The Spoony Experiment - Because bad movies and games deserve to be hurt back!

http://www.facebook.com/randall.bohannan Randall Bohannan

Kewl–been ages since I was playing In Sigil, city of portals :) Tons of adventure ops here.

JD Zero

All these CM stories.. I miss rolling my dice. They’re gathering dust. :c

http://twitter.com/LazarheaD Lazar Gruev

MMMMMMMMMMM… donut on a pizza GLHGLHLUHHLH…

http://twitter.com/plastikloeffel EL

Another great CM, keep up the good work =)

http://twitter.com/Bolt_V3 Andrew Joyce

Actually, if he didn’t have to sleep, rest, eat or whatever else… he COULD get out in a not unreasonable amount of time. I would assume a minotaur can run faster than a human… say a flat out run of 50 miles per hour. Normally wouldn’t be able to keep that up, but if he could in the maze… hundred million divided by fifty, divided by twenty four, divided by three sixty five…

He could get out in two hundred and twenty eight years, if he never stopped running at top speed.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1631667413 James Walker

How long could you keep your resolve, running at top speed for 228 years down a hallway of blank featureless stone? You’d go insane far before you got even close to the end of the tunnel. I mean, it’s not like you even have a maze to occupy yourself with. You have absolutely no outside input . We’ve all seen people get massively bored with more stimulus in a laughably small fraction of 228 years. It’s not a very nice fate no matter how you slice it.
- http://twitter.com/MichaelCWells Michael Wells
  
  I think in that situation his mind would give out but his body would revert to conditioned memory. Like writing your name you do it so often for so long you do it automatically. Long after his mind gave out he would find himself running face first into a door.. and then still running against the unopened door.
- http://twitter.com/Bolt_V3 Andrew Joyce
  
  That would be the catch. Physically, he could do it… it would be the isolation and the mental strain that would cause the issues.

http://www.facebook.com/VegasManX Eddie Navarro

I suppose if I really wanted to hammer it onto my player if he tried that with me, I would remove the no rest, sleep, eat, whatever from the equation. I’d make him suffer for those million miles as he starves and thirsts and tires his way towards the goal that (though ridiculously far off as it is) just became ten times more difficult if you’re starving, thirsty, and exhausted. This is why thou dost not fucketh with the Lady of Pain.

http://twitter.com/Brut3man Ioannis Maniatis

In Torment, if you piss of the Lady two times you just die. The game says that even your immortality cannot save you.

http://www.facebook.com/ChusterMerino Chuster M. Merino

The Tale of the Revenge Characters!

http://twitter.com/TychoShiel Tycho Shiel

When you asked what I would have done, the first thing I thought was to create and ABSTRACT maze. Something psychological. Imagine sitting him in a smallish maze and letting him navigate it in a day flat. Then, when he finishes it, put him in a supernatural Truman Show. Make replicas of everybody and everything he knows, give him horrible luck and make his life Hell. Set s psychological requirement for escaping, such as volitionally living the life of one of those Keeper things for a week out of penance. But make him figure that out.

But that’s just me.

JD Zero

LOL Were I ever to meet Noah, i may not get along with him, but he definitely goes on unfocused conversational tagents like me… It’s like talking about Garfield and some how ending on Mars Exploration.

Also.. I remember there being a campaign where something higher than Ao ordered him to take away the power of the lesser Gods once, by essentially making them deaf to the prayers of their followers or something.. So yeah. There’s always a bigger fish apparently.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

Ao clearly stated in the Time of Troubles novels that even he answered to someone.

http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

Monsters Manual 2nd edition states that: Minotaurs are immune to maze spells.

http://www.dotd.com/mm/MM00211.htm

http://twitter.com/trivianinja Ian Fay

It’s still in 3rd edition as well, it’s listed in the spell description for Maze (page 252 in the 3.5 PHB, last sentence of the entry for Maze).

Even seems to have made it into the Pathfinder base book entry for Maze.
doresh

Maze spells do not equal interdimensional pocket dimensions – ESPECIALLY not the ones created by the Lady of Pain. Otherwise, this would require there’s something that can resist her, but there is nothing that can.
- http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki
  
  Hey, i’m telling you where the guy got it from, not that it makes sense or applies in any way to the situation.
  - doresh
    
    I know it has to come from someone. But he should’ve thought it through a bit better ^^
http://www.facebook.com/david.m.edgren David Michael Edgren

Not only does the 2nd ed Monstrous Manual state that, but the Humanoids Handbook states it as well. I’m betting that the guy assumed that since he’s immune to Maze spells that would mean he’s immune to mazes in general, which is pretty logical. However the lady of pain doesn’t cast spells, so this ability is hull and void anyway.

I’m really surprised that Spoony overlooked this in his research as it’s rather plain to see in the Humanoid’s Handbook. Then again his memory of 2nd ed isn’t all that great…such as confusing the Doormouse and the March Hare in Dungeonland XD.

We love you Spoony, and whenever you get confused or forget something we will lovingly give you the info! These stories are awesome even if certain things are forgotten or confused over time. I’ve loved this series since the squirtgun wars episode, as I had recently seen the DMSO in the books shortly before it came out. We took your advice and did not start a squirtgun war of our own in our campaign.

GunsmithKitten

Don’t ever, ever, EVER tell PC’s that there’s something they cannot kill. There will always be a decent chance that your group will include the breed that will try. They’ll meet the usual fate, but don’t think that merely presenting something on the power level of the Lady or a terrasque is automatically enough to deter this breed of player. Just let them learn the hard way.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Miles/100001710632442 Chris Miles

You actually want to get mazed once in torment. You can get some good RP stuff out of it that adds to the game.

http://www.facebook.com/joshua.w.hastings.5 Joshua William Hastings

I have mixed feelings about characters that simply have ‘don’t try it’ put on them. I don’t like them because their existence seems to be something like going against a personal GM rule of mine, being “Don’t say no, say Yes, but…”

Then again, if there are characters that the players really shouldn’t fuck with, it prevents a possible situation where they become so powerful it’s difficult to come up with challenges that might make the scenario fun. Short of inventing monsters specifically designed to kill them as swiftly as possible, what can touch them? Kinda goes back to the superheroes thing, when you think about it.

JenxRodwell

Well for one thing, the whole “you can’t kill the Lady of Pain” situation shouldn’t really ever be present. The Lady is not an NPC. She’s a background feature.

But if you really, really wanted to kill her the Planewalker site/forum actually had this as an article in the fanzine they made called “Killing the Lady of Pain” and the short version is this – If the DM is ok with the Lady of Pain dying, then it should be possible. Mind you, it will have nothing to do with combat, stats or skills. No individual character or party will ever be able to physically confront her. Period.

However there are things in the Outer Planes that do some really, really weird shit. The article actually discussed various theoretical ways in which to defeat her, and stressing the fact that this thing should be basically the plot of the entire campaign.

And another thing also discussed was – Ok, you somehow managed to destroy her. What now? Maybe SIgil vanishes. Maybe the whole Outer Planes stop existing. Maybe you kill her and then she simply resurrects herself immediately and kills all of you. Maybe one of the characters simply becomes transformed into the next Lady of Pain and the circle continues on unbroken as it always has.

And really, if you’re playing Planescape the actual combat and/or spellcasting abilities of the characters shouldn’t really matter in…more or less anything. Planescape is about power, belief and philosophy. You become powerful there not by simply gaining levels and casting better spells. Shit, most things in the Planes can cast more powerful spells than a wizard by just barely thinking about it. No, you progress by gaining power. Real power. Power over people and other beings, power over what they believe in and what they think is true and right.

I personally would run a campaign about killing the Lady of Pain only with a group I know will be able to think outside the box and won’t simply try to cheese the rules in some way. Because, seriously, I don’t care what it says in the fucking manual. I don’t care what it says in the fucking character sheet. I’m the DM, so if I say it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t fucking happen. That’s what you have a DM for – to be a mediator of the collective story being told.
- http://www.facebook.com/joshua.w.hastings.5 Joshua William Hastings
  
  Ah, I see, so it’s more of a contextual, fluff thing rather than a levels and stats thing. I usually try and do things like that, and did so a lot when I started GMing, but most of the groups I’d play with would usually focus on numbers. It’s not that they didn’t want to follow a plot, but that elements of the plot must be reflected in the numbers found in the books.
  
  This kinda leads to a problematic situation where one of my players unintentionally creates a powerhouse, and since situations are all resolved in dice rolls, the game becomes boring because that one dude can do, basically, everything.
  
  I guess a close encounter with beings similar to Lady of Pain can be a fairly decent educational tool. After all, there’s only so much ‘punishment’ people can take before realising a physical confrontation simply won’t work, but there’s also the possibility that people who want numbers more than story in their encounters won’t learn or simply give up. While I plan on using such a being for a Zelda campaign I’m working on, I may have to stress that the campaign will be more about story than numbers before starting.
  
  Also, I suppose what I mean is that I’d more than likely be tempted to warn players of consequences that may come from actions like “I piss off the Lady of Pain”, though, if I was feeling particularly harsh, I’d go along with it, deliver the due punishment and move on as appropriate.
  - JenxRodwell
    
    Honestly, if the group wants to slash things up with swords and blast things with fireballs…they really shouldn’t be playing Planescape in the first place. Not only due to purely thematic differences, but as a setting Planescape just…isn’t really that suited for hack and slash. You could do it, of course, but a good GM can basically do anything, so that’s not saying much.
    
    However the setting doesn’t really have any prominently stated up dungeons or locations that are well defined where such sort of number-crunching, axe-wielding gameplay can occur. Things in the Outer Planes simply tend to be both way way too powerful and way too vague and metaphysical to be approached as as a simple dungeon crawl.
- labeth
  
  Yeah, I agree with you entirely.
  
  My group had a campaign dealing somewhat with the Lady of Pain a few years ago. The group didn’t kill her, but she was slowly dying (I can’t remember why, but there was a reason) and “infected” one of the party with her essence. That character’s personality was eventually sort of hollowed out and she became the new Lady of Pain.

http://twitter.com/XxWolfCallxX William Weggans

Love these CM episodes they are so awesome.

JenxRodwell

I am watching a Counter Monkey about Planescape. I haven’t felt this good after coming home from work in MONTHS. Thank you, thank you Spoony.

“Walking” trough the Great Wheel, aside from being a monumental stupid thing to do considering planes like Ysgard, Limbo, The Abyss, Gehenna, Baator, Acheron and such, is impractical time wise, as Spoony pointed out, because the Planes are infinite. Yup. You have Infinite planes, yet they are all next to each other. That is simply because they are close to each other not in any geographical sense, but in a purely philosophical one. As such traversing on foot from one plane to the other is possible simply due to change in your thinking. Otherwise you’ll be traversing the Beastlands for eternity (or at least something there eats you. Or stomps on you.)

Since I could probably write a fucking essay on Planescape that’s all I’ll be commenting on, unless someone wants to know more that Spoony didn’t cover.

Oh and I absolutely agree with the title of this episode – You DO NOT fuck with the Lady of Pain. Ever.

kallikanzarid

Sounds like the Shadows of Amber.
- http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
  
  The shows of Amber?! You know Amber?! <3 Amber!!

http://twitter.com/ManiacMKD Martin Dorman

Why is it Minatours that try to break campaigns? Every time, if someone plays a minatour, they will do the dumbest stuff. Even you play as one it will tempt you to charge in to poke the gods. It’s like Row Row Fight the Powa in PC form.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

I never did that. I always played my Minotaurs as cagey quiet types who did a lot of observing and very little talking. I managed to get a Krynnish Minotaur Fighter/Mage up to 12th level playing that way.

http://www.facebook.com/benjamin.keen2 Benjamin Keen

Hey Spoony, please do another video on your bookshelf, you haven’t done one for donkeys, and that was great and fun, pleeeease do another

http://twitter.com/trivianinja Ian Fay

Ah, the War in Sigil. Which led to two memorable character moments for me.

1) That time I had sex with an Arcanaloth. (It had information we needed, I was a Sensate. Made sense at the time.)

