Have fun storming the castle!

Tonight Jeff ran another session of the Dragonlance game. Last time we tracked the elven kidnappers to a fortress in the ruins of a city on the edge of the dragon overlord Frost's domain. This session we tried to go rescue some elves, and succeeded so easily that we decided to bite off more than we could chew, and ended up getting a bit chewed on.

( game summary )

The DM had me make a spellcraft check to accurately aim the dimension door out of the city from the top of the wall without ending up in midair. I got a total of -1. Note to self: Restrict dimension door to line of sight in the future. Oh, wait, that was already my policy, I just forgot. }:P

Werewolves and Vampires

Damn it! Fricking LJ eating my post... I normally copy all the text before hitting post, but this time I accidentally clicked on 'rich text' mode while going to do that, and it cleared the text. Grrr. Grrrrrrr. GRRRR.

Anyway, what is it with werewolves and vampires? They just seem to go together so nicely, like chocolate and peanut butter...

I had a dream about werewolves and vampires last night. For some reason, I get the impression that it was based on magic the gathering, even though it didn't really have any elements that related -- the overall plot (if you could call it that) was a combination of Harry Potter and me reading Harry Potter, the battle scenes were visualized like something out of Heroes of Might and Magic, and the main characters were werewolves and vampires.

They were *nice* werewolves and vampires, though. The werewolves looked like pretty country girls -- human ones -- and liked to hang out in the bright sun under pretty little trees in the grass and the breeze. I think they were my family, which is about the only way I'd know they were werewolves.

They had a truce of some sort with the vampires -- the vampires agreed not to suck anyone's blood, and in return the werewolves left their flowers alone.

The vampires, you see, were mostly vegetarians. They started their life as parasitic flowers, which attached themselves to a tree (including the werewolves' trees) with some sort of glue, and multiplied along the branch. Then their petals turned into butterfly wings, and the butterflies (that were actually young vampires) fluttered about drinking nectar from flowers.

Then, eventually, they changed form again, into perfectly normal looking scary goth chicks, and moved into the city and hung out in night clubs. At one point in the story I had a disturbing encounter with one -- not unpleasant, really, just disturbing. I'm not sure what they drank in that form, although the... er... encounter gave one possibility. Eheh.

AT ANY RATE, the vampires and werewolves were on the brink of war, for some reason I didn't really understand, because I just heard the adults talking about it in the background, while I was trying to read through this book about a young kid drawn into a world of vampires and werewolves.

Urge to kill... rising...

I'm getting royally pissed off by La Pucelle Tactics, now. Around chapter nine, they start introducing the inherently annoying mechanic of 'win this map without hurting any of the enemies'.

The first time you run into it, it's not so bad. The people you aren't supposed to hurt are really hard to kill anyway, and you just have to kill the boss, who tends to want to be in the front lines anyway. Later, you have a reprise where the boss runs away from you, and you only have one character, but your one character is powered up and has long ranged attacks, so there you go.

THEN you get to Chapter 10. After fifty million hours of cutscenes, in which the empire's witch-hunting guards are made out to be complete scum of the earth, deserving to be wiped out to the last man, you finally go up against them... and Alouette says, 'you know what to do, Prier'. 'Yeah yeah, I know. I won't hurt any of them.'

ARGH.

The guards are weak. Strong attacks, but weak defense, and low hit points. So you can't bring out any of your strong characters, or they'll die from counter attacks. That's manageable -- you can swap out weapons for extra armor. And in fact, for the first couple maps, it's not *too* annoying (aside from the fact that you're not actually getting to, you know, play the game, instead just having to run away from everything).

But then you get to the third map, where one step away from your base panel, the enemies are lined up completely blocking your path. And behind them, more enemies block all the other choke points. So as soon as you let them have a turn, assuming you have anyone outside your base panel, you're instantly swarmed with enemies two deep. That you're not allowed to hurt.

In disgaea, this would not be a problem. You'd have your monk punch them to other squares, or use your spear-guys to hop over their heads, or just pick them up and throw them. La Pucelle doesn't have any of that.

Did I mention that when you run away from a battle, you don't get to save before the next one?

After running to the previous map and back about six times, I managed to figure out that if I left a decoy in ONE SPECIFIC square, the guards would happen to open a path along the bottom of the map, which looked like a high-jumping character could take to sneak to the exit... but no, there was a six-inch high rock blocking that path, so of course you can't go that way.

Eventually I just turned it off in frustration. I think I'm going to just play it again (at least it let me save after the damn cutscenes), kill EVERY SINGLE FUCKING GUARD, and accept a 'bad ending' for that chapter. Grrr.