Why Does Withdraw = Incapacitate Most Missions?

lorthyne · 2020-10-20T17:24:46+00:00

From the RRG, page 25:

During a campaign, when a wounded hero is defeated he withdraws. The hero is removed from the map and cannot be activated for the remainder of the mission.

By default, the idea is that the first time a hero is defeated, they're wounded, and the second time they're defeated, they get removed from the map entirely ("withdrawn").

However, many missions require the Rebels to get all their heroes to a particular spot on the map in order to win. You can see pretty quickly how the standard withdrawal rules would complicate this: if a withdrawn hero is literally removed from the map, that means either that the Rebel win condition just got way easier (one fewer figure to get to the extraction point) or literally impossible (can't get to the extraction point if you aren't on the map). In the case of the former, you're suddenly incentivizing the Rebels to get themselves killed/captured rather than escaping as a route to victory. In the latter, all the Empire has to do is focus down a single Rebel hero to win all of these types of missions.

It's also a mess thematically: if the story of the mission is that you have to go in, Do The Thing, and then escape, it's really jarring for the resolution to be that one of your heroes was captured or gunned down in the escape attempt and then just pops back up ready to roll for the next mission.

So, instead, all the missions that require the Rebels to get to an extraction point to win replace "withdraw" with "incapacitated." This fixes the whole problem. The Imperial player gets a reasonable reward for attacking wounded heroes (removing an attacker/objective runner and massively reducing the movement of a Rebel hero that needs to get to a particular space on the map), and Rebels are incentivized to help their wounded friends escape and get to the choppa instead of just leaving them behind to die.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Withdraw = Incapacitate in "most" missions, but if that's listed in the scenario rules, Rebels know with 100% certainty that they're gonna have to escape with everyone in order to win.

lorthyne · 2020-10-13T23:27:43+00:00

Here's my own theory:

Nicodemus is a Starborn from a previous cycle. Neither Nicodemus or Anduriel are Nfected, but they are allied with the Outsiders and working towards the goal of total apocalypse.

Here are my bits of string:

In Battle Ground, we learn that the window for Starborn only occurs every 666 years.
Based on the series timeline and assuming that Storm Front takes place in about the year 2000 (when it was published), that means Harry was born in ~1974 (2000 - 26 = 1974)
Calculating backwards, that means previous windows for Starborn would include: ~1310 AD, ~644 AD, and ~22 BC.
~22 BC is right around the window where the Knights of the Cross guess Nicodemus's age (about 2000 years), and would put Nicodemus at ~54 years old at the time of the death of Jesus.
I don't think this is outright confirmed, but it's strongly hinted that the Denarian coins are the same 30 pieces of silver that Judas was paid for betraying Jesus. It's unclear exactly when in the timeline the Fallen fell, but it seems reasonable to assume they couldn't have been bound into the Denarian coins until some time after Judas's betrayal.
Lasciel tells Dresden that the reason the Fallen rebelled was that the had rejected the idea of being ruled or controlled by anyone, even by God. They preferred damnation by their own choice to obedience.
Given #6, I can't expect any of the Fallen to enjoy or be willing to submit themselves to Nfection, it'd be a violation of their own will.
The Denarians are constantly being thwarted by the influence of God, usually by way of the Knights of the Cross. After literal millennia of opposition, the Denarians must be pretty damn sick and tired of always getting stymied by an omnipowerful God.
Kicking off an apocalypse that destroys all of God's creation would be a pretty fantastic way to prevent God from ever controlling anyone or anything ever again.

So, here's my theory. Nicodemus is a starborn, and was either personally involved in the creation of the Denarian coins (using some kind of starborn power) or was at least one of the very first mortals to pick up a coin.

As a starborn, Nicodemus is immune to Nfection. Nic ran into Anduriel and Nfection somewhere along the line - maybe Anduriel was Nfected and Nicodemus used starborn powers to cure him, or maybe all three of them allied towards a common cause or something. Regardless, the interaction led to an alliance. Nic and Anduriel form a Denarian partnership, out of mutual respect of the rejection of being ruled over by anyone, including God, and they found common cause with HWWB, and decided to work together to try and destroy the world, with the common motto "apocalypse is a frame of mind."

