D&D-Day: The Ballad of Echo Company (OOC)

[MrAbdiel]

Oh yeah. When it comes to damage, Bathory's abjuration barrier should have absorbed 15 of that damage, so she'd have only taken two points of it.

Oh, I bet you're glad you had that! :D

Scenes are up, please proceed to your designated combat theatre and establish your presence. Everyone's objective: regroup with the platoon, and figure out what the hell is going on.

Spoiler: Next Scenes...

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The company is scattered. Waistcoatwill, Continental Op, Novabomb, PartyOfRogues, and abwinningh42: You are blown back almost to the bunker line on the sea wall, near to the elevated machine gun emplacements and, importantly, not the Kreigshield acolytes you were hoping to smoke, but the full blown, powerful Kreigshielder Magi themselves. You'll be proceeding to The Best Laid Plans.

Stanleyindraven, Cavir, JbeJ275, Heavenblade, Rokku, and Awful - you've been blown back OVER the bunker line, all the way down to Naphto beach itself. You're going to splash down in the shallows, crawl up onto the sands, and have little choice but to join the poor grunts trying to survive in the storm of lead and spellfire as you advance up the beach and try to regroup with the rest of the company. You'll be proceeding to Two Hundred Yards Of Nightmare.

[PartyOfRogues]

Spoiler: Rolls

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Landing: (1d3)[3]
Stealth: (1d20+10)[23]
Perception(Adv. from darkvision) (1d20+9)[29]
(1d20+9)[26]

[Novabomb]

Spoiler: Rolls

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Stealth: (1d20+10)[11]
Perception: (1d20+8)[22]

[Waistcoatwill]

Here goes nothing! Really? A nat 2 on my first halfling. Do you have your revenge yet MrAbdiel?

Spoiler: Rolls

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Landing (1d3)[3]
Stealth (1d20+4)[6]
Perception (1d20+5)[22]

[Continental Op]

Spoiler: Rolls

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(1d3)[1]

Athletics (if in a tree): (1d20+5)[18]
Athletics (disadv.):(1d20+5)[19]

Stealth:(1d20+7)[13]
Stealth (disadv):(1d20+7)[25]

Perception:(1d20+5)[20]
Perception (disadv):(1d20+5)[22]

[MrAbdiel]

Btw Awful, I think you’re calling private Gamble “Rumble” but honestly that’s a sick nickname

[JbeJ275]

Everyone forming up on LT on the beach gets (1d8+5)[11] Temp HP.

[Cavir]

What languages do the Vults speak? Were we taught any basics to deal with prisoners?
Surrender (them, not us...)
Drop your weapons
Hands Up
Faster
Stop

...or more ideally here since they are in range of Message:
There's a huge bomb coming, get out of there!
(lot safer for us to charge it if they've abandoned it)

Xilo speaks English, Dwarven, and Elven if that helps.

Everyone forming up on LT on the beach gets (1d8+5)[11] Temp HP.

Out of curiosity since I'm new to 5e, what's that from? (and thanks!)

[JbeJ275]

What languages do the Vults speak? Were we taught any basics to deal with prisoners?
Surrender (them, not us...)
Drop your weapons
Hands Up
Faster
Stop

...or more ideally here since they are in range of Message:
There's a huge bomb coming, get out of there!
(lot safer for us to charge it if they've abandoned it)

Xilo speaks English, Dwarven, and Elven if that helps.


Out of curiosity since I'm new to 5e, what's that from? (and thanks!)

That’s from my Eldritch cannon which I have in protector mode. It’s a subclass specific thing to artillerist artificers. Basically a small machine on legs that gives people close to it a shield whenever it’s close to them.

[stanleyindraven]

alright, Bruce has a move of 40, so i can pull double move to 80 ft round 1, clear the last 20 and plant the explosive in round 2 right? that looks like a great go.

[MrAbdiel]

Yep! Since the plan implicitly contains Bruce being the one who draws the most fire, being out in front won't hinder him much.

[MrAbdiel]

What languages do the Vults speak? Were we taught any basics to deal with prisoners?
Surrender (them, not us...)
Drop your weapons
Hands Up
Faster
Stop

...or more ideally here since they are in range of Message:
There's a huge bomb coming, get out of there!
(lot safer for us to charge it if they've abandoned it)

Xilo speaks English, Dwarven, and Elven if that helps.


Out of curiosity since I'm new to 5e, what's that from? (and thanks!)

Oh, languages. I meant to think about that.

