Kid-Friendly RPG at TactiCon 2013 – Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about the preparation and starting schene of the Kid-Friendly RPG (KFRPG) game that I ran for a group of six young boys at Con Jr. for TactiCon 2013. They were on a quest to find and take out an evil wizard known as Kalor the Terrible, but first they had to take care of the rat problem in the basement of the Rusty Lantern Inn.

Scene 2: Rats in the basement

I moved to a basement map and put a bunch of rats on the map (once the party had sorted out their light situation, of course). We rolled for initiative (one player versus the GM), and the rats won.

Rats are wimpy monsters (even big 50-pound rats like these), so they have a d4 for attack and defense (a standard monster in KFRPG gets a d6 for both). This let the players learn how combat works without being seriously threatened.

As the rats started dropping, a couple of players wanted to heal the rats and train them. Sure, why not? I had them roll some hard heal checks once combat was over, and they were able to heal and train three of the rats. Now they had pets! Pseudo-zombie pets, sure, but at least they were loyal (if a bit gross).

Scene 3: Back to the inn

Back upstairs, the players decided they wanted to go see a blacksmith. However, it was night time, so they would have to wait until the next morning.

What about Kalor the Terrible, you may ask? What indeed! No mention of him from the players. They needed a blacksmith, for some reason! (I still have no idea where this notion came from.)

They decided to get a good night’s sleep (recovering the few hit points they had lost).

Scene 4: Meet the blacksmith

In the morning, the party went off to see the blacksmith. I brought up a map of a town and indicated which building was the smithy.

Village map

Village map

Using Masks, I named the blacksmith, and I decided to pull out the token for good old Sir Oakley from Madness at Gardmore Abbey to represent the smith. He was heavily armored; sure, why not?

The players started shopping, talking about the cool stuff they wanted to buy. Then one of the rangers declared that he was just taking one of the blacksmith’s swords.

Naturally, the smith shouted for him to drop the stolen sword, whereupon the ranger decided to toss a dagger at the smith.

Yes, the heated battle was on!

Some of the players decided to join the battle, even as the smith’s apprentices came out of a nearby house to join the fight.

Some PCs decided to steal some armor and put it on, right in the middle of battle.

Others decided to get out of there to go check out the festival tent with gnomes in it on the other side of town.

Some changed their minds in the middle of the fight, going back and forth between fighting and paying for the stuff they were taking.

Eventually, the ranger who started the fight, along with the wizard he had dragged into it, got themselves subdued and arrested. The magistrate would be in town the next day to hear their trial.

The other four members of the party debated what to do. Two of them decided to just hang out at the inn. The other two waited for nightfall, then went for the jailbreak.

Scene 6: Jailbreak

The would-be rescuers (paladin and wolfman) decided that they needed to know the exact layout of the jail (or at least as much of it as they could reasonably discern from outside), so I sketched a quick map in MapTool (amazingly, I was not expecting to need a jail map; go figure).

After dark, the jailbreakers went around to the narrow windows high up in each wall of the jail, peering in to try to find their allies. This involved the acrobatic wolfman standing on the shoulders of the athletic paladin. Eventually, they found the right cell.

Wolfman called out to the prisoners, who started to wake up, but at the same moment the paladin heard someone coming around the building. Wolfman and paladin hid in the bushes as a couple of guards came by on rounds. The guards didn’t see them, and walked on by.

Meanwhile, the captured ranger and wizard were now awake, and they had seen the wolfman’s face for a moment before he dropped out of sight. They decided to make a big ruckus to draw the guards – which worked.

While two guards were outside on patrol, the other two guards came to check on the prisoners who were making the noise. The ranger made a fantastic roll to reach between the bars to grab one guard by the neck while the wizard shot a bolt of electricity at the other. They were able to grab the keys off a guard’s belt and make their escape, locking the guards in the cell.

Meanwhile, the patrol had passed by the back of the building, so the paladin decided to try to toss a hammer between the bars of the window to give his allies a weapon – not knowing that they were already escaping. By the time he got the hammer through the barred window, it ended up landing on a locked-up guard as his friends were heading out the front door, dealing with the patrol.

