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  1. #1
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    I'm attacking the darkness! Crap, I rolled a 2: Dungeons and Dragons Discussion

    Anyone else here participating in Season 3?

    I'm DMing the local store for at least the first chapter...first DM attempt in 4e, should be fun and help me acclimatise my DM skills in 4e with the more compact design.

    Edit: If anybody DMed previous seasons and has any pointers about what to expect with the general format I'd love the tips as well :D

  2. #2
    Banned.

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    Was. School happened.

    Interested in hearing you talk about it if it goes well. (Even more interested if it goes poorly!)

  3. #3
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    First session is next week, I'll try to keep a running journey here, will be good for my own review purposes as well.

  4. #4
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    A note for anyone following at home: This is a remake of the classic Keep On the Borderlands adventure, so if anything sounds familiar, that's probably why.

    Session 1


    5 players; I believe we had one 4e newb, two Encounters newbs, and two returning players from Season 1. Group makeup ended up being Rogue, Cleric, Ranger, Wizard, Fighter. I want to say the Ranger probably shouldn't have been allowed since this is supposed to be Essentials only, but Ranger is a pretty core striker so I allowed it, and we needed the ranged striker anyway. Plus the kid was like 12 and hardcore about playing it, and this is about having fun, not rules.

    Opening RP in town went alright, though none of the players had any semblance of Streetwise so they gleaned absolutely nothing about the town or its inhabitants. They managed a History check for some basic knowledge about the keep as a whole but that's about it. Got their quests from the key NPC (Benwick), slept, and set out the following morning to take on their first task: rescuing a prisoner.

    Rogue and Ranger managed to Stealth in, spotted every monster (even the ones in concealment in the back Q_Q), and proceeded to bloody the brute mob in the encounter in the surprise round lol. Backstab+Sneak Attack is vicious. >_>

    I had heard about how brutally PCs were getting beaten up in the Dark Sun season so I tried to take it easy with some of the more potent powers; saved the dragonborn mob's dragon breath as a bloodied-only action, but he went from bloodied to dead before he could use it

    Thankfully I got a little mileage out of the minions that had ranged poison darts that could knock a toon unconscious (save ends). It was fun too as the way they were set up in the encounter I just held them with readied actions until the poor cleric moved into range and got pelted by all 4 of them at once

    I was a little nervous and slightly underprepared insofar as I was having to fill out my initiative tables on the fly instead of being able to just say "ok go" once initiative started, so I actually ended up missing a key monster entirely for a whole round which kind of sucked because he had some of the interesting moves: close blast 2 net that immobilizes and he could drag netted PCs at his speed (with the intent of dropping them into the nearby 10' deep hole). Once I remembered and got him involved things got more fun since I kept trying to drop them in the hole (which they irritatingly kept saving the fall). Sadly the net is just an immobilize and not a disarm or anything so the PCs who were stuck in the net were still free to beat on the guy, but he was at least able to avoid CA thanks to the net letting him perform more or less at-will slide 1 actions on his captured PCs.

    Closing RP didn't go nearly as well, I kind of botched the dialog for the dragonborn they took prisoner. I don't think the players noticed, but it just didn't go as smoothly as I'd have liked with regards to actually linking PC action to narrative information. It worked out in the end but they ended up bringing back the dragonborn despite my very clear warnings (which I was smart enough to give a setup for earlier in opening RP) that there is a risk that someone at the keep will identify him and notify the perpetrator of the turn of events, or possibly even set him free. I'm pondering how I'm going to punish them for that; perhaps bring the dragonborn back in the next encounter since it's basically a street brawl. Start him at bloodied value maybe so he already has access to the fun powers and isn't too beefy (there's already like 8 targets in the encounter, none minions).

    Encounter 2 looks to be a lot of fun and the table is pretty smart so I'm looking forward to it. I'm probably going to spice it up a little, get some environmental effects going.


    Like I said above I was a little nervous. My first ever public game, and the first time I've tried to DM 4e...I botched a few combat calls as a result (herp derp surprise round grants CA), but corrected them handily enough. I felt self conscious about how much I was looking down at my paper but there's not really any helping that I don't think; the only way I could make that better is if I print out the stuff in such a way that I can stand it upright in front of my screen and read it without having to physically move my head. I'd still have to "look down" though so I'd still get self conscious about it. I like to think I tried to maintain contact with the players despite it though instead of just withdrawing into the printed materials. And the players all said they had fun, so I'm pleased with the result. Looking forward to more adventures to come

  5. #5

    Sounds pretty good. I wouldn't count out the solution of printing out stuff for your screen. If nothing else it will keep you organized, thus you will look down less when you need to find something.