2) The battle at the Armory. The players split evenly on both sides, and my PC turned the tide of the battle. Who knew 14th level Invokers were really useful on large-scale battlefields?

http://www.facebook.com/vextra Chris Jeffery

Man I love this story and that you’re doing Planescape. If you have more Planescape stories I’d love to hear them, its by far my favourite setting and always, always produces interesting stories. One slight correction- Archeron is the plane with the endless conflict cubes, not Carceri. And your solution with the Maze is inspired, I don’t think I’d have come up with something like that that fast.

As for his solution- I vaguely recall reading somewhere in the Demigods and Deities that there was a Plane on the Abyss ruled by a Minotaur God in a huge Labyrinth, and that Minotaurs cannot get lost in that, so thats possibly what he was recalling aswell.

http://twitter.com/trivianinja Ian Fay

Hey, Blipdoolpoolp becomes really important in Night Below, which is a really good mod!

And he’s an Aboleth god.

http://airos-the-tiger.tumblr.com/ Airos

She is a Kuo-Toa Deity, not Aboleth.
- http://twitter.com/trivianinja Ian Fay
  
  Ah, my bad. That mod’s got a big city of kuo-toa that’s being run by an Aboleth, and I think I got it confused.
  - http://airos-the-tiger.tumblr.com/ Airos
    
    I kept thinking she was a Sladd Goddess until I looked it up, which is a whole other state of confusion since Sladd aren’t really aquatic. =P
- http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki
  
  so is she the naked chick with a lobster head? that one always confused me and my one eyed friend.
  - http://airos-the-tiger.tumblr.com/ Airos
    
    To be honest, I can’t recall ever seeing any images of her. The groups I was ever a part of typically used homebrew pantheons.
    
    I’m not sure if they had Bilpdoolpoolp in mind when they came up with the saying “if it smells like fish, have a dish”, so make of that what you will. XD
  - http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
    
    She’s the one, yes.
doresh

Pah, my Aboleth whorship Cthulhu and no one else XD

http://www.facebook.com/nicholas.honer Nicholas Honer

I don’t have time to watch this right now, but I am seriously looking forward to doing so later.

M_Appel

I just noticed something. It really looks like someone needs a haircut! ;D

http://twitter.com/AlexChiu88 Alex Chiu

Hi Noah, In D&D 3rd Edition Monster Manual. Page 137, the Minotaur has a ability called Natural Cunning (EX.) “Although Minotaurs are not especially intelligent, they possess innate cunning and logical ability. This makes them immune to maze spells, prevents them from ever becoming lost, and enables them to track enemies. Further, they are never caught flat-footed.” I’ve been watching your videos for years since The Thing video, but have never replied to comments. Just wanted to say, keep it up!

http://twitter.com/AlexChiu88 Alex Chiu

https://twitter.com/AlexChiu88/status/273882872488792066/photo/1
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000270812903 Luke Liszewski

Problem is, they were playing AD&D, so I would assume 3rd ed. was yet to be released.
- http://twitter.com/AlexChiu88 Alex Chiu
  
  Your right Luke. I was just watching the episode, and I haven’t played DND in a long time. This show gives me nostalgia, and it hit me that I remembered in DND 3rd edition that Minotaurs are in fact immune to maze spells. I replied by instinct. I assume Noah is not a D&D 3rd Edition fan.
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Nash-Knight/740228999 Nash Knight
    
    It’s the same in the second edition: “Minotaurs are not particularly intelligent, but are extremely cunning and have excellent senses. They have a +2 bonus on their surprise rolls, have infravision, and can track prey by scent like a ranger, with 50% accuracy. They always pursue an unfamiliar scent. Minotaurs are immune to maze spells. “
    - http://www.facebook.com/reinis.rinka Reinis Rinka
      
      Yeah.. that’s a lot of time spent looking in the wrong places for Spoony
- Vlademir1
  
  I’d suspect it to have been some of the errata and experimental changes that often showed up in Dragon.
  
  Of course as I pointed out to my friend just now by IM, who says that the Lady’s “mazes” are physical mazes in the traditional physical sense, after all “maze” can be used metaphorically. Then there is the potential of what form the exit takes, which I’d suspect to be just another of her portals with whatever esoteric activation requirements. Add to that then where does the exit lead, because it’s not likely to be into Sigil, and the potential of “do you even want to take the risk of leaving the maze” ultimately becomes very real.
  - Segatron
    
    I was thinking of this myself. I think that by my definition, Silent Hill would be a labyrinth. One where you do not solve it by finding a door out, you get a door out for solving it.
    
    “The Shadow of the Lady of Pain falls upon you, and you find yourself in a moderately furnished living room with a PC. Using an old Commodore 64 joystick, you must complete ‘I wanna be the guy’ on the hardest setting without using save states. Every day that you fail to do this the joystick becomes more and more encrusted with cheeto dust and dried splats of mountain dew.”
- josh martyn
  
  it was in AD&D too, players handbook
- http://www.facebook.com/elliott.l.anderson Elliott Lee Anderson
  
  “They are
  
  immune to maze spells” Is a direct quote from AD&D Humanoids
Mateusz K.

There is an old fantasy board game called Talisman from Games Workshop, and in one of the expansions there is a minotaur player character – and in the description of his skills it states he does not get lost in a maze. I doubt it was the basis for this guy’s idea, but you never know…

damn, now I want to watch spoony play Planescape…
http://www.facebook.com/lynn.hansen.338658 Lynn Hansen

Ditto for 3.5.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Onnuri-Kwak/513138744 Onnuri Kwak

Moral of the story would not be “don’t fuck with LOP”, but it would be “Don’t Fuck with GM who can screw you over somehow.”

http://twitter.com/GamesSaveLives silbmaerto

Honestly, I would love to see a game where an entire party just tries to find ways to screw over the Lady of Pain. Played properly, they would almost certainly never win, but it would be fun just to see how creative the players get.

http://twitter.com/GamesSaveLives silbmaerto

On a completely unrelated note, what would be the most efficient way to generate an infinite supply of nuclear weapons in a fantasy setting?
- http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West
  
  Magic, I guess. I’m sure there has to be an alchemy formula for turning lead into plutonium.
- DarkNacht
  
  Most fantasy setting with high or medium level magic have a spell that can create any simple item that is not a precious metal so just create lots of half orbs or plutonium/uranium and smash them together.
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Nash-Knight/740228999 Nash Knight
    
    You can’t start a nuclear reaction by smashing pieces of radioactive elements together lol. And in a magic environment there’s got to be an easier way to generate that kind of destructive power, just create a spell of equal might. AND it wouldn’t work. Not on a regular god, not on Lady of pain.
Vlademir1

It’s not quite the same thing but I remember some years back reading the notes of a campaign that happened entirely within one of her mazes. The site I read that on seems to unfortunately no longer exist however. I’ll have to look and see if I saved a text copy somewhere.

Mnerp

I like what Spoony’s doing with his hair now. He looks nice with a Ponytail.

magnusk_98

The Pathfinder Bestiary entry actually spells out the Minotaurs ability to not get lost very clearly. Pathfinder Minotaurs actually can’t get Maze’d at all.

“Natural Cunning (Ex): Although minotaurs are not especially intelligent, they possess innate cunning and logical ability. This gives them immunity to maze spells and prevents them from ever becoming lost. Further, they are never caught flat-footed.”

Pathfinder wasn’t around when Spoony was 18, though. ^^

doresh

If anything can make them get lost, it’s the Lady ^_^

(And what does cunning and logic help when you’re trapped in a non-euclidian maze without exit?)
- JenxRodwell
  
  If you look at the Planescape: Torment game, Ravel’s maze is not really maze like. It’s basically a garden. The exit is not an actual physical exit too. I mean, that’d be just silly.
  
  So yeah, Minotaurs not being lost in mazes hardly matters in this situation.
  - http://twitter.com/Brut3man Ioannis Maniatis
    
    Isn’t the Key to Ravel’s maze the lack of wanting to escape from it?
    - JenxRodwell
      
      Could be? I haven’t replayed Torment in a couple of years now, so my memory is growing fuzzy on the details. Huh. A good reason to go replay it again!

http://www.facebook.com/SergioZamoraGrancelli Sergio Zamora Grancelli

You know? I love that intro you made. Good job. Watching all CM eps :P

Fredrik Andersen

Great story as always Spoony! I have to ask; You often reference Cthulhu and you have stated that you have been playing the RPG, I would love if you’d tell a story from those campaigns, will this maybe happen in the future?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Christoffer-Izzy-Andersson/100000113924909 Christoffer Izzy Andersson

Soooo….can you woo this Lady of Pain? I’m picturing a very stereotypical bard-character who feels an instinctive need to flir with anything that carries the title “Lady”, offering up flowers to her with a great big grin on his face before he disappears into a maze, leaving the flowers to fall to the ground.

JenxRodwell

Well you could. For..I dunno, a few minutes I guess?

Not that the Lady will appear to kill you, that’d be giving the troublesome insect too much attention. No, more likely the Harmonium (the self-appointed police of Sigil) or a random demon or warrior or someone will see what you’re doing and just arrest or outright kill him on the spot, lest the Lady does decide to show up.

And interesting fact about the Lady – the flaying? It’s not always intentional. If you so much as have her shadow fall over you (and she has a BIG shadow), you’re just flayed open. Simple as that.

doresh

Mmh, minotaur pirate mages…

http://twitter.com/Dreamking89 Jon Waterstraat

I think in 3E (I’m not sure if that was around when Spoony was 18) minotaurs have a power that basically says they’re “never lost”. It explicitly says that the maze spell doesn’t work on them and that they have an innate sense of direction.

Still a good response to your player, though.

Wulfrik the Wanderer

Blibby is the god of the Kua-Toa, actually. Not that it matters since he’s still fairly useless.

Also, you talking about Torment makes me really want to go play it, holy hell.

ScreamingDoom

Isn’t he the one who can summon in any amount of Kua-Toa, though?

So, yeah, he is fairly useless and actually pretty killable for a high level party, he can summon literally millions of Kua-Toa instantly, which would present a bit of a problem.
- http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
  
  Ahem… Blibby is a she. I remember there being much juvenile snickering and giggling over her being drawn as a fully nude woman save for a lobster head and claws in the 1st edition Legends and Lore.

Aschthebloody

so the lady of pain is the infinite chaos that spawned existence itself…yea fucking with that would be the worst thing that you would spend the rest of eternity regretting if your lucky

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1271696023 Adrian Burt

So let’s see, you don’t age, hunger, or tire in a maze. It’s 100,000,000 miles long. A minotaur can walk 24 miles a day. Assuming Sigil has 365 days a year and has no leap years, it will take 11,415 years and six months to get out of that maze.

Michael Sporzynski

As it doesn’t get tired, nothing stops it from running all the way through – so it can actually cover more ground than 24 miles. It’s still a pretty long time/distance, though ;)
- http://twitter.com/Brut3man Ioannis Maniatis
  
  yeah, but how many years of constant running have to pass before his brain turns into mush?
  - Carteeg_Struve
    
    Personally I would also have had the hallway ever so slightly (just about unnoticeable for the first century or two) always inclining upward more and more.
    
    Good luck not sliding backwards some come latter year 8,347.
    
    Then I’d have the exit move suddenly and have new corridors open up every 11,000 years.
  - http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
    
    It’s a minotaur. How could you tell?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=25102916 Bryan Edwards

The Lady Of Pain sounds A LOT like the premise of the first couple Hellraiser movies, right down to the Labyrinth…. though The Leviathan which rules over that realm (as well as the Cenobites) is more akin to something which would belong in The Abyss in Planescape.

doresh

You should check out Pathfinder’s Golarion setting. They have Zon-Khuton – a god that wandered beyond the bounds of the multiverse and came back as a cenobite XD

http://twitter.com/Stalgrim Not Important.

Is there anything in fiction that could beat The Lady of Pain? I’d be interested to know.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

The Lady is primarily defined by her lack of definition. That makes it difficult to measure, gauge, or judge virtually anything about her.

ScreamingDoom

Nice solution, Spoony. :)

My first thought was to simply have the exit open to the entrance, creating an infinite loop.

