Category Archives: In-Person D&D

Living Forgotten Realms – my first time

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While I mainly use this blog to talk about my efforts at serving as a Dungeon Master for my own online games of D&D, I do like to play D&D, too.  At the moment I am between campaigns in real life.  I don’t mean that I have no prospects for my next campaign – the next one will start in a couple of weeks with my same play group, just with a different person taking a turn as DM (as I discussed in my post about the death of my wizard character, Zod).  The online game that I DM is also on hiatus as two of the three players are currently on vacation.  This has given me lots of time to learn about MapTool, for instance, which is great – but I miss playing D&D.

Fortunately for me, I live within walking distance of a fantastic local game store called Enchanted Grounds.  This is a game store / coffeehouse.  I mainly go for the games – formerly a lot of Magic: The Gathering and German-style board games like Pandemic and Settlers of Catan, and more recently of course for Dungeons and Dragons books and dice.  In addition to selling D&D stuff, Enchanted Grounds also runs organized D&D events.  They’ve been running D&D Encounters on Wednesday nights, which I’d love to check out but which unfortunately conflicts with the bowling league that Barbara and I are in (yes, we both play D&D and bowl).  They also have Living Forgotten Realms, or LFR, which I only vaguely understood.  I knew it was a D&D Fourth Edition game, but it’s set in a campaign world that I know nothing about.  Also, I wasn’t sure about the rules for creating a character, getting into a game, etc.  When I finished work Thursday evening, I had a hankering to play some D&D, so I printed out the character sheet for one of the three potential characters I had rolled up for the campaign that we’ll be starting with our friends in a couple of weeks (a character that I was pretty sure I was not going to play in that campaign) and headed off to the store.

I had checked the store’s web site and their LFR Yahoo Group before leaving, and I knew that players had to basically reserve their spots in the game in advance.  There were going to be two tables of players – one in an adventure for level 4-7 characters and one for level 1-4 characters.  I introduced myself to Rich, the man who coordinates the LFR games at Enchanted Grounds, and said that I had never played LFR before and would be watching and learning this evening.  However, when game time rolled around, one of the six seats at the low-level game table was empty because one of the scheduled players hadn’t shown up.  Lucky me – I would get to play!

I introduced myself and my character (Rohgar, the half-elf Paladin) to the group, and we were on our way.  The group had five first-level characters and one second-level.  We were a technically balanced party, though a little heavy on healing.  My Paladin was the only defender, and he was a healing-focused guy.  We also had two Clerics, one of which was a mega-healing pacifist.  We had a controller – a Psion, which I hadn’t seen in action before – and two strikers (a Ranger and an Avenger).

The adventure began with the local king charging our group with the task of investigating some evil activities in the area around the city, and we soon encountered an old man with a broken cart by the side of the road.  As we approached to help him, some shadow creatures came out of the trees and attacked us.  We beat them up without much trouble, fixed the man’s cart, then headed off in pursuit of a black-clad knight we had seen on a nearby ridge during the battle.

From here, the night turned into a long stretch of role playing, which was kind of fun (though mixing in a combat encounter along the way might have been more fun).  We were on horses and had to follow the knight’s trail down a steep slope, which was problematic for me as I was terrible at Athletics.  Most of us ended up breaking our horses’ legs in the descent (so sorry, Starshine!) and had to continue on foot.  We found the knight, who had a skull for a face, in a glade of white-painted trees, which a Religion check revealed were designed to ward off evil spirits.  We talked to the knight instead of attacking, and it turned out that he was a guy from town who had been falsely accused of treason, cursed by his father, and banished from the city.  The skull face was just a mask he used to hide his identity from the townsfolk who hated him (smart choice, going with a skull face).  We wanted to help him clear his name, so we took him back to town with us.

We arrived to find a big, torch-wielding mob freaking out about the evil activities and the approaching (unscheduled) lunar eclipse.  Our knight friend skedaddled.  We dispersed the crowd, repaired a holy obelisk, talked to the knight’s father (who definitely seemed fishy to us), tracked town the town official who had banished the knight (he was incompetent), tracked down some reports about the evil activities that the town official had hidden (they would help to clear the knight’s name) and finally ended up at a temple to an evil goddess.  The cult leader, naturally, was the knight’s father.  We dispersed the cultists and engaged the leader, who was about to sacrifice his baby son on the altar.  Our strikers teamed up on the cult leader while the rest of us handled the shadow creatures that were trying to get into the temple.  Again, it was a fairly easy combat.  We saved the baby, got a new hearing for the knight (I’m sure he’ll win) and were awarded the king’s favor.

