The 28th works for me.

For dinner on the 28th, lets just cook something.

I'm thinking spaghetti or burritos. What sounds better to you guys?

I like the burritos idea.

Although, if spaghetti is the favorite, I'll volunteer to make a pot of sauce ahead of time for the occasion. I may even be convinced to make a batch of meatballs to go with it.

I vote for whichever tastes less terrible: gluten-free burrito pouches or gluten-free noodles. Not that I won't eat the "Now with 50% more gluten!" version, but I am indifferent to selection otherwise.

Whether it's burritos or pasta, I'm sure we can have both a gluten-filled (flavor-filled) option and a gluten-free option.

Yeah, I know. I just mean that I am indifferent to burritos or spaghetti. For Sweetnips, I'm sure one of those will suck less than the other.

on the gluten front, burrito's would be easier.

Let's make that the plan. I will get and bring the following:

Refried beans
flour tortilla's
corn tortilla's
guacamole
salsa
green chili (Schlereth's gluten free medium and hot. maybe a medium as well)

Other options would be rice (instant is soo easy) and ground beef.

If you guys want those I'll work on putting that together too.

Everyone just plan on bringing some cash. I'll figure out how much it is after I get the supplies and we'll go from there...

Sound good?

Sounds good to me.

We'll definitely need meat. Ground beef is fine. I think we should do rice too.

Thanks guys for thinking of me, after certain peoples posts on pirates I was starting to feel like people thought I was full of shit.

I can do some meat-based burrito-filler. I figure transport on that should be easy.

Sorry about that. I was posting that to oppose Monson's "omg gluten is terrible and no human should ever eat it again" hippie rant.

This.

I think food allergies, especially minor ones, are under reported and responsible for some strangeness. Our diets are vastly diverse compared to even a few decades ago, after all, and we really don't even understand how the gut works. I mean, before a century and change ago, how many humans ever had access to BOTH rice and corn?

Unrelated, but I just realized what we should call American cars covered in sporty-looking bling.

So, January??? 25th?

January 25 and February 1 both work for me.

I don't know of any conflicts.

H, I think you should be aware that we are getting a little worn out on this campaign. It's not that it's a bad story or we're not interested in what happens, it's just that we're tired of epic battles. Above 15th level, they are all epic battles. It's about 45 minutes between my turns. If I weren't targeted by things, I could go watch an episode of Psych on Netflix between my turns. So I think I can speak for everyone when I say we would appreciate it if you can minimize the number of remaining battles. Two would be a good number.

Speaking of epic, I can't begin to think about the next session until we get this loot situation sorted out.

Discuss...

I was aiming at 3-5 more sessions, but that is likely more than two battles. If you guys are explicitly telling me you don't want to game anymore, your last battle was not unreasonable as a stopping point, though it was never intended as one. There's not a whole lot of plot left, but there's definitely some evil dragons who have been fucking with you since 7th level off and on, as well as an unfinished tie in Umbra (which will not, as you may fear, take up a zillion sessions, for a storytelling reason you have yet to see). I already cut out out quite a bit of content since the summer, which is why almost every adventure has related directly to your overall mission instead of there being distractions and hints and sideplots, and why I turned some planned sessions of "Caligo Without the Heroes" into a brief vaguely disconcerting description. I can't compress into two sessions, even if I wanted to, which I do not.


I'm good the 25th. I will have p30-31 sooner than later.

I guess I would like to hear what the others want to do. I won't speak for anyone else on whether we want to be done now.

Five more sessions is basically June. If we're lucky. That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that 15+ level battles in 3rd edition are just... short spurts of fun with long sessions of doing absolutely nothing. As DM, I know you're busy all the time, but for the players it gets a bit dull. I'm just lucky I haven't been turned to stone or anything so I actually get my turns.

The olden days had a way around that by having two characters, but the extra time per turn pretty much fucked that over.


Do note- we had a two session battle that had aspects planned from before you rolled your characters. I'm glad you all enjoyed that, but if you think every battle is that, fucking LOL I can't do that!

Sooner would be best. I even created a thread just for you!

As for an ending? I am impartial. It will be a bit crazy for me after March.

