I guess since I'm here again, I'll make my own Now Playing topic!

[Maniac]

hi i took a two-week break because i thought i ruined my life by being an irresponsible adult but I didn't

so yeah, persona 5. that's a better thing to discuss

just started the third palace. feels like the game has been in autopilot mode whenever a palace isn't active, which is pretty annoying. aside from one s-link I've been rushing down (and have hit a wall where I need way more stats), my s-links feel pretty underdeveloped and my stats feel pretty underwhelming. did pretty crap on the first exam even though i feel like I was grinding pretty hard for knowledge points, so I guess that would confirm my stats are bad.

the first palace was pretty damn rough, beyond even the standard of how unforgiving early-game SMT games are. probably comparable to like, naraku from SMTIV, only way longer. IV-drip exp combined with mobs who are designed to basically one-shot anything they touch don't go too well -- there was a point where I couldn't burn down one of those red mobs that were just blocking the hallway, and I had to go back to the beginning of the dungeon and grind some fodder enemies for half an hour until their miserable exp drops leveled me up. i spent the greater part of a week there even excluding mandatory plot visits/calling card days. the only saving grace was that the first boss was a huge wimp, because I felt pretty underleveled by the end of it. the second palace went way better, thankfully. i guess the second boss was supposed to actually be kinda challenging, but I stuck around in the dungeon long enough to fuse a Matador and his AoE physical attack just demolished him.

waifu tiers: uhhhhh. i guess the doctor lady is kinda hot, I've been pounding away at her s-link at least. it's at level 7 and everyone else is at 3-4. otherwise, the field is pretty barren. shogi girl is also pretty good looking, don't have access to her yet tho. on the dude side, I hate mishima way more than i thought i would. he's pretty cute, but his personality is impressively gross. yusuke's voice is way too deep for his design and his personality isn't very sexy, but since he's the handsomest guy from P3 to now who doesn't try to murder me, I guess he'll have to do. goro is still moe as fuck but uh yeah

[ganonfloyd]

i'm glad you did not ruin your life

hifumi is rad when you can social link her imo

[Random]

i'm glad you did not ruin your life

same

[Maniac]

i'm sure this three oni mini-boss fight I got into with each of my party members under 20 MP that wiped me a bit under a dozen times will have been a greater challenge than any of the actual palace bosses by the time I'm done

also props for having a save room right down the hall inaccessible until after the fight, and then having another save room in the very next room after that fight

EDIT: at least I could finish the whole palace in a single day since the segment after that mini-boss lent itself pretty well to sneaking past all of the mobs.

EDIT: EDIT: and done. kaneshiro did bigger numbers than the other guys, but he still got punked by tarunda like all the rest

[Maniac]

i really don't regret leveling up takemi's s-link to the exclusion of almost every other person's s-link now that I've noticed that she sells accessories that give me invigorate 3 AND she sells them for half price now so I can load my entire party with them

rip my persona 5 playthrough (2017-2018)

[ganonfloyd]

it was a good run, rip playthrough

[Maniac]

also i'm still using matador like, 11 levels after he was first available for fusion. been feeding him queen's necklaces so he can keep up in level, so he's consistently the same level as I am. also got lucky and trained a resist skill for his only weakness onto him as well. he has enough speed to always go first even with the massive initiative buff hard mode seems to have given every enemy, controls four elements, has matarunda and of course has not andalucia swift strike, so he's pretty much as unfair to everything I fight as he is to every first time nocturne player. might end up taking him all the way through as I keep replacing his stuff with cooler skill cards

also i found it kinda neat that the tomoko kuroki expy crazy stalker girl I would regularly check up at school on turned out to be a mementos boss