My second thought was to have the character appear in a coffin. The exit is right in front of him. The problem is there is also several thousand tons of dirt keeping the door closed.

Third thought was to have the character appear on a tiny desert island in the middle of a vast ocean. The exit? It’s in space, directly above from the character.

I hope you’ll talk about Ravenloft soon, Spoony. It’s my second favourite setting, after Planescape.

doresh

Why settle for dirt? solid would should be more fun – and that’s if the Lady actually wants him to ever reach the exist XD
http://twitter.com/Brut3man Ioannis Maniatis

My first thought would have been to have a maze where the key would have been a state of mind, or the memory of a smell. His Race ability would have been useless then.
http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West

I would have had the exit floating in mid-air over an active volcano.
“Congratulations, you escaped the maze! You plummet into a lake of lava. You die” >:)
http://www.facebook.com/people/Nash-Knight/740228999 Nash Knight

Who THE FUCK minused this response??

http://www.facebook.com/people/Will-Harper/100002349648899 Will Harper

I was thinking something similar about the maze thing. Yet now that I really think about it I would make it a hallway with the most smooth surface in all of the great wheel. He see a door out only twenty feet away. When he walks about ten feet to the door he find he is half his size. Now if he walks fifteen feet to the door he will find he is now one fourth his size he originally was. The door did not move and it is at a finite distance but he keeps getting half the size as he keeps halving the distance between him and the door. Now that can mess with peoples minds.

I did play planescape torment but I find it with a lot of text. Oh course I may have been immature at the time I played it. I am reading a long text and thin I lose patients and am like common I want to do some adventuring. And because I lose my patients I skip important stuff that I need to advance in the game. Now that I think about it I should play it again and finish it though. The story is original for a game even as of now.

http://twitter.com/MammaJambas Yomommmmma

Am I the only one who has been watching Spoony since the start, but can’t help but laugh and smile at the cheesy intro and “Hello i’m your host spoony!”
Idk it’s like are host is growing up :)

http://twitter.com/Okanehira Okanehira

Yeah its weird because most of “us” i assume have seen all spoonys stuff.

I think spoony said once though that a lot of people who had never seen his videos before only come here to watch counter monkey so I get why he feels the need to introduce himself.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Grzegorz-Wojtczyk/100000046280578 Grzegorz Wojtczyk

Updated my journal.
What can change the nature of a man?

http://www.facebook.com/adamantyr Adam Haase

Great stuff, Spoony!

The nitpicker in me HAS to say this… Carceri is not the plane with the giant cubes floating with armies fighting on them. That’s Acheron. :)

I have run a Red Steel campaign, back after the box sets came out. The setting was based upon a series of stories/articles written by Bruce Heard in Dragon Magazine called “The Voyage of the Princess Ark”, which was in turn based on Mystara, the Known World setting of the D&D box sets. The area the setting takes place in was first detailed in Module X9: The Savage Coast.

The main draw of the setting was that every PC gets an inherent spell-like power, due to the “red curse” that permeates the region. By carrying cinnabryl, the red ore, they can stave off the curse (which mutates you in weird ways) and fuel their magical abilities. Depleted cinnabryl becomes red steel, which was natural masterwork weapons and armor, and held enchantments well. There are also wheellock guns, which use materials derived from the red ore to make magical gunpowder.

http://twitter.com/Soleiji SolEiji

This is also the case of 3.5e. http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/minotaur.htm For a moment I was like “but they ARE immune”, but this is Planescape. Perhaps this didn’t become a thing until after 2e.

Either way, the solution was awesome.

http://twitter.com/Okanehira Okanehira

That CM was one of the best! “How do I get this bitch” great great story!

I was honestly laughing my ass off when you were describing the minotaur picking on the “deibus”(spelling) being Biff and just being a prick for no reason.

I would seriously love to hear more about Planescape, the first 1/2 of the video was fascinating just hearing about the world and architecture.

aaronbourque

What can change the nature of a man?

Peace1986

Just google : lady of pain 4e, I did because I think she was on the cover of the second MM for 4e, so I expected her to be 4e statted.

She isnt’t.

First google result is however some guy who homebrewed stats for the lady, at first they boo it away but from page two, people start discussing why it wouldn’t be possible, since lvl 30 chars are pretty much godlike.

SHE KICKS GODS OUT OF HER CITY!!!

Jayden Reynolds

Your description of the Planes/The Wheel makes me think of the Warp from W40K, particularly how the distances between planes change at a whim. Obviously The Wheel is great fun to play through with a clever DM.

I’m sure the Warp was inspired by The Wheel, of course, combined with various mythological hells and hyper/sub/warpspace from any number of sci-fi universes.

JenxRodwell

Not really. I’m pretty sure the original Warhammer Fantasy game existed if not before Planescape, then at least alongside it for one to really influence the other. That and the fact that the Outer Planes and the Warp have very little in common from a thematic viewpoint, aside the obvious fact that both are the Afterlife in some form or another.

And Spoony didn’t really explain planar travel all that well. The distances between planes doesn’t change. There isn’t any to begin with. All of the planes are infinite. They stretch in all directions forever. The Great Wheel is not an actual physical wheel, where the planes form a circle around each other. It’s a metaphysical wheel, it’s a wheel only in the mind of the creatures who inhabit the Planes. As such travel between planes is almost exclusively done trough portals, while travel when you’re IN the plane you want to be on, especially travel on foot has little regards for such things as “time” or “distance”, since the Plane represents a philosophical viewpoint and/or the will of a certain deity, rather than an actual physical place.

http://www.facebook.com/connor.lavell Connor Lavell

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?475080-4e-Stats-for-the-Lady-of-Pain

Darahas

You said that Planescape is sort of that kind of universe with an “anything goes” setting. Does that mean I can be that kind of rogue?

http://twitter.com/foolinc Anthony Puhl

Loved this video, though after you mentioned it, I now want to see a video (or multiple videos) on corrupted wishes.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Bennett-LaRue/100000392184293 Bennett LaRue

I goddamn love Planescape: Torment. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Drew-Taylor/1434335676 Drew Taylor

What the guy should have done is wait until you explain the maze, then say his power. That way you couldn’t pull the hallway trick (which is exactly what I thought of when you mentioned it).

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003407262296 Lorien van Arden

So he’ld walk out of the maze, flaunt his cleverness, piss some more on the Lady of Pain and spend the rest of the campaign with his intestines on the outside and his head stuck between his legs. Or did you think the Lady would award him a medal for beeing cheeky ?
http://www.facebook.com/Tjaedern Tjäder Tjäderborn

Yeah, but the the Lady of Knives would have known, so when he asks where the exit is you answer “You feel that is very very veeeeery far away.” and you give him a general direction. If he tries to find it anyway, let him find exit very fast with some miracle, but let the superlong corridor be at the end.

You know, troll him and try to let him think he won.
But wouldn’t be an equally good quick and witty “lol! counterowned! In yo face!!” as spoony, but still.

Greig Stock

Man, I don’t care if your legacy is raging at bad games.. I would love to see you do a playthrough of Torment and share your experience of it with the rest of us. I played Torment a little over a decade ago, and I swear, that game changed me.. it was just.. if I had to cheapen the whole thing and force a single word to describe the experience that I had playing Torment, going through the story and its characters, then that word would be ‘beautiful’. That game made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me shudder and think on things I hadn’t considered before, even after reading other fantasy works in the past.

That game made me love RPGs, and it made me wholeheartedly a fan of DnD, which I’d already garnered an interest for via Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate.. just.. that game was the best thing I’ve ever played. It still is. Beamdog might be making an Enhanced revamp of it, as they’ve done for Baldur’s Gate. If it sells well, compared to how poorly it sold during its original release (bad decision, releasing it around the same time as Diablo II), it might prove that there’s merit in making another Planescape game – though getting WotC to stop being cunts and allow people to make something that isn’t a 4th Ed. cRPG would be the real obstacle.

John Ferrara

Well with D&D Next in it’s play testing phase you may see a D&D RPG for computer in the near future. However without Interplay making them I don’t know how it would fair.
http://twitter.com/KyleHuckins213 Kyle Huckins

I’m not a huge RPG guy but Torment is the best game I’ve ever played regardless of genre. Incredible story and dear God did I get into it. I nearly cried near the end a few times because I was so immersed in it.
Erebus_Locke

A Lets Play of “Planescape Torment” would be really great.

It actually would be a good connection between “old spoony” who focused on games, and “new spoony” who seems to focus more on RPG stuff.
http://www.facebook.com/patrick.coyle.581 Patrick Coyle

Planescape: Torment – the greatest novel you’ll ever play.

Guus van Voorst

Its in the name ;-)

http://sbkmulletman.deviantart.com/ sbkMulletMan

Ha, my first thought of handling the minotaur situation was to just put him in a straight, seemingly endless hallway. Maybe a friendly worm will give him directions along the way.

That, or put him in a circular room and tell him to sit in the corner.

I’m really curious as to what’s on those audio discs. I wonder what a spooky, floating skull tour guide is like. I keep imagining it as a D&D version of Portal 2′s Wheatley.

Greig Stock

Oh! Another thing! I DO remember an occasion of one character, just ONE character, in the HISTORY of DnD, ever actually being able to fuck with the Lady of Pain. Just one.

Vecna.

Vecna attempted to ABSORB the Lady of Pain, as I recall it. An act which more or less resulted in the entire fuckin’ Multiverse blue-screening.

Vlademir1

Ah… Die Vecna Die! the story to explain the changes between 2E and 3E in universe. IIRC that module is among the very rarest in the 2E canon. Cheapest copy I can find via Google shopping is ~$30 in acceptable condition and ~$75 (and up) in essentially new condition. Great way to end one era and begin another though.
- Greig Stock
  
  Oh, totally. It’s also, in my opinion, the best and most intuitive method of explaining such an extreme change of rules between editions – the incident was quite literally a ‘hard-reset’ for the whole Multiverse, which resulted in things becoming ‘muddled’ from what was their previous ‘natural state’. Pretty clever, if ya ask me. Mind you, the Time of Troubles, the Fall of Netheril, and such were also a good method of explaining the previous edition shifts, as well.
  
  Personally, I think the Spellplague was the least impressive edition-shift story, if simply because while the others tried to change things while keeping a relatively cohesive narrative and acknowledgement of previous editions and their events by maintaining a linear timeline throughout it all, 4th Ed. and the Spellplague just went ‘lolno 100 time skip, everything that happened in the past is now irrelevant’ and ditched all the history we, the players, had engrossed ourselves in throughout our time playing DnD.
  
  And sure, I know you can always just homebrew in the content and such, but it just feels disheartening to know WotC has pretty much dismissed all the other stuff.
  
  ..that and knowing what happened to the Wheel and how they screwed over the whole metaphysical, belief-based setup of the Multiverse as it was introduced in Planescape pisses me off to no end. Seriously, now demons/tanar’ri are no longer manifestations of ‘chaos and evil’ in the world, and are instead just ‘evil elementals’? What the hell, WotC? Not to mention the total dismissal of the Blood War, and.. gah.. must not let the grief get the best of me..
  
  In regards to Spoony’s commentary on why Planescape didn’t sell well.. well.. pretty sure it did. It had the best artwork, the best setting, the best ideas. So naturally, it was too good to last. Some part of my gut tells me it probably had a lot to do with that bitch, Lorraine Williams (see here for context: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Lorraine_Williams) and her ‘DnD is anti-Christian’ mantra that resulted in a lot of the shortcomings of the DnD brand, and its inevitable being sold over to WotC in the end. Mind you, once WotC had the DnD brand, they failed miserably to sell a lot of the awesome franchises like Planescape, Spelljammer and so on.
  
  Hell, consider that Ravenloft is freakin’ awesome, but then WotC sued the original creator to hell and back for the rights, and didn’t know what to actually DO with the setting once they had it.. resulting in its death. Then there’s the crap like the RPGA refusing to play settings players liked (such as Planescape and D20 Modern) at gatherings, and focusing solely on the Forgotten Realms and such.. it’s fairly easy to see why it all fell apart in the end.
  