Sheesh.

Scene 7: On the run

Now that everyone was free (and outlaws), the group decided to go get their two sleeping party members and hit the road.

They talked about their general plan – staying within sight of the main road into the hills, but keeping off the road itself. Walking by night, sleeping by day. Going nowhere in particular – just to a faraway town.

Kalor the Terrible? Who’s that?

At this point, we were about 90 minutes into our two-hour session, so I decided it was time for a final battle.

Silly players; in their haste to get out of town, they had unwittingly set up camp in a dragon’s hunting grounds.

A few kobolds came upon the party and started talking about “the Master.” After combat began with the kobolds, the Master – a dragon – showed up.

Now the party got to toss out their big, special blue chip powers, as the dragon flew around and breathed fire.

Eventually the good guys (?) were victorious and the dragon was defeated. The only tricky part was how best to skin the dragon to make awesome armor from its scales.

Fin

Thus ended Kid-Friendly RPG at TactiCon 2013. As expected, it was a pretty crazy game, but I was ready for anything and just rolled with it. Sure, these kids became bloodthirsty, jailbreaking outlaws and completely forgot about the evil wizard menacing their country, but they got some cool dragonskin armor out of the deal. All’s well that ends well!

The kids seemed to have a blast, and I enjoyed their unpredictability. If you keep the rules simple and your mind open, kids can create a rollicking good time in an adventure game.

Michael the OnlineDM

@ClayCrucible on Twitter

Kid-Friendly RPG at TactiCon 2013 – Part 1

Labor Day weekend in Colorado is a special time. Sure, it’s a great time to enjoy outdoor activities as summer wanes, but for me it’s exciting because it’s TactiCon time!

There are two big local gaming conventions here in Colorado each year. The bigger one is Genghis Con, which takes place over Presidents’ Day weekend in February. The smaller one is TactiCon. Both have lots of RPGs, board games and miniatures games, complete with a good-sized exhibit hall.

They also have Con Jr., which provides kids of con-goers with gaming of their own. I don’t have kids,so I’ve never been involved with Con Jr., but this year I decided that I’d run a game for kids.

You may have seen my post about the Kid-Friendly RPG (KFRPG), the simple game I designed when my young niece and nephew were visiting last Christmas. I figured I should bring this game to Con Jr.

Preparation

To get ready for the game, the main to-do was to create more characters. I said I could have up to six players, and I only had eight character sheets prepared from last December’s game. I wanted to make sure the kids in my game had more choices.

Basically, I created male and female versions of the existing eight characters, with a few tweaks to make the characters match the pictures I found online.

As a recap, KFRPG characters are pretty simple. They consist of:

  • Race and class
  • Attack die and defense die
  • Three skills
  • One special power

I always include a big picture of the character (using a Google Image Search, for personal use only) and a spot for the player to name the character.

I put my copy of Masks in my bag for the game. This is a cool book in general, but I keep in on hand because of the running lists of random character names at the footers of the pages. What is that NPC’s name? Let me look that up (flip, flip, flip…).

I also had to make sure I had the physical supplies on hand that I would need:

  • The printed character sheets (half page each)
  • Three red poker chips (hit points), one green poker chip (healing potion) and one blue poker chip (special power) for each player
  • Dice that I didn’t mind giving away (I bought a pitcherful at Gen Con)
  • Minis to represent the player characters (I bought a bunch of plastic ones on day 2 of TactiCon)

Finally, I had to make sure my projector setup was ready to go. The projector and rig still work great after three years. As for a MapTool file, I use this one. It has a bunch of different maps on hand, so that my players can go wherever they like. I also have tons of monster and NPC tokens set up in MapTool that I can drop onto the map at any time.

KFRPG is intended to be very free form, letting the players go to bizarre places. And as you’ll see, they did!

Setup

My game was scheduled to start at 11:00 Sunday morning. On  Saturday afternoon, I found the room where I would be running the game, just so I would know where to go. I made sure I arrived about 20 minutes before the scheduled start time on Sunday, so that I would have enough time to set up.

