Chapter one closes...

So I finished up my first stint as DM Thursday (8 sessions over about 4 months). Overall given my experience level as a DM, I think I've done a good job. Not great, but good.

To recap:

Session 1 - Character, party, and world building. Beginning of first adventure, which was written by me.
Sessions 2-3 - Finishing up the first adventure.
Session 4 - Flying High adventure.
Sessions 5-8 - The Slaying Stone

As I've written before, I really liked The Slaying Stone. In addition to the "sandbox feel", it does have a decent number of traditional combat encounters. I think I ran zero of them as written because the players figured out the location of the stone so quickly. I ended up with a few improvised combat encounters using Monster Vault monsters, and running the Hu-Jat fight semi-modified, throwing in Krayd as a way to get the encounter to be more challenging to the level 3 PCs.

Anyways, at this point, I guess I want to talk about the last night's activities. The PCs needed to put the kobolds on top of the pecking order in town in order to please Tyristys, the brass dragon that had the stone. As the goblins started looking for them, they decided to talk to the kobolds. Because they had been beating up on the goblins a lot, they had little difficulty making the kobolds believe that they weren't trying to trick them. After determining the capabilities of the PCs, the kobold leader Speelock had some ideas about how the kobolds might be able to defeat the goblins with the help of the PCs. The skill challenge I ran for this can be found here.

Overall, the skill challenge went well. I think there were two not insignificant flaws in what I did with it, though:

1. It was a bit long, because I was really running 5 simple skill challenges at once. There were roughly 25 skill checks, plus a decent amount of narrative, and it took a little over an hour.
2. In several cases, probably once per PC, I was too suggestive of what the character should do. My role is to present obstacles for the PCs to overcome, not do that and then suggest a course of action.

But it seemed pretty well received. Versus the other skill challenges I've run so far, it was by far my favorite.

After successfully preparing for and implementing the minor war, the PCs bid the kobolds farewell, got the stone from Tyristys, and headed back to their patrons to give it to her to be destroyed. On the way, they had a final encounter with the orcs who were also trying to get the stone.

I thought the end of the first adventure (session 3) went well - it was a fight against a solo fire elemental, which was basically a reskinned Monster Vault green dragon solo - so I figured I'd go with another solo to cap this one. I used a level 7 solo from an issue of Dungeon called a Soul Weaver Collector as the basis for my solo. And then I used some "boss monster" rules I found on angrydm.com to make him a bit more interesting. Essentially the monster would go through three phases:

1. Vohx would use a magic item he got from his patron Dreus Matrand to "buff up". This would sacrifice his comrades, turning them each into a pool of sludge (4 pools total). I called this Sacrifice Sludge, which is a one-crit variant of Blood Rock, a terrain feature that allows you to crit on a roll of 19 or 20. To make the risk/reward tradeoff a bit more interesting than that of Blood Rock, when standing on Sacrifice Sludge you can't gain hit points. As he buffed up, the air would be sucking in toward him, pulling the PCs. He would use only melee attacks in this phase.
2. In phase 2, the air actually allowed him to fly. He would use only ranged attacks in this phase as he flew.
3. And in phase 3 after enough damage was done, he would land back on the ground and use whatever attacks he wanted.

This fight was our longest so far, clocking in at around 90 minutes. Combat encounter length is a common complaint about 4E D&D, but it's really the first time I've experienced it in my campaign. Most fights have been around 45 minutes, with one quite fun one (IMO) taking about 15. In that one, the PCs had to take down 3 patrolling monsters, but do it really quickly before their buddies came around the corner. The Monster Vault and MM3 monsters, which I've been using almost exclusively, remedy some design issues that made the fights take too long in some cases with MM1 and MM2 monsters.

This leads me to my first mistake with this fight. I thought the Soul Weaver Collector was based on MM3/MV design principles, but in fact it was not. It should have been doing way more damage, and because of its lackluster damage, it was never really a threat. I don't think the healer even used both of his healing effects.

