Epic Fail - 3rd Session Wrap

Well, now that I've had about a week to digest what happened... It's clear the party failed. Horribly. We had a fairly straight forward objective but we got sidetracked by a trick. Our main objective took longer and as a result met someone who set us up to basically kill the tavern owner we were working for and set the entire town on fire. One our way back, we were given a box to bring to the owner (as far as we knew). It didn't look right, showed magical properties etc. On our return, our cleric let another character talk him out of keeping the box out of town. I was around back of the tavern trying to tend to an NPC that had been injured so I couldn't put my two cents in.

I also didn't originally trust the person that gave us the box but my character has made some very rash decisions and decided to let another lead the way. I don't want to even get into what we did during the side quest... It wasn't pretty. We kind of succeeded there but I have a feeling we created a more powerful foe that will be a problem later on. We also learned the hard way that our party hasn't been very detail oriented so far. Hopefully that improves.

Our first night in town, we had a quick skirmish that raised questions from the local authorities. Adding the events from this session, I have a feeling we are going to be in some serious trouble. I'm kind of dreading what I will hear what will happen next time. By "dreading" I mean anxiously waiting with a big grin on my face because oh, boy! It'll be a challenge :) Carric's (my character) levels of disbelief, confusion, and anger are swirling, his sense of vengeance is swelling. The primal nature that he taps into to assume the form of beasts is raging.


Will the wild boar lash out?

Or will he be able to steady himself and let wisdom be the solution?...

I'm a DM Now?

In the very short time I've been playing D&D I've played live 3 times. The first two times as a PC. I've wrote about them already. It has been tough going so far to coordinate our very busy lives to get regular dates set. In the meantime I ran a couple solo text adventures for my fellow adventurers. They were supposed to be quick encounters to break the waiting and give us an excuse to roll dice even though it wasn't a real game. The first one lasted several hours when the Barbarian in the party yelled back down the alley and told the damsel in distress to "shut up!" So instead of a quick run down an alley, kill a couple goblins get on with your day, I got to improvise a small story line. It was fun!

The next text adventure I did was an idea I had for our cleric. That one lasted over parts of almost 2 days (with long breaks in between). It was a little more set up than the previous but was largely improvised as well but with the time in between responses it was easy to plan a couple moves ahead. Even with that he managed to surprise me which was very cool and made the story so much better.

Last weekend I tried my hand at officially sitting behind the screen and running a one off. One player was our Barbarian who is completely obsessed with the game now and the other was our friend from our regular gaming group who wanted to give D&D a try. It was different to say the least.

 I ran  "Bandit's Nest" by Dan Coleman. It is a really cool adventure that was perfect for a one off. I won't go into spoilers just in case. Good creatures and layout. I really liked the encounter and glad I found it.

How did it go? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure. They both seemed to enjoy it. We bogged on rules once or twice, but not enough to crash the game. I kind of expected that anyway since we are all still so green. I was extremely disappointed that they didn't go into one location. It would have been soooo cool. I had special music for that one and everything. I think it would have scared the ... out of them :)

The biggest difference that I noticed while running this vs. the two text adventures that were my own story is that I was having trouble getting a good flow putting the info out there since it wasn't "my story". I had reviewed and read through the material several times but still had to refer to the hard copies a little too much. I'm sure that would have worked easier if I was using/inserting this as part of a larger campaign. The upside? I didn't have to design the encounters within the story.

Overall, I liked the experience. I have started building the framework and feel of a world, a basic story line and studying up. Once I clear up some time after finishing Pandemic Legacy, I think it'll be time to officially dive in and do it for real!