The Glass Cannon Podcast - Cannon Fodder 8/28/24

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Troy and Joe are back in action with a breakdown of Episode 48 of Campaign Two! There's lots to discuss including flying rules, an adventure design bottleneck, and Matthew's horn-blowing experience. In Listener Mail, a look at how adventure notes are kept across several of the GCN shows! Submit your questions for Listener Mail at https://forms.gle/v5huj25dkVSmkbLEA Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/it3z0Rk67MU For more podcasts and livestreams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com and for hundreds of hours of exclusive shows and benefits, make your membership official and join Glass Cannon Nation today by becoming a subscriber at jointhenaish.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to Cannonfutter, a behind-the-scenes look at the Glass Cannon Network. Yeah, what is going on everybody? Welcome back to Cat and Father. It is Wednesday, August 28th, 2024, and I'm your old pal Joey O'Bate. And I'm Troy. Let's get physical, LaValley. You getting physical this morning, buddy? No, I have a physical today. Oh, you do? Amazing. I have my annual physical this morning. No, I have a physical today. Oh you do Amazing annual physical. Yeah, we're taking care of ourselves. I have god

I hate talking about this because it makes me sick to my stomach. I Have to talk about old man stuff. I have to get a filling Repaired today. Oh man Would you chip your tooth on a juju fruit? I today. Oh man. Would you chip your tooth on a juju fruit? I was having another round of atomic fireballs, my favorite, and jaw breakers. No, I, you know, I'm just old dude. Like, I don't eat candy really anymore. I, you know, I brush my teeth multiple times a day. I haven't had a cavity in a really long time. And I just went to this about two months ago, maybe.

And she was like, I'm not liking the look of this filling you got when you were 11, you know, like it's rotting out of your head. That's a long time for a filling. And I need to fix it. You know what I mean? And it's just like, God.

So now I just hate it. I mean, you know, you're numb. It's not like painful Yeah, but they're all up in your mouth with that shit and it's all like the bright lights and the drilling and the drilling and that I just hate it. I don't mind it. I don't mind. I don't mind it. My six-year-old doesn't care for it Yes, I do have the the The emotions of a child when it comes to the dentist. I'm like, I don't like it.

Yeah, I don't mind. I like it. Get in there. Play around in there. They usually have the dental hygienist do the cleaning and she's a butcher. She's very nice, but she's always like, does that hurt? Is that too much? I'm just like, let me just spit real quick. It's like so much chunks of gum just like hitting the, oh my God.

Dude, it's so funny. So I didn't have health insurance until I got married. Now we have health insurance through the company, but between 21 and 40, I was without health insurance. And so I didn't have annual physicals. So for 19 years, did you not go to a dentist? Yeah, I was broke. I didn't have any money. My parents didn't have any money.

Like I had no way of doing it. So like when I got sick, I had to go to the emergency room. This was before like these little pop-up urgent cares were all over the place. The urgent care business. Yeah, I'd just fucking go in there and then like, no money. So like the bill would come. I'd be like, I can't pay that. Did you ever have a sore tooth?

Did you ever have to get a tooth pulled? Did you ever have like, ever have any? I would go to get cleanings every few years instead of twice a year and just pay cash for it because the cleaning wasn't bad. You're like, please don't have a cavity. Please don't have a cavity. Then from time to time, there's one time I remember I was sitting at a Broadway show

and like, something fell out of the back of my mind. I think that's a cavity. I got to go get that taken care of. I was like, oh, God, paying cash to have a filling. It's brutal, dude. It wasn't until I got married that I got my wife's health insurance. Yeah, but you know what like dental insurance at least at our age it's like it's not doing much. Yeah like you're pretty much paying out of pocket for anything

besides yeah so cleaning is free that's that's nice but like other than that yeah you're paying because dental insurance is so cheap. Anyway, we don't have to get that. Let's know let's talk about it. Let's talk about the breakdown of dental insurance versus medical care. Anyway, what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the FOD. We got some exciting news coming up this week. As usual, we've we've we'll get into Episode 48 of the glass cannon podcast and a nice little We Are Stupid from Professor Eric with positives and negatives, a couple negatives, but a couple praiseworthy comments, which I like.

And then of course, a little listener mail. So we talked about it a little bit last week, but just want to hammer it home to everybody. Next week, our playthrough of Ember is going to begin. Ember, which is the new Kickstarter project from our friends at Foundry VTT. It is their own original online tabletop role-playing game. It is a just so awesome. It is designed to fuse into one, your tabletop RPG experience and a multiplayer digital RPG experience into one thing so that you have the awesome digital facilitation of a multiplayer video game, but the openness, sandboxiness, and the ability to improv of a tabletop role-playing game. And I think that they, you know, from what we've seen so far, because we've started

to record this, we haven't finished recording it, we are, I mean, they're hitting it really close to the mark, because it looks like you're playing a video game at times. And then other times you just, you know, descend into hilarity and silliness and let the story go where it will. It's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. It's wildly impressive.