The second mistake was putting him in the air for the second third of the fight. We have 3 melee PCs (a warlord, a warden, and a hexblade warlock), and when Vohx was airborne the PC DPR dropped significantly. And because the DPR was low, this boring phase took even longer. Having the warden throw handaxes at a flying foe must have been really boring for his player. I think if I had it to do again, I would put everyone in the air, with some special movement rules to allow semi-controlled flight. That would have been cooler, and allowed the melee guys to stay in melee range some of the time.

My third mistake was that I didn't notice any of the above until right near the end of the fight. I had been occasionally looking at the clock noticing how long things seemed to be taking relative to other fights we had done, and I should have at least tried to figure out some way to fix it on the fly. Instead, it just kept being something of a slog. Especially phase 2. I actually did call the fight a bit early in phase 3 because once he was back on the ground the warlord critted on him, and that seemed like a reasonable way to finish off the bad guy. But that just saved a few minutes, when I should have come up with some way to save 30. Or not mis-designed the encounter in the first place.

Now, all of that said, I don't think the night was a failure. I think it was okay. We had some good roleplaying, we did a skill challenge that had an interesting and decent narrative, and there were even moments of the minis-and-maps battle that were good. I would have liked to have gone out on my strongest night, but that didn't happen.

And I may sound like I'm down on myself above, but I'm actually not. Like I said at the outset, this is about learning a skill. It's not something I expected to be perfect at after 4 months. Writing down what I think my mistakes were is a good way to avoid them in the future. And I will definitely be DMing more in the future. :)

NPC Motivations

So I haven't written any entries for a while, but I've been running The Slaying Stone for the past two sessions (6/2 and 6/16). I think it'll last another one or two. In my opinion it's very much worth picking up if you're looking for an interesting low-level adventure. I don't think I've ever read a negative review of it, and my impression is that it's generally regarded as the best WotC-published 4E module.

Note that if you haven't read it, there are spoilers in the below. I have scaled some stuff up because the PCs are currently level 3, but beyond that my changes have been pretty minor.

The adventure was going pretty much as I expected for the first session. The players defeated the initial encounter (which I changed to be comprised of additional orcs from Vohx's clan), captured and interrogated one of the orcs, and then talked with Treona and Alkirk to get the job. They snuck into town as expected, and holed up in an abandoned building near the hot springs. They left some clues so the 5th member of the party (a drow ranger) could catch up. The player was missing, and so we invented a quick rendezvous with a member of the secret order he's part of to explain his temporary absence.

At the beginning of the second session, the ranger caught up, and because his perception is so high (PP of 25 in his default "stance" at level 3 is pretty crazy), he spotted Tyristys's lair near the hot springs. The PCs investigated, and talked with her in a humanoid form that I decided she had (elven, brass armor, etc.). She was cautious and curious about them, but didn't really give anything away. The PCs basically figured out what she was by her distinctly "brassy" look and the way the lair was dug out, and they got the impression that she was powerful since the rest of the monsters left her alone. But they had no reason to suspect she had the stone. They left, and as they were heading into town to start investigating, the drow had a thought.

"You know, if she's powerful and there's some artifact in town that has the ability to kill any single creature, she probably has it."

This made a lot of sense to the other PCs, and so they headed back. They used one of the "is the stone nearby" scrolls outside the lair, and it pointed into it. At this point, I was solidly in improv city. I had expected things to pretty much follow the pattern laid out early in the module. Where the PCs would start investigating around town, eventually find some brass dragon scales in the library, and figure out where such a creature probably lived. They'd talk to her, and by that point she would have been watching them for a while. She'd know that they weren't absolutely evil, and it would be possible to convince her to give up the stone. We were not following that pattern any more.

The "face" for the party went in and talked to her a second time, and because she had no knowledge of them, I decided that there was absolutely no way she would give up the stone yet. She basically told him as much, and that the party needed to prove themselves worthy of it. It looks like they'll now be trying to start a conflict between the kobolds and goblins in town - and she'd like to see the kobolds come out on top. Not that she loves kobolds, but she definitely hates goblins.