My verdict on Living Forgotten Realms as a player is that it’s definitely a way to get that D&D fix when I can’t get it any other way.  I believe this store runs games three times a week, so there are plenty of opportunities to play if I so desire.  I was surprised at the low level of challenge in the battles, but the role playing was quite fun.  Our pacifist Cleric basically stood up and gave a fire-and-brimstone speech to the mob in the city, which had the odd effect of convincing the townsfolk to try to incinerate their lamps, but it was way cool.  My Paladin was supposed to be quite diplomatic, but I sort of stunk when it came to actually talking rather than rolling dice.  I’ll work on it, though.  I definitely prefer the home games with friends, but LFR is something I could see myself playing from time to time.

The magic item system for LFR is a little confusing.  During the adventure we came across a few different magic items, and we had to divvy them up for use during the adventure.  However, at the END of the adventure we could each take one magic item, and multiple players could pick the same thing.  To make matters more complicated, you can only USE a magic item up to four levels higher than your character (so, as a first-level character I could use up to a fifth-level magic item), but you can HAVE any level magic item.  Also, if it’s an enchanted weapon of a particular type, you can transfer the enchantment to any weapon you want.  In my Paladin’s case, I took a seventh-level magical dagger and transferred its enchantment to my longsword, but I can’t actually use that enchantment until I move up to level three.  Confusing, I know.

I could see myself playing LFR again in the future – hopefully with Barbara joining me – but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to play my Paladin again.  He did exactly what he was supposed to do – bring the enemies to himself, absorb damage, dish out healing, punish the enemies he calls out when they attack his allies – but it just wasn’t that much fun.  I really didn’t move around at all in either battle – I stood there and traded blows with bad guys.  It worked for the party, but it was kind of dull.  I know I’m going to play an Avenger in my main campaign with my friends, so I might try LFR again with a Warlord that I’ve rolled up.  We shall see.

How about DM lessons?  Aarrun, the DM for the game Thursday night, was a great DM in my opinion, and I feel like I could learn a lot from him.

  • He knew the rules forward and backward.  For instance, he knew what my Paladin’s powers could do much better than I did.
  • He kept the game moving, letting the table know whose turn it was and who would be up next.
  • He got into the role playing in a good way.  He had a favorite NPC – a batty old lady who ran a book and bird shop – who really came alive with Aarrun’s acting.
  • He let the players try whatever they wanted, even if it was stupid.  Hilarity often ensued.

I have a long way to go before I can be a DM on par with Aarrun, but I feel like I can get there one day.

The Death of Zod

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I was planning to write about more advanced MapTool macros that I’ve created for player characters today, but my plans changed after our in-person D&D game.  This is the first time our group has been able to get together in almost a month, and we decided to use the Memorial Day holiday as an opportunity to barbecue,  hang out and do some adventuring.  The food was great, if I do say so myself (I did the cooking).  Barbecue ribs with sauce from Sonny’s Barbecue (a chain that we know from Florida), plus burgers, grilled veggies, baked sweet potatoes – good times!

As for the gaming, the last time we played was when we fought the infamous down-leveled Troll Vinespeaker that nearly destroyed us.  Fortunately, we finished that guy off at the end of our last session.  Our group returned to the rebel camp that we were assisting, rested, and helped the rebels relocate their camp (since the bad guys now knew where the old one was).  My wizard, Zod, used a ritual for the first time ever to conjure Tenser’s Floating Disk in order to carry some of the wounded rebels.  The rest of the party carried supplies, helped navigate through the woods, and inspired the camp onward, with great success.  We then set off to a nearby cave that the rebels were hoping to dig into in order to create a secret tunnel into the city that they were rebelling against – but which had been discovered to contain a cave troll.  Fire supplies at the ready, we ventured into the cave.