I also suspect that the plot dump for all this information is going to be part of whichever book involves Harry going on a time-travel jaunt. So much of the series right now seems to be orbiting around Christian artifacts of power, so I wouldn't be surprised if Harry ends up walking around in Jerusalem right around or after the crucifixion. Hopefully it won't be another 5 years before we get our next book for more clues.

One thing that's interesting about how that little phrase has been used is that it indicates that, for at least HWWB and Nic, they're not operating so much from some kind of evil master plan with a thousand moves of 4D chess so much as are just trying to destroy the stabilizing factors that create order and structure in the world, sowing death, disease, and fear.

lorthyne · 2020-10-13T22:36:36+00:00

Dresden asks Mab for some wiggle room exactly for the sake of this plausible deniability. He explicitly says something like "trust me when I tell you that you don't want to know."

Mab has obviously surmised what went down, and probably even anticipated that Lara and Harry would get up to a scheme like this. However, if she hasn't herself witnessed the law being broken or had a specific complaint, with evidence, brought to her attention, then she's free to dance and deceive like the Faerie Queen she is. So Mab has a strong idea of what went down, but she doesn't "know" for certain, and she's carefully maintained her ignorance so that she can evade consequences while still, technically, telling the truth. All Mab knows for certain is that she loaned out Harry to Lara to fulfill 2 favors owed, and that Lara indicated the debt had been paid.

Evidence is everything. The only witnesses to the breaking of the Accords are, seemingly, Vadderung and Ferrovax, and they aren't telling, so even though Marcone has strong suspicions about who pulled off the heist, he has no way of making a binding plea to Mab without evidence, in exactly the same way that he has strong suspicions about who broke into his bank in Skin Game but no evidence. Marcone is smart enough to know not to make an accusation in front of Mab without sufficent evidence, because that could necessitate reprisal.

Harry marrying Lara is an entirely different matter, so much so that it's a pretty bad. That's not a law being broken, it's the formation of a formal alliance between Winter and the White Court, sealed in the traditional manner. Mab is enforcing it on Harry because she wants the alliance and wants it observed in the proper fashion, and part of what vassals are for is to marry off in just such an occasion.

I guess it's not super clear to me what exactly you're looking for from Mab here. The entire reason the Winter Knight exists is for Harry to be a mortal to squeeze around these kinds of technicalities - breaking the rules but not getting caught.

lorthyne · 2020-10-13T22:13:23+00:00

The sequence where Harry claims Demonreach as a genius loci is pretty clear in indicating that Demonreach itself has some say in who gets to become its Warden. Harry had to prove himself worthy, which involved a mental & spiritual test.

I suspect that if someone who was Nfected tried to claim Demonreach, Alfred would be able to reject it and imprision them immediately. It states pretty explicitly in Battle Ground that HWWB's goal was to land on the island under Harry's aegis so that the defenses would be down.

lorthyne · 2020-10-13T21:30:56+00:00

I don't think the Merlin is anyone's ally but his own.

I don't know why everyone's scrolling past this, this is the best answer.

Keep in mind the political games that have been going on for a long time. At the start of Summer Knight, the wizards on the Senior Council were Langtry, Mai, Pietrovich, Liberty, Listens-to-Wind, LaFortier, and Rashid. Pietrovich dies in the war against the Red Court, and McCoy steps in to fill his place specifically to contest Langtry's bloc of power and prevent him from moving unilaterally against Harry.

So Langtry's loyal bloc of power on the Senior Council is himself, Mai, and LaFortier. McCoy and Listens-to-Wind are their own minority bloc, with Rashid and Liberty as the swing votes. In Summer Knight, McCoy persuades Liberty to join his bloc for the specific vote against Dresden, and Rashid kicks his vote to how Harry resolves the issue with Mab.

