said - Onward!
I tried pretty hard to get someone to take the Wish ring as their treasure, hoping you would figure out a good use for it, but I couldn't get any takers.
I only saw one clue to take it and that clue came BEFORE the gnomes had the ring in hand and told us it was a ring of wish(es). The anti-clue for me was the first round negotiation, because I thought if they were going to use the ring to screw us that they would take the deal flat out. The fact that they negotiated gave me the impression that they were not screwing us THAT way. Remember that it is hard for us to read your mind. No stress - we were wrong so be it.
For those curious, besides avoiding a partial bloody teleportation, Andron figured there would be similar controls at the other end to send the vault back. Also, he was concerned that if this Great Wizard Tribunal was still alive, it would be trivial for them to track down robbers appearing from the Floyd flaunting a bunch of loot.
If so, it was the gnomes' idea!
Last edited by Quonundrum on Sat Jun 15, 2024 4:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Theo did think about Andron's disappearance, but it seemed to him that he did it wllingly and, being Andron, was doing an experiment or testing some theory. I thought the other PC was dead.
This could be a good Shakespeare play. Or a different version of The Treasure of Sierra Madre/A Simple Plan.
"It's not about losing the money. It's about losing all the stuff." -Navin's girlfriend
PCs
PCs Big Shiny Island (AD&D 1E) - Theo, unappealing human ranger Horror at Briargate (AD&D 1E) - Faron, droll human thief Lost City of Eternity (AD&D 1E) - Torix, proud Pictish barbarian Ghostal (Dungeon Goons) - Delx, canny musical wanderer
I also thought that Andron went willingly to wherever he went. And, (metagaming) that Amun was being NPC'd and had been killed off to end that situation.
We're all playing good, or close to good, aligned characters. We made a deal and got screwed. (And we were too weak to fight the gnomes to enforce a deal)
Sucks, but I guess we learned the hard way.
Edit - Also, the problem with negotiating for the ring was: who gets it? Anybody who got the ring would have got something way more powerful than anybody else, but also essentially a "party treasure". Could they actually use it without group consent?
I think, ironically, Maag hit the nail on the head with his story about loot causing more trouble after the heist. The ring was too much for any one character/player to demand. It was easier to divide up the lot if we all settled for roughly equal shares.
Let's talk about this a little more then, so I can understand the situation better.
As most of you already know, I like to keep my games challenging for the players. As a player myself, several of these games seem to be run pretty similar in most respects, but I have always been one to believe that if there is no risk to the PC, then there is no reason to play.
However, I have noticed that my style is not really the "norm" here. Would anyone agree with that, or is this something I have stuck in my own brain?
According to the praise I have seen so far, I play in one of the most popular games on here, but I personally find the game to be incredibly slow, with almost no real danger. If the group gets stuck or misses something, the GM simply tells them what they are doing wrong, or what they need to do to solve the issue. I personally would rather have my character die doing something wrong then to have anyone tell me how to resolve an issue. But again, that's just the way I have played for about 40 years. I know that doesn't necessarily make it the "right" way.
So, I will ask this of each of you.....
Would you prefer to play in an easier game, where you just make an INT check and I tell you what you need to do? Or do you like a more challenging scenario where you might not get everything exactly right every time, but most things still work out in the end?
I am not pointing fingers or calling anyone out. I really just want to get better at doing this.
My vote is for a challenging game like we've had so far. It reminds me of the old sort of "DM vs players" 1E games that I used to play when 1E was new. But unlike those, OM has never thrown crazy unbalanced power at us. The challenges have been more about figuring out what's going on, and why. That makes a very interesting game.
In this specific instance, I think DM played the NPCs pretty ingeniously. We had plenty of information about how thoroughly selfish and avaricious they were. But we (I) missed thinking through how cleverly and ruthlessly they might use the wish ring againstus. Our bad. It ended up being a great plot twist, Twiligh Zone-like ending to a story, I thought.
If only Theo hadn't taken the gorgeous chainmail off.... By the way, do we still have the ioun stones? I thought not.
PCs
PCs Big Shiny Island (AD&D 1E) - Theo, unappealing human ranger Horror at Briargate (AD&D 1E) - Faron, droll human thief Lost City of Eternity (AD&D 1E) - Torix, proud Pictish barbarian Ghostal (Dungeon Goons) - Delx, canny musical wanderer
I like the challenging method here. For me, the 'challenge' is the pace/style of the PBP genre - it's harder to get the jist of things, the unspoken nuance, so to speak, through this forum - vs a real-time F2F style - which makes it challenging for me personally. Add that into a style that has posts every few days (or every week in my case when i get distracted by - squirrel!) and it makes it hard to pick up on the subtle things at times.
I am in agreement with some of the others where I was viewing this as the gnomes getting the big treasure they were after to help us all come away with something. Role playing Alordan, for lack of a better word, he was happy to see peace be made and then figure out how to get Andron back - or get themselves back first - and then find andron
I agree with everything OM wrote. Let me also add that I would have been completely fine if abandoning Andron was a reasoned in character thing to do. I play him fairly close to paladin Lawful Good and that necessarily entails more risk.
I am going to join in this discussion even though I wasn't along for this particular adventure. I agree with OM and prefer the harder adventure, it is simply more satisfying. If I loose a character now and then so be it. As far as something like an Int check, I don't mind them for a situation like when you are using it to see if a character would recall something that the character should know in the setting (the prince died 2 years ago sort of thing). But not for figuring your way out of a puzzle or problem.
I'm fine with it being more challenging. The clues were there and we missed them. I know that you always put clues in to your descriptions, and over the last couple of years I've got a lot sloppier at looking for them. So this is a wake up call.
This scene came back to me earlier this evening. I guess we followed Nash's hypothesis
but the blonde had her revenge
. I thought also we were hunkering down for 4 days to then travel back. I would also have thought we would save the wish for a different purpose. With that being said - Onward!