To be honest, I think I handled it really well for a relatively new DM. The PCs came up with a great idea that I had absolutely not planned for, and I was able to say "yes" and not shut them down or railroad them into my preconceived notions. And I think I've pinpointed why I was able to manage that. It's not because I'm sort of genius. It's not because I've studied improvisational theater. It wasn't just luck. It's because when I was preparing, I took specific notes about the motivations of the NPCs. And that saved my butt. Some of the motivations came from the author (Logan Bonner), and some came from me thinking about things. But I did think about these things, and I wrote my thoughts down.

And when the PCs figured out the mystery without finding any clues, I still had motivations to fall back on. I knew she didn't really care about the stone (since she's powerful enough to not need it), but I had thought about what she would fear - that it would be used on her. And in no small part, it's because the players had joked in the previous session about summoning Orcus and using the stone on him after they got it to "farm him for XP". :)

Anyways, understanding what the NPCs want is going to be an important part of my preparations from now on. And it should help me deal with the unexpected more effectively.

Obviously to lots of DMs, the above is pretty much "duh"-worthy. But it was a huge help to me a week or so ago, and I needed to write it down to help me remember. :)

Flying High

So last night was the fourth night of the campaign. We finished up the "aftermath" of the previous adventure and did a quick one that was written by a 3rd party. It was from From Here to There, by Goodman Games. The particular adventure was called "Flying High".

Basically the adventure plays out like this:

1. The party is heading to their next adventure. On the way there, they are "attacked" by flying creatures - Steelwing Hippogriffs to be precise.
2. The hippogriffs try carry one or more of the party off.
3. Failing that, one of them pretends to be hurt and tries to play on the party's sympathy.
4. In reality, they are trying to get the party to help them. Kobolds have been stealing their eggs, and they need humanoids to enter a cave and retrieve them.
5. The party eventually figures this out.
6. They help out, defeating the kobolds and saving the eggs, plus a newly hatched hippogriff.
7. The hippogriffs are happy, and the party has made some new friends.

I'd seen a few generally positive reviews of the PDF, so I bought it a few months ago. It is reasonably good, although poorly edited, IMO. Lots of little mistakes like the combat with the kobolds being populated two different ways in two different places, 3.5E instead of 4E skill names used in certain places (e.g. Climb vs. Athletics), etc. I haven't read the entire PDF, though, so maybe other adventures are edited better.

Anyways, it grabbed me for a few reasons:

• It's not a "kill everything that moves to succeed" adventure. It's not difficult to figure out that the hippogriffs mean them no harm, but it's still something that the PCs don't necessarily expect.
• It fit in well with our warden's goals - protecting nature from evil monsters.
• It sets up the potential for future flying mounts, which would allow the party to easily travel long distances. That was one thing I always liked about Morgan's game - the Wraith Carts we used allowed us to travel quickly, so the campaign had a more epic feel to it as we went all around the continent.

And I think it went pretty well. The skill challenges were decent, and the hippogriffs actually managed to grab one of the characters and carry him off in the first encounter.

I guess I wish I had modified it a bit more, though. The kobold combat was pretty lackluster, following a very standard pattern of:

• One leader guy
• A few soldier guys
• A lurker/skirmisher guy
• Some ranged attacking minions
• The combat taking place in a pretty uninteresting cave

And when it's really the only combat in the entire adventure, the party has a lot of stuff they can throw at the kobolds. Daily powers, action points, etc. It was quite an easy fight in the end.

I was thinking about it on the drive home, and I wish I had added some traps. The kobolds live here, and they are totally known for setting up traps in their lairs. Or maybe a two-room setup where the first room is almost entirely traps with a few kobolds, and the second room is where the main combat happens against the bulk of them. Ideally after the party is somewhat damaged and hasn't had time for a rest to heal up. It could have made the combat a lot more interesting for sure.

I guess if I have one lesson to take away from this adventure, it's that I should look at 3rd party adventures as more of a "core" or "kernel" of what the final adventure should look like. Don't get me wrong. I definitely like the adventure. I just think it could have been better for me and our group with some modifications.