  On the plus side, we have sites like Planewalker (click here for win: http://www.planewalker.com/) and the fact that they’ve converted a lot of Planescape content over to Third Edition rules for those scallywags that can’t wrap their head around THAC0.
- http://www.facebook.com/patrick.coyle.581 Patrick Coyle
  
  “Die, Vecna, Die!” would have to be a collector’s item just for the title.
  
  Pretty sure TSR’s collapse and sale to WotC was due more to overextension and other mismanagement than any real flaw in the game itself – basically, they were putting out awesome products, but they were doing so much across so many campaign settings that they couldn’t sell it all fast enough. (Seriously, did Birthright sell well enough to warrant fourteen sourcebooks and three expansion settings?)
  
  Not sure why WotC was so hesitant to continue Planescape or Ravenloft though… maybe they stuck with just a handful of standard settings (and Eberron) because they were afraid of repeating TSR’s mistake?
  - Greig Stock
    
    Well, the general joke is that it was so good it was outdoing all the other settings.
    
    Also, it isn’t untrue that WotC generally forced the settings they wanted to sell down peoples’ throat, such as the Forgotten Realms setting, and the aforementioned ignoring of requests to run D20 Modern, Ravenloft and Planescape at RPGA events. They genuinely did ignore such things because they wanted to spread specific settigns more than others.

MichaelVonGoth

I FOUND THE STATS FOR THE LADY OF PAIN!!!

HP: More
AC: You miss
Attack: Hits
Damage: Choose effect
Saves: Yes

:)

MFlorian

It should be

Saves: Nothing can save you now.

http://twitter.com/Cronos006 Paul Deatherage

Don’t act like you’re looking for something in part 2, Spoony. Admit it , you’re just using that as an excuse to have your ass in front of the camera for as long as possible. :P

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mitchell-Bandes/100001750373297 Mitchell Bandes

As Max Bialystock taught us, if ya got it, flaunt it.

http://www.facebook.com/william.bumgarner.1 William Jeremiah Bumgarner

So….this place is the Wheel Of Morality?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mitchell-Bandes/100001750373297 Mitchell Bandes

Wheel of Morality, turn turn turn; tell us the lesson that we should learn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv6IWX1_XHQ
- Greig Stock
  
  Today’s lesson is.. slaadi lay eggs under your skin.

http://twitter.com/SageGenesis Arik ten Broeke

Cool story. :)

Two slight comments.

First, in AD&D2e there is an 8th level wizard spell called Maze. By the text of this spell, minotaurs are immune to this spell. So the player was correct in that minotaurs are immune to “Maze”. However, the LoP uses a different ability which happens to have the same name.

Second, Birthright is not like Highlander. Characters are not immortal. They took the idea of “divine right to rule” to a literal conclusion and gave nobility a divine origin. This does often come with a few special talents or powers, but not Highlander-style immortals.

The special knives are also somewhat mis-remembered. It’s possible for one noble to forcibly “inherit” the power of another by slaying him, and there happen to be a few elven relics that are slightly more efficient at it. Most of these have been lost. They’re certainly not standard equipment nor something a PC will ever own, or even see.

http://www.facebook.com/jamerific.neonj Jamerific Neonj

Anyone else having troubles with the player all of a sudden? They now take forever to load, sometimes even an hour waiting for the video to sync up

Lone Wolf

Mt Olympus? Good? How come so many fiction writers forget that the Olympian gods where pretty much evil? The most well adjusted Greek god was actually Hades – the god of the dead and the guy who kidnapped his wife which depending on which version of the myth you go by might have been a child.

Jegsimmons

dang spoony….you need a hair cut.

anyway, YES!!! i love counter monkey!

http://www.facebook.com/cptcrunchyog Zach Bonner

It cannot be cut. It has taken on a life of it’s own and now goes by the name, “Jeff Dowhighly”.
- Jegsimmons
  
  at least he can do a good cosplay of Connor Mcloud.
  
  or an 80s metal band.
  - Vlademir1
    
    Well, he could do young Connor. By the time of the Gathering in the movie Connor doesn’t really have long hair. Duncan on the other hand is quite doable with that hair.

CaptainDingaling

I’m quite sure Ultimecia could take down the Lady of Pain.

http://sbkmulletman.deviantart.com/ sbkMulletMan

She couldn’t even beat a bunch of ugly kids with memory problems.

Although, I suppose if The Lady of Pain had any sense of humor, she’d laugh herself to death over ultimecia’s poor fashion sense.
- CaptainDingaling
  
  The problem with this message board is that no one can take a joke.

Carteeg_Struve

And if you’re curious about her nights off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYJGmYsHCUg

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mitchell-Bandes/100001750373297 Mitchell Bandes

Thou shalt not fuck the Lady of Pain.

LoneWolf343

Wouldn’t RPGs of this nature be all about bragging rights?

ScreamingDoom

You know, I just had a weird thought.

What if R’yleh is the result of the Lady of Pain mazing Cthulhu? His not-dead-but-dreaming state in the ancient cyclopean city deep in the ocean is just the result of him annoying the Lady.

That’s right, asshole! The only hope you have of escaping your maze is to wait until the stars are right and get these stupid little monkey critters walking around on the surface to release you. It’s like being buried underground in a nuclear bunker and having to rely on ants to dig you out.

HOPE YOU LIKE WAITING.

http://twitter.com/Dreamking89 Jon Waterstraat

Excuse me, I have to clean my brains off the wall behind me because my mind has just been blown!!

http://www.facebook.com/people/George-Rosenbaum/100001387887487 George Rosenbaum

So the Lady of Pain doesn’t like being worshiped?

So if I burn her in effigy, what happens? Does she open a portal back home? Does she serve me? Does she maze me anyway? Just an interesting thought.

doresh

I’d think she’d just ignore you as one of the few mortals who did something smart. I’d run away from the fireplace as fast as possible anyways, just to be on the safe side XD
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003407262296 Lorien van Arden

From the description spoony gave she is the anathema to godly power – basicly the EXACT opposite of the powerbalance with all the deities ,archdevils and demonlords on one hand and her on the other(you may, for your spiritual sanity, include elemental forces at the crossbeam of the scales). She is one where they are many. They have power of everything but Sigil but she controls Sigil. They derive power from believe where her believe might be the reason for Sigils existance.
Praising or shunning her would make her more like a god, which might weaken her in the cosmology of planescape since she’ld be their negative.

Since she seems prone to step on ants that trouble her, and any amount of recognition in her direction could be construed as “believe” in one way or another, your only winning move is not to play and GTFO as fast as you can.
RobinAdams78

I know what my DM’s answer to this would be:
“Are you telling me your character is burning an effigy of the Lady of Pain?”
“Um, no…”
“OK. You tell me when you want to burn an effigy of the Lady of Pain, and I’ll tell you what happens. (Smile.)”

Kendotuxedo

So what if one of the Gods decided to worship her?
Would someone like Zeus equally fall victim to her judgment?

ScreamingDoom

Yes. She’s killed a god before.

Aoskar was a god who tried to usurp the Lady of Pain in Sigil by becoming the God of Portals. He was smart enough not to try to take it by force, but instead by getting a large amount of the city to believe him to be in control.

The Lady tolerated him for a while, but suddenly and with a single thought killed him, cast his body into the astral plane, killed or mazed all his followers (except one), and destroyed his temple.

All of this happened simultaneously in an instant.

So, yes, if a God somehow made it into Sigil and started worshipping her, there’s no doubt she would quickly deal with him.

CaptainDingaling

On a fantasy note, I would like to see the Lady of Pain vs. Grenth from Guild Wars. Grenth can’t be killed because he is death and he also can make portals and labyrinths and send people to the underworld for good. So he can’t be mazed and he can’t be killed.

ScreamingDoom

Here’s how a group I was in was introduced to the Lady of Pain:

A horde of Tanar’ri found a large portal from the Abyss and got it into their fool heads to launch an invasion of Sigil. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of demons poured into the city and began to cause massive wanton destruction and murder. The party was right in the path of the coming storm.

Then the Lady of Pain arrived. She glided down the street towards the rampaging swarm, stopped, and made a slight gesture with her left hand. Instantly, the entire army — ALL OF IT, AT ONCE — burst into a river of flesh, gore, and demon blood. Ever see that commercial for the Sodastream which has bottles of soda just bursting simultaneously? Yeah, like that, but with demons.

Everyone in the street (which included the party) had to make a series of saves to try and grab onto something and resist the vast tidal wave of viscera that poured down the streets.

None of it got close to the Lady. She stood right in front of this vast river of blood, and it actually went out of its way to GO AROUND HER, as if the detritus itself was shying away from the Lady, fearing to touch her.

After the outpouring finally stopped, the place was absolutely CAKED in gore. Except, of course, for the Lady of Pain. She merely turned and floated down the street, disappearing into the maze of Sigil.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Oh no.

The party found out later that the infinite legions of the Abyss are now a bit less infinite after that stunt. That’s right, the Lady not only destroyed the invasion force, she decided to make herself REAL clear by putting a noticeable dent in a literally infinite amount of Tanar’ri in their home territory.

This was the Lady of Pain mildly annoyed.

One does not fuck with the Lady of Pain.

As a side note, I’ve always wanted to run a game where something like this scene happens right off, only when the Lady is leaving, she pauses, looks right at one of the PCs, and her lips move almost imperceptibly upwards before she continues on.

The entire bulk of the campaign will be finding out why the Lady of Pain smiled at said PC.

Of course, the denizens of Sigil (as well as any non-clueless berk) would NOT want anything to do with the PCs. No one knows what the hell such a gesture would mean, but everyone would agree that it’s very, very, VERY bad. Arch devils and gods would refuse to make deals with the PCs because of it. It’s that kind of bad.

http://www.facebook.com/MrBoffin Jared Michael Anjewierden

So… if you can’t die in the maze, don’t need to eat or sleep, etc. That Minotaur got out of the maze in about 2000 years. 9 Light Minutes man. Spoony, you’re my hero. And I checked the math.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Andreas-Tornqvist/605088298 Andreas Törnqvist

You managed to pronounce ‘Mjölnir’ without sounding like a linguistically retarded American – as a Swede, I approve of this message.

http://profiles.google.com/jordanselby Jordan Selby

Love your Counter Monkey episodes Spoony! Best when they’re long.

Thanks!

Seonghoon Park

I love your reviews, also counter monkeys XD
enjoyed it while eating sweet potatoes- thnx for sharing your dnd experience with us spoony lol

Brendan Tucker

And how many points of sanity did he lose running down a corridor for several hundred years? Because I would have rolled a few insanities and dropped him back into the campaign at the exact same moment he left.
The second strike is an instant and violent death though.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

I dunno… He’s a minotaur, not sure he’s got enough working neurons to develop insanities.

http://www.facebook.com/jaakko.hosioja Jaakko Hosioja

I think I would’ve just let the guy out and congratulated on finding a way to stick it to the bitch, even if in lore she wouldn’t have given two shits.. Such an absolute concept is just ass.. as fun as an invisible wall at the edge of a computer rpg map.. no you can’t go that way.

draxo

Ah, the lady of pain. The overgod-like entity that kicks gods butts before breakfast and you can not hope to ever win against. At best you could hope to delay her long enough to get the F away (since she’s so powerful, she frankly doesn’t care about you more than she cares about a fly buzzing two streets over). If you’ve ever managed to piss her off.. again, at best you can delay her long enoguh to get the F out of the cage. Though since she is said to control the portals of the cage.. Anyway. Essentially the lady of pain is like Cthulhu. All stats should be said to ‘enough to win’ ‘nothing works’, ‘DC: they die’ and ‘roll a 21 on a 20 sided die with no mods to save against this’

Anyway. The lady of pain. the reason my nigh immortal 38th level character HATED going to Sigil (the cage!) out of fear. The reason my (long hard 10 year earned) 38th level (essentially a demi/lesser god in power) would just up and flee at the mere rumor the lady of pain was anywhere nearby where they were in Sigil. 38th level character? At best a new pair of running shoes compared to the commoners clogs as all the advantage you would have to get out of the way of the lady of pain.

http://www.youtube.com/thefaustianman Faust

HHHHHHUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHHHHHMMMMMMMMM! I just came. Planescape!….and I didn’t even watch the video yet.