I like the story, and I would like to see it through. But I would agree that when the encounters are extremely high level, it does get a tad old after a couple of hours. If we can maybe make the encounters not all completely insane, I am all for continuing.

Honestly, one lesser encounter where we could completely blow up the other side and be godlike would be a heck of a lot of fun...

I know that everyone on this gods-forsaken donut are dragons, but some of them have to be a tad wimpy right?

Or really, maybe just keep the combatants to a reasonable number, like somewhere under 8 dragons.

Well, the Vix-Thur combat was exceptional. I do keep battle length in mind, but it's always a bit down on the list (primary is verisimilitude and realism, secondary is fun and challenge, third is practical considerations headed primarily by length and available effective actions). Such a battle, if you'll recall, had three friendly NPCs and like a dozen villains. The airship battle, while awesome, was also long mostly due to the number of NPCs.


A fight where you completely wax the opponents has happened as "you defeat them effortlessly". While this seems like a cop out- you've come by your items, powers, and skills honestly, after all- the problem is that such a battle is not particularly FUN. Your clever attack on the winged demons, for instance, still took over half an hour to play out, and you were in very little danger (the danger came from their save-or-trouble effects). It's possible that the whole crew would very much enjoy playing out such a scenario, but I believe it is more likely that it would very quickly get boring. In the current game, you very much have to earn your sword swings, and each die roll is infused with meaning and hope. If you were wailing into a target dummy, I believe that charm would be lost within the first few swings, and not recaptured until something was riding on the line.


I cannot promise any limit to the number of dragons in any encounter! However, I will point this out: dragons are powerful foes whose rounds do not take relatively long to play out, and the number of dragons who work together is far smaller than the number of humans, in most situations.




Many things in 3.5 seem designed to make shit take a long time. For instance, if you have a +34 to hit, you are at the LEAST looking at +34/+29/+24/+19. Is that REALLY needed? What if you were instead like, either one at +34 that deals double damage, or three at +28? Either of those would resolve with ONE fucking shake, and your target number would be reached ONCE instead of four times. Everything refers to other stuff, so you'll see shit like "this counts as continuous damage for interrupting casting", so now you need to look that shit up, and roll another die with concentration and modifiers, versus "this has an 8% chance to interrupt spellcasting" as older versions would write. Yes, the new thing is fair, and scales with level, but that's still very time expensive for very little reality gained. E6 is a solid way to address this but I'd like a way to play high level games without this concern. Well, I'm taking the statements at face value: it could just be you guys getting sick of some other aspect, be it the game or the roles. But the execution time on fights is definitely overly epic, and seems to have gotten WORSE in 4. The version number is how many hours it takes to go around the table, eh?

It's not the game or the roles. It's just the long combats. Let me break down the nights...

1-2 hours of bullshitting.
1-2 hours of roleplaying (usually closer to 1, and it's only roleplaying in the sense that we're trying to get to the next battle)
ALL REMAINING HOURS BATTLE.

Then we spend at least another hour trying to understand all the loot we have. This is also a component of high levels. Well... ok, and you are partly to blame on this one. A full page item description does take a little while for us to understand all the nuances.

That pretty much sums it up.


I don't have a good solution. I realize spanning two nights is not the norm and the previous battle was very long, but even discounting that one, that's how the night goes. As DM, your turns take a long time. That's not your fault and I know I did the same thing at higher level. When a character sheet has 8000 words on it, it takes a while to figure out the best course of action. And while you assuredly were smart enough to write down someone's AC both buffed and not buffed, you might not have the results of what happens when half their shit is dispelled.

On top of that, with high level wizards on the board... honestly, we can't really plan our next turn out ourselves. "Ok, I'm going to throw a delayed blast fireball when my turn comes up... oh, my targets have now all dim doored to different parts of creation and my allies are the only group that has clustered. Ok, instead I will cast a dispel on that guy over there. Oh, shit, nevermind, I've been swallowed by a dragon. I guess I better... ok, the salad shooter killed the dragon. Alright. So... wait, why am I glowing again? And hour now it's going to actually be my turn...." We have more options and less predictability in what the battle will look like on our turn, so our turns take longer as well. Unless we're statues.

