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otakumick said:
While I find the Myrrdin/Dresden correlation amusing, I don't think it likely that they are analogues of each other. I believe that it is simple to test this.
Test 1: When Myrrdin leaves a building, is it on fire?
Test 2: Does Myrrdin drive a very old bug?
Test 3: Does murphy's law go into overdrive where Myrrdin is involved?

Other tests may also be used, but if the answer to these questions are no, then Myrrdin is probably not Harry Dresden. Probably. Let's hope not anyway. Unless dealing with a sufficiently hilarious fic with him as the main character.
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1.) The building is not always on fire when he exits. If that was the case, he wouldn't be able to get a home, let alone go shopping for essentials.
2.) Mab granted him the use of an old Bentley, I believe, when his blue beetle got stepped on in a decisive manner.
3.) Murphy is a detective for the CCPD in their Special Cases Unit. Who is Harry's primary contact there. She is surprisingly effective in the presence of magic, but in Overdrive, no.

So, all three of your tests can pop up with false negatives.
 
Itsune said:
1.) The building is not always on fire when he exits. If that was the case, he wouldn't be able to get a home, let alone go shopping for essentials.
2.) Mab granted him the use of an old Bentley, I believe, when his blue beetle got stepped on in a decisive manner.
3.) Murphy is a detective for the CCPD in their Special Cases Unit. Who is Harry's primary contact there. She is surprisingly effective in the presence of magic, but in Overdrive, no.

So, all three of your tests can pop up with false negatives.
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Ahem, well yes. However, as far as 3 goes I wasn't referring to that Murphy. I was referring to the law about what goes wrong.
 
As I have stated before, the one mage you DO NOT WANT on your case for anything is one Ms. Lina Inverse.
Not only the building you are in be on fire, it will likely be -gone-, along with most of the community if she decides to get serious. She tackles gods on their home planes and WINS.

However, as she is on friendly terms with at least one group of golden dragons, it's not likely to come to that. If anything, the PRT would have to be summoned to get her out of Fugly Bob's after eating several Challengers in a row in short order. :)
 
Kryslin said:
As I have stated before, the one mage you DO NOT WANT on your case for anything is one Ms. Lina Inverse.
Not only the building you are in be on fire, it will likely be -gone-, along with most of the community if she decides to get serious. She tackles gods on their home planes and WINS.

However, as she is on friendly terms with at least one group of golden dragons, it's not likely to come to that. If anything, the PRT would have to be summoned to get her out of Fugly Bob's after eating several Challengers in a row in short order. :)
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I'm more scared of missing off Harry Dresden. When he kills you you stay dead...

Zombie Tyrannosaurus Rex! Nuff said!
 
Ms. Inverse is effectively a walking tactical nuclear weapons platform.

The Dragon Slave is often shown digging out craters like Castle Bravo 15 MT nuclear test shot did. :o :o :o :o

Sure, she can do smaller scale destruction, but given her irascible nature, things escalate very rapidly... like at a good percentage of C.
 
I'm always going to be more scared of the nicer one.

Lina Inverse might be the shounen protagonist version of Glory Girl, but Harry Dresden kills gods when some idiot finally lights his fuse

And this is derailment anyway. When's the shipyard due to be built?
 
PossiblyEnos said:
Equipment has a lead time of two to five years.
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Personally I'm waiting for Taylor to start playing with magic. There's a lot she could do to simplify the "boat graveyard" just through use of the Fabricate spell. She doesn't have a lot of skill in, say, metalworking, but she doesn't need much skill to convert 10 cubic feet per level of a shipwreck into a solid lump of metal. If the DM is kind you can pick what parts of the base material gets used.

If you really want to have fun with your DM, wait for them to give you an obviously magical, trapped door. (Last time I pulled this stunt the DM had placed an adamantium door so heavily enchanted it glowed.) Then use the wall next to the door as the component for, say, a rough stone table. Just make sure to use the side of the wall that includes the hinges..

That's just one spell that could help create clear "lanes" through the boat graveyard for ships to pass through. Imagine what Taylor can do when she gets creative.
 
Leechblade said:
Who needs magic to move metal when you've got the strength and talons of a Golden Dragon?

All Taylor needs is an excuse to rip and tear at it. I'm surprised Danny hasn't brought it up!
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If you mean moving then that only works on small vessels, which assumes Taylor can hold her breath long enough to get the work done. (There's a reason why "underwater exercise challenges" are a staple on reality TV shows - they're hard!)