The troll’s lair was interesting – it was a giant lake with a narrow path running around it.  The troll was tall enough to stand and walk in the lake, with the goal of grabbing adventurers, using them as weapons against one another, and dragging them underwater from time to time.  The water made our use of fire a little more difficult.  If the troll was under the water, for instance, Zod’s flaming sphere couldn’t hit him.  Still, with good tactics (and some crazy-awesome dice rolling from Barbara’s ranger, Violet), we finally defeated the cave troll and got some good loot.  Most of us had used up our daily powers and action points, but we still had plenty of healing surges left and we figured that the troll was probably the nastiest thing we would encounter, so we decided to explore a little further.  After all, if the rebels were going to be digging a tunnel in this cave, we should let them know what to expect up ahead.

A short while later, our party came to a small waterfall, behind which was an area that looked like still water.  We spotted an amulet in that area, but Zod’s Mage Hand wasn’t able to penetrate the surface.  Our warden recognized the “still water” as some type of slime creature, so I cast a fire burst at it, and the battle was on.

We were fighting a whole bunch of slimes – a big yellow one, two nasty green ones that liked to engulf us, four gray ones that sucked our Fortitude defenses down, and something like 15 slime minions that slid us two squares every time they hit us.  Bree’s defender was soon slid to the far side of the chamber and was unable to get back.  Zod tried to take out multiple monsters with Thunderwaves, but with mixed success.  Eventually we were surrounded and found ourselves in trouble.  We ended up with Kyle’s bard alive and the other three of us unconscious.  Barbara’s ranger made a miraculous natural 20 on her death save, which helped immensely.  The bard healed the warden, who was planning to come administer a potion to my wizard, Zod – when the yellow slide decided to attack Zod while he was unconscious.  That, friends, is called a Coup de Grace, and it’s an automatic critical hit – and a dead wizard.  Oops!  I didn’t feel that badly about it, honestly.  These things happen.

The rest of the party was able to escape the slime cave, and I headed to the computer to print out a character sheet for a Warlord I had rolled up a couple of weeks back (we needed more healing).  In a few minutes, though, the rest of the gang called me back into the room.  They had decided to call this an end point – not just for our session today, but for the campaign.  I was worried at first that somehow my letting Zod get killed caused the party to collapse, but it turned out that Barbara and Kyle were both rather unhappy with how they had built their characters from the start (Kyle because he was brand-new to Fourth Edition and really wanted a Monk, not a Bard, and Barbara because I had interfered too much when she was creating her character and it never really felt like HER character), Bree wanted to try her hand at DMing, and Nate was itching to play rather than DM.  So, we called it a campaign.  Bree will probably start us up again in three weeks with a pre-published adventure to get us going anew.

What lessons did I learn?  Well, first I learned that the death of a character is not catastrophic.  I’ll admit that I’m not great at role playing yet, so I probably wasn’t as attached to Zod as I could have been, but the thought of bringing in a brand-new character didn’t sound so bad to me, honestly.

Second, I think that character death is more acceptable when it feels fair.  The cave troll we fought was challenging (mostly because of the water) but fair.  The slimes were very numerous but fair.  Dying there didn’t seem like anything went horribly wrong – some bad luck, some tough monsters, maybe a questionable decision to push on without daily powers.  Had we ended up dying to the troll druid from our previous session, I would have been bitter, as I felt that monster was unintentionally overpowered.

Third, I’ll have to think about how I feel as a DM about the possibility of the campaign ending, perhaps abruptly.  While our DM, Nate, was happy for the chance to play instead of DM, he seemed to take the decision to end the campaign after this battle somewhat hard, as if it were his fault.  We were having fun with the campaign itself, but having two players with characters that they didn’t like all that much was a problem.  The notion of me rolling up a new character when Zod died basically got them thinking, “You know, a new character might be fun!” and things went from there.  It wasn’t Nate’s fault.  I think he worried that the encounters he put together were overpowered for our party, and maybe they were a little bit, but that’s because he used to work at Wizards of the Coast and was used to playing with people who ran super-optimized characters that would blow through any encounter equal to their level or even a little higher.  Did he make things too hard today?  No, I don’t think so.  Sometimes it’s right to flee, and we didn’t do that soon enough in the slime battle.  So it goes.

I had fun with my first real D&D campaign, and I’m glad that I’ll get the chance to hang out with this same group of friends to adventure together.  I find the idea of a new character, new DM and new campaign to be exciting, not depressing.  The only down side is that now I won’t get to play any D&D at all for several more weeks – but that’s mainly because I have some business travel coming up the weekend after next.  After that, game on!

