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There's got to be some archmage bankrolling them or something.
A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover
- Thread starter DragonParadox
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- a song of ice and fire a sword without a hilt d&d 3.5 dungeons & dragons 100% high octane dragon fuel ave corvidae battle action dragon diplomacy best sister bureaucromancy delicious soul-stuff dragon dreams come true dragon ta'veren greatest uncle hubris is a coward's word in defiance of gods and men mammon's folly mutually assured mage's disjunction qm murderhobo top tier coatl
There's got to be some archmage bankrolling them or something.
- Location
- Germany
Which threats exactly? They never fought something on screen until now and their first on screen appearance is a tactical retreat to avoid a very messy defeat. After we already got a few paragraphs about how hopelessly outmatched they are.
As far as introductions of something in a story go, this could not be much worse for them.
I foresee a follow up Punishment Expedition into the Earth Plane against their Formorian Allies.
Crake
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING
- Location
- USA
No time.
- Location
- United States
That's not quite what I'm getting at. I mean the Lannisters shouldn't be able to stand up to us. Mortal factions in general shouldn't be able to stand up to us. Not the Lannisters, not Qarth (hence them bending the knee preemptively), not Yi Ti. We outgun everyone to a hilarious degree.
Yes, the Lannisters have a lot of cash, but there's only so much that cash can get you with a lack of loyal manpower. We on the other hand were rolling in with supersoldiers and spaceships, and somehow we're getting bodied in the throne room? If it was Lanna and Gerion here I'd get it, but it's their lackeys.
This is running into the problem of "not everything deserves to be a challenge". The Lannisters have been falling behind for years, and that should have been shown here instead of having them stand toe to toe with us on any level. It's one thing to hire extraplanar mercenaries, it's another thing entirely to secretly smuggle ten CR 15 golems into the Red Keep and blindside us.
No point. It's just business.
Once the Lannisters are dead the contract will be defunct.
- Location
- Germany
I'm generally fine with the Lannisters having this. It's still a drop in the bucket compared to what we have. That we couldn't detect anything of it before hand is insane, but not that they got something of note going over the years.
But I've been looking forward to the Praetori deploying for literal years and now they are just another bunch of worthless chumps in the one engagement where they could really shine and do something that matters.
Over in Casterly Rock, they will be completely irrelevant next to Qyburn duking it out with Lanna or something.
And after that, they will be a cheerleading squad during all those bland, forgettable battles against the D&D monster of the week.
This just... ugh... so much time and work for pretentious Legionaries...
But I've been looking forward to the Praetori deploying for literal years and now they are just another bunch of worthless chumps in the one engagement where they could really shine and do something that matters.
Over in Casterly Rock, they will be completely irrelevant next to Qyburn duking it out with Lanna or something.
And after that, they will be a cheerleading squad during all those bland, forgettable battles against the D&D monster of the week.
This just... ugh... so much time and work for pretentious Legionaries...
If I may be frank here, what happened here was me panicking a little, specifically by the 'easy mode discussion yesterday'. I looked back at the countless interludes about unopposed conquest and greatness and I thought to myself, OK how to I make his fight a challenge while keeping to the themes of the Lannisters? Alas in that question I missed the most important question of 'did I foreshadow this as being possible'. The answer was no and this is how how we got into the mess we are in. We have had a lot of white room fights that were also failiures on my part so when I came up with an interesting engagement I was eager to put it into practice and did not consider the context.
More broadly I am best when I write characters, so I put in the work on coming up with a history and a tone of voice for the PoV character and again I missed the broader implication of if he should be heading into the fight I designed.
More broadly I am best when I write characters, so I put in the work on coming up with a history and a tone of voice for the PoV character and again I missed the broader implication of if he should be heading into the fight I designed.
- Location
- Africa
the only way I see this making sense is if the Lanisters could see the writing on the wall and this was an all or nothing Hail Mary by the Lanisters to halt out conquest at the Red keep and hold the capital made only possible by investing most of their available resources along with the best brightest of the golden shields(short of the their PCs) cause any other explanation would make no sense cause we out gun the Lanisters in just about every single metric from number of mages , width and depth of arcane lore , raw resources(exo plenary trade) , economic might(all of essos's more advanced and developed economy) , sheer numbers of troops(all better equipped than even the richest westerlands knight) , population(most of essos) and planer diplomacy(the sultans of the planes of earth and air consider us rulers of the garden) , simply put they should not be able to fight us in any meaningful fashion in any form of sustained conflict
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You know there is one thing I can do without retconing to show just how powerful the praetori are compared to normal warriors. I can show them fighting red cloaks, from the perspective of the latter. Would you guys like that?
I know I cannot turn back time and make it the first showing, but it will give some gravitas to what they are and what they imply compared to mortal armies, sort of like the march of the armored praetori who was sadly retconed because the armor did not exist.
- Location
- United States
DP, easy mode is in reference to factions that should matter. That would be Fiends, the Bloodstone Emperor, the Others, Shub-Niggurath in Qohor, the Efreeti, the
The Lannisters are not in that list. They're mortals, geassed mortals, who aught to be desperately trying to save their asses and failing.
- Location
- Germany
This is what I mean with "forgettable". I completely forgot that even happened. And narratively, you could have replaced the Praetori with a bunch of Legionaires just fine there.
- Location
- Germany
Not really. You have this weird idea that someone stomping on someone else makes them look powerful, but it does not. For someone to appear powerful, there needs to be a battle with genuine stakes and in which it's clear that effort was spent.