Band-aid solution:

There are a bunch of regional languages. Common is spoken in Albinon and Amcara. The Kreigvolk speak Kreigspiel. The Aquiteauxans speak l'aquitaire. Far on the other side of the war, the Vuskarran People's Panoply speaks Vusk, and demands all who live under its authority speak it too. The other major members of the Nexus powers include Hito-Mori, in which Mori is spoken; and Vicio Ascendio, the newly reborn nation of Vicio out of almost a thousand years of petty bickering and backstabbing amongst its member states. They speak Vicioni.

So especially relevant languages are Kreigspiel, L'Aquitaire, Vusk, Mori,and Vicioni. Along with any you care to make up. These regional languages we'll do a little different from the core languages.

You're welcome for your character to know one of these languages if you're entitled to learn one from a background or trait from somewhere. Additionally, for every point of Intelligence Bonus you have, you know one of these languages at a lesser level, but enough to navigate through any non-technical conversation. Obviously this campaign takes place in with mostly Kreigsprechers and L'Aquitiare parlants, so they're the most immediately useful. But if you pick something else, or make one up, I'll try to feature it every now and then.

Anyone who doesn't know Kreigspiel has been given a Kriegspiel primer, and you know the terms "Surrender", "Disarm", "Kneel", "Stop", and "Move". You've been trained in a little more than that, but once you go beyond those 5 terms, you're going to need to make Intelligence tests to make yourself understood. Difficulty of such a test, presuming a simple message (E.G. "Where is the hospital?") is typically going to be 30 minus the target's Intelligence score.

[Cavir]

alright, Bruce has a move of 40, so i can pull double move to 80 ft round 1, clear the last 20 and plant the explosive in round 2 right? that looks like a great go.

Need to get clear of the blast too.

How thick is the top of the bunker? If it's only 2 feet high and they need to see out the slot then the roof is probably not as thick as the sides. The anti-tank mine going off on top of it could collapse the roof on them. Our engineer should have an idea if it'd work or not.

[JbeJ275]

One alternative we could use, depending on how generous the GM is feeling could rely on my size tiny mobile cannon. It can move at 30ft but being size tiny might be able to slip through the slit with a satchel charge and drop it into their laps if we can keep throwing suppressing fire their way/use fog cloud to keep anything approaching them heavily obscured which makes ranged attacks a really difficult proposition.

Oh, languages. I meant to think about that.

Band-aid solution:

There are a bunch of regional languages. Common is spoken in Albinon and Amcara. The Kreigvolk speak Kreigspiel. The Aquiteauxans speak l'aquitaire. Far on the other side of the war, the Vuskarran People's Panoply speaks Vusk, and demands all who live under its authority speak it too. The other major members of the Nexus powers include Hito-Mori, in which Mori is spoken; and Vicio Ascendio, the newly reborn nation of Vicio out of almost a thousand years of petty bickering and backstabbing amongst its member states. They speak Vicioni.

So especially relevant languages are Kreigspiel, L'Aquitaire, Vusk, Mori,and Vicioni. Along with any you care to make up. These regional languages we'll do a little different from the core languages.

You're welcome for your character to know one of these languages if you're entitled to learn one from a background or trait from somewhere. Additionally, for every point of Intelligence Bonus you have, you know one of these languages at a lesser level, but enough to navigate through any non-technical conversation. Obviously this campaign takes place in with mostly Kreigsprechers and L'Aquitiare parlants, so they're the most immediately useful. But if you pick something else, or make one up, I'll try to feature it every now and then.

Anyone who doesn't know Kreigspiel has been given a Kriegspiel primer, and you know the terms "Surrender", "Disarm", "Kneel", "Stop", and "Move". You've been trained in a little more than that, but once you go beyond those 5 terms, you're going to need to make Intelligence tests to make yourself understood. Difficulty of such a test, presuming a simple message (E.G. "Where is the hospital?") is typically going to be 30 minus the target's Intelligence score.

So would racial languages or planar languages still exist but as an equivalent to Yiddish or Latin respectively, being the languages of academia or if dispersed communities? Or do racial languages not really exist in setting?

[MrAbdiel]

Need to get clear of the blast too.

How thick is the top of the bunker? If it's only 2 feet high and they need to see out the slot then the roof is probably not as thick as the sides. The anti-tank mine going off on top of it could collapse the roof on them. Our engineer should have an idea if it'd work or not.