I mean, for everyone that was clamoring for us to join Foundry for so long and was excited when we joined, if you're a Foundry virtual tabletop purist, it's going to be right up your alley. It's just like we barely scratched the surface with it and we're already blown away for a product that's not going to come out for a while. So make sure when we drop the link to the Kickstarter and you want to use our link so that Foundry knows that we're sending you over there, make sure you throw them a few bucks because it's a very ambitious project that's going to take a village to bring to

light. Yeah, we'll put the link in the description for this show on YouTube and in the podcast. Click on that link to go and get, you can get notified for when the Kickstarter actually goes live. If you're hearing this after it's already live, it's the whole month of September, so just jump over there. If you're interested, support them and get early access to this really cool project. I think that it's really going to blow people away. I think that it's really

going to be an amazing alternative for people that have to game at home. It takes so much of the work out for GMs and players for the digital game experience. It's really, really awesome for a TTRPG. So good luck to them and we wish them the best. Other than that, really not much new going on. Oh, if you are a Vorpal subscriber to our subscription service, and that's 25 bucks a month, if you're at the $25 a month tier, you can come hang out tonight. Tonight, 730 Eastern, 430 Pacific. Jared and I are getting together for another Talk Nerdy Town Hall on our Discord stages. That means you guys come up to the stage and just chat with us and we're just going to be talking nerdy, just hanging out, talking nerd stuff.

We love to take callers, as we call it, and people come up and chat. I sympathize with them and agree with them and Jared roasts them and argues with everything everyone says. So it's a really, really fun time. Please come by if you're available. And if you're not at the Vorpal tier, just upgrade upgrade takes two seconds upgrade and you can come hang out with us tonight. Be awesome. So 730 Eastern on our discord. We'll be hanging out live. And I believe can't promise it but I believe we will have special guest Matthew Calatacasa. Oh, this one. Yeah, we're going to be talking about the writing and

design of a prequel, which I think is an interesting concept, writing something that happened before the thing that people know. How do you approach that, you know, both in movies, but also in like role playing games, if you're writing your characters backstory, if you're writing details that led to what's something we already know, how do you craft that? How do you design that? And so hopefully we can have, Matthew will be there. I thought you'd be talking about chest hair styling. That'll be another episode.

We'll have them on a Christmas time. Arm hair. Our hair sweaters for the Christmas season. Speaking of subscription services, if you are still a member of our Patreon, which shockingly, actually I guess not shockingly, people have probably subscribed to services that are no longer that I don't use at all. Also, I have been a member of things that people have said you need to do this to shift over or whatever and like here's the deadline and I wait until the deadline passes. Yeah, and I'm like god

I gotta go do that. Yeah, I mean that happened We we we we launched the new subscription service almost coming up on the one-year anniversary Which is crazy this September and as of September 1st We'll no longer be cross posting on patreon because we've been cross posting You know for people who who were slow to make transition and even for people who didn't make the transition. So the Patreon will be officially dead. All the bad content will stay on there, but there will be none of the new content, no new legacies, no new Blood of the Wilds, nothing on there.

And obviously the new subscription service has 10 times what's on Patreon because it's got Gatewalkers ad free, it's got Giant Slayer ad free, it's got everything on there. So, as of September 1st, we're going to be just kind of mothballing the Patreon. Your Discord access is going to be, the only way to be able to get the Discord access is through Supercast and the news service. So, make sure we posted something on the Patreon, but if you're listening to this, you're like, ah, shit, I got to do that. You can do it, you get a 30-day free trial. So, if you've been on the fence, I mean, if listening to this, you're like, ah shit, I got to do that. You can do it.

You get a 30-day free trial. If you've been on the fence, if you've been on the fence or any other reason, at least try the 30-day free trial to see what everybody else has seen that it's just a complete and total upgrade based on our needs. It's nothing against Patreon. I love Patreon. I thought Patreon was great. Patreon is awesome.

It was life-changing for us, But because we put out so much content, Supercast is just... Well, no, because we put out so many different story podcasts, Patreon did not support that functionality and Supercast does. And so what it allows you to do is have separate feeds of the shows you like organized right in those feeds and exclusive just to you, which is great. Plus, you know, more variety of podcast apps that you can use to listen to your stuff. So yeah, highly, highly recommend you make that move over if you're able to. All right, let's talk about episode 48 of the GCP. Okay, hell of an app. Hell of an app, man.

Man, action, comedy, more action. Love? Love? Yeah, it really was cinematic in its scope, as some people mentioned. I really appreciated that terminology because I think that it nailed it pretty well. The image of this goddess, she who walks through seasons, being almost the size of the jungle itself in a way was just beautiful and really incredible. And then the idea that you have to leap onto this creature

and people fall and there's true genuine fear. I mean, I was truly fearing for Ramius' life when I had to make these climb checks and these leap checks. It was just very, very stressful. So overall, and then it also had just so much comedy, so many big laughs, all in all a great episode. But let's start back at the beginning.