    That kid(12) reminds me of myself lol.

  6. #6
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    I already plan to scan the page with monster statblocks and tape them to each of my card tents that I stand up on the screen to show initiative order to the players; I was going to do it for week 1 but then I said "naw I have them right in front of me, what's the point"...but after that first encounter I can already tell it will be SO much easier. That way I won't forget monsters, either >_>

  7. #7
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Session 2

    6 players tonight, the previous 5 plus one extra. Ended up with two wizards in the group for it, which was perhaps slightly irritating for me since it would have significantly shortened the lifespan of my minions in combat were it not for their terrible rolls all night lol.

    RP was good. The players were really fixated on that dragonborn, but I had it whisked away to the inner bailey of the keep which is a restricted area without express permission, escort, or business with the ruler, Lord Drysdale. They completed their quest to return the prisoner and then settled in for dinner which was paid for by their taskmaster (and worth a free healing surge, or a refunded one if you were at full hp). After dinner they tried, unsuccessfully, to find out more about the dragonborn, and we all had a laugh at the barmaid's reaction to the Fighter using Diplomacy on her to try and get some information. They noticed they were being watched by a halfling but didn't really pursue the issue, much to their own chagrin as once they headed out into the rain they were ambushed.

    Combat was much, much better this time. Taping stat blocks to the card tents helped a ton, as did using paper markers over top of the cardboard tokens they supplied for combat to distinguish one creature from another (B1/2/3 for bandits, etc); I'll have minis someday ;/. My only fault was that I had been reading some old AD&D stuff the day before so I was stuck in THAC0 math and kept calling rolls of 18 a miss on an 18 defense score. Thankfully my players were paying attention and would kindly correct me without any fuss.

    The narrative for the scenario says it's been raining heavily, so I used that to the advantage in combat; non-adjacent creatures had partial concealment, you fall prone on a natural 1, and running (literally, just standard move speed doesn't incur this) through puddles on the map require a DC 12 Acrobatics check or you fall prone and lose the rest of your action. In hindsight, I should have made that last effect happen simply by passing through the puddle by any means that isn't instantaneous as the effect only came into application twice in the entire combat, but ah well. Only one creature rolled a 1 as well so there was no impact there, and except for the Wizards everybody rolled pretty well so the concealment was a nonissue (not to mention the Ranger is the only one who really had to worry about it anyway).

    The silly wizards weren't entirely using their heads as I told everyone at the start that the rooftops on the map were valid squares and the buildings were only 20' high, making it easily possible for them to fey step up onto them and stay out of harm's way, but instead they both got bloodied through the course of the scuffle

    The Dragonborn made his theatrical return (he appeared to have been healed, tortured heavily, and crudely healed again; he was heavily disfigured, and we had someone who could actually speak Draconic this time so they heard him swear an oath of vengeance to Tiamat for the humiliation suffered) and conveniently was the closest one to the group in the ambush. He also got to go toward the top of the round, so I made sure to get good use out of his breath attack this time

    I think combat lasted a good 4-6 rounds from top to bottom, I can't remember for sure. The dragonborn went down quick, the players having had enough of his shenanigans, and the minions were slowly picked off leaving nothing but the halfling and 3 otherwise healthy NPCs. The halfling was fun since he had a power that let him move at speed and attack at any point during the move while still finishing the full move transaction without provoking OA. It annoyed the Fighter greatly :D

    I took advantage of the twitter buffs that have been running on the WotC twitter feed on the Encounters nights; There's typically been 5 per session day that they cycle through randomly every hour, so at the start of the session I rolled a d10 and doubled up two numbers per buff and chose one that way, repeating this process an hour later for a different buff. It worked out well, the players liked the narrative addition (the first buff was kids in the upper windows of the buildings would throw rotten vegetables for 2 damage at anyone, player or creature, who missed an attack roll, which incidentally took out one of the minions; the second was the ale the PCs had at dinner was especially potent and granted them the ability to take a healing surge on a crit). Going forward with my own games I may try to incorporate this kind of random buff thing somehow, I like the flavor it adds.

    Once it was all over there was some minor concluding RP with a spy that was introduced (in name/description only) during the earlier RP; the players joked around about the fact that she was there the whole time but didn't actually try to help. At one point they were talking about firing on her which I would have hand-waved as her simply being too strong to take on, but thankfully they were either kidding or simply talked away from the idea. In any case, they asked a few questions of the spy about their following tasks (find evidence linking the keep's banker as a cultist of Tiamat, and recover a religiously-significant gem), but were interrupted by commotion from around the corner as the bank itself was apparently on fire.

    Thus the saga continues.

  8. #8

    That twitter shit is awesome. Totally forgot they were going to do that.

    The fact no one left and you got a new dude for the second run is a very good sign. Usually games implode then.

  9. #9
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Next week opens with a skill challenge; I'm trying to find a way to make it more dramatic than it is right now, as in its current form it just causes a slight inconvenience during combat with some elementals if they fail (elemental fire spreading across the floor one square at a time during combat). There's only 4 elementals in the combat as written (scale to 5 for a group of 6), so I'm not sure that just running the challenge during combat (forcing them to give up standard actions to run the skills, obviously) will work, since the party can handily dispatch them and ignore the fires entirely. Maybe give them regeneration 5 or something as long as the skill check remains unfinished?

    Edit: Regeneration 10 if you really want to make them do the skills first.

  10. #10
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Session 3

    5 players tonight, all from last week. The 6th hadn't signed up at all this week, not sure if he was just out or what. It left us without a cleric which the party was unsure about at first but they decided to press on with their 5-team anyway.

    There's not really any RP or particularly interesting narrative for this session, I think it was kind of built just around the skill challenge and subsequent combat vs elementals, so not much RP to be had no matter what you do. The players were still really good about being descriptive about their actions and thinking about secondary consequences; at first they were just going to bull rush the doors but were concerned (through absolutely no prompting of my own, mind you, other than an Arcana check to note that the commotion in the scenario was magical in nature) decided instead to have the Rogue pick the lock and only open it to peek and get the lay of the land, which gave two of them a surprise round.

    Combat went well; the whole session felt a little shallow/short, but my watch told me otherwise. I think that was just the result of the material for this particular portion of the chapter, I didn't get to/have to do as much talking outside the combat situations so it felt like it zoomed by faster. Regeneration 10 worked marvelously for the elementals, as there were a few times they'd get bloodied from incidental attacks from people, and then snap back from it. I was worried that it would leave the PCs severely spent with a full complement of full hp monsters, but that wasn't really the case, especially since the players did in fact focus on completing the skill checks first; whether that was through my descriptions of it or the players' own intuition of the situation I'm not sure, as they took that focus pretty much from the start without even directly observing the regeneration yet. Still, it worked out, I was fairly pleased with the result.

    Sort of a sidenote here, I went out and picked up some square red and orange beads to use to mark the fires on the ground that were started and spread by the fire elementals in the combat (click for larger view, didn't want to double the post length with an incidental pic):



    Even as simple as their purpose was, the players were really impressed by it. Said it gave them a much easier tactical view of the overall layout as the battle went on as well as added some flavor to the board. So that makes me happy, and is food for thought for anyone reading this who is or wants to DM their own games in the future; even simple stuff like that can make a good impression.

    The poor Rogue in the group is still learning the hard way that running out in the front lines is probably not the best plan given his defenses; his saving grace this time was a few of my crappy rolls plus the elementals attacks primarily coming up against his Reflex defense...even so he still took a good amount of damage. I think he's down to one healing surge now, and I'm not even picking on him forcibly, he just always makes himself a convenient target. He almost got into serious trouble though as he had three of the elementals within threatening range of him plus several surrounding fires, was prone, and was himself LIT ON FIRE. The twitter buffs played to the advantage there as they had resist fire 1 for the first hour and +2 on saving throws (which being lit on fire was naturally save ends) for the latter half.

    One of the Wizards I think finally got into the swing of things with his character or the game in general, as he started to 'loosen up' and be less mechanical with his actions. At one point he fired a Magic Missile at a bloodied elemental and narrated himself doing a "The Fonz" type move to fire it. Best part was, he actually killed it with the attack just by happenstance of its hp. Whole table died laughing, it was awesome. He got extra points for that one, as did the Fighter for being hilariously mischievous after combat and going and peeing in the story antagonist's bed.

    Next week is the end of the chapter, after which I'm swapping off with another guy (one of the players, incidentally) to DM, and I'll be on the player side instead. So I'll still write some info so it can stay consistent across the whole season (since I should be DMing again in chapter 3), but it'll be a little different perspective in the meantime. I may post my own commentary about how he DMs and reflect on what he does that I can do to make my own game better, not sure yet.

    I do need to make myself an Essentials character though to get a jumpstart on my point gain for those chapters...probably make a slayer. Too bad the silly DDI character builder doesn't include Essentials yet

  11. #11

    Could have went with starbursts...

    Bonus points for silly stuff like that rocks. Basically what I would do is give huge significant bonuses to rolls simply for being a badass. Doubt that's allowed though.