You don't know how thick the bunker is; but you can always try. Sal would know that setting the small amounts of explosives you have off merely exposed to the concrete is unlikely to breach it, if it's standard Vult construction as he's been taught about. Ideally you want the explosive packed into a corner or between two surfaces (like inside the overhanging concrete lip of the pillbox's top, under which the guns traverse) for a magnified effect. To create a penetrative blast from a stationary device against a single plane open to the air, you'd need something like the TNT bundles that were in your munition drop that came out with you, and is probably being snaffled up by those druids by now.

[MrAbdiel]

I might not be explaining the slit well; but imagine a cross section of the pillbox. Flat top, goes down about two feet of flat concrete; then tilts inward for a > shaped wedge just above ground height. At the nadir of this hollow wedge is a slit, maybe an inch and a half high; just enough so that the gun barrels can track smoothly left and right, as if rail mounted for that purpose. It would be very hard to get something in through that slot that was thicker than a human hand. But getting a Weasel bomb into that > wedge will generate enough opposing concussion to rip the top off for sure.

[JbeJ275]

Ah OK.


Also just to keep our knot cutting options open. Would a shatter spell be able to do the same job as a satchel charge in this case?

And how many people can ast fog cloud or an equivilent spell? Because that's really our best shot at negating the guns.

[Cavir]

I can only do fogcloud 1/day so was hoping to save it but can use it if needed. Even with the cloud it doesn't stop them from shooting since they are just mowing back and forth.

Would a shatter spell be able to do the same job as a satchel charge in this case?

Command should have issued some scrolls of it! Will have to put that in the suggestion box if we survive.

I might not be explaining the slit well; but imagine a cross section of the pillbox. Flat top, goes down about two feet of flat concrete; then tilts inward for a > shaped wedge just above ground height. At the nadir of this hollow wedge is a slit, maybe an inch and a half high; just enough so that the gun barrels can track smoothly left and right, as if rail mounted for that purpose. It would be very hard to get something in through that slot that was thicker than a human hand. But getting a Weasel bomb into that > wedge will generate enough opposing concussion to rip the top off for sure.

Figured the gunners would need to be able to see too. Guess they are looking beside the gun.

[MrAbdiel]

Shatter is definately a useful spell for damaging enemy materiel when you can get up to it; but a fortified hardpoint just has too many HP to be vulnerable to anything but an extraordinarily high level spell. A long enough series of Shatters could crack a bunker, presumably; but not few enough that it's militarilly expedient to plan for it.

One of the concessions we're making in this setting is that magic can assist many tasks in this war, but rarely if ever solves enduring problems. Sending spells are useful, but enemy forces can scry them, so you need to study war cryptography anyway. Healing spells are great, but it's just the kind of thing that a military machine would factor into its metrics; so instead of sending a soldier into combat expecting him to get shot and die for his country, they expect him to get shot three times, using one of his spell slots to heal each time, and then to die for his country. Not to mention (and this is another thing I'm establishing now, just as I think of it) I'm going with a kind of golden hour hangup for healing magic.

Similarly, a shatter spell has to have all kinds of excellent uses - spiking enemy artillery without needing to get all the way up to it, cracking open an existing weakpoint on an enemy tank, or bursting open the a fuel barrel on a passing Vult supply truck, leaving a flammable trail. But if a second (or even a sixth) level spell is able to burst a concrete pillbox or bunker, there would either have to be a bunch of counterspell runes loaded into every defensible structure (lame) or else it just wouldn't be effective to build them at all.

So don't hear me saying "shatter is useless", but I am saying you'll have to use it as a force multiplier when you use it, rather than a problem solver in a lot of cases.



Also big lols for Bruce just getting bored on Omaha beach and going looking for bullets. I'm sure he'll get disciplinary beatings with the sock full of the medals he wins, if he survives. Late night for me, posts tomorrow for both threads!

P.S. I am having a lot of fun with this game and all your characters. I'm fighting an urge to put you in more peaceful situations and to say "now just interact for me", but I know that's not what we're here for! ;)

Spoiler: The Golden Hour

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The Golden Hour is the hour after bodily trauma has been received in which it is responsive to healing magic. Each additional hour or part thereof after a specific injury is received requires a healing spell of one level higher to be effective. For example, imagine a driver stumbling out of the darkness to into the medical tent, having just had to walk for just under five hours after being in a jeep accident. He'd better hope there's a level 9 cleric in the house, because his injuries won't respond to less than a 5th level spell slot. A soldier who gets shot in the first hour of a 10 hour operation, however, is beyond even the reaches of the most powerful healing magic available. Largely, this means that most recovery from injury happens over long recovery breaks in medical tents and makeshift hospitals, under the care of trained physicians and nurses rather than chugging at the faucet of celestial pact warlock heals. For supernatural healing abilities that are not spells (lay on hands, or the Aasimar healing hands ability for example), the functional level of the heal is equal to half the healer's level or CR, rounding up. A successful Medicine check (usually at DC 10) will give an observer a good idea of how many hours old an injury is.