Just simple Google-fu for a tanker's weight gets me to the Wikipedia page for oil tankers. The smaller oil tankers are in the "few thousand metric tons of deadweight" range up to 550,000 metric tons. Looking at some quick scribbled math on how much Taylor can be reasonably expected to push, pull, or drag in 3.5 puts her well, well below what it would take to move even a smaller tanker when you factor in the fact that those tankers are full of water (more weight) being moved through water (more resistance) across a soft sandy base (more resistance).

If you mean shredding the shipwrecks, yes she can do that. The results would be a lot of sharp objects scattered around unless she turned the entire thing into confetti. (Which would take a huge amount of time and did I mention holding her breath earlier?) Those sharp objects would be serious hazards for any ship if the tides or weather are wrong.

A mix of the two - clawing a ship into easily movable chunks - would work but be time consuming and tedious. Note, to be fair, the mix would be the best for local jobs. Taylor could drag the pieces up to the docs for salvage or recycling. My earlier post about turning the wrecks into solid ingots would leave dense, heavy lumps of iron / copper / lead / steel / plastic that would be a "unique and fun engineering challenge" to recover from the bottom of the bay.
 
Nicholai said:
If you really want to have fun with your DM, wait for them to give you an obviously magical, trapped door. (Last time I pulled this stunt the DM had placed an adamantium door so heavily enchanted it glowed.) Then use the wall next to the door as the component for, say, a rough stone table. Just make sure to use the side of the wall that includes the hinges..
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😐
I would've shot you dead with a Meteor for that stunt, in a pure 'Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies' moment. It's gamers like you that make DM's come up with insane ways to kill characters. ☄ You know, like that whole Tomb of Horrors thing... 👀
 
Jonn Wolfe said:
😐
I would've shot you dead with a Meteor for that stunt, in a pure 'Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies' moment. It's gamers like you that make DM's come up with insane ways to kill characters. ☄ You know, like that whole Tomb of Horrors thing... 👀
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Then honestly you're looking at it wrong.

A trapped door is a challenge for the players to overcome. It might involve the rogue spending an hour (game time) to roll the dice on detecting traps, disarming traps, picking the lock, and so on. It might involve the wizard pulling stunt like that. Either way it is a challenge. The issue with the "a wizard did it" that actually bit us in the tail was the other players assuming that the door was "defeated" the minute it tipped over. So the barbarian in the party rushed in.

.. which meant running across the explosive rune trapped surface of the door ..

Reasons to fully explain a plan to the party before implementing said plan +1!

Ranting against the barbarian aside, in effect I turned one big challenge the party couldn't really deal with into multiple, smaller ones that had their own risks. Once the door is down we still would have had to disarm the magical traps or use grappling hooks, rope, and a lot of strength checks to pull it out of the way. That would mean backtracking through the dungeon. (I was planning on using Grease spells to get around some of the noise.) Go figure dragging a heavy, metal door across a stone floor is going to make noise. Cue handing the GM a perfect opportunity to roll for random encounters because noise attracts random encounters. Note this is after tipping over said metal door onto a stone surface..

Had the door been mechanically trapped instead of magically trapped the only thing that trick would have done would be to let the party get well out of range of any traps before pulling on it. (50' of rope, a grappling hook around the exposed edge, and a corner work great!)

And, oh yes, we still would have had to move the heavy stone table out of the way to start the process of moving the door. That's not just a strength check - that's going to involve some dexterity or more clever thinking to get the table out of the way without touching the door and setting off the traps. (Can you throw the grappling hook and catch the table leg but not over-shoot and hit the door?)

There are ways around these that require effort and creative thinking (Silence 15' Radius to keep the door tipping over from ringing the dinner bell for anything nearby, Grease spells, and so on) that burn party resources. The ranger lost a spell slot for their Silence spell. All of those things being used on a door make the rest of the dungeon harder.
 
@Nicholai I beieve you're misreading the complaint. It's not a matter of "Gah, you bypassed my clever trap!" It's a matter of "Gah, you're too clever, you're making me do more work.

I've ran into a few GMs like that. They tend to absolutely hate any clever plan or spell use (especially spell use) that deals with a challenge in a way they didn't plan for. Doubly so if said clever plan or action sidesteps their desired MANDATORY PLOT EVENT such as "party will get captured by the badguy because they were sent to take a heavily defended castle without enough support". Or if your clever plan/action allows you to contribute rather then get insta-killed like the GM wanted and expected.
 