In two weeks, the party starts looking for The Slaying Stone. I'm looking forward to it. And based on the above lesson, it looks like I have some modifications to do. :)

Night 3 Review

Okay, so in the third session a few days ago (Cinco de Mayo), we basically finished up the first adventure. I haven't actually described it yet, so now that it's done I'll run down the basic stuff that happened in the adventure, which I entitled "Elemental, My Dear Adventurers."

1. The PCs are in town when it's attacked by a slew of minion elementals. They thwart the attack.
2. The PCs volunteer to investigate in exchange for a reward, which is collected from the major businesses in town. These businesses have an obvious interest in the town not being destroyed.
3. They talk to a few NPCs around town about who might be behind the attack, or who might be able to help. They keep coming across the name Immeral Daymark, a powerful wizard who built a stronghold on a nearby mountain years previous.
4. Immeral is actually well-respected in town. No one thinks he's behind the attack. But maybe he has information about it.
5. The party heads up to the stronghold. As they approach, they start hearing a recurring pounding. It gets louder as they get closer.
6. The party enters the stronghold, which is built into a rocky "dome" of sorts. They meet a robotic butler named Book that gives them some information. Immeral went downstairs to one of his labs a few days ago, and hasn't been back since.
7. They go down to the laboratories, and follow the pounding to one of them. There are anti-magic wards that prevent the enormous fire elemental contained within from escaping. They also see humanoid remains, and a wand fragment near the badly burned body.
8. The party decides to check out other areas before trying to tackle the gigantic fire elemental. The first room they come across is a laboratory where different types of elementals are being "fused" together by a giant machine. They defeat them and turn off the machine.
9. The party then checks out another laboratory. In this one, there are elementals that can be buffed or de-buffed by randomly shifting energies. So for instance, a fire elemental may be buffed by a square of fire energy, or de-buffed by a square of cold energy. I used Final Fantasy oppositions - fire vs. ice, and water vs. lightning. The party had to solve a fairly simple puzzle to shut off the room, otherwise an infinite stream of elementals (new test subjects) would keep coming in as they killed them.
10. Near the end of that fight, they heard a massive explosion. The enormous fire elemental had escaped.
11. One of the PCs grabbed the wand fragment. He got a chance to talk with Immeral's "echo", which let them know what had happened. He basically let in the enormous elemental by accident, and it killed him. The spell he was in the middle of casting (Dimensional Cascade) is still stored in the wand, and if an arcane PC holds the wand within 100' of the elemental, the spell will be cast. This will shrink it considerably, and the PCs should be able to defeat it at that point.
12. The PCs give chase, which was a skill challenge. If they succeeded, they would catch the elemental before it reached the town. If they failed, it would be in town before they caught it. They succeeded, so were able to fight it on the road leading to town.
13. They got in range, which then shrunk the elemental to a manageable size. They then defeated the elemental.
14. They got their reward.

So the first night covered some startup stuff plus #1, the second night covered #2-#8, and the last night covered #9-#13. The bit at the end where they get their reward will be covered at the very beginning of the next session. The thing I want to focus on is #12 - the skill challenge.

Overall, I really like the idea of skill challenges. They're basically a way of building a narrative together as a group, describing some series of events that happen as the PCs try to reach some goal. In this case the goal was simple - catch the elemental before it reaches town.

I have read a lot of advice on the web and in Dungeon about skill challenges, and I decided to run the first one very transparently. In particular, I told the players they were entering a skill challenge, and I told them how many successes they needed. This was something Morgan always did, and it always worked well I thought. "It will challenge all of your skills," is the quote from him that I always think of. :) Fred has done the opposite, seamlessly going into the skill challenge without saying so. And again, it's worked well.

I've seen both work well, so I'll definitely be trying both ways, but the first time out I really felt like the challenge went badly. It didn't "feel" right, and the narrative that we ended up with was really awkward I thought. I think ultimately that it all came down to bad preparation. The PCs had to get 6 successes for various obstacles in their path, and I had come up with four. I had figured that they would come up with some alternate ideas, or that I could improvise a few, and that I wouldn't actually need to have a full six prepared. Very bad idea. :P I didn't have enough prepared, and I think it really showed.

