((Radio furnished me with copies of the
hellhole chatroom Discord talk about Chalice. Thank you, Radio!))
[01:02] Mr.Bones: because makign spell steel is difficult? Only ones makign it are the alchemists
[01:03] Mr.Bones: guys you were gonna attack, then chickened out of
[01:03] Radio Controlled: Hmm, why DID we not do that again?
[01:03] Radio Controlled: I'm sure there was a reason, but for the life of me I can't say I know it.
It was pointed out by someone that the Alchemists are the only people making and selling some things we want to buy, like spellsteel. They will no longer be making and selling it if we murder them all. Thus, I decided to go for the acid pits instead, since they also sounded like a good place to get harmful chemicals. I wanted harmful chemicals specifically to pair with Cloud, which is now limited, so the hex isn't as important anymore...
[01:00] ER: Sigh, why didn't we take appearwherecasteristhinking and dead for gang words? That would be entertaining.
[01:00] ER: just one free kill every mission provided you have good int
appearWhereCasterIsThinking is a poor targeting spell, which lets you target one attack. Which will just fail if you don't have a strong harmful word to pair with it or if your opponent rolls well on vit. It's good for teleporting, but aside from that fireForward is comparable and far cheaper; that makes the word redundant, and Many is better at redundancy.
Dead requires an enchant, which means strength+Int, two rolls to fail, one which we suck at. Anyway, you can already make things dead with Dex alone, which we're good at. Again, redundancy. Clockwork works as both a buff and material, while repair is godly.
...This was facetious, wasn't it? Eh.
[00:16] Mr.Bones: Yep, the 4v4 means it didn't totally overpower the spell and destroy it
[00:16] Mr.Bones: just almost completely
[00:17] Mr.Bones: the spell has to roll against the potency of the attacker's spell...or something else if you just throw shit in.
[00:17] Mr.Bones: like bullets for instance
[00:36] Mr.Bones: The mage breaker doesn't have any abilities or things you couldn't get
[00:37] Mr.Bones: His spells are all made via the spell list
[00:54] ER: Also one thing that added to the confusion was that PW said in IRC that he was immune to almost any magic.
[00:55] Mr.Bones: I said he was immune to magic because you guy's magic is throwing shit at man
[00:55] Mr.Bones: and he's pretty resistant to that
[00:56] Mr.Bones: I believe I also told you he was quite literally made of Titanium
[01:05] Mr.Bones: Wait till you can see what he can do with his left foot
[01:05] Mr.Bones: or right hand
[01:05] Mr.Bones: or left hand
[01:05] Mr.Bones: or sword
[01:05] Mr.Bones: or spear
[01:06] Mr.Bones: or shield
[01:06] Mr.Bones: or chestplate
[01:06] Mr.Bones: or helmet
[01:06] Mr.Bones: etc
That last bit is especially scary for me. While PW could've been joking, everything he named is something you can slap a tattoo on, or store a spell in. Back in Perplexicon, Piecewise gave us a boss called "Null" who had tattoos storing spells on every body part, along with enchanted equipment, and he supposedly never cast a single spell using words, relying exclusively on stored spells. He utterly curbstomped everyone who tried to fight him, anyway, and only decided not to kill them because he was trying to spark creativity. People at the time were far,
far stronger than RR is right now, and had access to unlimited uses of every word in the spell list, and it
still didn't help.
This mage breaker is acting, and has been described, distressingly like Null if Null wasn't playing around.
Furthermore, while we certainly
could spam spells and hope to get lucky rolls, it's not a wise idea. Any decent spell needs to pass a dex check, maybe an int check, an anti-magic effect (No, the anti-spell isn't just a cheesegrater. Else it wouldn't have successfully grated the titanium on a 4v4.),
and then finally a vit check. That's four chances to fail against likely large die sizes, and beyond that we don't even know what spells can harm him. "Acid Cloud MortarShot Many" might kill him, even if he's metal, but projectiles seem very unlikely to work by word if god, gasses and fire flat won't work if he's metal, and... we don't really have any other options, do we? Enchanting him into (flammable!) white phosphorus might let us incinerate him, but that requires getting Raven to melee range in one piece (hard), then her beating his dex with d6 str, his end with d10 int, his magic protection (and highly worded-up body) with d10 pot, all by decent margins (actually less hard but still difficult), and if she fails she loses her only chance to harmfully enchant him. And then we lose Permanent Repair when she dies. Which hurts extra, because Repair is now limited to one cast per mission.
Oh, and again, even if we win, that probably just means we'll get to fight more than one of these guys later. ._.
So yeah. I really think we should play to our strength and
fly away. We've got three copies of Crow, which is a good escape word, a lot of Cloud for cover, Wall for obstacles, and we could even use fireForward and mortarShot to make sure we're very fast crows.
Hopefully. Piecewise might rule that a crow fired out of a mortar still only flies four spaces with d4 speed.We retreat to the Dreamer gate, and abandon the chemical pits. There's a chance he won't realize how the crow flies, and even if he does, it's a better position to make a last stand from, we'd have support from the Dreamers--
unless they betray us for dragging them into this, but even then they're still an easier fight--and we have a much higher chance of talking him out of fighting. After all, destroying the gate is much worse for the merchants than letting an intimidated gang run away into The Unreal. He'd be more concerned with the gangs who are actually still operating in the merchant's territory.
So yeah, my vote is to fly. Except for Sarge, who's fast enough to just run, because we don't have enough Crows.
....Oh, and Egan, can you please repair Corven's armor too? Else he'll just die to the followup cast. >.>