Because it opens with the fight with this. Is Sphinx the right word? No, Sphinx is like a human face. Hierarchos Sphinx. Hierarch Is Sphinx the right word? No, Sphinx is like a human face. Hierarchos Sphinx. Hierarchos Sphinx, yes, Hierarchos Sphinx. Talk to me about this creature. What a weird creature. Do you know where it comes from?

No, no, I don't. I'm looking now to see if it's been around. I'm sure it's been around before. You know, I'll just look up. It did sound familiar to me. How do you spell it? H-E-I? H-I-E-R-O. H-I-E-R-A-CO-SPHINX. Hieraco. Hieraco Sphinx. It's a mythical beast. Yeah, so it's been around. It's definitely in D&D. It is. Okay. Yeah, it's definitely in D&D. It is, okay.

Yeah, it's definitely in D&D. Oh yeah, it's in Forgotten Realms. The hawk-headed high-rose sphinx is a common sight within the maze-like tombs and mortuary complexes of Egypt. Okay, yeah, interesting. This reminds me, it makes me think of Stargate. Like, you remember in- Do you remember Stargate?

Never saw Stargate. Never saw stargate so like in stargate You're like They're basically You know they connect to this other world and the other world seems weirdly like Egyptian and it basically like one of the first things they come in contact with are these guardians and they're higher rose Sphinx's they come in contact with are these guardians and they're hyrosphinxes. Is that how you pronounce it? Hierarcho-sphinx.

Hierarcho-sphinx. They're hierarcho-sphinxes, except they have the bodies of a human and either the head of a hawk or the head of a dog. The dog head one is, I think, a different name. The hawk head one is definitely one that is pretty cool. I think it's played by Digimon Honsu, a young Digimon Honsu. But they're masks. You don't even know they're people at first.

They just look like aliens. But then they remove these big headdresses and you see that they're humans. So anyway, that concept is really interesting. And to see that in a flying creature, always terrified of a flying creature at low level in these TTRPGs. Yeah, it was good. I was thinking about this fight, especially as I was rewatching it before we put it out there.

My one regret was not getting two of you up there. When Barnes went up there, I had this split second where I was like, do I jump them now or do I wait? And I should have waited a second. You just got to be like a statue. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's in the nest. The way I had it emerge, I certainly could have had it emerge, but yeah. You could have had a nest, but not a visible bird.

Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just – in the moment, I just jumped on it because I didn't think that like – I didn't think that you guys just wouldn't come up. I just was – I was bloodthirsty for Barnes and I should have waited because if I got two of you up there and one of you had to climb up there and can't just do some sort of cool ability, now your pot committed and everyone would have to scramble up there and

now this thing is like just flying around at the top, grabbing you, fucking throwing you off the tower and stuff. So it was still harrowing. But I was mad at myself that I didn't kind of push to have the combat happen at the top of the tower because that's really how it's intended. But you guys played it the way you should play it based on what I gave you. Yeah, yeah. It's there's a big, big, big jump once you enter climbing, active combat climbing into a combat.

Yeah, because when you're realizing that each action is going to get you five feet, you got to go 15 feet and you have to succeed three times. Now a crit gets you up higher, but crit is a lot less likely especially for somebody like Ramious. It's just like, it's crazy deadly. But you know, like you said, if you're pot committed, you're pot committed, you can really nothing you can do about it. Yeah. And so having having Barnes and somebody else up there would have made a very different combat. I do that. I do that plan. I don't get to GM that much Pathfinder these days. But like, I do that plenty after a flight. I do that. I do that plan. I don't get to GM that much Pathfinder these days. But like, I do that plenty after a fight. I'm like, God, I just jumped the gun a little too early. I was

excited. I wanted to try to kill somebody, but I didn't think like if I did this, I'd have a better chance of killing somebody. And yeah, anyway, that's interesting to hear. And I agree with you having him up there alone, he, of all people, could also get down so easily because of his mirror ability. So that was tricky. I realized the seconds after I brought the creature out, I'm like, it's too late now. I fucked it.

I couldn't do it. But that happens. We are not infallible. All right. But we survived the combat. We defeat the creature. By the way, there's all little things in here that I'm thinking of, and we are stupid. but we're going to get to that in a second.

Let's go to the blowing of the horn, which was one of Matthew's iconic funny moments. He was way into that. He was way into that. He was wrapping his mouth around. It's not his first spore horn. Spore horn. Oh my God, we could not stop laughing. And when I was, Francis told us when we went into record episode 49, the next recording we went in for, we got into the studio and he told Matthew, he was like, I worked through a rough edit of 48. And he said, I was in here alone laughing, cackling like a madman, just rewatching you

doing that. And like, we were just cracking up. So funny. It was so funny and it just, to me, was, it captured those Jade Regent days. Those things we would just do in the room that everybody would be busting up just being silly. That was so fun.

