Session 5: Experiences

OK, another session down, another chance to look at how the game ran and what lessons were learned.

The focus for this session was on Artemis again. He has a lot of plot hooks in his background and they are coming to the fore quite strongly. We got to meet a lot of his Clan members and some of them were rather strange. I need to remember not to overplay some npc's. The Shaman in particular probably ended up coming acorss as more kooky than creepy. I was particularly pleased to see him develop in this session and to see more of Azhanti coming out in his chat with the Witch.

The trip into the underways of the mountain went quite well. Assamber put his recently acquired brew potion ritual to good use in creating a poison detector (I dont bother with cash costs of rituals, making them more of a plot device). I again ran it as a skill challenge to find where they were going with the players describing the results of succees and I failures.

When I have done this before I have had failures result in an encounter of some sort. I didnt really want to bog this session down with inconsequential encounters so I planned to simply narrate their failures. They might flee from a nest of shadowhunter bats or get swept away by an underground river. The penalty for failure was loss of a healing surge. There were raised eyebrows around the table and a bit of sputtering but I reminded them of the power of the Viking Hat and they simmered down.

In the end I think it worked quite well and the players seemed to accept the idea. I wonder what they would have thought of the penalty for failing the challenge (arriving at the pumping station, losing 2 surges, expending a daily power of their choice and then getting surprised by the enemy).

The second part of the game was very cool. The group got to fight their first dragon in an ancient crumbling temple. Artemis pushing the Chieftain to join them did give me pause for thought even though I had introduced the idea with Isaac wanting to murder his Uncle. I had prepared some stats for them to join the fight but reconsidered at a late stage and had the npc's explore a different part of the temple. Fights can be complicated enough without adding in a bunch of npc's even if I did try and palm them off on the players at first.

I didnt bother to lay out the area befroehand, I simply dropped all of the temple tiles from that set onto the board and allowed everyone (including me) to lay down five tiles in order. When we had the map I also gave the players a list of special areas, hazards, pits, strange altars etc to add. I got to add one element for each they added. There were beneficial and harmful options and, classic for my group, they added a bunch of stuff to make life more difficult for them.

I have talked before about how wary I am of solo encounters and this was one against a level 5 solo dragon modelled on the young Black and Blue dragons in the MM. 260 HP, high defences and decent damage output had me slightly concerned, especially as it is an undersized group. Good use of tactics made the battle much easier than I thought it would be as the group hid in a narrow corridor where it couldnt get at the back lines.

Taking my cue from one of the players I had the dragon retreat and seal the corridor. The players got to recover their encounter powers but their daily effects ended and the dragon got to recover some HP and its powers. They came back at it hard and fast in a much more open environment and we played chase the god damn nippy Ranger until it went down. Splitting the fight up like this really made it feel much less like a padded sumo fight. Next week I am going to give waves of monsters a try and see how that works (I can hear the MMO comparisons already).

One thing that is becoming very apparent is that daily powers need some setting up before you use them or they become way too unreliable. That's tricky at level 5 in a 4 man group when you dont get a lot of bonuses to attack rolls. It may improve as they get more powers but in the meantime I may start throwing a larger number of slightly lower level monsters at them. That might also let Assamber feel that he is more than just a minion clearing machine.