As it turned out, there was a Ticket to Ride game that lasted all the way to 11:00 AM in that room, so I had to set up the projector and my supplies quickly when that game ended. The organizer gave me a few extra minutes to get this in order before sending in the kids.

I had a table of six boys, ranging in age from about 7 to 11. All of them had some familiarity with fantasy role playing, many having played D&D before. I had never met any of these kids before.

I started by passing around the character sheets, letting the kids pass them back and forth and swap with one another until they were happy with what they had.

One kid had this gigantic dragon mini that he wanted to use for his character. I told him that he could be a druid and the dragon could be his animal companion that he could call upon with his special power.

The other kids picked a wizard, two rangers, a dwarf paladin and a wolfman warrior (although I didn’t have a wolf mini, so he was really an elephant man).

Scene 1: The Rusty Lantern Inn

Since I’m going for a straightforward game when it comes to KFRPG, we all began in an inn, the Rusty Lantern. There were a couple of dwarves in one part of the inn, a couple of elves in another part, a human woman (Val) running the place, and a burly human man fetching food from the outdoor kitchen.

Web of the Spider Queen Session 1 - No Grid

The Rusty Lantern Inn

I had an adventure hook ready for whenever the kids needed it: An evil wizard known as Kalor the Terrible is rumored to be active in the area. No one ever sees Kalor himself, and accounts vary as to exactly what he looks like, but he leaves his signature in flaming letters in places where he has wrought havoc.

But rather than forcing this on them, I asked the kids what they wanted to do. Some wanted to chat with the elves, so I had the elves tell them that they were fleeing their homeland because Kalor the Terrible had been there.

The dwarves had heard of Kalor, but said that he was more of a legend from hundreds of years ago.

Val the innkeeper said she had some information about Kalor being active in the same region as the Rusty Lantern, which freaked out the elves.

The kids thought this sounded pretty good, so they wanted to press Val for more information. But before she was willing to trust them, she had something she wanted them to do for her first:

Kill the rats in the basement of the inn.

Yes, I wanted the adventuring cliches to flow thick and heavy! Let’s kill some rats.

Time for a cliffhanger!

Since this post is getting so long, I’m going to break it into two parts. Tomorrow, the battle begins!

Michael the OnlineDM

@ClayCrucible on Twitter

TactiCon 2012 Recap: Fiasco, Ashes of Athas, Chaos & Alchemy and impromptu D&D

Labor Day weekend has been a lot of fun for me the past three years, as I’ve been attending TactiCon. This is the smaller of the two conventions put on by the Denver Gamers Association each year (the bigger one is Genghis Con over Presidents’ Day weekend in February), but the 2010 edition was the first gaming convention I ever attended, so it always has a place in my heart.

I’ve done the “Marathon GM” thing in the past, where I run a D&D game in all nine of the convention’s four-hour slots over the weekend, but I was taking it a little easier this time – only being signed up for seven. Yes, I’m still nuts.

Thursday

Thursday night, I had signed up to run a session of Fiasco. I had only played once before, but I think it’s a cool system and one that I want to get more comfortable with. I’ve been playing around with creating a playset of my own, but since it wasn’t ready in time I just brought the four sets from the base Fiasco book, plus the D&D-themed set, the rock band set and the set played on Tabletop a couple of months ago. My players, two of whom had never played before, opted for the Antarctica set. Since there were four other players plus myself, I decided not to participate as a player, instead just helping them along. I think Fiasco plays best with four.

The players had a good time, setting up a web of relationships and secrets. Things were going swimmingly until the radioactive penguins started growing tentacles at the end of Act One. Amazingly, the players all rolled pretty well by Fiasco standards at the end of the game, so none of them ended up dead and one ended up coming out smelling like roses. We finished in under two hours, too, which was great – I still had a little prep for the rest of the weekend’s games to finish.

Friday

Friday was Ashes of Athas Day One. I was running the three adventures from Chapter Three of the Dark Sun-set organized play campaign. I was delighted to discover that three of the guys whom I’d run Ashes of Athas for back at Genghis Con had returned, and they were stoked to play at my table again! They really made it fun for me last time.

This time was no different. With my projector setup running (and attracting lots of admiration from passers-by, as usual), we kept the fun flowing all day long. I felt bad for my core three players when they were bumped to another DM’s table for the middle session, but the reason was that we had a group of new-to-D&D players and the organizer knows that I love running games for new players (and that they tend to keep coming back after they’ve been at my table). I did love the new folks, too. Something about new players just gets my energy up.

My core three players were back at my table for the final adventure of the day, and it was mostly a big, two-part combat encounter. The second part had a very interesting environmental effect: Any PC starting or ending a turn in a zone of evil ashes had to make a death saving throw. This was in the Athasian plane of death, so it made sense. The cool thing about this was that it made it possible for a PC to die while still at full hit points, but not randomly out of nowhere as in a pure “save or die” effect. It really affected player tactics once they found out about it, and made things tense when they otherwise might not have been.

Saturday

Saturday was going to be an interesting one. I was signed up to run Ashes of Athas from 9:00 to 1:00, from 2:00 to 6:00 and from 7:00 to 11:00. However, I was also signed up to run demos of Chaos & Alchemy in the board and card game room from noon to 3:00. I had asked the D&D organizer ahead of time if maybe I could bow out of some of my Ashes of Athas games, but he told me that he was really short on DMs.

Fortunately for me, he was wrong. Saturday morning, we had three DMs and three players. Easy solution: I would bow out, one of the DMs would play and the other DM would run a table of four! This let me get some much-needed coffee, check out the vendor hall, and then start showing people how to play Chaos & Alchemy.

Chaos & Alchemy cover art by Chris Rallis – Logo by Bree Heiss

My lovely wife came to join me in the demos at noon, and she was very eye-catching (like I said, she’s lovely). We had two tables of demos running non-stop, with lots of folks deciding to buy a copy of the game. One guy started telling all of his friends that they needed to come try this game, and I believe four of them bought copies. One of THOSE people also sent another buyer my way! Players are teaching one another to play the game.

A guy who owns a very new game retail store bought a copy and asked about carrying Chaos & Alchemy in his store. Two guys turned out to be involved with the organization of Denver Comic Con and wanted to talk to me about having a table at next year’s convention, with a “local game designer” angle on it. There was a lot of enthusiasm, and I ended the weekend with just 25 copies from my original 125 copy print run on hand. It’s off to a really good start!

As you might guess from all of that, I was able to spend most of the afternoon running Chaos & Alchemy, in part because there were only two tables worth of players for Ashes of Athas and the other two DMs ran the games. However, when the evening time slot came around, we had two tables of players but one of the other DMs was nowhere to be found, so I set up the projector and ran the adventure.

The players for Saturday night were the same six I’d had for Friday night. The adventure was the conclusion of Ashes of Athas Chapter Four, and it was my least favorite of the Ashes of Athas adventures I’ve run so far. It was really long, with too many skill challenges and combats for a standard convention time slot, and one of the combats ended up wiping out the other table of players (my table had a very hard time with it). We still had fun at the table, though. The party didn’t mind when I switched to some brief narration rather than actually running through some skill challenges, and they rolled with the bizarre “desert peyote trip” ending of the adventure.

This adventure also gave me my favorite gaming moment of the convention, when a new player who was running a spear-toting Ardent was trying desperately to figure out what she could to to help her allies while she was standing on a bridge and the gargoyle menacing them was 20 feet below her. Answer: Jump off the bridge, spear pointing down, and hope for the best. I gave her a +1 bonus for charging (sort of) and a +2 bonus for combat advantage (the gargoyle did NOT see this one coming!), and ruled that if she hit with the attack, it would count as an automatic critical hit.

Boom – gargoyle pieces everywhere! What a great ride.

Sunday

I had nothing scheduled on Sunday, which was a first for me. I decided to sleep in, have an early lunch and get to the convention around 11:15. I got in on a game of Smash Up, which I knew had been a big deal at GenCon. I love the theme of the game – you play with a 40-card deck that’s made up of two 20-card decks smashed together to give you something like Alien Dinosaurs, Ninja Tricksters, Zombie Pirates or Robot Wizards. The mechanics of piling up minions and playing actions to take down some shared bases, with points awarded based on who contributed the most to breaking the base, were pretty good. The balance seemed fine, too, with the final score being 15-11-11-8 (I was one of the 11s).

However, I just didn’t have that much fun during the actual gameplay. The Robot Wizards, for instance, had really long, involved turns. The Ninja Tricksters got to do interesting things at unexpected times. The Zombie Pirates both had things popping out of the discard pile. The Dinosaur Aliens… were big. And they could return things to players’ hands. My turns were short and a little boring. It’s a game with lots of potential, but it didn’t quite do it for me.

I ran a couple more demos of Chaos & Alchemy, then headed over to the D&D area to see if maybe I could play in a game in the last time slot at 2:00. The organizer asked if I could run something instead. I didn’t have my laptop with me, even though the projector and rig were in the car, but since I’d never tried running module cold, I agreed to go for it.

I was loaned a wet-erase mat and marker and was seated at a table that was mostly empty, since the players (mostly kids who were friends and family of one another, with one adult) were apparently in their rooms leveling up their characters. Once I realized that they didn’t care what module they played, I decided I’d run one that I wrote – The Stolen Staff. I downloaded it from my blog to my iPad. I used the backs of business cards for initiative trackers. I wrote down monster hit points on a sheet of paper. I borrowed some minis from one of the players to represent the monsters.

And we had a rollicking good time! I soon realized that these kids really just wanted to fight stuff, so I gave them plenty of interesting things to kill. We had gotten off to a really late start, but we still fit in three fights and some role-playing, finishing on time. I did have a weird moment afterward when one of the kids asked me, “So who did the best?” I didn’t understand the question, so he clarified, “Who did the most damage and killed the most monsters? Who was the best?” I told him that my favorite moment was when one of his friends had his character jump off a tower to land on a minion (I guess I have a thing for PCs throwing themselves off of stuff). Maybe he’ll get the message that D&D is about creativity, not just numbers. Here’s hoping. It was a very min-maxed party, so I’m guessing I won’t change any opinions, but so it goes.

Afterward

Once all was said and done, I still wasn’t quite finished. A couple came up to me as I was packing up from my last game and asked if I was Michael (I am) and if I could teach them about Fiasco. Apparently they had bought the game and weren’t confident in jumping in, and they had seen my name in the program as someone who had run Fiasco. So, after the GM appreciate ceremony, I met up with the two of them and taught them about Fiasco before heading home.

Yay for more new gamers!

-Michael the OnlineDM

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

Between GenCon and TactiCon 2012

Just a quick update since I haven’t written in a while.

GenCon was an awesome experience. The highlight was getting to meet so many of my friends from the online D&D world, mainly from Twitter (d20Monkey, Jennisodes, LawOfTheGeek, deadorcs, FELTit, GeekyLyndsay, d20Blonde, Squach, TheIdDM, SlyFlourish… the list goes on and on). A lot of these were at the Thursday evening GenCon Social, with more coming at the Saturday evening recording of the Tome Show and dinner afterward.

I sat in on several seminars during the convention, with the highlights being a Kickstarter panel, the Law of the Geek panel and a panel on board game design.

I was on an episode of This Just In From GenCon as a sponsor.

I did some informal demos of Chaos & Alchemy in the general gaming areas with some good success. I was only able to do about 30 or so demos over the course of the weekend (not having a booth makes it hard to do that sort of thing), but 10 people did end up buying the game after playing it – a pretty good conversion rate! It was enough to make me want to keep going with this thing, and I’m currently talking to some small publishers and also doing the research about maybe running a Kickstarter for a big print run.

I’ve learned that my Wednesday bowling league that usually keeps me from running D&D Encounters in the fall and spring is going to be on Tuesday instead this year, which means that I’m DMing Encounters again. Yay! No write-up for this week, except to say that my table full of evil drow did a good job of role-playing. They’re scheming and backstabbing and having a lovely time.

Now I’m on the eve of TactiCon, one of the two local conventions each year. I’m running Fiasco tonight, followed by two days of Ashes of Athas (the D&D 4e organized play set in Dark Sun). I’m going to try to find time on Saturday between Dark Sun games to demo some Chaos & Alchemy as well.

So, I’m still out there, still gaming, just very busy!

-Michael the OnlineDM

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

TactiCon 2011 – LURU 2-4 Need to Know

LURU 2-4 Need to Know – Spoilers ahead

The final adventure I ran at TactiCon 2011 was LURU 2-4 Need to Know. I had a full table of six players, including my friend Nate, another couple of players who I knew from Enchanted Grounds, a player I knew from other convention games, and a couple whom I hadn’t met before.

I began by asking the players to introduce their characters to one another, and Nate led things off by doing so in-character. This set the tone nicely for the rest of the table, as all of the PCs came to life. All of them mentioned their race (although the changeling in the party explained that she claimed to be an eladrin, hinting that she wasn’t really), though most did NOT mention their class. Instead, they let this become clear from the way they behaved in battle. One introduced himself as an actor (later revealed to be a hybrid bard-warlock), one as just an adventurer (later revealed to be a rogue), one as bloodthirsty bug (a ranger) and one as a princess (a hybrid bard-warlord).

The princess in the party is my favorite PC I’ve seen so far in an LFR game. She rode around on a Tenser’s Floating Disk and made excellent use of Direct the Strike to boss people around and make them attack. It worked really well. She was also able to leverage her “royal status” to bluff her way into a guarded city along with some of her allies during the adventure.

The best part of this adventure was the opening combat encounter, which took place in an inn that was soon set on fire. The growing fire and the lava elementals that arose from it were a ton of fun.

The final encounter was less fun, as it involved a beholder in a pretty boring 10 square by 10 square room (with an attached sewer area). Every time a player started their turn, they were subject to an eye ray attack (unless they ran into the sewers). They couldn’t flank the beholder, nor could they take opportunity attacks against it when it used its eye rays.

It got frustrating, but having learned my lesson from an earlier adventure I started changing the beast up a little bit. I tried to cut way back on the most devastating control effects from the beholder – the sleep ray knocked out the fighter for several rounds, and the petrification ray took away at least two PCs’ entire turns. The adventure made it clear that you need to go easy on those during the beholder’s turn, which I did, but when it rolls a random ray at the beginning of a PC’s turn, the odds are good that a controlling power is going to come up. So, I switched to more damage and less control later in the combat, even on the random rays.

Ultimately, everyone had a good time, and using MapTool and the projector to project the spreading fire onto the map in the first encounter was a big hit. It was a good way to end an awesome TactiCon.

TactiCon 2011 – MyRealms adventures

MyRealms adventures – Spoilers follow

All day Friday at TactiCon 2011 was devoted to my MyRealms adventure trilogy: The Staff of Suha in the morning, Tallinn’s Tower in the afternoon, and Descent Into Darkness in the evening. I only had one player who played in all three adventures, but my tables were full throughout.

I feel confident in saying that these were a hit. I’m constantly tweaking my own adventures, and I was taking notes as I ran them, but they were all little things to tweak here and there – nothing that needed a complete reworking.

My favorite moment of the convention came in the final battle of Descent Into Darkness, which involves facing a beholder in a room that includes a river of magma. The party was doing their best to keep the beholder locked down, and at one point a rogue decided to jump onto the beholder’s back. He stayed aboard for four rounds.

In the first round, the beholder was stunned, so the rogue stabbed away.

In the second round, the beholder got up from prone and tried to shoot an eye ray at the rogue (tough to do when he’s on top of the beholder) and missed.

In the third round, the beholder flipped upside down and flew just over the surface of the magma, but the rogue made a great Athletics / Acrobatics check to scramble around the ball of eyes as it rotated and avoided the magma.

In the fourth round, the beholder had had enough of this nonsense, decided that it could handle the magma better than the fragile humanoid on its back, and dove into the river and back out. The beholder and the rogue both took 30 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage (save ends).

The rogue’s player asked me, “So what happens if that takes me below zero hit points?”

The whole table replied with “Oooooh….”

Yes, he fell unconscious while in the river of magma, which meant that he lost his grip and floated just below the surface. The beholder survived the bath, but the party ran out of options to rescue the rogue without killing themselves. Thus passed the short-lived rogue, may he rest in peace.

I’m not much of a killer DM, but PC do die at my table from time to time. In this particular case, it was worth it. I knew that was true Sunday evening when some players at a different game I was running said they had already heard that story about the beholder and the rogue and the magma river. When your players are telling stories about your games to their other friends at the convention, you’ve done something right! Well, unless they were saying, “This jerk of a DM killed my character…”

TactiCon 2011 – CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way

CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way – Spoilers Follow

I ran three sessions of CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way at TactiCon 2011 – Thursday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday morning. My biggest worry was that there wouldn’t be enough players for the Sunday morning game, thus denying me the Iron Man achievement, but no worries there – I had a full table. Actually, the Thursday evening table was the only non-full table I ran all weekend (only four players). Saturday morning’s table actually had seven players!

I hadn’t run this adventure before TactiCon, but by the end I was quite a natural with it. It’s a fun little adventure, where the party has to track a missing caravan into the feywild, dealing with a thieving elf who accidentally got the caravan into trouble. They rescue the captive drivers and caravan workers from gnomes who were planning to deliver them as slaves to some eladrin – and then fight off the eladrin as they try to escape from the feywild.

The first table decided to take a different approach to the final encounter. Rather than dashing for the portal out of the feywild, they decided to literally circle the wagons and shelter in place. No problem – I adapted the existing maps I’d prepared in MapTool, and they fought from within the wagon circle.

The second table, with seven players, had four people who had never played LFR before. As my regular readers know, I LOVE introducing new people to D&D, so this was a great time for me. The highlight was when one player, having thrown his only (non-magical) dagger at a foe in an earlier round, decided to try to take out the enemy by springing off one standing stone to kick the bad guy off another stone. Good Athletics and Acrobatics led to success, with the PC standing atop the stone and the bad guy prone at its foot, taking decent falling damage, after which he was soon dispatched. Awesome.

The third table had my friend Nate as a player (yay!) as well as a father-son pair who had approached me on Thursday or Friday, admiring my projector setup and asking about the game. I told them that the Saturday morning and Sunday morning games would be ideal for new players, so they signed up!

This was a solid little adventure, and I could see using it as a good introductory adventure for new players in the future. Also, I found myself using character voices in this adventure – something I don’t usually do much of as a DM. The thieving elf Harelahur somehow developed his own voice, which I think made the players feel a bit sympathetic toward him (they all let him run away instead of turning him over to the authorities at the end). The cold eladrin leader’s voice was fun to do, too. I’m not usually a big “voices” guy, but I could see doing a little more here than I have in the past, if the character is right for it.

TactiCon 2011 – SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds

SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – Spoilers follow

I’ve already written extensively about my experience running this adventure at TactiCon. In a nutshell, it was a mostly-fun paragon tier adventure that my party decided to take on at a high challenge level. This came back to bite them in the final encounter against a hydra, which they eventually had to retreat from. This meant that they received a negative story award, which left them with a lousy feeling about the game. And it led to my only non-perfect DM evaluation scores of the convention (two people gave me a 9 out of 10).

I did learn later that the hydra’s attacks and defenses and damage should not have been scaled upward by 1 according to the adventure, so I made a mistake there (but the boss monster in the other adventure branch does have instructions to adjust his attacks and defenses and damage, so it was an understandable confusion on my part). And ultimately I should have changed whatever seemed unfun to me as we went along at the table (a lesson I took to heart in the last game I ran a the convention).

