The Glass Cannon Podcast - Cannon Fodder 11/8/23

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

It's a light news week here at the GCN and the guys dive right into the recap of a wild fight on The Glass Cannon Podcast C2E8. They'll discuss how closing the door actually hurt the PCs, the early game power of the Shillelagh spell, and an interest change made to the Massive Damage rules in Pathfinder Society Organized Play. Plus, in Listener Mail, was launching New Game, Who Dis? the best decision we've made as a Network? Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/lMmsrnCo5gw For more podcasts and livestreams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com and for exclusive content and benefits, subscribe today at jointhenaish.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network, the premier source for role-playing game entertainment. Welcome to Cannon Fodder, a behind-the-scenes look at the Glass Cannon Network. Yo! What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to Cannon Fodder. It is Wednesday, November 8th, 2023, and I'm your old pal, Joe O'Brien. And I'm Troy. All I want for Christmas is you.

Is you. Ooh, baby. Welcome back, everybody. In the world of Troy LaVallee, we are thick into the Christmas season. So fucking thick. So fucking thick. Into the Christmas season. I am, fun fact, on vacation right now.

Not actually here. Not actually here. Through the magic of television, we're recording this way early, actually, because I'm on vacay. Week of November 8th. Where are you? It's my birthday week. This is amazing. I am returning to Asheville, North Carolina. Lovely. to Asheville, North Carolina. Because it is the first place we did a show that was new to me that I was like,

I am coming back here on vacation. And I actually did it. I couldn't believe it. Pulled it off. Got the wife and her parents interested and my kids and everything. And we're driving down, dude. 10-hour drive. Driving to Asheville?

Driving down to Asheville. My Lord. 10 hours and staying for a week in driving down, dude, 10 hour drive, driving to Asheville, driving down to Asheville, 10 hours and, uh, staying for a week in Asheville. not a week. It's like five days in Asheville. So, so freaking excited.

We're going to do hiking and, uh, uh, zip lining and, and then also just the breweries and the restaurants and the, and it's your birthday and it's my birthday. Yeah. Do me a favor on your birthday.

Text me to remind me it's your birthday. You got it, buddy. And then I'll have somebody send you a happy birthday text. No, I know exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to text you to remind me that it's my birthday. And what you write back is going to be so mean. It's going to upset me for at least two or three hours. And I'm going to have to like –

You're going to laugh so hard. I can't believe he wrote that i can't believe in this day and age in this day and age uh what's up everybody we are recording uh fought a little ahead this week but we're very excited to talk about episode eight of the gcp we're a little light on news this week it's actually kind of a quiet week at the GCN because I'm on vacation, which is awesome. It's starting to wind down the whole year, man. I'm ready for it. I mean, we sort of build that way. We like to take more time with our families over the holidays. And so it's going to be a little bit quieter on the news front, but we'll talk about episode

eight, crazy combat. We'll get into We Are Stupid. And of course, we'll talk about episode a crazy combat. We'll talk. We'll get into. We are stupid. And of course, we'll have a little listener mail. So we got a good show for you here today, even if it's a little bit shorter than usual news. I have next to nothing. Next week, we'll have Gloomhaven on Friends of the Pod. We'll talk more about that next week's fodder. But otherwise, yeah, it's a pretty quiet week. And we have no we're actually recording this before Extra Life went off.

Yeah. So, like, we don't really know how it all played out. We can't look back at it yet, unfortunately. So, sorry we can't, you know, do a little recap or – what's the word I'm looking for? Debrief. A little debrief on Extra Life. You know, maybe that'll be in the next five. I'm sure we hit our goal.

I'm sure we hit our goal. I'm sure we hit our goal. And that's very exciting. But yeah, man, I'm just looking at the calendar right now. And it's Thanksgiving soon. I know. I mean, we're coming right up on it. It's Thanksgiving soon. You know, it is imminent is the season five finale of Getting the Truck.

It's coming hot. Oh, that is coming hot. What is, oh, that's. I'm not 100% sure what day is coming hot. Oh, that is coming hot. What is, uh, Oh, that's, uh, about a hundred percent sure what day it airs. I knew it was in November.

Uh, I know, but I don't know if they know. Yeah, they don't know yet. So we're not going to, it's not this week. We'll say that it's not this week.

