Stories of Industrious PCs

[Hamste]

Humans can't survive 45g of sustained acceleration, my google-fu is weak but suggests something more in the order of 5g. OFC, if we are using tech capable of putting out 45g for 8 days, maybe we have better tech to help our humans.

John Stapp showed that you could survive 46 G force (Not clear on how ok he was afterwards and it wasn't extremely long.). It certainly wouldn't be comfortable but if everything is properly supported to distribute the force to non-important parts, perfectly straight and the person was very healthy I could see people surviving in 45. Though it doesn't really matter as this is all theoretical and even at 5 g you would get to those speeds with in a lifetime easily enough.

[Geordnet]

Second, you mistake the notion of salt having a necessary and vital place in life with "valuable like silver and gold."

I'm not looking at its value relative to metals, since fantasy RPGs (read: DnD) are notorious for having way too much gold going around. I was comparing it to the value of manual labor and other necessities... In which, you have made your point. Baring the possibility of some unusual pressure increasing the price of salt (alchemy, maybe?) or significant general inflation, 1gp per pound is a bit too much.

Still, I don't think you should be calling out the GM on that. I highly doubt he did any research on the historical value of salt ahead of time; more likely, he was caught by surprise and had to come up with a number on the spot. And you yourself said its less unreasonable than the 'standard' price in d20. After that point, he merely stood by his decision.

Or would you prefer that he retcon it after a player devised a business plan around exploiting it?

I can only conclude that you've never swung a pick in your life, and that you've never handled rock salt. Rocks may be hard, but rock salt splits and crushes easily. A single swing of a pick could probably dislodge a 2½" clump. Your calculation is way off, even for my example of pounding on the salt layer with a rock in your fist.

I suppose I was a bit too conservative with that estimate, but I feel like you're missing my bigger points: that there is far more work involved in a mining operation than chipping away pure salt, and that the workforce would not be paid according to the value of what they produce.

Really? Ancient plutocrats had no back-up plans?

None that were ready to deploy within a month or two, at least; perhaps if the world hadn't ended they would've been able to do something.

They controlled bronze golems with jewels that had the "password" engraved in them so any idiot could take control of them?

There was a trick to reading it, so only someone already "in the know" could figure it out. In any case, it's better than no password at all, which is usually the default for magic items.

Hassan swung by them on a flying carpet and snatched the jewels from them, like a cartoon?

It's mid-level D&D. The monk can defy gravity, the cleric can walk on water, and the barbarian can sleep off a dozen stab wounds. Heck, the rogue could probably steal your underwear.

Really? The whole story of a permanent rift to... anywhere, that isn't lame?

Probably why it was a totally unimportant and forgotten detail of a side quest dungeon to explain where a few monsters came from.

Rift redirected to the deep ethereal by a bomb? Calling up dreamscape from the ethereal to the prime? The only trouble they encountered was a few night hags???

You just listed two other major troubles. And they're just the tip of the iceberg.

Balloon transporting a 6500 lb aboleth with swamp gas? (You'd need 188,000 cu ft, just for the weight of the aboleth, add another 20% or so for the gasbag.) For 2000 miles?

If you have a problem with fantasy airships, then this is not the setting for you.

And keeping it alive?

It takes only a handful of low-level spells to allow people to live practically anywhere, from the hottest desert to the bottom of the ocean. Why should keeping a giant fish moisturized be impossible?

And these guys aren't so bad, ya know. They only kidnapped one child from his home. All they wanted to do was torture him to death. It was for a good cause, ya know, money. For them. And they're good, ya know, so it's good for them to have money they got by torturing an innocent child. Yes, they also tortured hundreds of other people, too. But not personally, no. They just put them in the hands of the night hags. For money.

No, they're horrible people; and with the exception of the Bard, they all know that they're horrible people.

If one actually good NPC (such as a mid-level cleric of Desna) got curious and really wanted to know what was happening, they'd be found out. Scrying is cheap and easy.

So are anti-scrying measures. And 'disposing' of the curious. Not that the PCs allowed many rumors of their deeds to form in the first place.

Finding out that these guys (supposedly CG for most of them)

...Did you even read their descriptions?

Finding out that these guys were buying kidnapped people to torture them to death, they'd have a high-level, scry-and-die reception in very short order. They'd never see them coming.

Except that they were in the middle of a desert that was also a no-teleport zone the size of a nation.