Gerbilking

Ok, what if this happened. Being that the spire to the sigil is infinite in length but not of width, otherwise there couldn’t be a ring around it, if a group were to cut through the spire in such a way that a lumberjack might cut down a tree (not literally, but just to get the idea across.), causing the top portion to fall off, having somehow made an agreement with the devils that they will use their magic and influence to blame the demons for the whole ordeal what would happen? The assumption is that the devils will cooperate to focus The Lady of Pain’s wrath on the demons, and that many of the other Gods would jump in to fight the Lady of Pain should she appear because she’s in their territory now and they’ve never had that opportunity. Assuming that all of this somehow comes to pass, how do you see it playing out for the world of Planescape and the group responsible?

Greig Stock

Actually, the Infinite Spire is infinite the way around too, in variable degrees. Despite it appearing to be a relatively short distance around, the journey around it can take days, weeks, or even months. So no.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Redding/100001210219556 Mark Redding

I remember the original planescape from 2nd edition, where it was laid out to where there was a giant tower in between all of the different ‘gate towns’ to the various planes. As you move toward this tower, magic and the divine start to lose their power, until when in the center, no arcane of divine spells work at all.

I tried to adapt this to 4th edition for a game i was running pretty much all of last year with multiple groups in the same world creating things, and impacting what other groups did or had to do. When the ‘end game’ happened, and after the world was saved, I had the ‘evil’ group make their escape through a place called “Worldforge” where they found the gate to this new area.

Unfortunately the game kinda petered out and ended, but i am planning a 3.5 game VERY soon. It’s just cool to listen to these stories to compare the horrors i’ve put players through over the years.

Belth

What is the song played in the intro called?

Bryan K

The Bard’s Song by Blind Guardian

Bryan K

Searching through, in every edition of d&d I found the Maze spell in, Minotaurs were specifically noted in the text of the spell as being immune to the maze spell. It also has a maximum duration of 2d4 turns or ten minutes, depending on which version you are reading. Being able to take someone out of a situation for that long with no saving throw (though SR seems to apply in more recent editions) is extremely handy..

doresh

That’s nothing. The good ol’ Sleep spell was basically a “Let’s skip combat” button. Only really useful at lower levels, but awesome nonetheless.
L1nk1

Here what the Lady of pain would have done.” You are not Minotaur anymore, go into the Maze.”

André

So, who’d win; the Lady of Pain, or Caine? Both come with the combat rules “you lose” after all.

doresh

I’m not a WoD expert, but I presume that D&D has a much higher power level in general. “You lose” for Caine probably doesn’t refer to gods, whereas the Lady’s “You lose” applies to anything that is not her.
- http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
  
  I’m on the fence here. The reason being, Caine can LolNo Mage: the Ascension Oracles who can make reality their bitch, especially if they’ve gone insane and don’t have to worry (as much) about Paradox. Yes, there is something above even Caine in oWoD, but only one thing, and that’s basically the Judeo-Christian god. And despite Spoony saying Planescape is where all gods meet, that particular god is never name checked for the same reason they stopped calling evil outer planar critters Demons, Daemons, and Devils.
  - doresh
    
    Why should they care about Jehova (*dodges a hail of stones*) if they have so many other gods? And who says that the D&D gods are weaker than him XD ?
    
    And they renamed fiends because of those “D&D is satanistic!”-accusations. Having clerics kick as for the Lord would’ve actually be a smart move to lay those accusations to rest XD
    
    Oracles might alter reality, but so can epic-level wizards. Planescape is also a setting made to also support player groups that have become powerful enough to duel gods, if they’re not already gods themselves, without having the setting fall apart thanks to the absurd power level the group has reached.
    And even if you manage to kill them, death is anything but permanent for them.
    - http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
      
      Well it’s like this. If you stat God, Jesus, etc., what has Spoony taught us the players will do to them? You think the game was called satanic BEFORE… Seriously, this has happened with angry Hindus who caused Marvel Comics to retcon a fight between Thor and Shiva because Shiva lost. They changed it so Thor fought the far less important Indra. The Hindus are angry RIGHT NOW over an online game in closed beta where mythological gods (including Hindu ones) battle it out League of Legends style. It’s called SMITE, look it up.
    - doresh
      
      Dammit, I forgot that they ALWAYS have to stat a god… <_<
      
      I know of SMITE, and it looks much more interesting for me than all those other MOBAs.

http://twitter.com/JavoDPC javier camejo

this guy is almost admirable its like challenging The Undertaker’s streak, you know he is going to get wrecked but you admire the balls it took to challenge him.

http://www.facebook.com/john.knudsvig John Knudsvig

I love Planescape. Wonderful setting. Last time I did anything with it was not actually a “Planescape” game though. The players, fairly early on, maybe level 5 or so, happened on a group of humanoids attempting to dig their way into an abandoned dwarven mountain keep. Upon beating them up and finishing the break in, (’cause that’s what players do…) and after beating their way through the remaining automated defences (low level constructs) they discovered that the “keep” was actually a fair sized dwarven city and that the place was chock full of the skeletal remains of both dwarves and any number of demonic entities. Further investigation and a few fights later, they found a portal-like device. Think SG-1 if it operated by mystic crystals. After a few levels of interesting dimension hopping they discovered not only a portal to Sigil, but exactly why the dwarves were wiped out and why they should be very, very, afraid. No matter how impressive your keep, no matter how fantastic your magic. Using Your own forges and trade with Sigil to sell arms and armor to both sides of the Blood War is a terrible idea. As for the players fears, well, higher end demons and devils can live a long, long, time and being the new stewards of a place that is loathed by both made things quite interesting for them.
Beware the DM offering great bounties of wealth and power, for their duplicity is boundless.

http://www.facebook.com/john.knudsvig John Knudsvig

As for the maze and your minotaur, I probably would have just made it a standard maze but had the exit portal lead to the elemental plane of fire. I have a low tolerance for people blatantly trying to derail my games for purely chestbeating purposes.

http://www.facebook.com/anton.vikstroem Anton Vikström

If were DM, I would have made the Lady of Pain put the maze inside a bigger maze inside a bigger maze inside a bigger maze etc… So that the minotaur will spend eternity finding his way out of mazes. Also fits in with the theme of inifinities.

doresh

Mazeception ^_^

http://www.facebook.com/robbie.dearras Robbie DeArras

Hah, I was hoping he’d go into what happens when you *REALLY* piss off the Lady. Not even going into what happened with Asokar, God of Portals, attempting to invade, I recall a background story about some guy who felt wronged by her, became a powerful archmage, acquired a gem containing the imprisoned soul of an ancient and even more powerful archmage, annihilated said mage’s soul to gain their powers as well, and went to confront the Lady directly. She just sent him away. He woke up a thousand years earlier with near total amnesia, knowing only that his misfortunes were caused by a woman with hair of blades in a city shaped like a Torus. Of course, he eventually figured out it was the Lady of Pain, marshaled his power, and attacked…not realizing of course this was a terrible idea. His reward? To get his soul sealed in a gem, to be found by himself, a thousand years later…

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mitchell-Bandes/100001750373297 Mitchell Bandes

Irony at its finest.
http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West

She created a paradox! *Cue music from Metal Gear Solid*
- http://www.facebook.com/robbie.dearras Robbie DeArras
  
  She’s the Lady of Pain, she can do that. I think it was implied that this stable loop here is only the end result of her creating it, and no one really knows what he did to annoy her so much in the first place that she went so far as to lock him in a time loop where he kills himself.
  - http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West
    
    Never said she couldn’t :)
    
    In fact, I would be very disappointed if a powerful, dimension warping god couldn’t pull off some chronological manipulation.
    - http://www.facebook.com/robbie.dearras Robbie DeArras
      
      Don’t call her a god, you fool! run! run away!
    - http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West
      
      Woops…I meant goddess. *Instantly gets mazed*
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Horobin/100000917734895 Chris Horobin
      
      Don’t worry that maze only lasts forever, not long at all
http://twitter.com/stormknighthec Clifford Hector

That was from the Faction War adventure, which was more-or-less the end of Planescape setting.
- http://www.facebook.com/robbie.dearras Robbie DeArras
  
  I tend to count ‘Expedition to the Demonweb Pits’ as the final planescape module, even though it was 3.5. It had all the hallmarks…sigil, abyssal politics, vrock dance parties…

http://www.facebook.com/adrian.m.priestley Adrian Michael Priestley

Is it “Si-gull” or SI-jell”? People keep telling me different.

draxo

sig -ill

Sigilians hate people who pronounce it ‘si-J-il’ and sometimes they get shived.
http://twitter.com/Enerccio Peter Vanusanik

What is sigil? Your knowledge of land shall be great.

Anyone00

A thought occurred to me after watching the the videos: What about The Doctor?
That would make an interesting Spoony and Linkara crossover video.

If Spoony ever does a review of the bad Mystara audio adventure I hope he remembers about the (good) Capcom beat’en-ups set in Mystara (although they got Showdow Elves mixed up up with Drow). I think there was also a Sega Genesis rpg, a PC strategy game, and another game for a more obscure console set in Mystara also but not as visually interesting as a beat’em-up.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

OldWho Doctor would know better. NuWho is too full of himself and would get himself butchered.

http://www.facebook.com/benkin.manfish Benkin Manfish

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8aqEEmjSrc (interview with the lady of pain)

i’ll just leave this here

Max B

Hey Spoony, I know this may be the wrong video to post this comment on, but I figured it has a better chance of being seen in a newer video:

In your Pathfinder livestream, you talked a lot about all the character tokens and monster tokens and stuff. I assume you have a resource folder of those for MapTools.
It would be completely awesome if you could release the zipfile publicly for download, so those of us with MapTool could use them for our own campaigns. I have a hell of a time finding ANY resource folders and such for MapTools right now….

Thanks! LOVE the new Counter Monkeys! Keep em comin’ whenever you have time!

http://www.facebook.com/robert.m.alford Robert M. Alford

Love the episode. Though, in the AD&D 2nd Edition Complete Book of Humanoids, under the Minotaur special advantages it states that they are actually immune to Maze spells altogether. So, while they can get lost in a maze, they can’t be magically put in a maze with normal magic. Of course, the lady of pain could put him there because, yes.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Nash-Knight/740228999 Nash Knight

Spoony mentioned that Tarrasque can be killed, and I’d like to know how exactly? I was into D&D up to the second edition (afterwards it became stupid), and I always wondered how could one kill it. I came up with an idea: in AD&D 2nd ed. it never explicitly says that a Tarrasque is immune to acid. And it can’t penetrate a wall of force. So: Surround it with a wall of force and dissolve it in acid! Any thoughts?

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

There’s step-by-step instructions for what’s required for putting one down in both 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D Monster Manuals. How to do it in practical terms? I don’t recall it being amphibious nor lacking a need to breathe, so if you could contrive a way to drown it… Perhaps IN acid…

Atmos_Duality

The Lady of Pain is the ultimate antithesis to the “I can count higher” game of power in D&D.
She is anti-twink. She eats munchkins.
Every attempt to interact with her is met with the word ‘NO’.
She just kind of exists to act as a player form of “Goofbane”.

That’s all she’s there for. Nothing else.She has no character, no motives, no purpose.
Basically, she’s an environmental hazard for which there is no convenient immunity save for ignorance of her existence.

SunOvaGun

I had a plane scape game once one of my players screwed with the lady of pain and he got mazed he had all of his stats and skills and feats set solely to escaping the maze and I made an exit I even left clues to where it was after several hours of searching for it he made it there. I made the door for someone of tiny size. XD

darkmage0707077

When you asked “What would you do”, I paused and thought about it because I wanted to challenge myself as a GM. And, in about 30 seconds (same as you), I came up with this:

You find yourself at the bottom of a pit. The grey, featureless walls and floor are completely barren, even of dust, and when you touch the walls of the pit, your hands come away with a slick, oily substance upon them. Looking up, your senses tell you the exit is 1000 miles above you.