It also captures why it's so great that we have this filmed now. Obviously some people still love podcasts and that's great. Um, but like when you get to see the video of what everyone's laughing at, it makes it all the more special. Yeah. So then we come to the real epic moment of the episode, which is the blowing of the horn, the rising up of she who walks through seasons, the approach to the

tower of she who walks through seasons, and then our requirement to make this leap onto the creature. Now, I'm going to go into it. I'll give you my perspective for a second. OK. In my perspective, I just, it wasn't even meta. It's not meta. It isn't.

I just assumed that the creature walks up to the tower, like, with its nose on it. Right. And we jump onto the head up to the tower, like with its nose on it, and we jump onto the head, grab the water and get off. I didn't imagine it as an adventure on top of the creature, right? So I'm a little like thrown off, or so I'm fine with just not doing it. Be like, you go get the water, I'll be down here.

And so that must have thrown you off a little bit, I would imagine, that I was just like kind of standing down at the bottom is like, dude, you have to get up here to continue the adventure. Like I'm not sure like kind of what was going through your head at that moment. But I'm fine with that. I was like, if he's not going to go, then the next X amount of episodes, Joe's going to be a Waldorf and Statler. Yeah. I'm totally fine with that because it's also something we've never really done. Obviously it sucks for you, but that'll learn you a thing or two about not participating next time.

Yeah. I don't know that it would suck for me. I think that it would be really interesting to like, I don't mind not playing for large gaps of time. If it's a choice I made that makes me feel like I have agency, like real agency? That's really cool. I certainly would not have pushed you to go.

I'm like, you sure you don't want to go? If you don't want to go, I think that's interesting for the story. We'd check in with you and certainly something cool would happen with you and the— The elves would be hanging out. Maybe we'd get attacked or something, a very brief very brief combat. There's lots you could do. Right now I'm thinking of 20 different things I could do. Yeah. All right.

So good. So that's good to know. Yeah. You should always have that option. Like if your character is like, I can't do this. I don't think the fun idea is for me to just hand wave it. I think it's much more interesting. Like, all right, let's see where this choice takes the story.

Yeah. Well, I think that there is a certain level of that that I want to examine in this episode, which taking it out of the narrative that we did, which I thought was great, the jumps, the falls, they were thrilling and scary, the healing of Asta and Zephyr and then them being like, Ramius, you have to come. We got to get on this thing. It's huge and we can't even see where the water is yet. We have to get on it.

And then him trying to climb up in the desperation using his deviant ability. It was all really fun. I really enjoyed it. However, I felt like, and I saw some comments to this effect and I wanted to address it. I felt like this brought up an issue that I have had in the

past with adventures and not just pre-written adventures, adventures that I have designed. Yeah. I've realized maybe sometimes, most of the time accidentally, because if I can plan ahead, I wouldn't have this happen. But sometimes accidentally, you create a situation where you have a high DC check, relatively high DC check that must be accomplished. But it has to happen in order for the adventure to continue properly. There is a key, let's just say literally a key. There's literally a key in a box and you have to get the thievery check to open it. And if you don't, you can't, there comes a time that shockingly, weirdly, the adventure design meant

in this one moment, you had to get through this one door or the adventure can't continue. So this brings up an interesting challenge, which I find that these games sometimes come up against. And it's a two part, it's a two part like not it's a it's like a paradox. You want to put a difficult test in front of the PCs that has high stakes like really high stakes and not just like you could live or die but like you could miss your chance

to do this thing that you must do to be the hero of the adventure. But on the other hand, you really can't have a high difficulty check being the only path forward in an adventure. And I felt like this put us kind of in that position. And I did feel like you did a little bit of hand waving once we were up there to just get us across from the tower to the creature. You're like, oh, you can just shimmy over that rope and then you're there.

Because it was kind of- Believe it or not, it's all from the book. That's all straight from the book. It says if you get a rope across, there's no check required? Yeah, then it's- Okay. There's no check required.

Now I was ramping up the tension. I think I said something in fact, like you should, virtually no problem. And you were like, virtually no problem? Or no problem. Ah, getting across. But yeah, I mean, I get that. I get what you're saying.

For me, I'm like that thing's not- What's the DC of the check? The DC is the DC. I'll read it right from the book. The demigod's flank is 20 feet from the edge of the tower, meaning a character will need to make a successful DC 20 athletics to leap, capital L, to land atop she who walks. Characters who fail can use the grab an edge action DC 20 reflex save to attempt to catch one of the trees lower on the flank but a character who

fails this save felt falls all the way to the ground 60 feet below as long as one character successfully scampers on to she who walks they can tie one of the Oasis ropes or their own ropes to a tree to enable others to tie in and swing across without risk. Okay, great. All right, great. So now I think that that's decent design in the sense that you only need one. And if you have a party without one person with training athletics. And I'm not moving that creature until you get across.

