7.5 KiB
The Two Year Emperor
-
Author: u/Lord_Drol NERV*
-
URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9669819/1/The-Two-Year-Emperor
-
Score: 11
-
Created: 2014-01-01T09:16:53
Post:
Comments:
u/Lord_Drol [+5] NERV (6 minutes later)
I was reminded to post this by the recent post of a link to the Tippyverse on this subreddit. The antagonists in this story end up basically being the Tippyverse, and it is awesome to see that in action in the hands of a talented author.
u/iamzeph [+2] (13 hours later)
Saw this on that other thread - good story so far!
Edit: I'm up to the current chapter, 20, and I enjoy the story and where /u/eaglejarl is going with it, but some of the dialog is a bit goofy and sometimes inconsistent (minor spoilers).
u/eaglejarl [+1] (3 days later)
I was definitely shooting for Emory; glad I hit it. grin Where did I do Cockney though? I don't actually know what Cockney should sound like, so if I wrote Cockney it was purely accidental. Oh, and as to the weight thing -- "better than the average American" says less about Jake and more about my opinion of the average American :)
u/iamzeph [+1] (3 days later)
Well, maybe it's just me - I pretty much always hear various British accents in my head whenever I read fantasy-setting dialog - only when Duncan was in drill sergeant mode did that drop away and I heard Emory :)
Anyway, I'm glad the chapters are shorter so they come out more frequently (I hope)
u/eaglejarl [+1] (3 days later)
Once a week on Saturday; tonight's will be up soonish.
Weekly seems to be about what I can sustain. For Christmas and New Year's I posted bonus chapters, but I can't stay ahead of that regularly.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I'm up to the current chapter (20) and like it a lot, though there are some rules things that the dugeon master in me frowns at. I'm quite curious about where the plot is going.
u/eaglejarl [+5] (a day later)
(Author speaking)
Thanks, glad you like it! Out of curiosity, what are the rules things that you object to? I've been trying to stay within very strict RAW (although by "very strict", what I mean is "if it's not explicitly and unambiguously disallowed, then it's ok" :) ) If there are goofs, I'd like to fix them.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Mostly just the bard tower. I mean, they already point out that it doesn't work because they don't have enough bards, but:
- Bardic music is once per day per bard level, Inspire Competence lasts two minutes max, a max level bard can therefore only Inspire Competence for 40 minutes a day (that's 3.5, in Pathfinder it's even worse - tracked in total rounds per day, usually well below a hundred)
- Inspire Competence provides a competence bonus, and multiple competence bonuses don't stack. (An early version of the 3.0 or 3.5 DMG had ioun stones as being untyped bonuses instead of enhancement bonuses, which led to lots of fights within our group.)
Easy fix for that is for those things to be pointed out, it doesn't substantially change the story.
Also, by RAW in the DMG, you don't get XP for defeating summoned monsters (which happens in chapter 3):
Do not award XP for creatures that enemies summon or otherwise add to their forces with magic powers. An enemy's ability to summon or add these creatures is part of the enemy's CR already.
So defeating a summoned monster doesn't count as defeating a real monster ... though XP is one of those weird things in a setting like this, because it's normally handled under DM discretion and while there's the CR and EL charts and stuff, they don't do all that great a job of laying out concrete rules (like, for example, those wizards who killed thousands of men with their orbital bombardment - should they have jumped five levels? If you're just going by CR and EL, then probably).
u/eaglejarl [+3] (a day later)
Ah, good point about the bard tower, I completely missed that. Thanks for pointing it out; I'll fix it. Now that I think about it, though, you don't need bards. Just jam commoners in there and have them use Aid Another. For that, a tower probably wouldn't be the best (more believable). You'd want something more like an assembly line.
As to the arenas...yep, you don't get experience for the monsters, you get experience for beating the mage that summoned them. Honestly, this is actually better -- the mage will have a higher CR than the monster.
It could also be argued that there are two other issues with the arenas:
You only get (at most) 1/2 XP for nonlethal combats.
If the DM was against you, then no XP would be awarded for a staged fight like this where there were no consequences for failure. But, if the battle consists of "beat your opponent unconscious", then there actually is something on the line, and I would rule you should get half. The RAW supports that (or, at least, does not flatly rule against it), so it works for my story.
None of these things really matters, though -- as long as you get some XP, the idea works. Because it didn't matter too much, I left it out instead of going into the full fussy details.
As to the wizards leveling after the orbital bombardment...that's freaking brilliant. I definitely need to write that in. Is that actually doable? I seem to remember something in the rules that says you can't get enough experience to jump you more than one level at a time -- that you will cap out one XP short of the second level up. Even if that's so, I think it's a crock and I'm going to add it as a house rule; I'll put it in the list on chapter 10.
Thanks for reading, and for pointing all this out.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
For XP on ridiculously high level encounters, the DMG has this to say:
However, an encounter in which the PCs defeat something far above their own level (CRs higher than their level by eight or more) was probably the result of fantastic luck or a unique set of circumstances, and thus a full XP award may not be appropriate. You're going to have to make these decisions.
It's another thing that the DMG is vague on. They've still got everything done in formula though, so it would be possible to derive the values.
AD&D did have explicit language stating that you couldn't gain more than one level at a time ("Once a character has points which are equal to or greater than the minimum number necessary to move upward in experience level, no further experience points can be gained until the character actually gains the new level.") but that language didn't make the jump between editions.