So, if I had to come up with a few things I learned about skill challenges:

• If the PCs need N successes, prepare ways in advance to get at least N+2. If the players come up with obstacles and narrative on their own, awesome, but if they don't at least you're not staring at them with nothing else to throw at them.
• Try not telling the players that they're entering a skill challenge next time. See what works better narratively given my DMing style. I am none of the DMs that I've played with, so I have to find a way of doing things that works for me.
• Relax. When it became obvious to me during the game that the skill challenge wasn't going great, I sort of froze up.
• The standard for "group checks" where half the group has to meet their level's easy DC is way too easy. With an even number of players, it's even easier - like ridiculously so. Play around with the math to figure out a way that these checks can be made more difficult overall. Maybe use a standard DC instead of an easy one.
• I want to read more and try and see if anyone has advice about preventing heavy meta-gaming in skill challenges. Each player always looks to use their absolute best skills. Like. Every. Single Time. Obviously this makes sense if you're just trying to "win" every encounter, but I feel that skill challenges represent a nice type of obstacle where even if the PCs "fail", it's not a disaster.

Other than that, the night went smoothly. I think the buffing/de-buffing elementals encounter (#9 above) was really interesting, and the final fight with the elemental went well too. Each combat encounter took about 10 minutes longer than I thought it would, but they still went pretty smoothly. Not much roleplaying this session, but that's fine since it was quite heavily emphasized last session.

And if I can leave you with a quote from Zombie Marie Curie, I will merely say, "But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process."

Night 2 Review

The session described below was actually over two weeks ago at this point, but it's pretty fresh in my mind still. It was a pretty standard affair, lasting a bit shy of 3 hours, and following a very normal pattern. Basically:

• A decent amount of environmental description. I was pretty happy with the "laboratory" I developed. Lots of cool (IMO) magical effects, which makes sense given the NPC that they were investigating.
• Some good NPC chats. About who might be behind the initial attack on the town, gathering information, etc.
• Once the PCs got to where the "stuff" was happening, there was a combat encounter. A pretty good one that I stole from Dungeon 179 - Elemental Fusion (pp. 55-57), by Logan Bonner.

I guess the part I was happiest with was that the NPC interactions went well. This is the part I was most worried about going in. Doing funny voices, talking in character, etc. It's not my forte, but in the final analysis it was decent, and I even had a fun time doing it.

Stuff I had listed on my first night's review that I was able to tweak successfully:

• I definitely did more flavor, which fit nicely because some of the monsters had cool powers.
• I was able to focus fire the cleric pretty well, which ate up more than half of his surges.

Night 1 Review, Part 2

So like I said in the last post, I think generally the evening went well. I guess I wanted to sum up some of my thoughts about what I feel like I learned that night.

• Building stuff together is really fun. Everyone brought a nice character sketch at a minimum, and in a few hours we were able to build a nice history for each character, and how they came to form an adventuring party a few weeks previous.
• If you bring a crazy idea to a good group, it has a reasonable likelihood of working. Not so much because of the idea, but because of the group. I think that's what happened with the world-building - a good group just took it and ran with it.
• Hordes of minions are probably best thrown at a party that's low on daily powers available. Lots of classes have daily powers that hit multiple creatures at once. Or powers that render minions moot by giving damage resistance for the rest of the encounter. Although some of them did burn dailies, which is depleting their resources for the next encounters.
• Focus fire the squishies, especially those with a low number of surges. Trying to overwhelm the defender is not effective, especially with two healers in the group.
• A single encounter may not be especially hard, but over the course of 4-5 encounters in a row without an extended rest, you can deplete the party's resources. Hopefully to the point that the last encounter is a real nail-biter.
• I wrote "read-aloud" text for before and after the first encounter, but I'll definitely experiment with ad-libbing next time. It can probably be more "organic" that way - it can fit into what the party is doing at that moment better.
• The combat went really smoothly. I did public initiative, and I think that helped. Everyone had an action ready when it was their turn.
• Part of the reason I wanted combat to run smoothly was so I could feel like interjecting flavor into it wasn't making a long fight even longer. I need to actually remember to interject flavor, though. There was a whole lot of "I use power X. 23 vs. AC. Hit. 7 Damage." without any narrative. Not terrible because combat was running smoothly, but not what I was shooting for.
• The players should be doing some flavor during combat too. Especially when using a power that the rest of the party hasn't seen before, which is pretty much true by definition in encounter 1 of adventure 1.
• When something seems wrong, look it up. I don't blame anyone but myself for this, but there was a power being used in a particular way that seemed wrong at the time, and as it turns out, it was wrong. I had really taken to heart advice to not bog down combat with rules questions, but really the advice is that you shouldn't spend a long time doing it. If it takes 20 seconds (which it would have since I could have accessed the Compendium easily), look it up.