Old-school Dungeons and Dragons

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Barbara and I are on a trip to the northeast from our home in Colorado.  We spent five nights in Boston, where we found time to get together twice on OpenRPG to play in our main online D&D session with Lane and Zach.  On the sixth day, we drove to Albany to meet our friend Sara and her family.  Sara just had a baby (her second) via C-section on Monday of this week, but three days later she was home and ready for her weekly D&D game with her husband Scott and their friends.  Since she knew Barbara and I liked D&D, she invited us to join them for the evening.

The game was first edition D&D, which we’ve never played before.  I found a document online called OSRIC, which seems to be an attempt to build an open, freely available rules system that more or less mirrors D&D first edition.  I glanced at OSRIC a little bit, but didn’t spend much time on it.  When we arrived at Sara’s place (and the baby is adorable, by the way!) and got ready to start playing, I chatted for a few minutes with Shawn, the DM.  He explained that, since all we have really played so far is Fourth Edition, we haven’t really played Dungeons and Dragons – we’ve just played a miniatures game.  He’s definitely an edition purist, and not at all a fan of Magic: the Gathering (a game I played for years, though I’ve pretty much replaced it with D&D now), which he sees as being related to Fourth Edition.  Fair enough – I’m always up for learning something new!

Barbara and I would be playing the characters of Ert and Bernie, who are hired henchmen of the main party.  We were brothers, a half-orc and a half-elf (apparently our mom got around).  We were only paid to carry stuff, and would defend ourselves if need be, but weren’t looking to get into the fray.  The game session lasted about four hours, of which we spent about three hours goofing around and joking with the group.  It was fun, and we fit right in.

The gaming itself, I have to say, was not meaningfully different from what we’re used to in Fourth Edition.  Sure, we didn’t use minis to show where our characters were standing on a map, but that didn’t feel like a big deal.  We only got into combat a couple of times, and the flow of combat was more or less what I was expecting.  Now, the specific numbers are wildly different from Fourth Edition.  Our wizard had four hit points, and our barbarian had a massive 16.  Armor classes are the opposite of what we’re used to (lower ACs make you harder to hit), and when you roll to hit a bad guy, the DM has to look up a table to see, based on your class, whether your attack hits or not.  There were some occasions where I felt like some of the things that exist in Fourth Edition would have helped, such as a nature or history check here or there, but those are minor quibbles.  The battles were a little underwhelming – usually just one or two bad guys, with nothing more exciting than swinging a sword or shooting a crossbow bolt going on – but I’m guessing that’s just because those were the encounters that happened to come up this time around.  The role playing was the same, and just as fun.

My guess is that old-school players don’t like Fourth Edition largely because it’s entirely possible to play Fourth Edition without any role playing.  You could play it as just a game where you move tokens around a board and play cards that make something happen (your powers).  You don’t HAVE to play it this way, though, and we don’t – we emphasize role playing, creative thinking, etc.  It’s way more fun that way.

Another complaint of Shawn’s is that all of the Fourth Edition classes are equivalent to one another in a lot of ways.  The impact of a first-level at-will power is going to be pretty similar across various classes, as will a third-level encounter power, etc.  He feels that the only differences are in the flavor text (one is a wizard casting a spell that causes a missile of force to hit an enemy while another is a rogue throwing a rock at an enemy using a sling, and so on).  First of all, I disagree somewhat here – there are actual mechanical differences, especially in daily and utility powers, but I do agree that the game is built to be balanced so that you don’t have one class’s abilities totally outshining another’s.  I actually like the balance, though – if you want to be a wizard, great!  You have useful things to do at all times.  Cleric?  No problem!  Whatever you want to be, you’ll be able to do something interesting.

I’ve heard of earlier editions as having the “linear warriors, quadratic wizards” phenomenon, where wizards are pathetically weak at low levels and crazy powerful at high levels, while warriors are pretty good at any level.  I think Fourth Edition gets away from that, and this is a good thing in my opinion.

So, D&D is D&D as far as I can see.  You role play, you fight stuff, you have fun.  The details differ, but the underlying game is the same.