Or perhaps they'd be taken alive for public trial before being painfully executed, disintegrated, and scattered to the winds.

Dozens tried.

Ummmm, who says X-wings, or any spaceships in the Lucasverse, use Newtonian rockets?

Well if they don't, then every x-wing is potential planet killer.

[Geordnet]

Not sure we'd end up with newspapers of any variety, since as far as I know, the printing press doesn't exist in-universe yet (and my character isn't the sort that's likely to come up with any variant of it- he's far more likely to try to create some sort of mass Amenuensis spell or something).

Nah, think magic Facebook.

Spoiler

Show

Then watch as it devolves into 4chan...

But seriously, you need to find a good bard to be the world's first newscaster.

[Mr Beer]

John Stapp showed that you could survive 46 G force (Not clear on how ok he was afterwards and it wasn't extremely long.).

For less than a second and suffered life-long vision problems thereafter.

It certainly wouldn't be comfortable but if everything is properly supported to distribute the force to non-important parts, perfectly straight and the person was very healthy I could see people surviving in 45.

I'm confident you'd be dead in less than 5 minutes without some special equipment that doesn't currently exist. A comfortable couch and a flight suit wouldn't cut it. There is no way any human is taking 45g or anything like it for days on end.

[hifidelity2]

In a current campaign our party was without a Cleric (AD&D) so we (apart for very little healing magic - only a paladins abilities) had issues with food as we were travelling a lot and were always running out / having to stop to hunt etc

I persuaded the DM to let my Wizard research a “Dehydrate Food spell”. This turned any food items into dust. Add hot (or cold) water and it became the food again. – so cast it on a roast dinner you got a small pile of dust – add water and you got a full roast dinner etc

It also worked on liquids (wine etc)

So apart for being useful for the party I set up a couple of businesses

I sold wands of Dehydrate to people to use (Mainly armies to help their supply situation) – bring the wand back and we will swap it for a new one (fully charged) for a fee
Also the shipping business esp wine – want to move 1000 gals of wine – I can do that with a small backpack and reconstitute it at the other end

It has allowed the Character to fund a major magic school

[DM Kroft]

Haha! I didn't know people were still reading this story so many years later!

I was perusing the forums as a visitor and accidentally stumbled upon this topic. Figured I'd register to try and help answer some of the doubts, if it's not intruding too much!

Let's start with the characters. How does a 7th level human rogue get Cha 20? There's more than one thing wrong with that. He's a rogue, Cha is not going to be his highest stat. He's only gotten one ability bump, so even if he did start at 18 it would only be 19.

He put an 18 on CHA, used his ability bump and had a bonus from a magic item (can't recall which one. It's been several years now!). The main idea behind the character was one of guile, charm, and manipulation, so CHA was the logical stat of choice. He was generally pretty bad in combat (and with his horrible luck when rolling HDs, he had a ridiculously low health pool).

A cleric who brags that he doesn't heal anybody?

Yes! And this wasn't the first of his clerics like that. The very first character he ever played was also a cleric who charged the rest of the party for healing. Our current campaign -set in Planescape- has his wife playing the healer, and he's constantly perplexed as to why she's so generous about it!

Only one arcane spellcaster (the bard doesn't count), and he's multiclassed and only Sorc 4 when the exploit is well under way? How did this party survive to be 7th level? I doubt it.

It's not like we were running random encounter tables 13 times per session. Getting to 7th level with any party composition sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It all depends on the kind of story and how smart the players are about dealing with their limitations.

They survived the mummies at so low a level (cleric 4 can probly only turn one mummy, and no cure disease for the mummy rot)? The barbarian is scrambling to find a place to dump a metal box of fleshspawn-denizens, he decides the mummy room is a good place to go? At level 10 (based on the monk 6/sorc 4 reference) the barbarian, alone, doesn't even consider a squad of mummies a threat, and can safely grab them and toss them into a pit? I doubt it.

The mummies were not meant to murder the characters when they first encountered them. In fact, they ended up talking with one of them after they put a crown on its head.

Then there's the economics. A pound of salt is 1 gp?! That's just a smidge less unreasonable than d20 salt being 5 gp per pound; at 1 gp per pound it's still twice as valuable as copper and 10 times as valuable as iron! 1 gp is more than a peasant earns in a day.