Good luck! What’s a minotaur’s climb speed, by the way? They don’t HAVE one?? Do you have any ranks in climb? More then 100? Oh well…What’s that? Break the wall off? It’s 100 meters of solid, seamless, magically enhanced (+5 of course) admantium. Does your LEVEL FIVE character have something that can even scratch that? Ooooh, that sucks…

Maybe next time you’ll reign in your attempts to derail my campaigns for your own personal vendettas so we can avoid this unpleasantness! Here’s a new character sheet if you want to join up again. For everyone else, as I was saying before…

http://www.facebook.com/bryan.popino Bryan Popino

After watching this, I was thinking….

Who would win in a fight, the Lady of Pain, or Slenderman?

Matthew Suchomel

Did you not see the title of this video? ‘Thou Shalt Not Fuck with the Lady of Pain’! She wins, no question.

But if you need more than that, let me just say this: As powerful as he is, Slendy still has other beings that he is either fighting with or making alliances with that are just as powerful as him. The Lady of Pain, on the other hand, has no equal. Gods don’t even pose a threat to her. So yeah, she wins.

http://twitter.com/XedAlpha XedAlpha

I love counter monkey, funny how relaxing and enjoyable just listening to one guy talk for half hours at a time can be.

doresh

Don’t those bags use pocket dimensions? Otherwise they’d be pretty unsafe IMO, since I’m sure there are potential thieves and eldritch abominations lurking in the astral planes – especially if they know there’s loot and doors into the mortal realm just waiting to be found…

http://twitter.com/nnecron Necro

In terms of high-fantasy category, it can’t get any better than Planescape, and the PC game is probably the best simulation of role-playing. There are no hand holding and lots of decisions to make, to the point where you often times have to act on your initiative. You get immersed into it’s story not only because of it’s excellent script, but also because it is a huge part of PST’s gameplay. Quests don’t feel like busy work because almost every quests are structured like this.

That said, I was surprised at how many people are fan of this game. There are lots of texts to read and you can’t really skim through them that much. I know that’s the beauty of it but I can imagine a lot of people would be turned off by this. It is also restrictive in terms of character customization like equipment and appearance. The combat is pretty much like every AD&D games so that’s not even very note worthy. I guess role-playing part is enough to make an excellent game like this if it is out done. Or maybe because Black Isle Studio was popular at the time.

Greig Stock

Well, actually, believe it or not, despite what so many publishers and devs today keep trying to insist with their ‘streamlining’ of RPGs, some of us actually do enjoy reading and being involved in an immersive RPG that spends more time on the story than it does on combat.

Hell, one of my favourite things about Planescape: Torment is the fact that you get the MOST experience points out of TALKING to people. Killing enemies nets you very little, meaning if you want to GAIN experience, you need to actually EXPERIENCE the world.

http://twitter.com/nnecron Necro

By the way, are Minotaur that niche to D&D players? I think it is just as famous as Goblins, Orcs, Beholders, and Draugr. Or maybe I just played too much CRPGs, I don’t know.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

Minotaurs are pretty rare as PCs. I know I had to practically beg to be allowed to play them back in the day. I played both Krynnish Minotaurs and Common Minotaurs. I vastly preferred the Krynnish variety. Not nearly as stupid.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Pötkö-Latvala/100002159487074 Pötkö Latvala

I think conceptually the only way to kill Lady Pain is to do it from outside the Sigil, since thats her place of power, the only place she’s omnipotent and nobody has power over her or can challenge her power in any way. So to basically render Lady Pain helpless is to destroy her place of power, destroy the Sigil from outside. But even thats neigh impossible, not only because she can keep anyone and anything out from it, but because literally every side wants to conquer rather than destroy the place, Sigil is the most desired place to own in the multiverse. So try to destroy Sigil, and every single other omnipotent entity will pretty much show you their rather harsh opinion about it.

But other than that, I don’t get why people want to kill her or anything. If you’re in Sigil, there’s no way to kill her, theres just no way. Its her rules which you signed in for if you go inside Sigil.

http://www.facebook.com/nasser.elusta Nasser Elusta

Thank you spoony for making Counter Monkey videos. I never played D&D and your videos introduced to me how people play the game, how to tell and make a good story from a bad one, and for telling good stories yourself. If you can write how you talk or have a weekly thing/blog telling a story, I would so buy the books or go to the weekly thing/blog.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Gaffen/1118004381 Joe Gaffen

Spoony, I just have to say that this was my favorite Counter Monkey yet, in no small part because of how you described the city of Sigil, and the Lady of Pain herself. Well done, man!

http://www.facebook.com/KoeLeos KOstantinos Piou ELeftheriadis

The Aperture Enrichment Center thanks you for thinking with PoRTaLS :-)
mmmm giant pizza xD

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

The donut is a lie.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Steve-Banta/100001416455321 Steve Banta

I’m totally on board with the folks who want a Spoony Let’s Play of Planescape: Torment. It would be the best thing on the Internet, ever.

Satsuma0

“Natural Cunning (Ex)

Although minotaurs are not especially intelligent, they possess innate cunning and logical ability. This gives them immunity to maze spells, prevents them from ever becoming lost, and enables them to track enemies. Further, they are never caught flat-footed.”

Well, it’s been true of Minotaurs in 3rd editon, 3.5 and Pathfinder at the very least. There must be some kind of basis for that player’s misconception in previous editions SOMEWHERE, although you, I, and anyone that tried to help you on Twitter never found it.

I’m guessing that in older editions the only mention of Minotaurs is actually in the Maze spell rules, where it stated there (and only there) that Minotaurs were immune to the spell’s effects.

If the Lady of Pain’s at will spell-like ability functions as an all-powerful Maze spell, then he would be immune to it on those grounds.

It’s still pathetic that he went to those lengths to do something so completely pointless.

Skelemelon

Isn’t it part of the original mythology of Minotaurs that they can’t get lost in mazes?

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

The original mythology is Greek, and in that mythology there was only one Minotaur which was cast into a labyrinth as a child. It never found its way out before its ultimate demise.
- doresh
  
  So they might actually be WORSE at getting out of mazes than humans XD

http://www.facebook.com/people/Terri-Wanger/504616660 Terri Wanger

*plays Silent Hill 2′s ‘Betrayal’ whenever Lady of Pain arrives*.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Edmund-Christopher-Scrivens/542556368 Edmund Christopher Scrivens

The specific wording in the humanoids handbook (I have the 2nd edition manual so the information is accurate) is that “they are immune to maze spells”, which is listed under special advantages. However, I would’ve ruled it that it’s the Lady of Pain, this is what she does, she fucks with you regardless of what you are if you do something dumb.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton

I would’ve ruled that the Lady of Pain’s power is Maze-like in effect, but is not, in fact, a Maze spell, and thus does not fall under the Minotaur’s spell immunity. If the Lady of Pain can LolNo every god in existence, I think she’s well beyond mere spellcasting.
- http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
  
  that’s exactly what i said!!
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Edmund-Christopher-Scrivens/542556368 Edmund Christopher Scrivens
  
  Sounds reasonable to me. If her powers surpass every single god (including fucking Cthulhu, seeing as even he got stats and yet she never did) then a Minotaur managing to override it makes no fucking sense.

Greig Stock

I like that there are so many case studies about the Infinite Spire. Countless people have gone missing, trying to climb the whole thing, or trying to map it.

http://www.facebook.com/michael.depiazza Michael De Piazza

I want all of Spoony’s things! I must devour him and gain his knowledge.

Arwijn

Spoony, i think you’re a great guy, and i absolutely love your Counter Monkey videos, but come on… 6 hours and you can’t find why Minotaurs cannot be stuck in mazes according to that player? That is just fail! Here’s were it’s at:

Arcane Spell: Maze
Location: Player Hand Book 3.5, page 252.
Quote: “Minotaurs are not affected by this spell.”

http://twitter.com/AlexChiu88 Alex Chiu

Well give him some slack. Even when I was 18 at that age. I didn’t owe or was knowledgeable with all the books, and even the internet then was hard to find info on everything. DND is what you make it. Thats why we have house rules. Plus this is a rare show, Noah is making a interesting show about DND, which I think is great, and more people need to be educated with a great pastime!
http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson

Well the thing is that is 3.5 and Spooney was talking about second edition. Also the Lady of Pain doesn’t just cast a Maze spell at you, she locks you in a pocket dimension of your very own made from your own mind so that you basically have to be able to trick yourself utterly to get out! Sure Minotaurs aren’t affected by Maze spells by they are affected by Planar travel, right?
- Arwijn
  
  I Know that. But that’s where his player got it from, and the other references people here have mentioned here in the comment section. Still… 8 hours. I could search it within 5 minutes with the SRD. (d20srd.org)
  - http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
    
    Your missing the point, Spooney said this happened when he was 15-18 years old! That makes it years ago, maybe even 15 years ago! So things like that may not have been available to him or this player at the time. Lets say Spooney is 30 years old… then he would have been 18 in the year 2000 or maybe 1999. Well third ed didnt come out til the year 2000! And 3.5 didnt come out til 2003!! Besides if he was deliberately running the game in second edition, and I note those are the books he was reaching for, then what relevance does a 3rd edition book have? those rules wouldn’t even be legal in a 2nd ed game. Lastly there’s always the Golden Rule of role playing, the GM is always right because its his game…
    - http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
      
      That said, he still failed because the old 2nd edition books state clearly that Minotaurs (normal ones, not Krynnish ones) are immune to the Maze spell.
    - http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
      
      Actually no he didn’t fail, as I said what the Lady of Pain does is not so much a Maze spell as putting you in your own little pocket dimension that just happens to be maze like and modeled off of your own mind so you cant get out.How does this Minotaur’s brain manage to trick itself?! Or not trick itself depending on your point of view and also as I said there’s always the Golden Rule, The GM is ALWAYS RIGHT!!! Without him there is no game! Without the unco-operative player scheming to derail his game, there’s just one less player at the table! Life goes on, you go find another player willing to respect the GM and his game…
    - http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
      
      Yeah, well there’s a grade of precious metal above even gold, so we’ll just call this the platinum rule, bucko. The GM is always right right up until he’s driven off and alienated his last player with rampant high-handed asshattery. Then he’s no lomger a GM, he’s just a douchebag with a bunch of over-priced paperweights masquerading as game books.
      
      The fact of the matter is, Spoony spent six+ hours looking for game rule justification in AD&D 2nd Edition rule books for his players claims, justifications which numerous people in this very thread have pointed out were in fact there AND HE FAILED TO FIND IT!!! This is shit I could locate in ten seconds flat if I knew where my Monstrous Compendium was, because the absolute MOMENT he said his player was trying to come up with a way to fuck with the Lady, and he reached for a book, said “Monster Mythology? Nah, that’s not it.” I knew he was looking for the Humanoids Handbook and Minotaurs due to their immunity to the 8th level Maze spell.
      
      It’s as simple as that. Spoony’s been playing D20 too damned long and it’s rotted his brain so he can’t remember the true awe and glory that was TSR.
    - http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
      
      Ok man, we can butt heads all year if we want too and I don’t think we are gonna agree. Ill finish up by saying that what you say about alienating players is true. The old saying that it takes two to tango is true as well. Maybe we should view all of this as a lesson in what not to do, both as a player and a GM. In other words don’t be the guy that deliberately tries to derail his GM’s story but also don’t be the GM that tries to extort his players.
    - http://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.haughton Daniel Joseph Haughton
      
      I’m in agreement with you there. The player was being a douche and was just begging for a GM Call of Cthulhu. Personally, if the Humanoids Handbook was on the table for use, I’d have said screw the silly “fuck with the Lady” bullshit and reveled in being able to play a goddamned Ogre Mage!
    - http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
      
      Lol yeah Ogre mage would definitely be cool! I played a Glabrezu once in 3.5 but I think that’s the only monster I’ve ever played. Well unless you count an Acolyte of the Skin.
    - Arwijn
      
      So? Even if it was before the internet in it’s current glory, he obviously had a lot of D&D books and he was DM. How can you not think of looking at the Maze spell and find it? Why would you even look through all the other books first? And why in gods name didn’t he ask his player for a data reference to check up on the rule? That would have been so much easier! Even if you had ‘heard about it’. 6 hours just smells like fail to me.
      