Troll druids are nasty

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We had our in-person D&D game yesterday, where my wife Barbara and I went to our friends Nate and Bree’s house to play D&D with the two of them and with our friend Kyle.  Kyle couldn’t make it, so I ended up running his character for him.  This was an interesting experience.  My character is an eladrin wizard, and Kyle’s is a tiefling bard.  Making matters a little more interesting, we only had Kyle’s original level 1 character sheet, and we’re now at level 3.  I leveled the character up based on my best recollection of the choices Kyle had made (though I’ll admit that I did change the level 2 feat to suit my own preferences) and ran with it.

Our characters started off in a rebel camp in a forest outside of a huge city.  Our party had decided to help the resistance against the overlords of the city, and we were getting ready to head off to a tunnel that the rebels were building to get in and out of the city to rid it of a cave troll.  Before we could leave the camp, however, we were invaded by two trolls and three ogres.  These guys were coming after us because of some run-ins we had with the authorities in the city before we got out to the rebel camp.  We later figured out (thanks to some fantastic intuition on Barbara’s part) that they were able to find us by tracking an enchantment on an item that we had stolen from them (oops, our bad).

The battle in the camp was pretty interesting.  The lead troll was clearly the guy we needed to focus on.  He started off by grabbing my bard (well, Kyle’s bard) by the head in the first round and hanging onto him throughout the whole battle.  The bard had a tough time escaping a grab, but he fought pretty well for a guy with his head being squeezed by a troll!  The rest of the party battled well and was ultimately helped by some of the other rebels joining the fray to finish off the bad guys.  We took down the lead troll and the three ogres, but the second troll – a druid of some sort – escaped into the woods.  Despite the fact that we had spent our daily powers and were not in the best shape in terms of hit points, we decided that letting him get away to warn other giantfolk would be a bad idea.  So, we chased him into the woods.

The chase was handled as a skill challenge, which we just barely succeeded on, and we found the troll druid in the woods.  Here’s where things got ugly.  This particular guy was a Troll Vinespeaker (from Monster Manual 2), which is normally a Level 14 creature but which Nate had scaled down to Level 6.  I think this means that he lowered the hit points, attack bonuses, defenses and damage output, but he didn’t fundamentally change any of the powers.  I think this was a mistake.  During the battle in the camp, the Vinespeaker had buffed his allies with some temporary hit points (fair enough), backed out of melee to shoot vine attacks at individual PCs (no problem) and then, just before he ran away, shot an area attack at a few of us.  The area attack created a nine-square area of vines that:

  • attacked each PC in the area when it was created
  • dealt 1d10+2 damage to each PC that was hit
  • IMMOBILIZED each PC that was hit (save ends)
  • dealt 1d8 damage to each PC that began its turn in the area or entered the area
  • served as difficult terrain (you move through it at half speed)
  • and the area persisted until the end of the encounter

Okay, a few things here.  First, I know that Nate scaled down the bonus to hit with this attack (at level 14, it was +18 versus Reflex, and I know that this troll’s bonus to hit was way lower).  So that’s good.  Second, I don’t believe he altered the damage dealt by the beginning of turn / enter the zone attack.  That’s not so good.  Even with all of that, though, we only saw this druid use the ability once in the camp, so we assumed it was an encounter power – once per battle.

Nope – it was at-will.

Think about that for a minute.  Every single turn, this troll (who started the battle in the woods about 10 squares away from us, with the PCs clustered together) can create an area of thorns around several PCs that, if it hits (which it usually did), deals a bunch of damage right there, then immobilizes the character until the end of their next turn at best (if they make their first saving throw), then deals additional damage at the beginning of the character’s next turn – and the one after that if they miss their save, and then the one after that if they miss that save…  It was ugly, ugly, ugly.

The troll quickly created four of these zones that pinned down most of the party.  The other party members were trying to pull the immobilized creatures out, but it wasn’t happening.  My wizard and my bard both went unconscious, still sitting in thorns (so taking 1d8 every turn until the end of the encounter).  Bree’s warden pulled the wizard out, but getting the bard out looked hopeless.  Barbara’s ranger then had the bright idea to try to scare off the troll by shooting some fire arrows at it.  The arrows missed, but the troll was scared of the fire and ran.  Now that he wasn’t generating new zones, the warden and ranger were able to pull the bard out, barely.  The unconscious characters were carried back to the rebel camp and healed, and we took an extended rest and chased after the troll druid the next morning, where we found him and finished him off (though Kyle’s bard almost died again to some stupid little plant creatures – sorry Kyle!).

The battles were intense and draining.  I’m glad we prevailed, and almost everything was great – except, in my humble opinion, the way the Troll Vinespeaker was converted from level 14 to level 6.  The Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) has some advice on changing the level of a monster.  It says that, to lower the monster’s level you should decrease its attack rolls and defenses by 1 per level and decrease the damage it deals with its attacks by 1 per every two levels.  You also adjust its hit points according to its role.  However, it also says that this process really only works for changing a monster’s level by 5 or less, and that beyond that you should pick a different monster to work from.

In this case, the Vinespeaker needed to be bumped down by 8 levels.  This means that its attack roll and defenses should all be lowered by 8, and its hit points should be lowered by 64 – and I think Nate did this exactly.  Its damage should be reduced by 4 – and I think Nate did this, but only for attacks that dealt dice damage plus static damage.  So, the damage from being hit by the thorny area attack was originally 1d10+6, and I think Nate lowered it to 1d10+2, which is reasonable.  He did not, however, change the damage dealt by the thorn area each turn or whenever a character entered the zone.  It was 1d8, the same as it would have been at 14th level.  This should have been no more than 1d4 (reducing the maximum damage by 4), although that’s only reducing the average damage by 2 rather than 4 (1d8 averages 4.5, whereas 1d4 averages 2.5).  I guess it really should have been reduced to a fictional die that rolls either a 0 or a 1 (average of 0.5).  So, that’s a big problem – we took a lot of damage from those thorns!

Furthermore, I think the point in the DMG about just abandoning this idea for monsters that are more than 5 levels away from what you’re seeking is important here.  A monster 8 levels above another monster is going to have mightier powers – not just in terms of the attack bonus or damage dealt, but also in terms of special abilities.  In this case, there’s no way a 6th level monster should have an at-will ability that creates a zone that deals damage and immobilizes when it hits, deals damage each turn that you stand in it or whenever you enter it, serves as difficult terrain and lasts until the end of the encounter.  If that were an encounter power, that would be fine.  Maybe even a power that recharges on a 6.  Alternatively, it could be an at will that creates a zone that persists for one turn.  But all of that together is just too much for a 6th level monster.

Let me be clear on something – I like Nate a lot.  I think he’s actually a fantastic DM.  And I think that the troll druid was a way cool enemy.  But I don’t think the troll druid ended up being what Nate intended him to be – a tough supporting character in an encounter led by a bigger, nastier troll and backed by some smaller ogres.  He ended up being nearly a solo monster.  If we had fought him one on one after an extended rest, with our daily powers charged, it would have been a fair fight (thanks in part to the wizard having access to Flaming Sphere).  So, that’s a lesson for us as players – charging after a bad guy when you’re exhausted from a tough battle may be a bad idea.  But if that thorny area attack had been an encounter power (as we thought) rather than at will, I think we would have handled him pretty easily, even when exhausted.  I think Nate chose to have the troll flee from the ranger’s fire arrows out of pity, honestly.  By that point in the battle we had given up on attacking the troll and were just trying to flee, but we couldn’t get our fallen comrades out of the thorns without the troll just creating more.  The troll couldn’t really have been that afraid of a couple of fire arrows (especially when they both missed him).

What have I learned?

  • As a player, I’ve learned not to make assumptions about what is an at-will power and what’s an encounter power!
  • I’ve also learned that chasing a fleeing baddie when you’re exhausted can be a bad idea – although, as I said, had the thorn zone been an encounter power I think we would have been fine mopping up a lone troll druid.  I think you should pursue the weakling before he can alert his big friends.  This guy, as it turned out, was no weakling.
  • As a DM, I’ve learned that you have to be very careful when adjusting monster levels.  I think that I’ll start by sticking to the DMG’s advice when I do this sort of thing, and not try to re-level a monster by more than 5 levels (and probably not even that much).
  • Rewarding players for being clever is extremely important and satisfying for everyone.  The fire arrows were smart, as was the discovery that the stolen item let the authorities track the party, and we were rewarded for both of those and felt good about it.
  • You have to be open to the possibility that you’ve made a mistake.  As a player, I realized that I made a huge mistake in assuming that the thorny area power was at will.  When I did, I changed my thinking to, “Let’s get out of here!” but it was too late.  As a DM, I think I should be open to the possibility that one of my ideas isn’t working, as with the power level of the troll druid in this case.  When that happens, I think I would want to fix it on the fly rather than let the consequences play out as written.  This is absolutely a situation I could see myself getting into as a DM, and I think I’ve learned something important about how to handle it.