A pound of salt is actually worth 5 times more in Pathfinder! I used 1gp because it's the value we used in other campaigns when salt got bought or sold.

Really? Ancient plutocrats had no back-up plans? They controlled bronze golems with jewels that had the "password" engraved in them so any idiot could take control of them? Hassan swung by them on a flying carpet and snatched the jewels from them, like a cartoon?

That's how the Aluum work. The control gems have runes etched on them and they allow whomever holds them to control the golem in a fashion similar to Dominate Person. The only difference here is that this was a master control gem, allowing the Pactmasters to order multiple aluum at the same time (regular control gems are attuned to a single aluum, though they can exert a small degree of control over others. This gem was just a more powerful version of that).

Really? The whole story of a permanent rift to... anywhere, that isn't lame?

I suppose it's a matter of taste. Being a big fan of Planescape, I'm used to including portals to other realities. In this particular case, the rift was just there to justify the big pool of salt at the bottom of the Ossirian temple (there was also a trap room underneath that was supposed to fill with salt from the rift, but they never visited it). The rift was merely there for dungeon decoration, not as an important part of the story (the temple itself wasn't essential to the story either. It was mostly set up so they could cure Jack from his absolute muteness, caused by a spoiled potion Valanar gave to him like 4-5 sessions into the campaign).

Rift redirected to the deep ethereal by a bomb? Calling up dreamscape from the ethereal to the prime?

Aye. The idea was that, since the Ethereal acts as the transitive plane between the Prime Material and the Elemental Planes, the severing of the portal left both ends connecting to the Deep Etheral rather than their original destinations, as the ancient device that made the portal happen wasn't destroyed in the process. Hence why it accidentally tapped into some of the many dreamscapes wandering around those parts of the plane.

Balloon transporting a 6500 lb aboleth with swamp gas? (You'd need 188,000 cu ft, just for the weight of the aboleth, add another 20% or so for the gasbag.)

On the one hand, it was a fantasy airship made from dinosaur skin intended to make an aboleth fly that I allowed chiefly because I thought their idea was very amusing, so absolute precision was not a factor. On the other, 188,000 cu ft is about 5,000 cubic metres, which you can fit inside a 22-metre wide balloon. A huge balloon, certainly, but we're already dealing with far more unlikely stuff.

For 2000 miles? And keeping it alive?

They kept Slimy sort of alive by constantly conjuring water. Furthermore, aboleth do not really die from dehydration, but instead enter some kind of deep slumber as giant tentacled prunes.

And these guys aren't so bad, ya know. They only kidnapped one child from his home. All they wanted to do was torture him to death. It was for a good cause, ya know, money. For them. And they're good, ya know, so it's good for them to have money they got by torturing an innocent child. Yes, they also tortured hundreds of other people, too. But not personally, no. They just put them in the hands of the night hags. For money.

Oh, they were pretty bad. Everyone constantly alignment-shifted into progressively deeper forms of evil, and suffered severe penalties for a while until they came to fully embrace their new ways. And they were completely aware of how bad they were. Some of them had their occasional bouts of guilt, mainly Vorgok and Rakhim, but there was no doubt in the players that, if their characters died for good, they would end up as crawling maggots somewhere in the Lower Planes.

If one actually good NPC (such as a mid-level cleric of Desna) got curious and really wanted to know what was happening, they'd be found out. Scrying is cheap and easy. Finding out that these guys (supposedly CG for most of them) were buying kidnapped people to torture them to death, they'd have a high-level, scry-and-die reception in very short order. They'd never see them coming. Or perhaps they'd be taken alive for public trial before being painfully executed, disintegrated, and scattered to the winds.

Many tried! The later parts of the campaign had many, many groups of avenging adventurers sent from all over the world to try and deal with them. It was a lot of fun turning the trope of "Five brave adventurers are hired by the king to stamp out evil" on its head and having the PCs be the targets rather than the heroes themselves. That's why they ended up turning their palace into a labyrinthine fortress filled to the brim with traps and monsters; they figured, if they were being besieged by adventuring parties, they might as well build their own dungeon!

And you have to consider that a lot of the plans they worked with (the story I told at /tg/ only focused on the bigger ones. It was a very long campaign, with I think more than 40 sessions of 6+ hours) were aimed at dealing with the consequences of their actions. It's why they were so desperate to keep the Prince and other investors so happy (and then kidnap said prince when things went awry), as it was the tool they had to stand against the continuous efforts of the Merchant Court and other organizations from both Katapesh and beyond to get rid of the STC. Assassination attempts against then were a constant threat, and protecting themselves from that was one of the key reasons they had to permanently hire the Brass Legion.

Managing Saltspit was more than just roleplaying SimCity (admitedly, for me that was the most entertaining part of the campaign, having them deal with the day-to-day issues of the town); it served as a shield against their ever-growing number of enemies. They were also spreading cash far and wide across the trading ports of the Inner Sea, maintaining a sizeable network of spies, informants, and hitmen precisely to make sure they weren't going to be caught pants down. Yet they still did, more than once. The orbital golem thing happened when Hassan realised they had already become the villains, so they might as well go full throttle and threaten everyone before they could threaten them.

[Straybow]

I didn't read much past the mere mention of orbital golems...

I'm the supergeek who, playing DnD for the first time in 1976 as a teenager, found the economics the most irksome part. The circles in which I played had gentlemen's agreements to neither exploit the ridiculous things as players nor punish players with the ridiculous economics as GMs.

So while using a 1 gp/lb value for salt is slightly less unreasonable than srd/pfsrd, making the rift pour it out by the ton is an entirely separate matter. The rift doesn't have to be permanently open and active to let in salt paraelementals for the original dungeon. Just because players look for a way to open the rift more doesn't mean it's possible for character of such modest level, or even at all. The GM can't think of anything worse than paraelementals coming through the rift. Just because the rift connects to the plane doesn't mean the rift is in a position to pour granulated salt to the material plane, like the valve at the bottom of a storage silo.

The fellow writing the story (DM Kroft?) says he's a "harsh GM" yet he seemingly doesn't put a clamp down on anything, even just for the sake of "no, that's just not going to happen." And if he can't figure a way for high level NPCs (or archons mentioned in the later parts of page 2 that I glanced over, and other mediaries of Good outer planes that would object to the mining of Celestial Sea, etc) to defeat these guys, he's not worth his salt (pun intended).

[Inevitability]

giant tentacled prunes.

I'm going to use that the next time I describe an aboleth.

[Straybow]

That's only for aboleth that have been airlifted by gas balloon for 2000 miles. Otherwise they wouldn't be considered pruney.

[DM Kroft]

I'm the supergeek who, playing DnD for the first time in 1976 as a teenager, found the economics the most irksome part. The circles in which I played had gentlemen's agreements to neither exploit the ridiculous things as players nor punish players with the ridiculous economics as GMs.

Their plans were never meant as an exploit; as I mentioned in the original tell of the story all those years ago, there was a lot of OOC discussion regarding the stuff they did. We've been playing together for almost two decades, so we're at that point where it's easy to know the desires and limitations of each person involved in the game, and they value the creation of a good story above individual progress of each character.

For instance, we have a tacit rule of not to interfere with other PCs story in a grave manner unless previously discussed. So situations like Rakhim's transmogrification and the final confrontation where everyone was trying to murder everyone happened because the players allowed it.

I often DM in a very sandbox manner, and I like to take a "deal with the consequences of my decisions" approach, meaning that I try to be as consistent as I can with the stuff I rule, regardless of where that takes us; and since I improvise a lot, it generally means I have to carry on with a choice I made on the fly. However, that approach works with this group because not only we've been playing together for twenty years, but also because we've been friends for thirty, so I don't have to tell them to be careful; they know I'll give them absolute freedom to choose their path even if I have a specific story in mind, and they return the favour by helping make that story happen, even among all the divergences that take place. Coupled with the knowledge that our campaigns often last at least 2 years, they often play with extremely long-term ideas in mind, and put a lot of careful thought into them outside of the game.

So while using a 1 gp/lb value for salt is slightly less unreasonable than srd/pfsrd, making the rift pour it out by the ton is an entirely separate matter. The rift doesn't have to be permanently open and active to let in salt paraelementals for the original dungeon. Just because players look for a way to open the rift more doesn't mean it's possible for character of such modest level, or even at all. The GM can't think of anything worse than paraelementals coming through the rift. Just because the rift connects to the plane doesn't mean the rift is in a position to pour granulated salt to the material plane, like the valve at the bottom of a storage silo.