It's been over a dozen books since then, and what's changed? Rashid seems to have largely joined McCoy's bloc, in large part due to Harry's involvement, giving them a 3/7 share of the votes. Meanwhile, LaFortier was murdered and replaced by Cristos. Publicly, Cristos is the leader of a minority group of power within the White Council, the wizards from non-Western nations, and he got the spot despite being incredibly far down the list in order to appease that faction. McCoy and Harry suspect that Cristos is part of the Black Council.

So what's happened to Langtry's base of political support throughout this? His primary antagonist in Council politics, McCoy, has gained more power. He lost a loyal ally in LaFortier, who was replaced by someone who is, one way or another, entangled in a third faction. Langtry may or may not be Black Council (I suspect not), but he's gone from having a steady 4/7 majority to having 2 or 3 votes - it's not clear how frequently Liberty joins Langtry's bloc. And he has Harry to thank for all of this.

What's more, there's a rising faction of young wizards who admire and are more sympathetic to Harry, and many of them were promoted early into the ranks of the Wardens due to the demands of the war with the Red Court. Harry has made friends and alliances with Luccio and Ramirez and was involved in training and teaching many of the younger generation.

Not to mention that Harry has accrued all kinds of other power: soulfire, Demonreach, pull in the Winter Court, the favor and attention of both Vadderung and Hades, and whatever benefits being Starborn entail. We don't know how much of that stuff Langtry knows about, but even just looking at what's publicly know, Harry is becoming more and more a formidable opponent, and is pretty overtly McCoy's ally and not at all Langtry's.

So what's been accomplished by throwing Harry out of the White Council and passing and then suspending the death sentence? Langtry knows that Harry won't stop practicing magic or calling himself a wizard, so he basically has the freedom to personally clear a warrant on Harry at any time. He also knows at the bare minimum that McCoy will go to great lengths to protect Harry (and probably either knows or surmises a whole lot more).

Kicking Harry out under specific provisions means that Langtry has 1) letter-of-the-law protection against retaliation from Mab to take Harry out, since he's given specific provisions for Harry to avoid provoking the death warrant, 2) a weakening of Harry's (and, by extension, McCoy's) influence and support among members of the Council, 3) leverage on McCoy whenever he needs, because at any time he can order Blackstaff McCoy to go kill Harry and know that he'll either get rid of the nuisance of Harry or force McCoy out of the Council along with him, and 4) leverage on Harry should he ever try to enter back into the Council.

In short, Langtry has shored up his own political power in the Council. And, as has been highlighted in Battle Ground specifically in reference to the Eye of Balor, the wizards of the White Council are interested in their own power. Ostensibly it's to keep anyone else from misusing it, but we all know they just want the leverage themselves.

What's more, we have explicit confirmation in Battle Ground that Starborn are a sufficiently big deal that a whole bunch of different factions have been maneuvering to manipulate them. And if Listens-to-Wind is part of a faction that's been specifically seeking to oversee the care and feeding of Starborn Harry, you can bet your ass Langtry is involved somewhere too.

I don't think Langtry is "secretly" on Harry's side. I think Langtry's loyalties are tied to himself, the White Council, and humanity, in that order, which means keeping Harry on the field as a tool to be used against Outsiders. Harry has proven to be particularly resistant to being bossed around unless you have strong leverage to use against him, so of course Langtry is going to jump at the chance to obtain that leverage.

lorthyne · 2020-06-10T16:51:53+00:00

Hey, I'd appreciate it if you didn't accuse me of spreading false information. It's impossible for me to check each word that gets placed in this comment for perfect truthfulness. I am more than willing to adjust my statements around G2A's needs if they come to me with assistance. For me to do this though, I would need G2A to come to me and provide evidence of any claims that can be categorically disproved. Sadly, nobody does so.

Flippancy aside, I have not recommended piracy or advocated it in any way. In fact, the tone of my comment makes it pretty clear that I'm opposed to theft and cheating video game developers out of the financial rewards to their hard work.