Or until you come up with another reasonable suggestion like, let's just climb it from the bottom. Which I would have been like, all right, it's going to be tricky. But really like- Jumping ahead for a second to Professor Eric's analysis of this situation, he says that he felt that your approach to it had a tinge, a cinematic tinge of like, you got to go now. You know what I mean? Like you can't puzzle this out. And he's like, that was really fun. But like, it can be dangerous when there's a high DC check that you can't plan as a group,

like, all right, well, who goes, how can we aid them? How can we whatever? So anyway, he was like, it all worked out really well. But it does bring up that that that general issue of be careful when you're designing adventures of having that all of a sudden, you didn't realize you got yourself into a bottleneck, where this one thing has to happen or the plot can't continue. Don't write yourself into a corner, as they say with that. That is good to know because I thought that you had to hand wave something in order to just keep the show moving. I'm happy to hear that it was like, no, once a rope was over, it made it without risk. Crossing was without risk. Now also, if you guys, if someone was like, I'm gonna jump and that information wasn't out there yet,

I'd still let you jump, just because it'd be funny if you fall. It is funny if you fall. And in this case, it's really not gonna be permadeath, you know, like at our level. Just really weakening resources. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Which I love, especially in a five-person party.

Anytime I can have you use your resources, that's signed me up. Well, I mean, honestly, man, I'm pretty terrified now. You know what I mean? Like we're coming up against... Look, this is... Whatever these creatures are that hop out, we're debating about this, Matthew and I. It's like we're debating, is this a diplomatic encounter or is this a combat encounter? We don't know. It's like Ramius has been drained of healing resources. If this turns into a combat encounter, that's really scary. If this is a multi-episode adventure over the back of this thing, it's

like a rest does not seem like it's in the future here. So it is very scary that those resources were sapped by the fall of Asta and Zephyr. So it really is like, everything is matters as you move forward. Every single instance of the die, the role of the die has its impact on the future. Anyway, what an app could could look back on this as a pivotal app we shall see. But for right now, let's let's analyze it and break it down with a little we are stupid. We are stupid. Yes. Oh, good. Nicholas.

All right. So let's return to last week's FOD before we move forward. One thing I wanted to mention, issue a correction. Is that what a newspaper says? We're going to issue a correction. We had come to, correct me if I'm wrong, but we had come to the conclusion that you must, that you don't have to take damage to roll the save against Stunning Fist. It has to deal damage. It does have to deal damage. We said that. I said that. Sorry, I was wrong. It does have to deal damage in order to trigger the save for Stunning Fist. You know, I caught that after the fact, but then I started debating with myself. Does deal damage?

Like you can deal damage, but the character doesn't take damage. Does dealing damage also include the taking of damage? You know what I mean? Because you're always going to deal damage. You can drive yourself crazy. I love rules layering. I love it. You can drive yourself crazy with that.

Deals damage, you'd think it means it has to get through hardness, has to get through whatever. Or is it just the active? I doubt damage just doesn't take it. Yeah, I don't know. I think the intention is that it actually gets through. Another comment, I wanted to highlight this one. This is a YouTube comment from last week's FOD from Jason Keighley, a senior developer

at Python. Nice. Friend of the show. Who wrote in. Yeah, thank you, Jason, for writing in and and said one reason we changed the grab knockdown and push abilities for monsters Is to allow PCs to benefit from having bonuses against such maneuvers or for buffing their fort save Before a monster could just automatically grab a character No matter how good they were at avoiding being grappled, which felt bad for some players.

Now the monster has to actually be good at athletics. So, thank you, Jason, for writing in. And we didn't think about that particular argument, but that makes a lot of sense. It's like, why should it be just as easy to grab Brotheramius as it would be to grab Zephyr? You know what I mean? Maybe that shouldn't be as easy. Zephyr is a trained, extremely athletic and acrobatic monk. Brother Amias is not athletic or strong at all.

So it should be much easier for one than the other. There should be a critical success range for one or the other. And so I like that design choice. Good for you guys. Thanks for explaining that. Yeah, I know that makes sense. I mean, as a GM, I want the free grab, but I get it.

If I make that grab, I get it free next time. I have to spend an action, but I can automatically extend it by just using that action. That's a fair trade-off. All right. Getting into this week's episode, thank you, Brother Ramias. Thank you, Professor Eric. Thank you, Brother Ramias. Thank you, Brother Ramias.

Hey, I love that guy. Thank you, Professor Eric. Thank you, Brother Raviz. Thank you, Brother Raviz. Hey, I love that guy. Thank you, Professor Eric, for writing in. We start with a little wrist slap for old Joe O'Brien. On Joe's attempts to aid Zephyr, he just says, quote, natural two, so no, unquote. That might have been a critical fail. Always say the full number since a critical fail would add a penalty to Zephyr's role. Zephyr missed so it made no difference. Giving that the DC to aid was 15, only an adjusted five or below would crit fail, blah, blah, blah. So you're probably fine. It probably was not a

critical fail, but it's a bad habit to not say the total number on every check. So- It's an O'Brien habit. Yeah. And he said, which y'all have mostly broken, except for me, apparently. So yeah, saying that, that is important to know because we never necessarily know when you are gonna make an aid check DC-20.

