No party deaths

Last night we took the huge party of eight players from the town of Brindol to Rivenroar Castle. The party decided to head to two nearby towns to try to get more precise directions, which actually surprised me. I thought for sure they would bring the map of the Elsir Vale to the captive Hobgoblin and ask him to point out the location. If they had done that, I would have had them make a new Intimidate attempt, and if it was successful, he would have pointed them to the right area. Instead they came to the solution in a more clinical manner. It lets them avoid doing skill challenges to navigate the direct path through the woods, along the river. It lets them avoid running into wild animals (even though some would live in the mountains, I assume they would steer clear of people hiking the hills). It also took them a full two days, when the trip should be able to be done in 8 hours. With the second day ending in a huge fight that took most of the party's Daily powers, nearly half of all of their healing surges and left most of the party close to bloodied, not to mention about two hours of real time, we decided to take a breather after that, with the characters camping outside of the Castle ruins.

DMing after 2 sessions

So much for the idea of posting weekly about the experience of running a DnD campaign. Oh well. Tonight will be the third real session of my Scales of War group, so hopefully by now I've gotten enough of the hang of things to run it pretty smoothly. Last week things went pretty well. It started with the encounter with an Ogre and his two hobgoblin allies, and I added in two Blackblades to try to up the difficulty for the number of characters. So far, all eight players have shown up both times, and it seems like the turnout is going to be good again tonight. I re-worked 4 encounters to be an appropriate fit for a party of 8, so as long as we don't get too far into the dungeon this week, it should be tough battles.

If the party gets to the portal room then I'm really interested to see how this all goes. The first encounter: Bar Fight, was a huge number of enemies, but since so many were minions, and the party was so big the whole battle went by with barely an encounter power used. It was a good place for everyone to get used to their characters' powers, and gave us all a fairly good impression of how I would be at running battles. Overall, I feel like it went pretty well, but not great.

The second session flowed right after the first, with the Ogre encounter mentioned before. The combat went really smoothly - but a little too quickly. Between the characters rolling several critical hits and them using action points and even a few daily powers it was over much faster than I anticipated. I added two more monsters to battle, but they were coming around the back of the fight, and the fight was basically over before they got into it. We followed that up with some role-playing, where the party met with a Councilman who hired them to rescue the townsfolk. Since the party did well role-playing (and got some good rolls on Skill Challenges), they were also commissioned to retrieve some artifacts, with both of these quests being rewarded with their full monetary value. This took longer than I wanted it to, but I wanted to make sure the players had a chance to learn what they needed, so I kept dragging it on. After that, they interrogated a captive hobgoblin and learned that they need to go "North". We stopped around this point.

Tonight we begin the third part. If my players are reading this, then they should know that "North" is not going to cut it. If they press this guy and get a map of the area he can give the basic location. If they fail that challenge, or just don't try it, they will be running into a nature encounter. This was planned on being one bear, but for the larger party I'll be making it into two bears. After that, they have a bit of road to travel on, and then they will be at the entrance to Rivenroar. I'm guessing that the road and the bear will go by fast enough to let the players get into the catacombs, so I have the first room, and the three rooms off of it ready to go for tonight. I think the odds are good that one of the party members will not survive the night - right now I feel like eliminating a player if their character dies (with an option to fill-in later on).