From my perspective, and I think Mike's and Chris's as well, we thought we were getting to the end here. In video game speak, we thought we have finished the penultimate boss, we collected the 7 sacred gem thingies, we were going to get some fresh potions make sure we had lots of arrows and shit, and we were about to head into the final dungeon. Of course, at this level, dungeons don't really exist, so it's really just heading into the final battle. Instead, you mentioned we had a choice of places... which usually indicates we have a long road ahead of us. The feeling was much like one time when I was driving back from Virginia and I was counting down the mile markers. I was almost to Colorado... a 100 miles... 50 miles... 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... WELCOME TO KANSAS?!?! I FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT KANSAS!!!

I am simply getting exhausted of mostly sitting around while other things happen. It's not your fault. It's just mechanics. I love my character. I want to get a little chair for him to sit next me so he can sass the others.

So I'm hoping the other two comment. I will say that once we hit March, as Jay suggested, I think we lose him. There's something about women where they go make a baby and then insist men help with it. It's like if I decided that I was going to build an underground bunker, and then insisted that wife help me. But anyway, that and the whole soccer thing.

By the way, I don't think Cooley means that he wants to have us accosted by 3rd level bandits. I think he means instead of 75% resources necessary for every battle, maybe 25%... maybe the enemies could underestimate us just a little more.

I'll say that I very much enjoy my character, both in and out of combat. I also enjoy the campaign as a whole, and it's getting interesting as we're getting to the endgame, seeing how things are wrapping up. Zem's sentiment about thinking we were close to the end, only to find out that we have TWO more possible paths....that was unexpected. I want to finish this out and pull back the curtain to find out all the final details. If that take until mid-2014, so be it. I think we can pull that off. Hopefully we can convince Jay to get away a couple more times.

As for the battles, I like the complexity and the uncertainty. I don't want them to be "we are assured of a victory" style. But I recognize that the alternative - "we might all die" - takes a lot of planning, and apparently at our levels, a lot of time to resolve. I don't know how to rectify that, as I'm not a DM. Maybe it means fewer NPS, which in turn will mean fewer enemies. Or maybe it means fewer, but more powerful, enemies. But then I see that such a huge amount of concentrated power on each side can potentially lead to quite a bit of unbalance in the combat, depending on which side rolls better inits.

I dunno. In summary for me: let's finish it out, I like the complexity of battle, shorter battles would be great.

Ok, it sounds like mostly indifference plus one affirmative. Here are my requests...

-Let's try to limit the bullshitting a little bit. We don't want to be bullshit-free, but maybe if we start battles earlier, we can end earlier.

-How about we work on punctuality? Some people could even arrive earlier.

-Let's start showing the pixie the respect he deserves.


On to other things...
I was in Barnes and Noble, and I saw they re-released the 3.5 Magic Item Compendium. It's pretty. It's it light gray faux leather cover. I thought "Fuck! I can't believe I never bought one of these! Now is my chance!" Then I got hope, pulled off the plastic wrapping, opened it up, and said "Fuck! This looks very familiar!" Then I stomped downstairs, looked on the shelf, saw a very brown Magic Item Compendium, and said "Fuck! I just spent $50 on a book I already own!"

Also, a lot of town names in the new world are, you know, real town names. I just took them straight off of Google Maps. Some are all my own, though. A few centuries before you will gaming, the first real empire was started. You live in a very young world in the sense that there isn't a lot of history. Really, it started with this empire because they conquered a lot of wooden forts and shit and built castles. The empire has since fallen, but it more or less brought civilization to the hoodlums. The empire began when a king from a powerful island nation took his ships north across the Sea of Sails and planted his flag on the mainland. Where he landed was known as the Northern Crossing... crossing the sea. And it's to the north. I decided that it would be shortened overtime to Norcross, which is the name that appears on the maps. I came up with this name many years ago. I just now saw a reference to Norcross, Georgia. I then looked up Norcross, Georgia, and found it is not near any bodies of water. In fact, wikipedia tells me it was named for Jonathan Norcross. I know this is petty, but this annoys me. I was really proud of Norcross.

Not bloody likely.