I guess I’ll have to shoot for perfect scores next time instead. 🙂

TactiCon 2011 is in the books

And on the fifth day, OnlineDM rested.

TactiCon 2011 started Thursday evening at 6:00 and wrapped up Sunday evening at 6:00. 72 hours from open to close for me (plus a little extra time at the end for the DM appreciation ceremony). I spent 36 of those hours at the game table, running games.

And I had a blast!

I got some dubious looks when I said I wanted to Iron Man the con (running games the whole time), but I can honestly say that I came out of it feeling energized, not exhausted. I did run a little short on sleep over the course of the convention (I had a 30 minute drive each way, so that cut into my sleep time a bit), and I’ll admit that I feel asleep at 9:00 PM last night and slept until 8:00 this morning, but I wasn’t getting headaches or feeling drained or anything like that.

Ultimately, TactiCon was a lot of fun. I was running games at tables in more public areas for most of this convention (in the past I’ve often been in individual hotel rooms), which meant that a lot more people got to see my MapTool / projector setup in action. It was a great feeling to have people stop by to say how cool they thought it was, or to ask questions about how they could build something similar themselves. Some of them even brought friends back later to show my setup off to them.

I’m looking forward to the next convention!

Individual game recaps

I’ve decided to break my detailed recaps into separate posts, rather than putting it all in one massive post. The links to those posts are below.

Lost on the Golden Way (Thursday evening, Saturday morning, Sunday morning)

MyRealms adventures (all day Friday)

Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds (Saturday afternoon and evening)

Need to Know (Sunday afternoon)

Annoyed at SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds

I’m most of the way through my attempt to Iron Man TactiCon (I’m running nine slots – 36 hours of games over a 72-hour period). I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m especially pleased that the adventures I wrote myself were well-received on Friday.

This afternoon and evening (Saturday) I ran a two-slot game of SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds. This is a paragon-level adventure, and I ran it with a party of mostly 11th level characters and a couple of 13th level characters. They chose to run it at level 14 (so yes, they opted for extra challenge).

It was a fun and challenging adventure for the first four hours, and when we came back from our dinner break we went into the last encounter.

It was silly-hard. Spoilers follow.

In the particular path my party chose, the adventurers have to fight against a hydra and two spore demons at the end. The spore demons were mildly annoying, but not much of a real threat. The hydra was insane.

It can’t be flanked, much to the frustration of the two rogues in the party.

It makes ranged attacks without provoking attacks of opportunity.

It has threatening reach in a 2-square radius (on a Huge creature).

It gets two free attacks against any PC that ends its turn within 2 squares.

Now, the PCs had spent a lot of resources in the next-to-last encounter, and only two of the six of them had action points for the last battle. There weren’t too many daily powers left (though there definitely were some).

The party had a really hard time with this battle, and they eventually retreated and declared defeat.

My annoyance comes in that, by running the adventure as written, I made the players have a less-good time than they otherwise would have. The final battle ended in defeat, and the party got a negative story award because of it (it makes them more vulnerable to diseases in the future). It was pretty miserable at the end.

And I have to admit that part of my annoyance is that two of the six players docked me a point on the GM evaluation sheet for the question, “How much fun did you have?” I still got great scores, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about the awesome possibility of getting perfect scores while Iron Manning the con. I really wanted that, and I failed.

Ultimately, this is on me. When the adventure as written has unfun things happening, I should deviate. I should follow my own judgment, and I didn’t. I should have had the hydra spread his attacks around more, rather than focus on one PC until it drops as the adventure says it should do. I could have changed things so that the hydra’s ranged attacks at least provoked opportunity attacks, or made it so that it only got a single bite attack against PCs that end their turns near it.

But I didn’t make any of those changes, and my players had less than optimal fun because of it. This doesn’t mean that every fight has to be a victory for the party, but if something feels unfair and I have the ability to change it, I should change it! I didn’t, and my players had less fun because of it.

Lesson learned. If something seems unfun, change it.