[Maniac]

sphinx is the worst fucking asshole ever

first match: "fuck, I have no items that can cure dizzy because I used all of them on the first part expecting to be able to use morgana to cleanse that shit later (presently not in my party and unable to be brought into my party because that status ailment prevents me from changing party members for some ungodly reason), let's switch out morgana to use me patra" *morgana gets hit with despair every single time the boss uses that attack* *also the entire party gets fucking smashed by sphinx dive since she used it right after tarunda wore off*

rematch: "still don't have items that can cure despair. alright, I can kill her in two ballista cycles, so she'll only get to use her despair attack once. i'll spam tarunda every round so it never wears off. i'll have makoto help after she uses despair so he can take care of i--" *almost the entire party gets hit with despair, including MC and makoto*

boy i got so mad at that. status ailment bosses in SMT are already the worst and this new despair ailment is especially god awful. you can survive a particularly unlucky hit from party-wide charm or confusion spells in the remaining character can spam restorative spells or items, so I played loose with status curatives. a status ailment that simultaneously prevents you from doing anything AND kills you instantly once it expires is next level awful and is basically instant death if it hits the MC if you don't have anything to cure it with. I'm actually gonna have to use the option that lets me return to a few days ago and stock up a bit heavier because fuck this lady

[Maniac]

ok good she's dead

i was gonna make a psychonauts joke but that boss soured my mood

[Maniac]

first pathfinder session in a month, still ongoing

at present: we triggered the boss fight within the first three rooms of his castle. CR 5 versus a party with an average party level lower than 2 since one of the more useful party members has been awol all break. everything went pear-shaped after that. i originally wrote my character to be a saintly neutral good character who would never abandon his teammates, but my party members are so dumb that I went "**** it" and ran away. tpk imminent. await updates

[Random]

what's a CR 5?

[Maniac]

The expected level for a party to be on par with the enemy. An equal party average level should generally be able to handily dispatch the threat, but usually the CR of midboss level creatures is a level higher than the expected average level and boss level encounters are generally 2-3. A three level difference is considered a beatable, yet very difficult encounter with a considerable chance of one player dying, and a not-insubstantial chance of a full TPK if the party can't keep up with them. Such an encounter doesn't expect two of five party members to be running around somewhere completely different, which happened in this session so the chances of a full TPK were insanely high.

So uh, this is the most interesting session I've ever had, so big time tl;dr for all the folks who don't give a shit about D&D and even the ones who do because I'm a boring person with a negative CHA modifier:

This encounter was weird because the boss encounter was initiated by a "friendly" NPC goading us to help her take out the boss. Generally, the expectation was that they'd whittle each other down (they're both CR 5), whoever lived would turn on you, but they'd be weakened enough for a full party to bring down. Only this NPC roflstomped the boss without taking a single hit. The only saving grace was that the boss teleported back into his castle and started taking potshots out of the window while the NPC ran inside to confront him rather than all of us just hanging out in the open when she turned. The boss nailed two of my party members rather severely doing this, so I suggested multiple times, quite emphatically, that we regroup; the fact of the matter was that the NPC was gonna murder him anyway and that we should get together, heal up and get ready for whatever may come next. So let me run down what everyone else was doing instead. Both of these two are D&D newbies, btw:

- The rogue: Went out yolo-ing and opening random doors elsewhere. Got seen by a completely different midboss, got stunned by her, and then bit it when the "friendly NPC" turned on us and went around looking for victims out in the open. She offed him right there with a critical hit that would have taken him straight from full to dead. I'm thankful that miniboss didn't come out looking for anyone else.
- The sorceress: I don't even know what she was doing. She took over half her HP in damage, which apparently she didn't even notice, and ran in a completely different direction standing out on the open. So after the NPC ended the life of the rogue, she attacked the sorceress in short order. Technically she didn't die: She was knocked unconscious and successfully stabilized. But nobody came to rescue her because she was out in the open on the other side of the map, so there's no doubt she'll be finished off after the fight.

The other two party members were the alchemist and the witch. The witch was already huddled up in a building that was within running distance of me and the alchemist. Ee huddled up in a battlement waiting to see how the fight shook down. The witch has a spell that augments her sneak stat that she put to considerable use providing reconnaissance, so she followed the NPC as she ran off towards the boss. At the same time, two things happened: One, the witch went past the NPC to find the corpse of the boss she killed. Two, the NPC met up with us and goaded us outside into the open, which the alchemist did. He immediately got feathered by her and knocked unconscious just as the witch arrived to fill in the blanks: The NPC was trying to lure us outside to kill us, since she was a harpy with a bow and being in a cramped fortress wasn't an ideal battlefield for her.