So, um, yeah, shit that's coming. And dude, it's already like time for packs on plugs. And we're a month away from packs on plug and that show is sold out in Philly. Sold out.

Sold out. A month and a half in advance, that shit's sold out. Dude, love Philly. You gotta love Philly. Right? Come on. Philly's fine. What's more exciting is the new Christmas sweaters we have.

Oh, yeah. Class Canon Christmas sweaters featuring the Campaign 2 cast. Slinging merch. Always slinging merch. Always slinging merch. Did you know you could find this shirt at glasscannonnetwork.com slash store? That Norse Foundry shirt? No, I'm saying – well, this actually happens to be one of our sponsors.

Thank you, Norse Foundry. No, but I was saying the – when you did it in the episode. When you did it in the Glass Cannon episode with the dragon shirt. It was just so funny. It shit cracked me up. So, yeah, I mean, news-wise, that's pretty much it. We've got a sold-out show. There's no other tickets to sell.

We have a finale coming soon in Get in the Trunk. We've got Friends of the Pod Gloomhaven coming. So, yeah, why don't we just focus on this week's episode just jump into the show we got a lot going on canon podcast yes it starts with door gate the debate door gate of closing the door you don't seem to like this this is this seems very uh seems like this irked you the closing of the door the extra action that lucky had carried over from the previous episode. Let's talk about one thing that very clearly does not happen at other tables. The difference between doing a show and not doing a show. Because we get questions like this from time to time.

What's different when you're doing a show? I'll tell you one thing that's very, very different. When a cliffhanger comes in the middle of your turn. You know, that is a pretty, pretty rare thing pretty pretty rare thing you don't play for three weeks and then you don't play for three weeks exactly and you have a an exact recorded record of what happened before so you go back and listen to it um the door thing it drove you nuts and i don't know why uh your thoughts on the door thing no it's fine i just uh just you know what is the goal here you know what i mean like the combat's inevitable you're gonna shut the door and. No, it's fine. I just, you know, what is the goal here? You know what I mean?

Like the combat's inevitable. You're going to shut the door and they're going to be like, ah, it must be nothing. You know, like I know the combat's inevitable. The goal was to create more action economy usage on their end. But I get it. It also created it on our end too. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day,

the worst thing you could have done was close that door. Yes. And so that's fine if I have a chance to punish you for it, I just. So that's where this is leading. It does crack me up that you were so irritated by it. And I do think it's because mentally you thought of it differently than we all did. You thought that we were going to close the door as a way to end the encounter early. But like we were just thinking of it as a tactic to slow them down.

the encounter early but like we were just thinking of it as a tactic to slow them down what ended up happening what it was was it was the perfect way to give them a chance to cast shillelagh which is i would call it a life-ending spell a pc killer uh it's wild it's wild and i've known shillelagh since 1e i've known shillelagh for a very very very long time and i never considered anything special considered it anything special and now i am terrified of it terrified it makes me in every uh ensuing oak steward fight that we have for the rest of this sort of like dungeon dove that we're doing right now it makes me want to do everything in my power to jump these guys before they have a round to cast it.

Cause it is so terrifying. Yeah. I'm looking at like first edition Shillelagh versus a second edition to see if there's any like major differences. Yeah. I'm not sure if they both become plus one weapons um you get your damage dice increasing the number of weapon damage dice to two yeah so the damage a little different in first edition it goes a small club or quarter staff transmuted deals 1d8 points of damage medium 2d6

large 3d6 so it increases the size of of the weapon in terms of its damage dice, right? Yeah, yeah. Gaining a plus one to attack and increasing the number of weapon damage dice to two. And because I'm two-handing them, it becomes even more dangerous. So yeah, here's the 2e version. The target grows vines and leaves, bringing with primal energy. It becomes a plus one striking weapon while in your hands absolutely brutal uh and it doesn't doesn't seem to have any um any heightening power which means that while this is terrifying and deadly right now it's not going to scale right i mean it says specifically it becomes a plus one

striking weapon so it's not really going to uh you know if you cast this as a fourth level druid or a sixth level druid like it's it's not going to make a plus one striking staff any more powerful. It doesn't make it a plus two greater striking weapon, right? So it really is horrible now, and then it's just going to kind of go away and not be a pain to us in the game as we go forward. It seems like a very early game spell. Yeah, I'm launching Foundry right now to look at it on my sheet. One thing I couldn't figure out is every time I drug Shillelagh to the character,

it didn't offer the benefits of Shillelagh on the character thing, so I had to always do it in my head or create a separate entry. So if somebody knows why that doesn't work, hit me up on the Discord. That was really bothering me, and I could not find an answer. Because some spells, it definitely does change the Johns. But for that one, I just couldn't figure it out. All right, let's see. Shillelagh.

