Friday Roundup 2/4/2022

- This post on raising the dead has some interesting points. I'm okay with our DF game having relatively casual resurrection - but we've lost a few PCs because they couldn't be found in time, and at least one when the player rolled a 16 vs. a "One Try" 15 or less to bring back the dead. That's sufficient for me.

But the star of the post is a comment about wishes from Geoffrey McKinney:

I'm a big proponent of wishes in A/D&D, and as a DM I am liberal in placing them in my campaigns. I treat wishes 1974 style:

Under the entry for the ring of three wishes in the 1974 D&D rules, Gary wrote: "Wishes that unfortunate adventures had never happened should be granted."

Imagine an unfortunate encounter with spectres in which half-a-dozen 8th-level adventurers are reduced to two adventurers of 2nd level each. A wish would restore four corpses and a dozen lost levels in one swoop. Of course, the wish would also make any treasure gained from the spectres reappear in the spectres' lair, along with any destroyed spectres being restored to unlife.

I am pretty stingy with what a wish can give you that you never had before. (After all, a wish in AD&D will add only one point to an ability score, which I think is reasonable in D&D as well.) But restoring stuff you lost? The wish will restore all of it when used as a reset button.

That's well worth preseving here, just in case the page or comments go away someday.

- I'm still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I spent a couple hours clearing out a location full of wisps, gritting my teeth through every lightning attack and having to put resistance spells on over and over again, even as my fully shielded guys got taken out. It wasn't fun.

Then I found by doing that quest, I'd run out the clock on a more important one.

So I had to restore from an earlier save and do things in a new order . . . and I have to do that tooth-gritting wisp-filled annoyance-fest over again. Maybe I'll set it aside for a few days. We'll see.

- FoundryVTT is still pleasing me . . . but I found that when I create a Scene, I can't adjust the map size as far as I can tell. And the draugr crypts simply do not fit. They're much too longer for a 1 hex = 1 yard combat map. I want the whole thing done because I don't want people doing "off the map" crap, where I get the very worst of theater of the mind - people asking over and over what they can do, how close is this guy, can I retreat, etc. - with the worst of mapped combat - the analysis of every step as if each one was Operation Overlord. My players are likely to have a Cunning Plan that involves Alchemist's Fire, Create Fire, scrolls of Create Earth, cloud spells, flash, nagetteppo, and so on because they're convinced it'll make all of the difference and somehow cause the draugr to make a critical, fatal mistake (I'm not convinced, as you can see.)

Anyway, how do I make maps bigger? I'd appreciate any help!

- I'm still enjoying this series on AD&D. This time - surprise!

- Okay, back to the mapping attempts.