  12. #12
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Well Encounters already does the Renown Points system to cover that and even has a specific reward available for a "moment of greatness", so that's what they got.

    By starbursts, you mean the candies? Decidedly less fire-like. In all honesty I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with it, just that I wanted something more than a slip of paper or scribbling on the battle board. Went into Michael's and just kind of went isle by isle until something jumped out at me, at which point I found those.

  13. #13
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Unrelated to Encounters, but this is currently the only D&D thread around so I might as well put it here.

    I came up with a wacky idea for a trap of sorts; it's a super rough concept piece right now because I'm not really sure what level range it's appropriate for or the exact application of it. I'd be interested in anyone's feedback on how to fine tune it.

    https://docs.google.com/document/edi...thkey=CJuJwbIC

  14. #14
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    Session 4

    7 players tonight, one of the regulars brought who I believe was his girlfriend. She had never ever played a d20 game before (but had played some tabletop RPG type games; he mentioned names but I didn't recognize them, but he described them as all being more basic logical rules and/or card driven instead of being numbers or dice driven), so it was fun getting to help teach her

    I understand this is like a 5 chapter thing, so not every bit will be narrative heavy, but I'm a little irritated at the nearly 100% lack of narrative content in these last two encounters. Not a lot I can do about it...hopefully chapter 2 will make up for it, and I should get to DM chapters 3 and 5 so hopefully we'll see more story in those two (simply judging by the overall pacing) so I can flex my narrative capabilities a little more often.

    The combat was...underwhelming. The way the map was laid out the PCs all started inside an enclosed space that just had a few openings in broken walls, vs 11 total kobolds of different varieties that tried to ambush them. The PCs got a high Perception check so they heard them coming, and the PCs basically just waited around inside the walled in area for the kobolds to line up at the openings for killing. Had they not succeeded on Perception, a faulty wall would have been pushed over on top of the party and created a huge open space, making for a lot more options for the combatants on both sides of the table and causing more concern about the threat certain ones posed. In hindsight, I probably should have just assumed that would be the case (handwaving off any Perception as being too low to succeed), or perhaps pushed the walls over anyway, but I had it in my head to leave the wall there for the players to use if they were smart enough to think about it (I even left a few creatures inside the blast of the wall for a while to bait them, but they didn't bite). In any event, the PCs handily succeeded, since they had free reign of their daily powers and such, being the last encounter before an extended rest.

    The only way I was able to do any serious damage to the PCs at all was thanks to the luck of the draw on twitter buffs (which even those I had to modify, as they were originally giving huge advantages to the players with almost zero tradeoff) causing all ranged attacks to do 3 additional lightning damage per hit and later to allow missed attacks to be rerolled (though not often in my favor). I was expecting a steamroll with the players knowing it was "no holds barred" but even so it just wasn't very interesting. We started late AND finished early, I was disappointed and even a few of the players commented on how anti-climactic it was. I wracked my brain all week trying to find a way to make it more interesting but there just wasn't anything I could come up with short of completely breaking immersion by just starting the PCs in an unavoidable ambush, which feels a little too 'on rails' for me.

    No matter. Next week, chapter 2 begins, I'll be on the player side of the table, gonna make me a slayer since we can use the extra striker. Hopefully I don't bleed too much meta from my chapter 1 information or the overall plot of the original Keep On the Borderlands lol

  15. #15

    I was curious how that worked... do they not give you a story synopsis that most modules contain?

    If I was in your shoes I would have the kobolds push the walls over anyway. Anyway the whole scenario seems a little unbalanced if your players can just "camp" lol. Taking inspiration from videogames, probably an easy solution is to have them toss in "grenades" - which would probably be vials of Alchemist's Fire or something to that effect. How much freedom are you given in DMing these encounters anyway?

  16. #16
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    The whole thing is open to DM interpretation, they just provide a lot of details in the writeup so that virtually anyone could theoretically DM. I blame myself for not executing it better really, but nothing to be done now; I was already running behind getting to the game so I didn't get a chance to really just stop and think about it.

    The story synopsis is there but this is a 5 chapter thing and I only have the material for the first chapter. WotC purposefully withholds the next chapter until 1-2 weeks before you run it.

  17. #17
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    not sure how that double posted. whatever >.>

  18. #18

    Can't download it (temporarily?). I think I'll listen to it while I play FFXIV, so I'll hold off reading the post.

  19. #19
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Tried the download from a few different systems and browsers and it worked fine, maybe they had a hiccup or something.

  20. #20
    YOU ARE SEARED
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    Have you ever been to DDXP?

    http://www.baldmangames.com/ddxpfp/

    I'm thinking about it. Maybe even as a judge to get a free ride lol.

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