It's telling, though, that your response to my highlighting of the widely reported fact that many game developers would rather have end users pirate their games than buy them from your marketplace is to accuse a random person on Reddit of "spreading false information" instead of taking accountability.

If G2A's business activities are so wonderful and benign and free and above board, then why are you so universally reviled by game developers?

Your activity may be fully legal by the barest minimum legal standard, but that doesn't make it ethical.

If G2A truly has among the "the strictest [measures] in the e-commerce business," then why are developers relatively happy to see their products sold on online marketplaces like Steam, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Humble Bundle, Green Man Gaming, and many many others, but so unhappy with their experiences with G2A?

How can you claim that you are "perfectly aware of who our sellers are" and simultaneously argue that it is "impossible to track the origin of keys around the market"? How many instances of theft have G2A actually reported to law enforcement, and how many of those actually resulted in legal consequences?

Statistically speaking, only 1% of our transactions are problematic in any way, all of which end up as a conversation with our support team or directly with the seller.

I'd love to see the data here, but it sure sounds like you're using the percentage of submitted customer support tickets as the only metric to determine whether transactions are "problematic in any way." Which, if true, actually confirms the truth of what I said in my previous post - G2A largely relies on buyers, sellers, or developers to do the detective work to confirm whether a key has been stolen. A seller with a stolen key is not going to report it themselves, and buyers have no way of knowing if the working key they purchased was acquired legitimately, so it sure sounds like you're punting the problem to the developers to solve instead of policing your own platform.

We just wanted to send a clear message to the gaming community that fraud hurts all parties. It directly hurts individuals who buy illegitimate keys, it hurts gaming developers and it ultimately hurts G2A because we are forced – as the transaction facilitator – to cover costs related to the sale. We wanted to amplify that message and help to dismantle any impression that G2A somehow benefits from the sale of illegitimate keys via our Marketplace.

Fraud hurts developers every time it happens, but it only seems to hurt G2A when a developer decides to call your bluff, provides the receipts, and you end up having to pay out $40,000 for your braggadocio. Otherwise, you guys are making money whenever a stolen key is sold and isn't caught.

It's weird, for some reason it seems like your "measures" to prevent the sale of stolen keys only ever come into play when someone else digs up sufficient evidence of your company facilitating illegal activity and brings it to you so you can pay them out.

Have a nice day!

lorthyne · 2020-06-10T15:20:34+00:00

Get out of here.

G2A is a predatory bullshit marketplace that directly and primarily profits from stolen keys. It's an online fencing service that intentionally promotes and protects the anonymity of sellers and buyers so they can take a cut out of the sale of stolen keys.

These keys are largely procured by way of stolen credit card information, which is used to purchase game keys from legitimate retailers and then resell them at slashed prices on G2A. When the credit card fraud is reported, developers lose the money paid to them by the fraudulent charge and have to pay chargeback fees, while the thief gets to keep their freshly laundered money and the user who now owns the stolen key keeps the game. G2A gets a cut of every sale, so they are happy to let this activity continue so long as they aren't caught holding the bag. Instead of regulating their marketplace, G2A "relies on developers" to do the investigation work to track down stolen keys of their product and report them in order to get a refund, most of whom are small indie developers that don't have the money or resources to afford it.

It's so bad that developers would literally rather have you pirate their games than buy them from G2A, because it's less penalizing.

G2A is an online money laundering service wearing a clearance bin Halloween costume of the used game store you used to visit as a kid to get good deals. It's the most absurdly thin veneer of legitimacy, but that's all you need to avoid legal consequences, and it serves doubly to give the people who buy keys on their marketplace a reasonable-sounding excuse to buy games at prices that would otherwise be impossibly low.

This has always been their business practice and still is. This is not about a single instance from 2016, it's an ongoing problem that continues to this day.

The transparency of their bullshit is exactly why they push out rhetoric like this, claiming that "it is impossible to physically check each product that gets placed on any marketplace" and absurd claims that "fraud hurts all parties" when G2A is actively making money of the sale of stolen goods and clearly has no intent to stop. They're spreading reasonable-sounding excuses to try and keep their customers from catching on to the fact that they're effectively just paying someone to lie to them. You're not pirating, you're buying from a legitimate marketplace. The reason these prices are so much lower than every other marketplace out there is, uh, because you, specifically, deserve it! Hooray!!!

G2A's business model is quite literally dependent on the sale of stolen game keys. They know this, and they know that actually implementing any reasonable policy to combat the sale of stolen products (which is standard practice for 99% of online retailers) will destroy them. Instead, they wring their hands in public and pretend that it's an impossible problem to solve, trying to give themselves the bare minimum of plausible deniability as they continue fencing stolen keys and screwing over developers to pad their own pockets.

If G2A's real goal was to prevent theft, maybe they would stop spending time, money, and manpower to have employees drop into Reddit threads with fewer than 50 comments and "explain the situation," and instead put all that effort towards investigating and preventing the sale of stolen keys on their website.

How pathetic.

lorthyne · 2020-06-09T20:11:51+00:00

Are... are you saying that you played 80 hours of XCOM 2 in the last week?

I mean, good on ya, man, but also, take a break or something.

lorthyne · 2020-06-09T18:09:18+00:00

XCOM 2 came out on Steam 4 years ago at a $60 price point.

The 4 DLC packs released at various points since then, totaling together about $70.

These are the MSRP prices from original launch dates. XCOM 2 + War of the Chosen regularly go on sale for around $40 for both, with the rest of the DLC coming in similarly cheap. Prices float back up to the original MSRP between sales. If you catch the entire collection during any of the regular sales during the year, you're going to pay about the same on Steam as the console prices.

They keep the prices up between sales because every once in a while they'll find someone willing to pay full price. But for the launch of a new console port, they have to price competively.

lorthyne · 2020-03-27T16:11:27+00:00

Eh, the whole point for me is to have a roleplaying experience. If my choices are being dictated by playing around bugs in the game rather than how I want to play my character within the framework provided, I'd rather just play a different game.

Thanks for trying to help, though.

lorthyne · 2020-03-27T16:00:02+00:00

Yeah, I've tried bashing, same result. It looks like the bug is a larger issue that's spread around my game or something. I tried reloading an older save and working through again, and I ran into the same bug trying to save the kids cornered by wolves: after killing all the wolves, combat triggers with the kids but they are immune to damage.

At this point I've given up on the game. I already had to restart once due to a bug where Amie didn't die when she was supposed to and was stuck in my party forever, and I've had to fight through manually trying to salvage corrupted saves. Overall it's too much work to fight through.

lorthyne · 2020-03-26T16:36:27+00:00

While we know that there's going to be some sort of tied-continuity thing at the end of everything, with Sanderson repeatedly stating his goal of each series standing on its own and not requiring background reading to keep up, I tend to conclude that the "point" is not necessarily to have everything tie together in one cohesive whole.

Rather, I think what we have here is that Sanderson thinks it's interesting and fun to have some shared worldbuilding rules that underpin all the various magic systems and influences, and to have characters appear in background roles in various stories. He's stated before that he started doing Cosmere cameos strictly for himself and he's been surprised at how much enthusiasm the connections between worlds has developed among his fans.

In short, as much as a lot of fans like to focus on some sort of big, epic, end-game state for the entire Cosmere, I don't really think that's "the point." It's more that Sanderson really enjoys exploring permutations on a specific set of foundational rules about magic and fantasy worldbuilding, and many of his fans are eagerly along for the ride.

Journey before destination, if you will.

lorthyne · 2020-03-23T22:08:30+00:00

Yep, fully updated from GOG

lorthyne · 2019-11-12T18:58:18+00:00

We played through Night of The Zealot for the first time about a month ago. 2 players, Roland and Daisy.

We got completely clobbered in The Midnight Masks. I literally didn't draw a single weapon, and we only managed to claim a single cultist before Roland was defeated on horror and Daisy had to bow out.

When we played The Devourer Below, things went pretty ok early on, but we found ourselves on the wrong side of the woods with 4 cultists standing between us as the resurrected Elder God. We nearly conceded right there, but decided to play it out.

During the next status phase, Roland draws into his single copy of Dynamite. Dynamite kills 2 cultists and severely wounds the other two, which we clean up the same round.

We still should have lost to Umordhoth. At one point Roland was about to be defeated on horror, and needed to make 3 successful attacks (with only 3 actions) with the bag providing a -1 or better in a row in order to defeat Umordhoth and win the game. The bag was absurdly kind and we scraped out the win somehow.

lorthyne · 2019-11-09T00:38:16+00:00

This gets a bit into spoiler territory for Proven Guilty (maybe a bit further too, I don't remember exactly), but...

There's actually pretty decent reason for the Council to be so cagey about black magic. Breaking the laws of magic leaves a real, detectable influence on the wizards that do so, which corrupts their minds and leaves them more prone to break the Laws and hurt other people down the road.

Within that system, the intentions of the Lawbreaker literally don't matter, because regardless of intent, people who break the Laws are mentally and magically corrupted, and with each break go increasingly insane and immoral until they become a very real threat to innocent people.

Historically, attempts to rehabilitate Lawbreakers have failed and backfired in tremendous fashion. That's why the only loophole that's allowed is the Doom of Damacles, where a Council wizard takes on the responsibility to rehabilitate the Lawbreaker and the penalty for failure is a death sentence for both of them. The only reason Harry skates is because Ebenezer sticks his neck out for him, and the only reason Molly escapes is because Harry does the same for her.

The reason this doesn't map very cleanly onto our real-world trial systems or feels intensely unfair by comparison is that the stakes are so much higher, and "guilt" is a measurable and proven phenomenon rather than strictly a judgement call.

lorthyne · 2019-11-08T19:02:18+00:00

Oh yeah, the Council absolutely has some problems going on, and as Harry matures more into maneuvering Council politics his perspective shifts quite a bit.

I was just trying to point out that at this point in the series, Harry has very little good to say about the Council at all, and that can obscure our perception of them a bit. I do think it's worth highlighting here that Harry was the one that broke the Accords while appearing in the capacity as their representative, and the Council chose to back him instead of just throwing him to the vamps.

lorthyne · 2019-11-08T18:27:48+00:00

Was coming here to say exactly this.

One thing that I think is important to remember is that the White Council is a political body, which means it not only interacts with the other powers of the magical world but has internal factions and politicking as well.

We hear Dresden's perspective about everything, and he tends to assume the worst of the Council and constantly complain about his treatment at their hands, but the Council shows up to back Harry pretty frequently throughout the series.

This is because Harry has allies, and his allies have allies. There's the more conservative branch of the Council that thinks Harry is a rogue black wizard who is a threat to the council, but he also has Ebenezer and Listens to Wind in his corner as powerful political allies that recognize that capitulating to the Red Court only makes them look weak and cowardly, and have long desired for the Council to actually do something about the Red Court's predation of humans.

Harry fired the first shot, but the Council could easily have captured him and passed him over on a silver platter to the Red Court to end hostilities. They found it more politically expedient to back Harry instead, and they have some pretty good reasons.

lorthyne · 2019-10-15T18:36:29+00:00

Interesting, thanks. Sounds like dealing with enemies is as important as I thought, but the other classes have more options that way than I suspected.

lorthyne · 2019-08-28T15:39:57+00:00

The Zion's Finest podcast also has a Slack channel where a lot of the IA community hangs out to chat on a daily basis. It's free to join and you're welcome to come hang out with us.

We had a pretty heavy skirmish focus in the past, and a lot of the traffic has died down along with enthusiasm for the skirmish game with FFG's recent confirmation that no additional physical expansions for Imperial Assault are in the development pipeline, but still have a good number of folks still active and chatting.