      But i guess these things just happen, like looking for your glasses when there’s on your head.
    - http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson
      
      Yes exactly, sometimes you just have a brain fart. So why not just give the fella a break? Why pick out a ‘failure’? Why not focus on the good parts of his story? I admit if it were me that were GMing that particular story I woulda just turned said Minotaur into chunky salsa loooonng before I did the maze but I am me and Spoony is himself and I will not fault him for making different choices than me.

http://twitter.com/nnecron Necro

You know, Counter Monkey may be a great way to take break from his usual rants not only for us but especially for him. His ranting is also good but the thing is I can see he becomes hot headed for real occasionally. In here he is being a fan for something for once. I don’t mean to say he doesn’t like anything, but when he gets up and decide to do something it’s always about complaining or something negative.

Greig Stock

I like seeing him rage as much as the next person – probably because I tend to rage pretty heavily about a lotta things myself, but to be honest it’s Counter Monkey that’s my favourite these days. Just being able to see Spoony gush happily about something he loves, rather than hates, is kinda cathartic to us fellow ragers. lol

http://www.youtube.com/user/yfnwaffle Waffle

I’ve never played D&D or any game like it. Decided to watch this because I like Spoony’s work and gotta say so far I’m really enjoying Counter Monkey. It’s actually kind of making me want to play D&D. XXD

Luke_Duke

Minotaur Pirates? That’s fucking awesome!

draxo

I know right? Krynn (pre-retarded new age) was AMAZING.

Then they f-ed it up with the ‘new age’. I just stopped caring, the word of mouth from wotc at the time was ‘it had to happen’ but.. frankly. No. It didn’t. You decided that arbitrarily. You fucknuts.

http://www.facebook.com/ANImaniacPJS Jerrod Schembs

Browsing /b/ with this video playing in the background. When I load a new page the first thing I see is a stone depiction of The Lady of Pain in the banner. HOLY FUCK SHE KNOWS

Malidictus

Is it just me, or does Spoony occasionally look like he has cute little girl pigtails?

yukovalis

I have two interesting stories about the tarrasque now that you bring it up.

The first is when my friend actually killed it by herself. I know you would cry out now *then the DM was a fool* or something but, No the DM was trying to kill her. She crawled up the monsters urethra… killed him from the inside. It was.. distrubing. I forgot exactly what she used, but at lv in the late teens, it was a pretty messed up fight.

The second story is another one of my friends made a character who was half drawf.. and half tarrasque. Seriously. Her thought process was this. Sometimes a tarrasque might need a little… relief. So what better way then to us a hole on the side of a mountain? You see where I’m going with this yet? :)

http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West

That’s…awesome. Killing the terrasque via his genitals that is.

She certainly gets kudos for grisly creativity. Now how did she even get in there I wonder?
- yukovalis
  
  Well I doubt the creature wears any pants. lol skill checks for climb, and blushing faces on fellow players.
Greig Stock

..wait, the tarrasque has a gender now?

L1nk1

JERRY!!

http://www.facebook.com/simo.vassykka Simo Vässykkä

I’ve given up watching your videos. It’s not that I don’t like you or them, but I just can’t. My connection, while not exactly bad, isn’t good enough. The new videos are so large that I need to buffer them to watch. I can’t pinpoint what the problem is (aside from my connection), but the buffering with the media player is terrible, sometimes it stops spontaneously and if I try to navigate it deletes all buffered data. I’ve tried downloading the video on my computer first, but when that loader just cuts the 2GB download two hours in, I have to throw my hands up and give up.

Yes I’ve tried toggling hardware acceleration and I’ve done a lot with Flash plugins, but it doesn’t help, I’m just here telling that my situation exists. You may be a videophile and care a lot about video quality, and that’s good, but it effectively prevents me from watching your videos.

Ability to toggle video quality or audio file would be nice.

ThomasMink

When you asked, “What would you do? Let’s assume this is true.. Minotaurs cannot get lost in a maze.”

My first thought was exactly what you ended up doing. Ok.. if the Lady of Pain is out to torture and disorient people with horrendously long mazes.. and she mazes someone who wouldn’t get disoriented.. she’d likely just make a really, REALLY long hallway.

everstar

I like to think the Lady of Pain is Sigil, and vice versa.

André

“The Lady of Pain is the DMs ‘No’.”

Player: “What if I-”
DM: “No.”
Player: “Ok, but what if-”
DM: “No.”
Player “Ok, maybe if-”
DM: “No.”
Player: “Can’t I-”
DM: “Nope.”
Player: “But if I-”
DM: “Sorry, no.”
Player: “Surely I can-”
DM: “No.”
Player: “Ok,but if I simply-”
DM: “No, not happening. Ever.”
Player: :(
DM: X)

http://twitter.com/Enerccio Peter Vanusanik

Now here is critical question. Can you fuck Lady of Pain?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mitchell-Bandes/100001750373297 Mitchell Bandes

You can not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYJGmYsHCUg
ThomasMink

No, but she sure as hell can fuck you.

Tjitze de Boer

I would have said, you’re standing in front of a door which you instinctively know is the exit to to the maze.
*I try to open it.*
It’s locked, you have no fucking idea where the key is.

How would you handle a masochist character who wouldn’t want to slay the LoP but who’d want to “lay” the Lady?

http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Nemo

I’d let him do it. It would be a fun moment to talk about ^^

MrRuse

I have read about people planning to use 4th Ed’s Rogue level 15 daily called Bloody Path (I think it’s in Player’s Handbook) that turns any attack of oppertunity made to the Rogue during a move action return itself to the target. The shadow of the Lady of Pain is said to flay the skin off any that touch it, so if you use Bloody Path to run through the Lady’s shadow, you kill her. Of course any decent DM will see at least three loopholes in this.

And on the mazing thing: Make a maze whose exit is far, FAR in the Hinterlands. That’ll fuck them up.

Greig Stock

That’s less a case of being able to beat the Lady of Pain and more a testament to how validated those of us are who keep complaining about how fucktarded 4th Edition is.
- draxo
  
  http://geek-related.com/2010/09/15/mike-mearls-admits-dd-4e-blows/

http://twitter.com/TS_Cheshire TheCheshireOne

I just wanna say that every time I watch a Counter Monkey, new or old, I learn something new or something different to improve how I roleplay.
So thank you for doing these and I hope you continue.

Adam Lowrey

I remember playing the Modron March adventure. It was fun if frustrating dealing with things from mechanus.

Also which planscape supplements are rare? I only have the Core Set, Planes of Law, and Planes of Chaos Box sets.

TThor

I’ve never played D&D, but listening to this has encouraged me to read Pages of Pain, the lady of pain seems like such an interesting being

http://www.facebook.com/richard.anderson.7543653 Richard Anderson

Two things both of which might have been posted but there are 226 posts so I have no clue.

1) From the book of humanoids Minotaur entry “They are immune to maze spells” which i could see misreading to be immunity to all mazes.

2) The stats in the Monster Mythology and the Legends and Lore are NOT for the gods, the stats are for their avatars on the prime material plane. It says that if you were to meet the gods in their domains they could destroy you with a thought and are unkillable save by greater gods and even then only with great difficulty. Also it says that they can’t enter the prime material plane themselves because if they did the other gods would shit a brick and gang up on them. This may be different in particular settings but in general this is the case.

http://www.facebook.com/patrick.coyle.581 Patrick Coyle

I sold a lot of my Planescape stuff years ago when I was in dire need of cash, but I’ve always held onto its last adventure – Faction War. It’s basically about what happens when a guy tries to carry out an elaborate master scheme to stick it to the Lady of Pain.

Turns out she has at least one other punishment than killing or mazing… it’s just that nobody else will ever know about it except him.

http://www.facebook.com/faolan.lunasvalen Faolan Lunasvalen

“Nobody sticks it to the Lady Of Pain”
lol that has to be a meme.
Not even Chuck Norris can stick it to the Lady Of Pain.

http://www.facebook.com/milo.gotje Milo Gotje

Planetscape sounds a lot like shin megami tensei.

doresh

Dunno. Does Planescape have a penis demon?

http://twitter.com/CthuluSpy Herbert West

What happens if the Lady of Pain is annoyed at herself? Will she maze herself?

likalaruku

Personally, I don’t think the guy did any research. He probably got that idea about the Minotaur’s Maze GPA from some cartoon he watched as a kid.

http://twitter.com/MetalDane Dane Winton

There’s an AD&D supplement book called Players Option: Skills and Powers that has rules for making PCs out of a few monster races, including Minotaurs. The rule is that Minotaurs are immune to Maze spells. Not that they can’t get LOST in a natural maze lol

http://twitter.com/TactlessC Thomas Atchley

The only thing I can think of as to Minotaur’s not being able to be lost in mazes, again roots back to the Something Awful D&D 4e Let’s Play where the party leader is a Minotaur, is that he comes from the City of Lang…which is a city that used to have mazes, but is now ruins. But this is iffy as I am pretty sure the player completely made it up for the setting because it is the most laid back D&D game ever. To the point where the Lady of Pain neither mazed or killed this same Minotaur that just asked her stupid questions for like half a minute.
Although to be fair the DM DID ADMIT “Yeah, if I was playing that anywhere near IC she’d have killed him as soon as he opened the door, but I didn’t think that’d be a fitting death and he didn’t really DO anything so I let him go” ,,, and now the Minotaur just says “the Lady” randomly because despite being the party leader and having Will of ridiculous proportions he is also borderline retarded.

Antti Iisakki Bräysy

Could house elves from Harry Potter’s universe get out of maze instantly, if their masters call them?

http://www.facebook.com/damion.jackson.5872 Damion Jackson

Lol Antti please consult The Ladies Answer Book to Everything. It consists of one word: ‘No!’ its a very short book :D

Segatron

I’m a bit surprised he did not mention her shadow, and it’s effects. I does reenforce his point quite effectively.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Felipe-Serpa/100000916337452 Felipe Serpa

Planescape: Torment SPOILERS

MASSIVE MASSIVE SPOILERS

Actually, playing Nameless One as evil almost makes sense. Every previous incarnation you meet or hear about was either insane, or evil, or a douchebag. You’ve slaughtered people, burned down Sigil, lied, cheated, betrayed and cajoled people for eons…

http://www.facebook.com/people/Felipe-Serpa/100000916337452 Felipe Serpa

The Lady of Pain just outright kills you if you piss her off twice. Just cutscene, death, gameover.

You can piss her off by killing the Dabus’ too.

Also, Vecna almost took over Sigil in an adventure, so he almost killed her…

http://twitter.com/CrinosG Jessie Staffler

In second edition, There is a high level spell called “Maze”, which basically does what the Lady Of Pain does, sticks a dude in a pocket dimension maze they need to escape from. And it explicitly says in the spell that Minotaurs are immune to that. So maybe he just thought the Lady’s mazing power was like the spell, and so the Minotaur was immune to it.

http://www.facebook.com/Tjaedern Tjäder Tjäderborn

If the books comes up we always ask the questioned player to point it out.
Why waste time, when he can just point it out, unless he doesn’t want the rule to be found, in which case he’s hiding something

Btw, I have a suggestion for CM. Why don’t you read up a bit on the rules and old modules you’ve played beforehand? It would refresh your memory, and you wouldn’t make mistakes and assumptions as much.

When telling stories, there’s not much to do but to draw most of it from memory though, and maybe it’s best that way? But even then, if it was a module you DM’d, or played, maybe your CM’s would be more structured and not as incoherent if you skimmed through them?

Looking through the rules around key things that is central to the stuff you are talking about could seriously improve the accuracy of the stories you are telling. I’m not bashing you Spoony, I love CM. I’m just giving a few thoughts on I think he can improve them.