The Praetori rolling over some Warrior 3 chumps is only filler.
- Location
- Germany
Please don't make this even more annoying than it already is. I for one am not in the mood to deal with "lol, mindblanked assault team!" on top of everything else.
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
There is still plenty of opportunities for them to shine, y'all. During the conquest and afterward.
@DragonParadox, I'm not a fan of retcons, especially significant ones, but it would be much cooler and more interesting if smaller groups of Praetorians in the keep were to encounter the Gold Golems and Golden Shields mages. For example, a squad of 10 Praetorians coming across a mage, Gold Golem, and several Lannister knights. Those are battles that could be fought all over the keep, rather than grouping them all up in the throne room and making the encounter virtually insurmountable.
The red clocks in the Red Keep are not filler, they are people at or slightly above the first soft cap, veterans of fighting demons and deep ones.
You know what, to hell with it. I'm ret-conning the last update out of existence and the last half of the update before it, not just because of what you guys have said about it, but because I do not like the narrative beat for the story I'm writing. I know not everyone likes those, but I genuinely do not feel like I can write from where the last interlude left off.
When I resurrect my 'writer's block quest' that is a sign I should be making serious changes not trying to trim around the errors.
- Location
- United States
Right, sorry. Just wanted to further establish who I actually expect these challenges from rather than mortal enemies.
- Location
- Germany
The Praetori meeting the golems in the hallways means they either have to run away or they are dead. My plan worked only because they could have overwhelmed them on the open ground in the throne room.
And no. I don't see much chance to shine for them anymore. What against? We have only threats that we can by definition only delay, but never meaningfully beat. That's the annoying part with all those off-plane factions.
The Lannisters are the only ones we can actually win in a meaningful way against.
- Location
- Germany
THis is still reasonable in terms of the Lannisters total assets.
Between Lanna as a crafter and them still having some buying-power for extraplanar crafters, this encounter itself is no problem.
It's still nothing compared to the fleshforged creations we have, or the Undead. In fact I'm quite sure that @Azel's Black Knights, Molds and their champion-variants could easily deal with this ambush.
It's still vastly outclassed even by our non-PC assets.
The issues Azel has are twofold, first with the lack of successfuly spying/divination, second with the first big onscreen fight for the Praetorians being a bad match for them.
And those two are connected, if we had known about the Golems, we could have easily send in forge-assets and undead to deal with them, rather than overwhelmed Praetorians.
- Location
- Germany
That is a wholly informed ability. If we had seen a few interludes over the last months of them actually fighting and winning against such threats, it would mean something, but you saying that they are not chumps does not change how they are perceived. And when their only on-screen appereance is to roflstomped, then they will appear weak.
Show, don't tell.
Edit: If you want someone that has narrative weight, then have them fight the Kingsguard, especially Selmy. They come preloaded with weight from the source material, even though we never saw hide nor hair of them here.
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Crake
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING
- Location
- USA
This does seem like a case of "the thread has been raising some poignant and insightful discussion. Maybe I should take some time to absorb this and maybe ask some questions and decide how to structure things as I mean to go on, instead of introducing new things with no foreshadowing?"
I mean, I'm trying to be understanding, but this is not an issue of "it happened because of the other day's discussion", DP. This has been an ongoing problem for months.
But that doesn't mean it's not fixable, even with this going on for months, it just... it feels like we've all been willfully ignoring this very obvious issue.
Do you want to just run a character driven quest with none of this extraneous empire building stuff tacked on? Because it is basically being tacked on with the way its been treated.
That's not a condemnation, that's genuinely a question. And this isn't ACTUALLY an issue of "the scope has grown to be too much", so please don't deflect with that.
This is not an issue of there being too much going on, it's more "I am forgetting, outright, the genre for this collective game". Which has implications. Implications more about how one views their own quest, and the very different view the players have.
This can be fixed, and it doesn't require anything more special than reevaluating the quest in light of that. But because this has been an endemic issue, this isn't a matter of "I will design an arc with this information in mind and that will now make up for all the mistakes I made over the past however many months", that's more "I am going to run an entirely different kind of game from now on".
I mean, yeah, in a way a lot can stay the same since it's the same characters, but it turns a situation where "I have PCs kind of attached to the narrative, yet all the stakes are in how this military arm of their empire handles this group of enemies, not just how I can make them stage props for the main characters".
- Location
- Reno Nv
Considering all that went into their creation the Pretorians felt not worth the investment. I was thinking Space Marines, not better armored Guardsmen. Now if this was a Last Stand situation it would be understandable, but this just seems like a by the numbers ambush.
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Offf I missed a bit of discussion.
My two cents is we retcon the golem and let the Pretorians shine.
Afterwards we continue with the easy mode quest with Maybe some hard mode stuff sprinkled in to give us a few beatings.
My reasoning for that is this. I read this quest to relax. I don't need low level of constant anxiety of worrying if today is the day SD gets hit with a were-displacerbeast pandemic or the squids releasing covid on our cities.
My two cents is we retcon the golem and let the Pretorians shine.
Afterwards we continue with the easy mode quest with Maybe some hard mode stuff sprinkled in to give us a few beatings.
My reasoning for that is this. I read this quest to relax. I don't need low level of constant anxiety of worrying if today is the day SD gets hit with a were-displacerbeast pandemic or the squids releasing covid on our cities.