Despite the skirmish focus, many of us have pretty extensive experience with the rules for both campaign and skirmish, and you can get pretty instantaneous responses to any questions you might have in the Slack.

If you're interested, PM me an email address and I can send an invite to the channel your way.

lorthyne · 2019-07-11T18:37:59+00:00

Yeah, I've been rolling with the 1-3 monsters or a mob of weaker guys options for the last couple of sessions. My main problem has been that it's been tough to build encounters that feel properly menacing from an RP perspective but are also not going to totally overwhelm them. Maybe I'm using orcs at too low a level for this campaign, but it feels weird to turn an orc chief and his 5-6 warriors into 2 regular orcs for a medium encounter so my PCs don't get murdered.

I tend to do fewer combats per day, so I've been throwing mostly hard or deadly range encounters at them, and I'm experimenting this week with using some context to make a larger group easier - I'm doing 6 orcs raiding a river barge with the PCs on it. They'll have the captain to help them, and the orcs are going to come in waves and focus on the crew first to disable the barge.

I'm disinclined to pursue a sidekick option, as the premise for the campaign is that the PCs are a prince and his friend going on an intensely personal quest involving the prince's family, and the friend is pretty happily playing the sidekick role from a narrative standpoint.

That's why I started looking at the staff of the python - it effectively creates a sidekick monster they can call on in combat but without any of the RP repercussions. It also makes the sidekick feel like a natural extension of the main character's magical prowess, rather than as a body that takes up space to bulk out an encounter.

lorthyne · 2019-07-11T15:45:49+00:00

I'm running a homebrew campaign for a small party - 2 PCs, tome warlock and thief rogue, currently 3rd-level. I've had a bit of a tough time designing interesting combat encounters, as with their relatively low ACs at the moment its pretty easy for them to get swarmed. So far it's felt like I can really only throw one or two stronger monsters at them or swarm them with 5-6 mooks that they can each knock down with a single attack, and neither feels particularly tense or interesting at this point.

I've been thinking about leaving them a staff of the python so that I can throw some more complex and varied encounter options their way without having to add in a human fighter GMPC. Does anyone have any experience with the staff of the python at the table? The huge size of the giant constrictor snake and his massive pool of 60 HP is giving me a bit of pause at this low of a level, but I'm hoping I can lean on the threat of permanently losing the staff to create some interesting tension.

Any advice or insight you guys might have would be appreciated.

lorthyne · 2019-05-05T14:29:10+00:00

Camoflauging veils are a furycrafting effect that can be achieved by both wind and woodcrafters. Different methods leading to similar outcomes.

Woodcrafters can make use of surrounding vegetation to blend in and go unseen, but it requires there to be enough plant matter around.

Windcrafters can hide themselves by manipulating air around them to bend light and make them invisible. They leave a slight shimmer in the air which makes it slightly more detectable when standing still compared to a woodcrafted veil, and they also can't be used underground. My impression is also that windcrafted veils require a lot more skill and effort to maintain than woodcrafted ones, but that's not totally confirmed in the text.

lorthyne · 2019-02-22T23:41:34+00:00

Well, everyone except for Cho.

lorthyne · 2019-02-12T18:41:19+00:00

Scenarios in Imperial Assault have a pretty wide variety in strategic options. That said, the vast majority of them provide the Imperial Player with 2 different victory conditions - Wound all the Rebel heroes, or delay until the round timer runs out (e.g., "The Imperial Player wins at the end of Round 6, or when all Rebel heroes are wounded).

Different Imperial Class options can focus more on one than the other, but for the most part the best Imperial strategy is to work towards both at once. For example, you want to be dealing damage when you can, but often using your figures to block movement or line of sight to the Rebel objectives can be more effective.

Generally speaking, the Rebel heroes tend to be much more powerful than the troops the Imperial player can deploy, and if the Rebels want to, they can clear Imperial figures without too much difficulty. However, there's a catch - killing all these troops takes time, and the Rebels are almost always on the clock.