Nicholai said:
If you mean moving then that only works on small vessels, which assumes Taylor can hold her breath long enough to get the work done. (There's a reason why "underwater exercise challenges" are a staple on reality TV shows - they're hard!)
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Segev said:
At least in 3.5, gold dragons can breathe water as well as air. And I think we're using 3.5 stats after the author learned about their spellcasting?
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Gold Dragons have been amphibious as far back as First Edition AD&D; in fact, the original images of Gold Dragons lacked wings, and were based on Oriental Dragons; specifically on either Ocean or River Dragons.

With the right spell set, Taylor should be able to manipulate currents on at least a small scale to clear silt from the channel, lower the weight of wrecks so they can be floated off the seabed, and even , once she has access to sixth level spells, disintegrate wrecks to get rid of them. Or, she can place demolition charges to recuse wrecks to scrap and lower the seabed in the bay, allowing conventional dredging to do the rest.

The problem, of course, is getting permission to do so, which is likely to be a LOT harder then one might think; particularly when one of the largest employers in the Bay (Medhall) has a vested interest in keeping the economy depressed. (A strong economy does not lend itself to Gang Recruitment like a weak one does, and the E88 would have a harder time recruiting their street level members if the economy was stronger.)....
 
Segev said:
At least in 3.5, gold dragons can breathe water as well as air. And I think we're using 3.5 stats after the author learned about their spellcasting?
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Jacen1 said:
Gold Dragons have been amphibious as far back as First Edition AD&D; in fact, the original images of Gold Dragons lacked wings, and were based on Oriental Dragons; specifically on either Ocean or River Dragons.

With the right spell set, Taylor should be able to manipulate currents on at least a small scale to clear silt from the channel, lower the weight of wrecks so they can be floated off the seabed, and even , once she has access to sixth level spells, disintegrate wrecks to get rid of them. Or, she can place demolition charges to recuse wrecks to scrap and lower the seabed in the bay, allowing conventional dredging to do the rest.

The problem, of course, is getting permission to do so, which is likely to be a LOT harder then one might think; particularly when one of the largest employers in the Bay (Medhall) has a vested interest in keeping the economy depressed. (A strong economy does not lend itself to Gang Recruitment like a weak one does, and the E88 would have a harder time recruiting their street level members if the economy was stronger.)....
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Obviously you can see how many campaigns I have run in where the DM actually let us go under water. Amphibious dragons honestly hasn't come up in my play experience.. but now I have new ideas to spring on my players.

Thanks!
 
Nicholai said:
Obviously you can see how many campaigns I have run in where the DM actually let us go under water. Amphibious dragons honestly hasn't come up in my play experience.. but now I have new ideas to spring on my players.

Thanks!
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To be fair, campaigns rarely go underwater. Which is fair since 99.9% of player characters are unable to breath under water. Swimming, drowning, and in-water combat only crop up on rare occasions. This in turn means that most game masters are unfamiliar with the rules for such occasions. Thus they avoid those rules needing to be used.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
To be fair, campaigns rarely go underwater. Which is fair since 99.9% of player characters are unable to breath under water. Swimming, drowning, and in-water combat only crop up on rare occasions. This in turn means that most game masters are unfamiliar with the rules for such occasions. Thus they avoid those rules needing to be used.
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Having looked at the drowning / suffocation rules in Pathfinder after fighting an Aboleth, drowning takes quite a while in terms of combat rounds. It takes 2 rounds per point of Con to even start Suffocating (so starting at an average of 20 rounds, or 2 minutes) before you even get to the Con check, which starts at DC10 and is +1 per round. So yea, usually whatever you're fighting is going to be well and truly dead before you start having to worry about suffocation.

(OTOH a full side quest / campaign in an aquatic situation is going to last more than 2 minutes, so if the GM wants to have such a story they're going to have to provide a way for the party to breath underwater and make sure they didn't invalidate the mage because the Lightning / Fire specced Sorcerer doesn't have any spells that work underwater, and make sure the Archer conveniently finds a Cyclonic bow of choice)
 
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Oh, elec spells work underwater. The problem is they work too well under water.

It's fireballs working underwater that always baffled me.

EDIT: I personally apply a concentration check if someone is hit while underwater to avoid expelling the air in their lungs. DC of 5+damage taken. Failure subtracts 5 rounds from how long until you start drowning. Which can get bad at times. And yes, I do apply your armor check penalty to this roll.
 
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