Ps.
Just a tip. If you have PDF-versions of your RP-books, it’s really easy to look up stuff with CTRL+F. Takes a few minutes and would improve the quality greatly I think. The books are available for download. Illegally anyway, but hey, if you own the printed books, I don’t consider it stealing.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000270812903 Luke Liszewski

Rejoice! Or maybe moan in anguish. A sequel to Planescape: Torments is in the works. Except its not really planescape. Read more for those interested: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/12/planescape-torment-sequel-finally-in-the-works/

http://www.facebook.com/people/Vaughan-MacDonald/100000473507885 Vaughan MacDonald

I love your D&D stories Spoony :D

http://www.facebook.com/jeff.juozapaitis Jeff Juozapaitis

Is the Lady of Pain explicitly immune to belief-effects? I mean, you’d be a fool to try and your DM is doing it wrong if he lets you, but I seriously wonder what would happen if you managed to convince everyone in Sigil and the planes that the LoP is a sham/powerless/nonexistent/whatever. (My DM fiat would be “nope, she seems unaffected, also mad, GLHF”)

Also, tying into Spoony’s normal philosophy about horror and dramatic tension, I think the absolutely most terrifying, tension buiilding thing for seasoned Planescape players would be “The Lady of Pain appears and gives you an item…”

http://www.facebook.com/Bigfeetz Aaron Trussler

Greek Mythology, that’s where.

http://www.facebook.com/luca.dalessandro Luca D’Alessandro

I just had to comment. Planescape: Torment is my favourite game of all times. I remember spending a whole summer playing it, and when I finally finished it I remember tears and a sense of satisfaction like anything else. It was epic, it was heart wrecking (like you said), it had the most likeable characters in gaming history, the choices you made impacted in a concrete way on the world around you, every sidequest was compelling to the point that I simply had to find everything and everyone just to see if they could shed some ulterior light on the infinite shadows of TNO’s story.
Nothing has ever come close to this, and I fear nothing ever will. That’s why I so badly wanted to play some Planescape RPG. Unfortunately in Italy it’s almost totally unknown, you can’t find the manuals, let alone somebody to play with!
So thanks for the video man. This is as close as it gets to talk with somebody who understands the beauty of this scenario.

WolfyD

Hiyah!
Just a small fact, because i was extremely bored :P

You say if you get mazed you can’t die, you doN’t get hungry or anything, i can’t remember if you say anything about getting tired, but making some calculations, based on what you said that the exit is 100000000 miles away, if he’s a big damn minotaur and an average step he takes is around 1m long (just for ease of calculation) and he’s walking at the pace of 1 step per second, without stopping for anything, he would reach the end of the maze in 5102.1 years.
I’m sure that’s all kinds of useful to everyone but as i said, i was really bored :P

Still love your reviews and vlogs and… well your videos, keep it up!

Vismutti

It shall never cease to amuse me when Zeus is called “Lawful Good”.

http://www.facebook.com/Kurokun1293 Roger Smith

You know, I was going to write something about the neutronium golem…and that particular book of “Who the hell statted these creatures”. But now that I think about it, its pretty amusing…I think that The Lady of Pain could still theoretically be the strongest being in existence since her will is done automatically, and nothing can get into her domain. Even if they did, her doors literally go anywhere; so even potential threats would have to track her down…or avoid winding up half a universe away.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Freddy-Duran/100000817426762 Freddy Duran

in 5e its somewhat possible that maybe minotaurs are immune to the maze spell….i think someone at wizards watched this video and thought to put it in…if its true that its like that

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1161393460 Nathan Jacob Caudill

when he said “Lady of Pain”, i thought he meant Loviatar, the goddess of pain and torture in HackMaster

this chick: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Loviatar

sprezzatura15

I seem to remember the DM of a D&D group I used to play with having the Lady of Pain as an NPC, and her giving quests to the players… I always thought they were overly ambitious in their gameplay style, and OH BOY was I right lol.

sprezzatura15

Well, now you got the Classicist in me curious with that whole bit about the Minotaur- I was figuring your guy probably did what I would have done in that situation (more out of laziness than smartassery, mind you…) but yeah, I figured he probably just heard a reference to that in the mythological story and then shoehorned it into his character description without checking if there was anything in the actual game to back him up.

Yeah, mythology doesn’t say anything about the Minotaur being King of All the Mazes, only about him being shut up in it. I’d call shenanigans on your guy too lol…

Mike Wierenga

We killed one of the two goblin gods last session. And ran the minor one off with an intimidate check. To be nice we let him keep his giant cyborg spider abomination. Lvl 24 is so broken.

http://www.facebook.com/shane.lancaster.37 Shane Lancaster

I can’t wait, one of these days he’s going to be grabbing shit off that shelf and it’s just going to come crashing down.

http://www.facebook.com/james.mars.370 James Mars

In 2nd Ed, they were immune to maze spells/effects, which is what that lady of bland is using. Also, the 2nd Ed Maze spell sucked. I decided to look it over when I was watching this video. It has a brief(measured in rounds) variable duration based off the Int score of the target.

Hitokiri Akins

The Lady of Pain wasn’t using a spell; she was warping reality with her powers. I repeat, reality is hers to fuck with.
- http://www.facebook.com/james.mars.370 James Mars
  
  The fluff doesn’t matter if it says “as this spell” and/or adopts the name of the spell. That said, if maze doesn’t work, we all know that the offending entity would regret being immune it. If said offender somehow could take her in a straight fight(or fought really really smart), they would just get punted out of the place & it’d still be game over for that character.

kallikanzarid

If someone tried to pull this stunt on me, I’d have them use their own intestines to get out, and then die of their wounds as soon as they’re out.

http://twitter.com/mollemannen123 Molle

dont know if i got the maths right but i think it would have taken him about 2280 years to travel that distance at average walking speed.

http://twitter.com/ravenwoodwitch angela

That Ponytail’s working for you. I don’t know how, but it just does.
Anyway, while I’ve always been crap at playing any kind of tabletop game, I know what this guy’s deal probably was. There is this weird instinct in people that when someone says “Don’t” that’s all they want to do. It’s kinda like how a three-year old wants to do all these things mommy tells them not to do, only dumber.
But, hats off to you and your counter-screw. That was just brilliant XD

http://www.facebook.com/people/Vaughan-MacDonald/100000473507885 Vaughan MacDonald

Technically, Spoony, the Minotaur in geek mythology did actually live in the labyrinth. He was locked down there by his mother.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1756540070 Christopher Stratton Smith

Finally Spoony shows the Planescape boxes! ^_^ I’m not even kidding when I say that during every single video that spoony has filmed in that chair that I’ve watched, I constantly keep glancing at the Planescape boxes, recognising only the core one and wondering what the others were. Ps. Playing Planescape Torment now. It rocks!

http://www.facebook.com/duston.justice Scarmiglione Of’Earth

I love Counter Monkeys. I especially enjoy when you talk about DMing. Oh, and Van Canto is awesome.

http://www.facebook.com/matthew.briner.79 Matthew Briner

I don’t play D&D at all, so please forgive me as I am about to ask a very, VERY stupid question. And yet, I feel the inherent need to ask it because I’m tired and I have nothing better to do.

So, this one guy plays a Minotaur and deliberately gets stuck in one of the Lady of Pain’s mazes solely because he inherently knows where the exit to every maze is and he can very easily escape. And so, to counter-fuck with him, the Lady of Pain puts him in a 100 million mile-long hallway and says “that’s the maze”. Furthermore, in this pocket dimension, he cannot die, nor does he get hungry. In this pocket universe, all that exists are the individual, the maze, and presumably whatever air they breathe that keeps them going. Minotaur, 100 million miles of straight hallway, incapable of dying.

…So how does that stop him? It will take him several million years, sure, but what does that matter? He’ll survive it. Again, I have zero D&D experience so I know I probably shouldn’t talk (and please school me if I’m being a COMPLETELY ignorant jackass here), but couldn’t he just have said, “Fine, then; two-and-a-half million years later, I emerge from the exit of the maze.” I mean, is there a process? Does the player have to wait as long as it would take him to complete the maze to continue the game or something?

I mean…OK, I get it. Even if he exits the maze, there’s nothing waiting for him but an empty universe. Hell, for all we know, the Lady of Pain is probably waiting at the end of the maze to kill him with a thought at first sight. Still…if he can get out of the maze and he can’t die in any way unless the Lady wills it, why is the length of the maze such a big problem?

Dan Schuett

The amount of time matters just for that particular adventure and that particular group. The character will eventually get out but in the mean time the other characters continue with the adventure. The player was probably planning to go, “Ha ha, suck it Lady of Pain I escaped from your maze!” and then continue with the adventure, that’s not possible now. So either he has to roll up a new character or his every turn for the rest of it is going to be, “Ok you’re in the blank, featureless hallway, what do you do?”

“I move x feet down the hallway.”

Edit: Also if the players want to use their characters in another adventure with Spoony the Minotaur is again exempt because he’s still trapped in the maze because it obviously hasn’t been enough time because the characters aren’t long dead.

http://twitter.com/Dutchtica Floris Overvelde

I HAD someone pull the Minotaur thing on me, AND I’m pretty sure this is (erronously?) on TV Tropes! … I should go to bed.

Aluminum Foil

… Thank you for looking up the cow people :>
Srs, I love stories like this.

http://www.facebook.com/san.shinobi San Shinobi

After seeing this episode, I bought Planescape Torment from GOG, booted it up, and hunted down every Dabus I could find. All of a sudden, some floating bitch showed up and next thing I know, I was in some maze I needed a guide to exit.

Zuzanna Patkowska

Hi, Spoony. I’m watching your Counter Monkeys for quite some time (not to mention the rest of your shows) and when I saw “Thou shall not fuck with the Lady of Pain” for the first time, and you said, she doesn’t like people worshipping her, I thought out this concept for a character:
Imagine a guy (or gal), who miraclously survived some kind of ambush, or slaughter, or some other harsh situation, and thinks that it’s because of some Providance under him/her. And for some reason he/she thinks that it was the Lady of Pain’s Providance (yeah, kinda stupid, but this is a raw idea). Moreover, he/she thinks that it’s unfair that other gods are worshipped and Lady of Pain is not, so he/she tries to fix it.

Again – raw idea and probably won’t lead to anything, but I wanted to share with it.

Tab

I once made a dread necro/shadowcaster that believed the Lady of Pain’s maze was a paradise, and made it his goal to get to Sigil and be mazed.

NymphadoraTonks

Very interesting Counter Monkey, as usual.

Also, nice ass :P

http://www.facebook.com/curtis.stark.7 Curtis Stark

Why, oh why, Spoony, do you mispronounce Sigil? It’s a hard “g”! If the Lady of Pain ever heard you mispronounce it, you’d find yourself turned inside out and lacerated by thousands of blades, yet live in agony for a few minutes!

Tab

Unless the pronunciation is different than the English word, then it is indeed a soft G.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/audio.php?file=sigil001&word=sigil&text=%5C%3Cspan%20class%3D%22unicode%22%3E%CB%88%3C%2Fspan%3Esi-jil%5C

Aquila

It says this video is no longer available?

Zipper Dragon

Pffft Humble

Zipper Dragon

Isnt Mepho….Mephostof…FUCK, IM CALLING HIM MEPHO… Isn’t Mepho on the 1st circle of hell, in Dante’s inferno? (The game)

Zipper Dragon

If it were me, I’d put him in a 5X5X5 room with an exit the size of a bananna leaf. Try to squeaze outta that, fucknut!

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.durham.7 Daniel Durham

hm but the immunity to mazes only seems to apply to minotaurs as adversaries http://www.charles-reace.com/Hobbies/DnD_Monster_DB/index.php?id=500

Zipper Dragon

What I did, oh god, I f**ked this chick. I mased her. I put her in a 12X12X12 room, with a hole in the roof. The hole was just out of reach, & I striped her of all her gear, & put her in a dress of berlaf. I was like *Evil finger pyrimid* Eeeeexellent

http://www.facebook.com/dtilson1 Daniel Tilson

“You can’t beat the Lady of Pain.”

I know, the challenge excites me. Look at my nipples. Look at them!

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Counter Monkey – Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain