Let the Right One In
I’ve talked in recent comics about my gun totin’ inquisitor. Girl’s got a rifle bigger than she is. She’s got self-buffs out the wazoo. A grit pool. Trick bullets. The Deadly Aim feat, sneak attack dice, and a literal goddess riding shotgun beside her. But bizarrely, I find myself most excited by this little rule:
Monster Lore (Ex) — The he inquisitor adds her Wisdom modifier on Knowledge skill checks in addition to her Intelligence modifier, when making skill checks to identify the abilities and weaknesses of creatures.
It fits the character, what with her whole “I’ve seen stranger things in these parts than you people could imagine” vibe. She’s the tracker and the survivalist of the group, so monster lore feels pretty on-brand. But honestly, it’s the fact that I’ve GM’d so much that makes this an exciting one for me. I mean, here is a class feature that jumps up and shouts, “Remember to make your friggin’ monster lore check!” at you. I think some players (myself included) could use the reminder.
All too often, when it comes time roll initiative it’s also time to turn off your brain. That’s because you did all the hard work up front. You figured out your attack bonuses and stackable modifiers and similar. Now you get to deploy that metric shitload of rule-fu upon some poor, unsuspecting monster. Never mind the fact that it might be incorporeal, immune to slashing damage, and potentially friendly. The words “roll initiative” have been said, and so now it’s time to make with the math.
I won’t belabor the point much further. I will only ask you guys to remember to roll your monster lore skills. As magus is discovering in today’s comic, forgetting to do so can have major friggin’ consequences.
Question of the day then! Have you ever found yourself bursting with impatience, waiting for a player to simply ask about the weird critter you’ve rolled up before slicing it to pieces? Or as a player, have you ever prematuraly gone for the kill before identifying some vital piece of info? Tell us all about your own encounters with monster lore down in the comments!
Dammit, Magus… >_<
We're going to have to put a leash on her, aren't we?
Well, I’m pretty sure it has already be a thing between her and Quizzy.
The Hnadbook of Erotic Fantasy comics refuse to stay on their side of the continuity. XD
On a completely serious and missing-the-point tangent off this post–
I think people routinely make the mistake of compartmentalizing a character’s sex life (or lack thereof) as if it isn’t often just as much a part of them as their romantic or professional life. I’ve had PCs for whom I’ve had (entirely unvocalized to the GM or other players, of course) serious mental speculation about how a person like them engages in the bedroom or doesn’t.
To give the most SFW example I can, I have one tiefling character who’s very succubus-coded, and I have it firmly established in my mind that she’s entirely ace and her relationship with sex is mostly, similar to her dysfunctional relationships with, well, relationships as a whole, utilitarian–they’ve always been something she engages in for the sake of keeping others close or getting what she wants, but she doesn’t really enjoy it, and recognizing that this people-pleasing behavior is both manipulative and a little self-destructive is a big part of her arc. Her arc in learning to care for others in an unselfish way and actually feel romantically or platonically desired is linked to an unspoken arc about realizing she doesn’t actually want to keep using physical intimacy the way she’s been using it.
Anyways, I realize this is entirely off the beaten path of a couple of jokes about a catgirl doing pet play; I just think it’s a neat subject!
And to be clear, this isn’t me saying we should all be openly talking about the HBoEF in these comments sections or whatever! This isn’t meant to contest what you said, just bounce off it for an unrelated ramble.
I know that Laurel had a queer character once upon a time who never got to express that biz at the table. Always seemed like a shame to me, since it was a fun variation on the “knight who wants to save the princess” trope.
But naw. Feel free to discuss HoEF stuff over here. Keep it PG-13 and stuff, but I’m not actually concerned about it. đ
https://tenor.com/view/cats-lazy-leash-gif-3564201
Our old Siamese cats thought leashes were confusing at first, but once they understood the idea, they thought walks outside were very interesting and exciting.
… Magus may not be as smart as a Siamese, though. :-/
As a player yes, especially when I’ve played barbarian. Tactics are for when you are in calm state. The moment rage gets on, only tactic I have is “if it stands it dies, if it runs it dies tired”. One more memorable one is when I go full on mean murderhobo and butcher a monster that pleaded me to leave it alone. Unfortunately for it, the team got payed for head we brpught back. GM aparently had tried to get us to negotiate with it for better reward, unfortunately I viewed breaking contracts as cowardly thing to do, also bad for business in future and so proceeded to turn it’s damage reduction to “up yours I have +8 to damage when raging with great weapon” cue game master revealing his plot and our cleric going “we lost how much easy money!”
But as game master, not so much as people who I play with know me, they expect suprises, trickery, general assholery, minor details that turn otherwise very survivable situations to self termination(Paranoia, the scout plane they were given for testing came with missiles, an easy electronics check would have realised that missiles already had a lock on, to the plane itself) and memes, I don’t think one guy has forgiven the “Purple Ork Kommando”- incident yet.
Sure. But as a smart player, doesn’t that it get frustrating to watch you mage pal forget to do the lore thing round after round?
Playing supposedly smart characters is hard when player themselves is in clouds all the time, main reason I play barbarians most of the time, relatively minimal need to pretend to be smarter.
Also it is a group activity even as GM I try to remind my players about their abilities and skill checks at least when story requires it.
The techno-leeches have assimilated the alt-text!
I really need to stop writing these when I’m passing out from exhaustion.
Todays comic is a good analogy on internet security. No matter how intricate your security, it takes one dumbass to compromise an entire network.
I bet she skimmed through the security training videos too.
And if you make your system idiot proof, the universe will just make a better idiot.
A while ago I ran a DnD game in a kind of post-post-apocalyptic magipunk setting. One of the elements in the setting were robots running on cores housing captured extraplanar entities (fey, elementals, demons, etc.). Most of these had gone haywire over the centuries since the precursors made them, and the only way to permanently break one was by breaking the core, freeing and (usually) banishing the powering entity inside. Otherwise they would reassemble themselves over time, often stronger and more unhinged then before. I had told the players this after an encounter with several demon powered robots during the introductory dungeon, and they had dutifully wrecked their cores to keep them down.
Anyway, a couple levels later the players ran into an encounter with a wolf-like machine. This tied into the backstory of one player, who had lost his father to a machine like that (he hunted it down in his backstory but didn’t break it’s core as he didn’t know about that at the time). The players fought it, defeated it and then… Just walked away, not remembering to permanently break it (I made sure to describe the robot still being mostly intact).
So I did what any DM would do, increased the bot’s stats and threw it at the players again a level later, making sure to note its similarity to the one they had fought previously. Once again the players beat it and once again they failed to finish the job.
So I powered it up further, giving it abilities to counteract what killed it before and made it into a boss-level threat. I threw it at them again a couple levels later, making it very clear it was hunting the players. Once again it was beaten after a hard fight. And once again the players beat it, and then prepared to just walk away. At that point an exchange along these lines occured:
GM (me): so remember that lore about power cores holding extraplanar entities?
Players: …yes?
GM: and how robots with these cores would reactivate after a while unless the core is broken?
Players: yeah.
GM: and now there is this bot that looks like several you fought before?
Players: yeeees?
GM: sooooo?
Players: ooooooooh… Right, yeah, we should probably do something about that.
Anyway, some spectacularly bad rolls later one of the players ended up partially possessed by an amnesiac fey wolf god. But that’s a story for another time.
“We depleted its health points using our mechanical resources. No further action required.”
Players are also robots in their own way.
No, I’m definitely the player who’s asking all about whatever creature I’m presented with. The in-character reasons may vary â one might care about identifying weaknesses to exploit, another just wants to know everything about everything â but I’m certainly the player most likely to be making knowledge checks before and during combat. Or after, for that matter… my lore bard has a habit of doing post-fight research on any unusual encounters, having secured access to a good occult library.
Just leveled up that aforementioned inquisitor. It was a bear choosing between
https://aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Heightened%20Awareness
and
https://aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Know%20the%20Enemy
Hmm… my bard’s not really into using magic to learn stuff… I don’t think she has a single divination spell in her repertoire. But she’s very much of the view that no knowledge is useless, and will take every opportunity to ask questions… about *anything*.
I’ve been playing Pathfinder 2e for a bit, and there monster lore checks take an action. (If you don’t spend a feat to make if a free action). And with vital buffs, positioning and attacking vying for priority, it can be several rounds of combat for the first knowledge check to be done.
When I do make a check, weaknesses and special attacks are usually the first questions, but if the attack doesn’t make sense to me I often ask for normal behaviour from the species. I need to know the monster’s motivation in this scene, you know?
I still maintain that there should be an equivalent Sense Motive system to Monster Lore for this situation. You could even codify it by making those sporatic “morale” entries a standard part of the stat bock.
As a DM I just prompt them to make the relephant Intelligence check to know what they’re dealing with. I then get to exposition-dump.
I usually wait a round or two before poking them. But yeah, your fear of being this GM…
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fpvn6v6mnxdvb1.png
…Shouldn’t prevent you from being a friendly GM and helping the players out.
With knowledge checks it’s not them actively sitting down and thinking, it’s an automatic determiner to if they know it. The players shouldn’t need to ask, it should be an automatic roll to determine who knows what.
It’s also why it’s incredibly stupid for OneD&D to try and make it an action. Crawford is a hack, and should be fired.
“With knowledge checks itâs not them actively sitting down and thinking, itâs an automatic determiner to if they know it. The players shouldnât need to ask, it should be an automatic roll to determine who knows what.”
Definitely agree with this. Though there might be a place for a “take a moment to look at the monster and see what you can figure out about it” action. Maybe this action allows another roll with a lower DC than the automatic reaction roll, plus possibly allowing you to note details about this specific monster (i.e. “You notice that this owlbear has burn scars along one flank. It has been burned in the past and may be unusually afraid of fire.”)
In elementary school back in the early 80s, I was recruited into the D&D group (OG Stranger Things crew) specifically *because* they needed a bespectacled nerd to figure out what the DM had thrown at us. I was once accused of having read the Fiend Folio for reasoning that the “amorphous humanoid making a buzzing sound” (cifal) was some sort of ‘colony-creature’ and suggesting that the AoE of one well-placed Pyrotechnics spell would generate enough smoke to cause it to dissipate or go dormant. (It works on bees, right?)
At our current Game Night table, my players have played with me enough to know that I like the weird and obscure, so when the team a) heard rumors of a deserted village with rumors of ghosts of the missing calling out for living, b) had to travel through said village to get to Destination, c) found an empty village with a lot of deer tracks, the retired Marine at the table said “Game over! We need to get out of here.”
While he couldn’t remember the name of the Leucrotta, he remembered enough about the lore to put 2-and-2 together and declare “Whatever happens from here, WE. DO. NOT. SPLIT. THE. PARTY.”
Never have I been so proud of my players.
Or shit, I thought it was going to be a false hyrda, lol.
Honestly? My favorite part about pf2e.
Monsters doing weird shit and prompting players for recall knowledge checks to understand what the hell is going on.
My biggest success with this personally was with a chimera. To twist on the concept, I’d given each head its own individual health bar, and each part of the chimera took its own actions on its turn (Each head had 2 actions per turn, coming out to 6 total, or just about double the action economy of a normal monster)
So it took a fair bit of figuring out for my players to realize what was going on, and that they needed to pick and focus one of the heads instead of just hitting the body in general, as it would make the fight easier.
The “wasted” third action of casters staying free for the that knowledge check is SO FRIGGIN FLAVORFUL.
I really do need to get involved in a proper 2e campaign.
“Let the Right One In”
Also known as “LĂ„t den rĂ€tte komma in” (2008), even dubbed it’s superior to the americanized slop Hollywood remake.
“Have you ever found yourself bursting with impatience, waiting for a player to simply ask about the weird critter youâve rolled up before slicing it to pieces?”
Nope. Honestly as a GM I dont;l get attached to NPCs, be they civilized or feral. I leave attachment and dismemberment up to the Players.
“Or as a player, have you ever prematuraly gone for the kill before identifying some vital piece of info?”
Oh yes. Very much so. So the year was 1992 and we were playing AD&D 2. I want to say the module was Palace of the Silver Princess or some such, however having reread it decades later none of it seems familiar (so either the GM was running a different module and just used it as a slip cover or they radically altered the plot and other details). Anyway, premise was we were hunting through a time-slipped palace for a lost princess to rescue her, the palace was filled with various monsters that had accrued over the years as it slipped between the temporal realities.
So, saving the Princess was paramount as that was the only way to free the palace and it’s grounds from the “time-slippage” curse. Anyway, there were only two of us, a Bounty Hunter Thief and a Priest of Vengeance Cleric, so we became overly… ah… “shoot first ask questions later” prone as the GM allowed us to have a surprise round if we voiced our actions before he called for initiative.
I (the PoV Cleric) carried a pair of hand-crossbows, one magiced up vs Undead (+2 I think) the other was a handbow of Life Leach (it fed me the HP it drained from the enemy when it level drained them, but had a habit of turning low-level creatures into undead). My partner carried a “repeating siege crossbow” Dirty Harry style (it was the 90s).
So there we were stalking the corridors, kicking in doors and shooting first, asking q’s via speak with dead when we cared to. We kicked open a door and the GM started to read the rooms descriptions, something about a candle light and movement behind a paper screen…
We both declared “We shoot it!”.
Suffice to say the Princess arose moments later as a wight and we had to put her back down. We decided to sneak out fo the coutnry with as much loot as we could easily carry and just mark that country down as “Do Not Visit”.
My players were once in a dungeon where they decided to kick down a door and instantly shoot whatever was on the other side of it.
Which was kinda awkward, because the thing on the other side was the villains lieutenant who was waiting for them to offer an alliance against the villain. So he just managed to start greet them before they shot him several times in the face.
Reminds me of the musketeer that accidentally fireballed his own love interest / princess to death. She’d been captured by the antiparty, and he was spoiling for a reason to explode those guys (unseen down a dark corridor).
This hurts me. My players tend to use their Monster Lore checks… after the creature has been killed and they’re poking the corpse to ask what it was.
That’s ultimately why I decided against this spell:
https://aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Know%20the%20Enemy
Doesn’t help much when the critter is already dead.
Once my group were traveling through the tunnels of a beholders lair, when they entered a cave filled with Beholders! The fighter ran forth and struck one, and it exploded into a cloud of spores, forcing the fighter to make a con-save at which they succeeded. A quick series of checks later, and the players realized it was Gas Spores. A type of fungi, that takes the form of a beholder.
As soon as they realized this, the fighter decided to go from spore to spore, destroying them. And while the DC for the spores was pretty low compared to the Fighters modifiers, having to do it again and again lead to them failing one of them. Which meant the spores took root, and killed them a couple of hours later (Something that would have been less of an issue if not for the fact that the Cleric got turned to stone in the fight with the Beholder itself).
Had any in the group asked what they know about those spores, or made checks to identify knowledge about them, then the fighter would most likely not have gone up and cut them up. But for some reason my entire group just decided this was a good moment to take a short breather, while the fighter worked out some energy.
For myself, I once attacked what turned out to be a (homebrew) creature that looked very scary, but was actually pretty weak. Apart from the fact that it exploded upon death. So I had a brief moment of glory as I cut it down, followed by another brief moment of panic as it exploded me.
Was proud of my group handling an assassin vine recently. After the initial grapple was escaped, we just kited the silly thing. It’s got such a slow move speed that we could just backpedal and toss cantrips at it.
I feel that “explode the explodey things from a distance” might have been a similarly good idea. đ
I’m going to read entirely far too much into how Magus’ tail does not project a shadow, refuse to consider it a simple art error, and you can’t stop me.
Are you suggesting she has an illusory tail?
Obviously, that’s not really Magus, just something using Magus’ appearance as an illusory disguise.
Alternatively, her tail is really a symbiont that has already been infected with vampirism, and therefore does not cast a shadow or reflect in a mirror.
I’m sorry, but I’ve lost track of what the plot is for this arc. Can someone explain why we seem to have techno-vampires from Street Samurai’s era creeping around everywhere? Is this something to do with the unsunken city? Is Sam actually from the distant past? How did the city reactivate if Gunslinger has the power source?
I’m normally OK at piecing the myth arcs together but I think I must have missed a vital comic or two…
What Gunslinger has is not the power source for the technovampire city; it’s the “torporb” that was responsible for the technovampire to all fall asleep and stay dormant for millennia. Now that it’s been removed, they’ve woken up.
I’ve never played in a game where the DM used lore. That said, I do try and make it fun for the groups I run to learn as much about the world and its inhabitants as possible. Unluckily, I’ve only run into a few players that were remotely interested. Even when they ran into my homebrew critters, they usually just started dumping everything, including the kitchen sink, on them to see what stuck. The few who wanted the lore, I treasured and rewarded.
My party (or rather their rule-savy knowledge enjoyer) rolls monster lore constantly. For one, we’re playing Wrath of the Righteous, so some kind of DR and resistances is pretty much always a given. The other is that in the last campaign, they were traumatized during a dungeon-crawl through an undeath-infested ruin. Since that, their first question is *always* “Can this thing be killed with normal means?”
In my current campaign, we’ve got a player (my brother) who’s both very experienced with D&D and playing a druid. Generally, he’s able to figure out what most enemies are both in- and out-of-character, unless I’m inflicting homebrew on the party.