Use Staff two-handed. So straight up, they're doing 1d4 plus 2 damage. Okay? And then when you use it two-handed, it becomes one D eight plus two. When you shillelagh it, it's two D eight plus two. Um, and then on a crit, that's real, real nasty. You know, that's got a max of, uh, 36 points of damage, which is real, real nasty PC killer. We're just going to roll this right into, we are stupid because it all is kind of combined. The, it is also brutal if you – and this is going

to sound more accusatory than I mean. I think it's an honest mistake. But you have to keep in mind as we go forward here the extra action to grab your weapon as two-handed. Professor Eric points it out as the guy that opened the door. So the guy that opened the door needed another action. He could have attacked one handed with a plus one striking, but it would be 2D4 plus two, not 2D8 plus two. For sure. Yeah. So you brought that up a couple episodes ago and we'd already recorded these. That's a good point.

I still don't think it's super game breaking because I'm not going like full gas. Yeah. So I think it kind of. like full gas. Yeah. So I think it kind of – Which is terrifying. Yeah, I think it kind of evens out. But it's really good to know because especially for you guys as well, when we start getting into two-handed weapons or casting spells, which causes you to remove a hand and then you've got to re-grip that hand,

that's going to be very, very important. Let's talk about Cucumber. Cucumber comes into this fight. And what surprised me, I don't know if I said it in the episode, but what surprised me is that Cucumber is not an animal companion. Is that correct? Are you looking at this sheet? Like the Cucumber is a pet, so it acts on its own.

It has its own initiative. It does its own attacks. So yeah, if anybody out there was like, hey, wait a minute, so it acts on its own. It has its own initiative. It does its own attacks. So yeah, if anybody out there was like, hey, wait a minute. How come this thing did move, move, attack on its own? That's because it's its own combatant. It's not one of the druid's animal companions. Right. Yep.

Yeah. So it's just something to point out there. Okay. Okay. Let's – okay. So overall – We're going to have the encounter now. Okay, let's – okay, so overall – Bring out the encounter now.

Overall, absolutely brutal encounter, mainly because we just can't hit this second hoax to it. And Brother Ramius is pretty – I felt pretty useless. I even had one round where I was like trying to make peace. I feel like it was in character, but I also – well, trying to not kill the guy. I feel like it was in character, but I also, well, trying to not kill the guy. I feel like it was in character,

but I also feel like tactically it was awful because like we were in a real, real bad situation. Now I also don't have much to go on to, to put out a lot of damage and our damage dealer started to go down. I believe lucky goes down at one point, at least prone to lethal. Definitely goes down, gets bleed damage.

I mean, bleed persistent damage. It's, it's a real show. And we can get out of it by the skin of our teeth. And one of the major reasons that it became such a shit show is because of how hard these guys hit with Shillelagh. And one thing that you brought up was massive damage. So let's talk about massive damage for a second. I believe you're going to talk about it more in was massive damage. So let's talk about massive damage for a second. I believe you're going to talk about it more in a later episode. So it's not that we have to deal, dig too much into it. But I do want to point out something interesting that Professor Eric brought up. So let's go.

First, let's go to let's go to Demiplane and just real quick look at massive damage, which I thought the way that you had talked about it before was a optional rule. But it's just in the rules yeah it's under death effects and instant death and and uh and under that i'm sorry it's under like other death effects or something i can't you just had it no no i know but i can't remember what title this is under in the core rule book, but then you get massive damage. You very simple one sentence entry. You die instantly if you ever take damage equal to or greater than double your maximum hit points in one blow. We discussed this on air. It put Zephyr down in like our first combat down out by the unicorn fight. It's really, really, really scary.

in like our first combat down out by the unicorn fight it's really really really scary and so eric just points out that this rule you know while uh pfs players go by the book most of the time i mean that you have to because you have to have a shared understanding of the rules that is not affected by home rules uh pfs as a society adopted a modified rule to massive damage and here's why because at level one and two it is i think imbalanced and for what it's meant to be yeah and it gets better after that so pfs i mean i feel that and so i so I'm thinking of modifying it because I'm like, it's just something seems off about it. Yeah. So here's how they modified it in Pathfinder Society. Quote, if a character has fewer than 20 hit points, treat their hit points as 20 when determining if their character dies from massive damage.