You might not tell us in advance and then somebody rolls it and it's like, that would be an adjusted 19 or that would be an adjusted nine. It's like, that's a critical fail 19 or that would be an adjusted nine. It's like, that's a critical fail. I should start making a DC 20

if your aid explanation is stupid. Yes, yes. Well, that brings me- You know what, that's stupid, DC 20. That's, honestly dude, that brings me to my next point from Professor Eric. Quote, while I'm glad to see more use of aid and not just swinging for the fences on third attacks.

I do think I also would have pushed back as a GM of someone aiding an attack from behind cover who couldn't even see what's going on. Zephyrs aid after running behind the wall. Maybe not disallow it in the moment, but have a talk after the session about slightly reining in the aid and needing it to be more involved. So this is a good point. And you brought it up in the episode. You're like, I'm thinking about outlawing aid in that moment.

And I know it's half a joke, but it's also because it's like, it is getting a little bit overused. And you're kind of saying like, oh, I can always just aid, maybe not necessarily. So I think that we should be a little bit more judicious, judicious, judicious about how we use it, when we use it. And I think that you should, you know, require a good explanation of what's happening that you can wrap your head around before you allow an aid.

You know, and I think you're well within your rights to be like, I don't think that would help. So no, I'm not gonna, sorry, there's not gonna be an aid right now. You know, we'll keep it moving. Dude, it's like the push action in Call of Cthulhu. I'm such a softie for push. When you push an action to redo a skill check, you're supposed to describe what you're doing

differently. If you can't describe it, you don't get the push. I'm just like, all right, you get the push. I think I might be a little more pushy with being justify aid, or I'm going to raise the DC. I'll go back to the pre remastered DC of DC 20. I don't want to discourage aid altogether, but it really should be more like come up with a good. Yes, I agree.

Let's not discourage aid altogether, but let's rein it in a little bit. To use Professor Eric's words. All right. This is going to be a fun. This is going to be fun. See uh, this is going to be fun. See this little book called the player core. Oh, look at that. I'm going to take this book and I'm going to throw it at you.

Wait, wait, you have one too. You want to sort out a sword fight with player course? Uh, never opened this. I'm going to, yeah, I could tell, uh, I'm going gonna throw this book at you right now because you did something wrong and this is an extremely important rule that I was not aware of because I also have not read this book closely enough. I did something wrong? The Sphinx, this is from Professor Eric, the Sphinx had 60 feet of move speed, but according

to Troy, it flew more than 70 feet in one action. Now he's not even just talking about Nicklin diming you on 10 feet. He's saying page 419 of the player core, the fly action. And he quotes, this is about difficult terrain. Yeah. Moving upward, straight up or diagonally uses the rules for moving through difficult terrain. That is wild. I never realized that. So if your move is 60 feet in 2e remastered, you can only fly up 30. If your fly speed is 60,

as an action, you can fly up 30. Even diagonal, up 30. So that's important to know. So thank you for pointing that out because as we get higher level, that's important to know. So thank you for pointing that out because that's gonna as we get higher level That's gonna matter for characters. It's gonna matter for a lot of people He says as a sub point as a minor help for Foundry You may already know this Troy if you have the token selected the top left input box on the token is designed to record height Offsets which can help with bookkeeping Yeah, it's how it helps with bookkeeping, but it doesn't help with the ruler thing. Because it would be great if they came up with a module which would then do Pythagoras

when you try and do the ruler. Because if you say something is 100 feet up, but it's only 10 feet away from you, and you do the ruler, it'll say 10 feet. I wish it would do the calculation. And I've done that before for when a character has been raised I don't do it all the time. But yeah difficult terrain to move like that's good. Keep me honest with that Yeah, I do it to try to fucking keep it moving But like if you say hey, yo, man, you can't move that I would stay honest, dude

I could tell you a big big one right now is Is my god my brain just shuts down sometimes. Who is Sydney's character in Strange Hands? Suki. Suki, Suki, like Suki turns into a bird all the time, goes flying around doing whatever she feels like. Like higher level PCs are gonna have to know this rule too. It's like, if you fly up, you can move at half your speed as an action.

So I will mention that to Sid and, oh, and Atticus as well. Like Atticus can cast fly. You know what I mean? So these are very important rules to know that I just missed or willfully ignored because I did not want to be held to that difficult rule. All right. A bit of praise from Professor Eric. Good job on the critical fail becoming a fail incap incapacitate rules, loved the excitement on the player side and then the secret knowledge on the GM side causing Troy to be excited about what was going to happen.

So in this moment, we're seeing the incapacitation rule now regularly being done correctly on the GCP, which is great. And that pretty much wraps it up. The rest of Professor Eric's breakdown is really analyzing this bottleneck part of the adventure of the jump of the leap. And he really gets granular with breaking down how difficult a DC 20 athletics check is for an average party of our level. So anybody that is highly trained in it is probably looking at a plus nine, like the highest, highest level. Really? Not a plus 13?

