Urgh
Endurance trial of a day...
Yesterday afternoon took a lot out of me at work. Today was more of the same running around trying to deal with one hectic matter after another, and even getting drawn into a meeting where I couldn't answer everything on behalf of people not present and ended up losing close to an hour of my day that could have been spent actually accomplishing something.
And then offline gaming, which was slow to start. Someone had the sudden impulse to go inviting a gamer who'd moved away to join the game via Skype. After some time setting this up, and talking with him a bit, he was drawn away by his SO. Only then did we actually get back to the game where we were in the middle of storming a twisted ritual meant to given a demon great power, etc., etc.
The GM plays things a little toward the "realistic" side. We had a whole bunch of tribe members to carve through to even get to the circle of the ritual to try to disrupt things. Along the way, our NPC companions went down, but the PCs were doing fairly well most of the time. Until, of course, our rogue took a bad hit and a couple enemies got in at our casters who (surprise, surprise) are pretty much useless in melee.
In fact, I felt pretty much useless for the duration. I was able to start the combat with a strong spell based off D&D's Spike Growth, turning a large section into the room into a potentially deadly field to move through. It's supposed to be difficult (albeit not impossible) to see, but after one beastie ran into it and killed itself, none of the other enemies even got close to it. The spell (which is probably the highest level one we have access to currently) served its secondary purpose of battlefield control to a degree, but it was disappointing to see it actually get to harm only one of about twenty opponents.
The following several rounds were a series of missing arrows. Whee, the excitement! In order to be challenging to our weapon master and fiendishly dangerous rogue, their defenses put them a bit beyond any of the characters that weren't direct-combat heavy, it felt like. And by the time we got to the bad guy, it was even worse, and almost everyone was suffering from wound penalties.
Our interruption of the ritual and killing of the casting shaman did manage to mess up the original intent of it all - to simply imbue their demon-possessed leader with powers of the nature goddess, but only in the sense that we kept them from closing the rift that was opened, so everyone in the room ended up sucked into the goddess' realm. Nature-enhanced-demon-possessed-orc happened, but rather than leading his armies around the plains conquering tribes, he was with us in the realm of the goddess he'd yoinked powers from. We failed the primary goals of either preventing the ritual entirely or killing the demon, as he overpowered and killed our only character who stood a good chance of dealing a solid blow against it himself.
So... one PC dead. Big bad guy run off by the goddess' minions/avatars/somethings, but loose in her realm somewhere. And the rest of the battered group really at a loss. And all that at nearly 1 AM. @.@
I don't know. I have felt invested in this campaign for having played it for a while, for liking my character, and such. Tonight, what felt like it should have been a climactic battle was a let down for me, personally, as I didn't feel usefully involved. We'll see where things go. Continuation (and resurrection) aren't out of the question, but... have to see how everyone feels, I guess.
Yesterday afternoon took a lot out of me at work. Today was more of the same running around trying to deal with one hectic matter after another, and even getting drawn into a meeting where I couldn't answer everything on behalf of people not present and ended up losing close to an hour of my day that could have been spent actually accomplishing something.
And then offline gaming, which was slow to start. Someone had the sudden impulse to go inviting a gamer who'd moved away to join the game via Skype. After some time setting this up, and talking with him a bit, he was drawn away by his SO. Only then did we actually get back to the game where we were in the middle of storming a twisted ritual meant to given a demon great power, etc., etc.
The GM plays things a little toward the "realistic" side. We had a whole bunch of tribe members to carve through to even get to the circle of the ritual to try to disrupt things. Along the way, our NPC companions went down, but the PCs were doing fairly well most of the time. Until, of course, our rogue took a bad hit and a couple enemies got in at our casters who (surprise, surprise) are pretty much useless in melee.
In fact, I felt pretty much useless for the duration. I was able to start the combat with a strong spell based off D&D's Spike Growth, turning a large section into the room into a potentially deadly field to move through. It's supposed to be difficult (albeit not impossible) to see, but after one beastie ran into it and killed itself, none of the other enemies even got close to it. The spell (which is probably the highest level one we have access to currently) served its secondary purpose of battlefield control to a degree, but it was disappointing to see it actually get to harm only one of about twenty opponents.
The following several rounds were a series of missing arrows. Whee, the excitement! In order to be challenging to our weapon master and fiendishly dangerous rogue, their defenses put them a bit beyond any of the characters that weren't direct-combat heavy, it felt like. And by the time we got to the bad guy, it was even worse, and almost everyone was suffering from wound penalties.
Our interruption of the ritual and killing of the casting shaman did manage to mess up the original intent of it all - to simply imbue their demon-possessed leader with powers of the nature goddess, but only in the sense that we kept them from closing the rift that was opened, so everyone in the room ended up sucked into the goddess' realm. Nature-enhanced-demon-possessed-orc happened, but rather than leading his armies around the plains conquering tribes, he was with us in the realm of the goddess he'd yoinked powers from. We failed the primary goals of either preventing the ritual entirely or killing the demon, as he overpowered and killed our only character who stood a good chance of dealing a solid blow against it himself.
So... one PC dead. Big bad guy run off by the goddess' minions/avatars/somethings, but loose in her realm somewhere. And the rest of the battered group really at a loss. And all that at nearly 1 AM. @.@
I don't know. I have felt invested in this campaign for having played it for a while, for liking my character, and such. Tonight, what felt like it should have been a climactic battle was a let down for me, personally, as I didn't feel usefully involved. We'll see where things go. Continuation (and resurrection) aren't out of the question, but... have to see how everyone feels, I guess.
What one DM envisions as a giant climactic battle may simply wind down into the grind and minutae of charts and die-rolling. Sorry things have been such a drag on you as of late.
ReplyDelete: Bleah. That's all I've got to say about that. I hope I do a better job for you. :)
ReplyDelete