So it's just like a little bit of a bump. So if a first level character has 15, 16 hit points. So it's just like a little bit of a bump. So if a first level character has 15, 16 hit points, you treat it as you would have to get to 40 to get double damage. And none of the hits that you've done so far have been 40. But they've been close. You had like a 34, I think. You had like a 32

in there. Yeah, those crit on these Shillelaghs is 36, but these are named characters. You know what I mean? If I nat 20 and you pull a times three crit i mean that's that's permajohn uh which is kind of fine with but it was kind of shitty you know i think back to giant slayer like if lork had been beheaded by ingrahill from that fan critical that is really shitty but also amazing and so it's it's like what makes something really shitty and what makes something amazing you know it's hard to tell like just having one of these oak stewards just pull a fan crit for a times four like bullet staff and it just times four crit kills that'd be

brutal but if we get you get you can't like if you're going to use fan criticals, then that's part of the game. It is a huge fight. I mean, it was skin of our teeth, but we get by. Talitha is proving to be a really good, almost like frontline fighter in a lot of cases, which has been awesome. And now we're left in this place that is so mind-boggling. Like, what in the hell is going on here? And I think it was a really fun way to end the episode. It's like, you're in this place,

you're finally out of immediate danger, but what the hell is going on here? You're in this horribly trashed room that, like, clearly they've let it go, and these other creatures were in there, not Oak Stewart's. So who's in charge? Is anyone in charge?

And what are we going to find through one of these other two doors that are in front of us before we move forward? So anyway, exciting app. Looking forward to the next one. Yeah. Let's kick it to a little listener. Mail! Sheboygan.

Sheboygan, Wisconsin. All right. This one comes in from, I don't know how to pronounce your name. I apologize. Cathal. Cathal from Ireland, from County Cork in Ireland. Cathal, Cathal, I don't know. I apologize. Awesome name though.

Asks, I thought you'd like this one. I'm teeing this one up for you. Hey, guys. I just wanted to ask, given all the amazing content that has come from it, was New Game Who Dis the best decision you ever made as a network? Troy, your thoughts. Since it was my idea yes yes i knew that would feed right into your ego nicely yeah i mean it's part partly yes partly uh just the decision to expand beyond pathfinder was one of the best decisions we could make you know so often I still feel like even with all our success, we're like the redheaded

stepchild of the TTRPG actual play scene. It's like no one ever fucking talks about us. And maybe there's a little chip on our shoulder because of that. But like also we're wildly successful and we make a lot more money than really successful shows. And that allows us to do a lot of cool things and bring in a great group of people and hire employees. Like we have people who have health insurance. I mean, it's just insane what we do that's so different.

But nobody fucking talks about us then. That's fine. However, when you say nobody, I would clarify, you're talking about like gaming media. Gaming media, yeah. Like professional gaming media. We're not really on the radar yeah when you google best actual play podcast the fact that we don't come up to like 10 results in is a fucking sin

but it's fine it's fine it doesn't bother me i don't need i don't need trophies you know that's not i'm not chasing we want other people to be able to find us that's the thing that's like i think if we had more uh sort of if we were out there a little bit more and talked about, more people would discover us and realize how fucking great we are. We'd be able to then grow the company and do even more cool things. But we're limited by the fact that no one is really chatting about us. Limited in some ways, not in others. But we would really hitch our wagon to the Paizo star for a long, long time. When the pandemic hit, it was the span of like three or four days.

I just thought, what the fuck do we do? What do we do? What do we do? I don't want to record stuff remotely and have it sound different than our first couple hundred episodes. And it was like, all right, well, we got to do this. And then what if we just start playing other games

and see what happens? We've always talked about wanting to do it. What if we do that as a way of like getting people excited and attracting people? We were just doing audio remotely. Then I was like, we should have a first episode of something every few weeks and watch that start to snowball and then have people be checking out games because they want to see an actual play of it who had never heard of us.