That's everything I can think of. It was a good learning experience for me, and overall even though I was pretty green, it all went fairly well. We'll see how the next leg of the adventure goes in 8 days.

Night 1 Review, Part 1

So Thursday 4/7/2011 was the first game, and I think generally it went well. We did pretty much what I expected, including:

• Having people describe their characters, and filling in a few holes here and there.
• Building a party history. Why are they together, how did they meet, etc.
• Doing a collaborative world-building exercise to define some basic status/history of the world.
• Running some roleplaying in town, and then the first combat encounter.

I want to write about the third thing - the world-building exercise - because it went both differently and better than I thought it would. I think of everything we did that night, it was the thing that had the best chance of totally failing. But it really didn't. Everything went better than expected.

The way the game was described on story-games.com (see this post), it was fairly structured. People took turns. There was a clear ordering to what happened. I went in with this idea in mind, and we sort of started out that way, but it quickly became something different.

It became more of a brainstorming exercise, with really just a dash of structure. And I think it worked much better that way, at least for our group. People looked at the cards they were given, and when one person built a bit of the world, another would often jump in and add something immediately. I think in the end everyone ended up starting the ball rolling on at least one area of the map, and I'm absolutely certain that everyone contributed something really cool.

I think my favorite area is #10, which is the southernmost part of the map. The continent doesn't end there, but the campaign area does for now. So the initial two influences were Melora and Asmodeus. This set up an area of conflict between evil tyranny and nature-loving folks. Someone quickly added Sehanine, which made the non-evil side influenced by two unaligned female gods. So they made the good side a matriarchy, fighting on behalf of a jungle/wilderness area. And on the evil side, there's an ancient black dragon who works on behalf of Asmodeus. Then someone added Zehir, who has dominion over serpents. So there are also Lizardfolk and Yuan-Ti vying for the approval of the dragon, and often fighting among themselves. Cool stuff, with tons of potential adventure/campaign hooks.

Other areas include a couple of mysterious islands, one of which holds a monastery with a vault of prophecies, and the other of which was colonized by an Eberron-like society in the distant past that fell and left lots of interesting magical stuff. There's a really really bad place you'd never want to visit - just overrun with badness - with the exception of one little area where followers of Bahamut lead a fight against the darkness. This will likely be the area that Fred's campaign focuses on. We ended up with openings to other planes in several places on the map - the Feywild, the Shadowfell, the Underdark. And on and on and on... Awesome.

One interesting thing I had noticed when I was building the deck - the 4E D&D pantheon tips on the evil side a bit. There are 4 Lawful Good or Good gods, 7 Unaligned gods, and 9 Evil or Chaotic Evil gods. When you build a campaign world using equal influences from each of the gods (the deck had two copies of each god in it), it's a pretty bad place. But with ample opportunity for "points of light". And as someone (I'm pretty sure Ken Austin) noted during the game, good folks tend to work together and build stuff, while evil can often get caught up fighting amongst themselves.

Ideas were flowing fast and furious, and it was really fun. I doubt I captured everything, but it's a really great place to start. And hopefully the group will feel a little more invested in the world since they helped build it.

Anyways, I'll write more about the game later, but that part of the night went swimmingly.