I dragged the alchemist back inside into a room with no windows. The witch healed him back to consciousness and we camped in there for a while. This was a pretty good place in which to hunker down; she first tried to open a door in the room leading outdoors. The witch gave the alchemist a snare item that he hucked at her and messed her up a bit. The plan from there was for me to grapple her, restraining her and preventing her from using her bow, at which point I could do another grapple check and pin her which would leave her helpless and liable for coup de graces, which are auto-criticals. This didn't succeed, but she provoked an extra attack from me as she flew off that did nick her for some damage. We shut the door and resumed camping in there. Next the harpy tried to ambush us from a lower floor. However, I got paranoid and started spamming perception checks since I had nothing better to do, one of which outed her before she could come up. I positioned myself to smack her hard if she came up, and she obliged. Tried to cast a spell in melee range of me, which gives me a free swing. It fucking crits. If the GM let me crit multiple times, it would have done so as I rolled two natural 20s in a row, but regardless I smacked her hard enough to fizzle out her spell. She gets hit with another snare, I try another grapple and failed again, and she goes running off downstairs. I pursue to get the drop on her because she's a good 3 turns off from getting outside like this.

Unfortunately our luck runs out here as she successfully gets a spell on me that put the fear of god in me and made me run away for a turn. The alchemist followed me down -- I guess he thought she wouldn't try to attack him indoors, which I stated outright wasn't a good bet; she finished off the boss indoors after all, and I had to move far enough away that I wouldn't have been able to bail him out. He forgoes the opportunity to run upstairs after scraping her with a crossbow bolt and also gets nailed with a crit, another one that'd bring him from full to dead if he wasn't already injured. The witch is out of everything by this point, still stealthed and decides to run off. The harpy doesn't notice her and tries to escape in another direction while I'm a good ways away, probably planning to strafe us again a bit later. At this point, I really don't wanna take my chances and I follow the witch out. We dive into a few houses until the witch's luck runs out, she gets seen close to the exit and gets nailed with, guess what, another critical hit. This one doesn't kill her, but she's bleeding out in the open.

I rationalize at this point that, while I left the rogue and the sorceress out alone with a clear conscience (ya can't cure stupid by being stupid too), it'd actually be firmly against my alignment to leave the witch, a 16 year old girl, to bleed out and die. So I stop to help her. She's insanely close to dying of bloodloss after multiple failed attempts to stabilize such that if I am to save her, I'd have to stop and try a heal check. I do so and fail. But a miracle happens and the witch's familiar, a pet cat, stabilizes her for me. I pick the witch up and play defensively as I carry her through the last 100 ft to the exit -- the snares make it so the harpy has a fairly low chance of hitting me with either of her two shots. Of course, she get another natural 20 on me, but couldn't confirm the critical. She gets a few other hits in me, but I have an absolutely obscene health pool for a level 2 character so I could afford to eat them. I successfully lug the witch out and the DM intervenes with plot to distract the harpy and we get away

Pretty satisfied with that ending. Me and the witch share full EXP for the two CR 5 encounters and level up. Of course, everyone else in the party dies, but they deserved it given how that ended up going down, anyone surviving would have been a miracle. Only I dunno if the two newbies wanna play again, because both of them seemed upset when they died (I don't fucking know what they expected, but they were) so I'm kinda worried about that. The rogue was dumb as hell to do whatever he decided to do, but they seem like a fun enough guy who was having fun learning how to play, so I don't want him to go.

also it's worth noting that the alchemist joined this campaign because his alchemist got killed in his first session of a pathfinder campaign with my old group, so he wanted to live out his alchemist build in this one. weeeeeelp

[Ƨɒlƚy]

Unlucky alch and witch are unlucky, but the other two...honestly, some people are solid arguments for metagaming.

[Random]

That does sound fun, but yeah I wonder if it's the best experience for new players. Almost wonder if it's worth trying to give them an easy win before throwing them into the fire.

[Maniac]

i'm half-way through august and only now have I maxed my first s-link

it was one that automatically levels up

i imagine i'm doing pretty poorly huh