I’ve heard it said that people learn more from failures than successes, and I think that’s true here, too.  Our party’s decision to go after this monster was a mistake, and I think I’ve learned from it.  The power level of the troll was a mistake, too, and I’ve learned from that as well.  The good news is that despite everything, our party pulled through and had a good time doing it.

One other note: It looks like schedule conflicts and upcoming travel plans are going to make it so that I won’t be able to play my online D&D game with my friends until late June (it’s mid May as I write this).  That’s disappointing, but it’s not the end of the world.  We may get the small group together (four of us) once or twice for a quick-hit adventure, but we’ll probably just put things on hold.  Hey, that give me more time to get some challenges ready for everyone!  I can live with that.

Lessons from my real-life DM

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Even though I’m a D&D 4e blogger, I’m still relatively new to the game.  I’ve been playing since early 2010 in a game with my wife Barbara and our friends Nate, Bree and Kyle.  Nate is our DM, and based on my admittedly limited experience, I think he’s really good at it.  I plan to think about the things that Nate does that make our games so much fun, and try to take those lessons to heart in my own DMing.

First of all, I think Nate has taken a lesson from the fourth edition Dungeon Master’s Guide to heart – the goal of the Dungeon Master (in person or online) is to help everyone playing the game to have fun.  I’ve heard that earlier editions of D&D pitted the DM against the players in a contest to see who would “win,” where “winning” as the DM basically meant killing off the party.  In fourth edition, the focus is on fun.  If certain aspects of the game aren’t fun for your particular group of players, then try to avoid those aspects if at all possible.  Wiping them all out probably won’t be much fun for the party, for instance, so try to avoid that!

We’ve played for about five sessions now (just leveled up to level 3 – woo hoo!), and I can tell that Nate is trying hard to observe what we like and dislike when we play.  It helps that our group gels really well – we like each other outside of our D&D time, too, which is a big plus.  So even if something weren’t going well at the table, we would still have fun spending time together. Still, things have been going quite well at the table.

At the end of the session, Nate asked specifically if we felt like we had the right amount of combat in the session.  We played for about five hours, during which time we had some discussions of how we would disguise ourselves to get out of the city we were in, a tense encounter at the city gate to see if we could escape, a pair of back-to-back combat encounters in a forest, and some open-ended role-playing time in a small rebel camp. So, combat in the middle with non-combat at the beginning and end.

It was great!  Nate was careful to let us run with our suggestions, but still helping us look for flaws in our plans (such as the fact that some of our characters were on “Wanted” posters in the city we were escaping and would therefore probably want some disguises in order to get past the authorities at the city gate without a fight).  The fights were tough but fair (boy, spiders that can jump on you from 30 feet away are vicious!).  And the roleplaying at the end had some conversations with NPCs that led into our two magic users spending time helping a wizard examine a magical sword to figure out its properties while the other two characters had an entertaining (non-combat) time hunting in the woods.  There was something for everyone, both inside and outside of combat.  We even had an NPC of a much higher level fighting with us, but she didn’t completely take over combat or anything like that.

So, what lessons have I learned so far?

  • Watch your players to see what they like and don’t like.  This will probably be more challenging online, since I won’t be able to see their faces, but we should have audio chat.  I’ll have to listen carefully and ask questions.
  • Make sure everyone has something they can do, whether in combat or out.
  • Go with the players’ ideas for how to solve problems, but provide coaching as needed, especially for new players.
  • Don’t feel obligated to hand out loot if it doesn’t make sense to do so.  If your characters kill some wild animals (like those darn spiders) in the wilderness, they probably won’t have any treasure on them, and that’s okay.  It’s fine to give extra loot at some points and none at others – it all balances out.
  • Reward characters for creative thinking – even if the reward is just the chance to play out a crazy scenario, with no XP or gold.

I think I can use these lessons in my own games as I start DMing.  On that point, by the way, we have set up this coming Friday as our targeted first session for our online game.  We’ll be using Gametable for the map and dice rolling and Skype for audio chat.  For this first time, we plan to mainly try a technology check to make sure we can all hear each other and see the map, but I’m hoping we have time for at least a little bit of adventure!