As PCs, the primary way you heal is by spending hit dice on a short rest and regaining all HP on a long rest. This is a game of heroism and teamwork, and it wouldn't be any good if characters were made to sit out for months at a time as the recovered. Therefore, you should treat healing from short and long rests not so much as becoming fully healed, but as your character receiving enough medical attention to muscle through the pain, hiding their injuries to not let their comrades down, or sneaking out of the medical tent to join their squad against flabbergasted doctor's orders.

[stanleyindraven]

i like the golden hour rule. i do wonder though, at what point is it considered more than a flesh wound? damage reduction and a high hp makes it to where someone can soak a bit of damage, like grazing hits.

I wonder, did any solders have shields?

[MrAbdiel]

Bullet proof shields were too heavy to be usable until we had advanced plastics in like the 80s or so, I think; but it’s a solid fantasy trope so a bunch will have shields in this game!

As for what counts as a wound and a flesh wound and what not, that’s the age old question of when to treat HP loss like a slow erosion of tactical advantage before a killing blow, and when to treat it like you’re shaving big ham slices off your enemy until you hit bone and put them finally down.

Answer: whatever feels most dramatically appropriate. Additionally, dramatic wounds (like bullets that cause no damage to Bruce because they “miss” his barbarian Con AC can be “dressed” or “healed” without costing actions or resources, since it’s purely fluff.

[stanleyindraven]

do bullets have to hit an AC? if so, at least a shield could be useful there, or to add obscurement. that would be better than what i do, running headlong into a deathtrap.

[Waistcoatwill]

Love golden hour healing, it makes Doc's existence make sense!

Edit: on peaceful interludes, the odd campfire scene, supply negotiation at base, and tense interaction with resistance fighters or prisoners who don't trust us sounds fun.

[MrAbdiel]

Posted! But I forgot to roll saves for Ordo, Jukebox and Spade!


Looking for 12, rolling at advantage.

Ordo
(1d20+1)[12]
(1d20+1)[18]

Jukebox
(1d20+5)[21]
(1d20+5)[14]

Spade

(1d20+3)[19]
(1d20+3)[9]

They do good!

[stanleyindraven]

well, this ought to be fun, though two of those guys nat 1, that sucks for them. So the 21 hit, what is half of 11? 5 or 6?

Athletics (1d20+7)[16]
Wisdom if athletics fails (1d20+2)[17]
20ft sections (1d100)[16] (1d100)[95] (1d100)[12] (1d100)[44] (1d100)[91]
Dex save with Advantage (1d20+4)[12] (1d20+4)[18]

re: sorry to edit a post with rolls, but omg, that is the makings for an epic charge.

[MrAbdiel]

Halves round down, so 5.

You get shot at by 6 fantaNazis and a machine gun turret while charging across a barbed wire strewn minefield.

Take 5 damage.

[JbeJ275]

Is there a roll one could make to open up a gap in the barbed wire?

Also

Dex:
(1d20+2)[12] or
(1d20+2)[5]


Arcana: (1d20+8)[18]

[MrAbdiel]

Sure! The idea to grenade it open was floated; spend a grenade and your action, and it’ll blow open a section on either the left side with the big group, or right side with the small group.

If you don’t want to waste a grenade for the sure thing, a dc15 thieves tools check (or similar) will also clear a patch.

[JbeJ275]

I mean I’ll use a grenade if I can but I was dubious of that suggestion. Historically for example in the First World War even directly targeting them with artillery shells which went bigger than any grenade only made them harder to get through, and in the modern era there have been a lot of examples of using grenades to further booby trap patches of barbed wire with them leaving the barbed wire behind when going off.

Again, I’m happy to do so but just wanted confirmation that was something I IC would know as likely to be successful rather than a waste of grenades.

[Waistcoatwill]

Definite CA: The First Avenger vibes going on with a gigantic muscle bound chap with a shield leading the charge against pseudo-nazis!

Doc would probably try to disarm the knife-wielding Krieger if that's possible? If not he'll grapple and try to drag the guy off Granger.