I don't think so. I mean, we're third level. Yeah, I the highest, highest level. Really, not a plus 13? I don't think so. I mean, we're third level. Yeah, I think we're third level. That's crazy. So it's less than a 50% chance for someone to make it? I'm sorry. He said plus nine, plus 11, if they chose that skill for their expert.

So yeah, I think 11 would be the max. So he says it's pretty close to 50-50 in the best case scenario. It feels more like a quick make a decision moment, point of no return commitment and less like we need to solve this puzzle. What I had mentioned earlier. And then he just had some suggestions for other ways that parties could approach this, whether it's reflex saves or falling part way but landing on a creature's leg, taking damage but being on it at least,

so you could stay in the story or whatever. Little suggestions that he would have done to keep it moving. But yeah, it's an interestingalyzation of the adventure design and how it kind of bottlenecked us there But yeah, I really liked hearing your explanation of it. It made sense to me. So I'm glad that it worked out All right. Let's go to Lister mail. Let's see. Let's see what the peeps want to talk about today I had to pick this one because this person is one of your people, Troy. Maxime Peralt from Quebec, Canada. Hey, a French Canadian. I thought he was from Boston. They're my original people.

What's up, Maxime? Thank you so much for writing in. Maxime's question is on GM notes and player notes. Hey guys, first of all, awesome work with GateLock, awesome work on Gatewalkers for Troy and the team. As a GM who is playing this campaign, Troy brings everything from the book to another level and the players role play are insane.

The question is, how does Troy take notes if he does it all? Do you have an app that you use? Also, how do the players take notes? Keep he does it all. Do you have an app that you use? Also, how do the players take notes? Keep up the good work, max. So I just want to give some insight into our note taking and how we sort of structure this stuff because this does come up in multiple games, multiple different parties and how people approach it.

Troy, do you actually ever take any notes on things that happened? Or do you always just kind just listen back to recordings? How do you try to remember what ideas to come up with next in terms of challenging the characters? I don't take any notes. I have a pretty robust Google doc that I use for my campaign prep where I just rewrite the adventure and you know that's just like a living document that I'll constantly be adding to taking away from you know because I go from like the verbatim copying of the adventure to like rewriting it to then adding

my own flair to being like oh we should do a dream here to like maybe reaching out to you guys and getting some input from you, putting that into my document. So that document contains everything. But I'm very rarely am I like, oh, that's interesting what they said. But I'm going to come back to that later. And not because I don't think it's interesting, but just because I do the episode, I watch all the videos to give Francis notes before it's published. And so it's a part of me. I feel like I have a pretty good memory.

Memory. Yeah. If something is going to be relevant, I'm going to find a way to use it. It doesn't mean I never take notes. There might be times when somebody will say something like, oh man, this is going to be great 50 episodes from now, but it's rare that I do that. I just kind of remember. I am running Get in the Trunk. My note taking, I also have a Google doc that I just kind of remember. I am running Get in the Trunk. And so my note taking, I also have a Google Doc that I work off of where I take all my notes for episodes and for prep and stuff like that.

As we've progressed and as I've gotten more years into it, I prep less and less and less, pre prep less and less than I used to. And I sort of just jot down some ideas. I use structures that I pulled out of reading games or books like Play On Safe and the Lazy DM. Like those concepts of how you can have one line sort of settings or NPCs or whatever, just give yourself some structure that keeps you free to play with the players.

That's largely what my notes look like. But then I can tell you what I do with Get in the Trunk is immediately after an episode ends, I start the notes for the next episode. And all I do is typically write two or three ideas. It's just like ideas that came out of that session that made me think like, I need to put this in front of them, or Roger said something like this, and I need to, you know, make sure that that manifests itself into an event or a moment or whatever. So I'll just jot down a couple quick notes in that minute. And when I say a couple quick, I'm talking two sentences, three sentences max, usually. And then I'll open that document up four days later. And I open it up and it's just like,

it puts me right back there. And if I hadn't written that down right after, I don't think that it would be as clear in my mind. So that's a good thing. I also like to relisten to stuff that we record before I play every, almost every Gatewalkers session I go into, I relisten to the entire previous episode we recorded, that helps me.

Cause I don't really take good notes as a player. Within our Gatewalkers campaign, Sydney takes notes, Matthew takes notes, they take separate notes. And we'll kind of consult with each other off air about stuff. Kate keeps the loot. I don't know if I've seen that loot sheet in a while. But one of the things that I like to do is I've created a standard loot sheet that is loot and NPCs and they're spreadsheets. So on one sheet is loot and its value and stuff and who has it. And on the other tab is NPCs and it's just names, locations, and then some notes about them or who they are or what part they have in the story. That document has been great in Gatewalkers because it helps us keep our NPCs straight. We share it among all the players. I do it in Blood of the Wild as well. Mary Lou is actually really good about keeping that updated with me.