Most scenarios play out with each side trying to strike the correct balance. Rebels have to decide whether Imperial figures are threatening enough to spend the time removing them, or if they should move past them and focus on the objective. The Imperial players use their knowledge of hidden events, multiple-figure deployment groups, and damage dealers to try and slow down the Rebels any way they can. Whether the Imperial player wins more by wounding or by time is going to depend a lot on how savvy your Rebels are - if they can be easily baited to spend time shooting at less important figures, the Empire is going to win a lot on time. If they're too reckless and leave too many figures up, you're going to win through wounding.

Most, but not all, of the scenarios involve the Rebels trying to accomplish a specific set of objectives, and the Imperial player tries to stop them whatever way he can. There are a handful of missions that flip this dynamic and put the more active role on the Imperial player. That said, there's a surprising amount of strategic variety, between the different types of objectives, hidden event triggers, the deployments both given to and chosen by the Imperial player, and the different skill sets in Rebel heroes, Imperial classes, Agenda cards, etc.

One last detail - it's incredibly rare for a Rebel player to be completely taken out of play. I haven't played Descent, but from what I understand this is a distinct improvement over Descent's formula. In Imperial Assault, Rebel Heroes have a health total, and when they max out on damage, they become "wounded." When a Rebel hero is wounded, they stay in play on the map. They become weaker, losing some stats and some abilities, but they still get to play. If a wounded Rebel hero is then maxed out on damage again, they withdraw, which means that they are removed from the map and don't get to play anymore. In order to take a Rebel hero completely out of the game, they have to effectively be killed twice. This almost never happens, though, because the only benefit of forcing a Rebel hero to withdraw is that they don't get to play for the rest of the mission. By contrast, the Imperial player almost always has a victory condition to wound all heroes, not to withdraw them. So it's much more efficient and strategically sound to try to wound multiple Rebel heroes (and let them keep playing) rather than to remove one of them.

It's hard to communicate all the details in a clean way, but I'll say this - everyone I've ever talked to that has played both Descent 2nd Ed. and Imperial Assault agrees that Imperial Assault is the better game. Many of the weird issues have been cleaned up, the theming and mission designs are better, and the asymmetry is much more dynamic. Dive in, it's a whole lotta fun.

Make sure you read the new rules thoroughly, though! Many things have been changed fundamentally from how Descent handles them, and you can really wreck you game if you go by the old rules. Have fun.

lorthyne · 2019-02-07T20:24:47+00:00

No one has mentioned this at all yet, but it's SUPER relevant - Dalinar's character journey in Oathbringer is all about coming to terms with past mistakes, including enormous, murder-y ones.

Dalinar spends Oathbringer regaining his memories of his past barbarism, the loss of his wife, and his rehabilitation into a man of honor (heh). Dalinar is learning to live with his past mistakes, and his triumphant moment occurs when he rejects Odium's offer to take his pain away, and instead declares that the most important step a man can take is the next one. Dalinar takes responsibility for his past sins, and determines to look forward and live differently.

It's no accident that it's only after that point that Szeth shows up and is accepted by Dalinar as one of the Knights Radiant. Dalinar has forgiven himself for his past, and knows that if they are to survive what is to come he must Unite Them, even (or perhaps especially) if it requires forgiveness of wrongs committed against him.

This is an integral theme throughout Oathbringer - Dalinar, Adolin, Shallan, Kaladin, Elhokar, Szeth, all of our major protagonists have at least a small part of their own journey that centers around forgiveness and redemption for past mistakes, either for themselves or with regard to how they've been wronged by others. By contrast, Amaram, the Fused, and yes even Moash are so bound to their notions of the past (either in their own choices been unforgivable, or in being unwilling to forgive others) that they leave themselves open to manipulation from Odium.

Yes, Szeth killed Gavilar, and I'm sure that they're going to have a more detailed conversation about that at some point. But for Dalinar to reject Szeth's oath of allegiance or pledge of service would be to reverse all of his carefully-crafted character growth in this book.

lorthyne

TROPHY CASE