I mean, so many people discovered us just by looking for games. You know, if you want to watch, if you want to buy Morkborg or you're interested in Morkborg, you Google Morkborg, we come up immediately. And now that might lead you to a live show of ours one day or buying our merch. And so, yeah, in many ways, that was like – I don't know if it was like the best decision we ever made, but it was like – it was the decision that has taken us to the next level of our company.

And now we've diversified our content so we've got a little bit of something for everyone. Yeah, I agree. I don't necessarily know that it's the best decision as a company or as a network we've ever made. I would say by far it's the best decision as gamers that we've ever made to not sort of limit our – I mean, you kind of said that in your first line. It's like the decision to try games outside of D20 fantasy games is just something you and i had not done like did you play when you were in middle school any other game besides dnd yeah i played murps i played middle earth role playing i played the marvel superheroes game um okay dabbled in some other stuff but like our main thing our campaign that we played was was adnd

but as we started going to conventions and not just paizo con but like packs and everything i would see all these games i was like oh my god i want to play all of these games but we were still kind of we had just started getting into full time and it was taking all of our time just to create the content that we were creating um let alone try and learn a new system. But I also didn't. Like, I didn't have any interest. I always wanted to, when we were at those cons, I always wanted to try new board games. Yeah. But I never was like, I didn't need any more role-playing games in my life besides Pathfinder.

And I certainly didn't need any games that were fiction forward, fiction first. Like, I didn't need more improv-ing and role play. I wanted more tactics, more battling. That was my favorite part of the game. Well, you know, dragged me kicking and screaming into New Game Who Dis, and suddenly, I mean, I, Delta Green, like, blew my mind. And then, like, Twilight 2000, I loved it so much. And it had both things. Like, yes, it has narrative, but especially in the case of Twilight or any of those Mutant Year Zero Engine games, like, it had fun tactics

too. Really fun, chunky things to dig into. Blades in the Dark. Wah! You know, like, I just, it made me enjoy gaming so much more than I even thought I could. It was my favorite thing in the world. And it became even more awesome after starting to see what other games were out there by other publishers. So, yeah, it changed. And and we've talked about this before. It then reverse engineers the way that you play Pathfinder. Absolutely. Once you start playing games like Blades and Delta Green and Cthulhu and, I mean, just the way that you use horror in these games and the way that you build tension, the way

that you build investigations, like they're just – everything can – the experience will not make you worse, certainly. It will only make you a better gamer. Yeah. It was a great decision for like a million reasons some obvious some a lot deeper yeah yeah uh ultimately though i will say lifting the veil as a company it's been pretty cool but it has been you know these games still don't really get their due you know like you could talk about us not being in mainstream media gaming media enough

but like these games aren't either and and we're trying you know through game through things like new game who does to raise the profile of these companies but everything gets dwarfed so much by wizards and paizo and you know chaosium to a certain extent so it's just like uh getting these other publishers out there is also something we love to do because people should be playing these games they're phenomenal and i you know the hardest part i think people run into is just getting their gaming group to do it because it's a real hassle. People have full-time jobs. They got kids, they got whatever. It's like, look, man, I'm only got two to four hours a week to play in total.

And so I'm going to keep playing my Pathfinder campaign. I don't have time to learn something new. I get that sentiment, but like, you gotta drag him kicking and screaming. That's how I got pulled in, and now I'm a convert. I gotta go. Close out Canipop. Oh, shit. That's right. We ran out of time.

Alright, guys. Troy left. So now I can talk shit on him. No, this has been great. I'm gonna play the old outro music here. Thanks for hanging with us, everybody. Oh, shoot, that's going to come in too hot. Troy threw me off. It has been a pleasure, as always, to hang with you guys. Thanks for watching. Thanks for letting me get away on a little vacation. Let's get Troy's jaw out of there. There we go. Just me.

It's been a pleasure hanging with everybody. Until next week. Next week, we'll talk a little bit more about Gloomhaven as that's coming up, among other things. We've got Thanksgiving coming. It's going to be exciting times. Until then, take it easy, everybody. Have a fantastic week and weekend,

and we'll see you next time. Bye! Bye! Thanks for listening to the Glass Cannon Network. For more podcasts and live streams, Bye. you