She keeps the loot sheet and she updates the NPCs as well with me. That one has a ton of NPCs because it's like a clan-based sort of so you have like the clan leadership and you have other hunters and you have like political kind of things going on. And so there's a lot of NPCs and we keep that straight on that Google sheet. Nick in Legacy of the Ancients takes unbelievable notes. He literally bullet point summarizes every moment of the episode. So like he has one full page for every episode. That's just like what happened. And what's cool about that is like, you can control F search that thing for a name or

a moment even and like find where it was what happened and get this details. And he shares that with us. And I literally open that up at the start of every episode. And sometimes in episode, I'm searching back and I'll find something from 10 episodes ago that a note he took that I can use for my character to like bring something up or say, I had a dream about that, you know, because skid wrote me a dream. And I normally I would never take good notes on it. But Nick took good notes on it. So yeah, I think those shared Google Docs are really a huge upgrade in our note taking across these games that I never used to have before, before we started recording. So.

Well, you know, it's funny is Foundry makes it pretty easy. That's something we don't really use a ton. But the journal options on Foundry is something you guys could delve into a little bit. I just get it. I don't really take any notes. But, notes, but the rest of you could like be adding to a shared journal on there. And I could be better at populating that with the images and stuff.

But it becomes a little trickier when I start changing stuff. Cause I got some pretty big changes coming up and there's just a little more work on my part cause I can't just drag and drop. But you know, it's pretty great to have that. I mean, look at what we, with the other tabletop that we use for getting the trunk in time for chaos.

I mean, it's indispensable to have all of those notes virtually on a virtually shared tabletop. I was looking back to like when we used to play Jade Regent, do you remember I used to send out summaries before each session? Or even after, like, this is what you guys did? I'm trying to find like, one of my summaries that I wrote you guys,

because they were pretty like, thorough, if I remember correctly. I would be like, all right, here's everything you did. Yeah, book four session. Oh yeah. Wow. Man, I'm looking back to, we have so many Jade Regent emails. I'm looking at these notes that Nick takes for Legacy of the Ancients.

He didn't use to organize it by episode. He just took straight notes. At episode 24, he began writing it by episode. He generally highlights in yellow, any item that we find or gold pieces. So any treasure is highlighted in yellow, which is cool. And then he puts in bold character names, but also things we need to remember to do, which is cool because then he'll copy and paste that into a list of like things to remember to do, which is cool, because then he'll copy and paste that into a list of things to remember to do. Remember to ask this person about this when we return to whatever town.

Remember to do that because you always kind of forget that stuff. This document is now 147 pages long. His notes. Awesome. For a legacy of the ancients. Yeah. It's really badass. Good on you, Nick. Good work. Dude, it's funny. I found Jade Regent. This is the title of the ancients. Yeah. It's really badass. Good on you, Nick. Good work.

Dude, you know what's funny? I found Jade Regent – this is the title of the email. This is December 10th, 2014. This is like – we're talking about glass candy at this point. I called it Season 2, Session 2. It would have been Book 2, Session 2, recap. I don't want to just read it. I'll give you some highlights. After a brief lesson from Sandrew on how the various quarters of Cal's Gart are laid out, the party decides to split up as Sandrew, Ameyiko and the rest of the caravan go off to blend in as well. The party checks into a local inn at the Bone Quarter.

Blah, blah, blah. I keep going on. Meanwhile, I have to make sure I don't have anything inappropriate here. Meanwhile, after – Don't just read without thinking first. After visiting the Jade – this skips down a little bit. Meanwhile, after visiting the Jade Quarter in a brief interlude where Maelstorm, which was your character in dog form, chatted up another local mutt.

Oh, that's right. I remember that now. Maelstorm, Ike and Aramis traveled to the fire corridor to try and find a guide to take them over the crowd of the world. They end up at a local grog shop called the Grim Harvest where the locals drink out of skulls. They talk to a very drunk and slightly bruised and battered Varkie trader named Ushaka. Dude, I remember this session.

It's so great. I wish I should do this more often. It's long. Dude, it's like eight paragraphs long and then it's just one. It's so great. I wish I I should do this more often That's what it's long dude. It's like eight paragraphs long and it takes a lot of time It's like you're playing for four or five hours and drinking. I mean you do do it for strange aeons, and then you read it out loud That's right. Yeah, so we still so we do have it for strange aeons, but Yeah, anyway, uh That is gonna wrap it up for us guys Fun side fun fun. That's it man, that's it. We gotta keep it tight, we got shit to do today man.

I gotta get my teeth drilled. I gotta get my butt looked at. I don't know, what do they do with physicals now? Finger in the butt man, always. Thanks so much for hanging out with us guys. Hope you enjoyed. Everybody have a fantastic holiday weekend. Hey, it's a holiday weekend this weekend. Enjoy. Check out the Glass Cannon podcast episode 49 tomorrow night.

Talk Nerdy Town Hall tonight at 730 Eastern Time. Come join us on Discord. And yeah, we'll see you next week. Until then, take it easy, everybody. Have a good holiday weekend. Enjoy and we'll see you next time. Peace! College football! Yeah! I'm back baby! It's time to make your membership official.

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