True, none of those things needed to happen; there didn't have to be a rift, but there was a rift. It didn't have to permanently connect into the Negative Quasielemental Plane of Salt, but it did. The rift didn't have to be fixed to a specific point in space, thus allowing them to dig underneath it to allow the salt to flow freely, but it did. Pretty much every single thing in the story didn't have to happen.

But I made those calls, and when the PCs figured out a way to use them to further their plans in a manner that both them and myself found interesting, I stood up by that call.

For me, a big part of the fun of being the DM is in presenting players with a situation and having them surprise me with a solution I hadn't thought of before. These guys know how I DM, and I know how they play, so it creates a virtuous cycle of each part making sure the other gets the things they most enjoy. This campaign in particular took a turn for the unexpected when Hassan proposed to start mining the rift; from that point onward, it was a constant and concious attempt on their part to really push the limits on their creativity, and on my part I promised them I'd try to be as fair and consistent as I could with the world, that I would try to have them face both the rewards and consequences of their actions. And while I'm certainly not a perfect DM by any measure, I think the result was very satisfactory for all involved. It was the most fun I've ever had running a campaign.

The fellow writing the story (DM Kroft?) says he's a "harsh GM" yet he seemingly doesn't put a clamp down on anything, even just for the sake of "no, that's just not going to happen." And if he can't figure a way for high level NPCs (or archons mentioned in the later parts of page 2 that I glanced over, and other mediaries of Good outer planes that would object to the mining of Celestial Sea, etc) to defeat these guys, he's not worth his salt (pun intended).

As I said, I do not claim to be a perfect, or even a great DM. But I do think I made a constant point of having the PCs deal with the consequences; every single time they did something that could cause problem, it caused problems; the only thing that truly allowed them to survive and thrive was how ingenious they were, which is what drove me to write the story in the first place. Precisely what made the whole thing so fun for me was seeing how they managed to find an opportunity in pretty much every issue they had to confront, until they couldn't anymore and everything started crumbling down.

[Straybow]

I see. My opinion was prejudiced by the opening claim to being a "harsh GM," which to you means something quite different from what it means to me. Like I said, a harsh GM would clamp down on ridiculousness, just by rule 0 as I described. The game is too easy to break with stuff like that.

I'm also curious about the statement that your gaming group speaks Catalan, but your location says Chile. Not that it has any effect on the discussion, just curious.

[Straybow]

Finding out that these guys were buying kidnapped people to torture them to death, they'd have a high-level, scry-and-die reception in very short order. They'd never see them coming.

Except that they were in the middle of a desert that was also a no-teleport zone the size of a nation.

No, Alkenstar is in the mana wastes. None of their magic would work if Saltspit was in the zone. There are literally hundreds of people coming and going from Katapesh to Saltspit, almost none would be able to afford full time anti-scry measures except the main characters. If they did spend a huge amount of their resources buying up protection for every laborer and outhouse, that alone would attract attention. There are laborious ways to circumvent magical protections when the location is actually known.

Ummmm, who says X-wings, or any spaceships in the Lucasverse, use Newtonian rockets?

Well if they don't, then every x-wing is potential planet killer.

No, just because you aren't using Newtonian (reaction mass) rockets, that doesn't mean unlimited energy and velocity is magically available. Every X-wing is capable of city killer velocities, and kinetic mass missiles would be as well (no need for a kamikaze). Orbital bombardment is a beatch.

[DM Kroft]

I see. My opinion was prejudiced by the opening claim to being a "harsh GM," which to you means something quite different from what it means to me. Like I said, a harsh GM would clamp down on ridiculousness, just by rule 0 as I described. The game is too easy to break with stuff like that.

I can understand. In my view, a harsh DM is one that doesn't pull any punches and has the PCs deal with the results of their actions, whichever they may be. Sometimes this means they will lose all their fancy gear to a rust monster because they didn't check, and others that they'll become filthy rich by striking an oportunity that the DM didn't foresee. Upholding the integrity of the story's internal paradigm, to use fancy words.

I'm also curious about the statement that your gaming group speaks Catalan, but your location says Chile. Not that it has any effect on the discussion, just curious.

Oh, not Catalan, but Castilian (coincidentally, my great-grandparents were Catalan). Castilian is how we call Spanish in places like Chile, Argentina, and parts of Spain. Technically it's the correct name, but it can be a point of severe discussion in some places, haha.