Underlabyrinth DnD Group 1 Session 5
May. 7th, 2019 09:23 amAdmin
We ended up adding two new players, Liv and someone from the interested group, when a couple of players weren't sure if they could come. This ended up pretty well, and we had a really good session. I was really glad I'd been able to play with Liv, because I'd been hoping I would be able to and I wasn't sure.
The week leading up to the session I'd ended up a bit stressed by the logistics. I'd tried to structure things so it was fine if I didn't know exactly who would be there and I didn't need to worry about it until Monday, but it didn't work out that way. I kept wanting to do prep to make sure I was ready for any of the players, and to make sure I didn't have too many players if I invited more, but that meant players vanishing into various crises affected the planning more than I'd hoped.
What Went Well
I did too much prep, but I think it was the right sort of things that helped build the campaign.
We started off with a little war council of the players and a couple of NPCs. This took a little long, but everyone got a good sense of what mission they were planning, what the alternatives were, what they hoped to achieve, etc, and I don't think I could have cut it much shorter. Everyone had good intel on possible alternate missions.
Several characters brought up possible clues which they'd had in session 1 and I'd been prepared to remind them of if needed, and several characters followed up on things I'd expected to come up like "did we get a more full translation of that inscription"?
They chose the mission I expected, and weren't as on board as I hoped, but I think they were reasonably happy with it. This was, "collect bounties for track down fungus creature who'd invaded the mines and killed miners, and the traitors who'd let them in". I'd only imperfectly managed a balance between establishing a status quo and keeping events moving, so the mission didn't feel as important to them as I'd hoped, but I think it at least had reasonably clear rewards, both tangible and intangible.
They also had several other quests they were quite eager to work on, exploring the river, looking for most lost civilisation, looking for the remains of the navigation device, plus a few private ones, so I hope that might come up next.
The new navigation rules didn't come up much, but seemed to work well. I hope as people get more familiar with them, they'll make the players feel more able to make sensible trade-offs about which routes to take.
Several things I'd been trying to bring up came up, like J's character Lucke getting to use his spellthief ability. The party revisited the square where they were first ambushed by rock bears, and were attacked by a lone rock bear who was totally outclassed. They're getting used to always looking up, I'll need to give them some more competence moments, and then maybe some curveballs :)
C's character Sammy did several awesome combat stunts, using his amazing dexterity to drop from the ceiling impaling the rock bear, and leaping onto the back of a fungus-zombie ogre. And using his parrot to scout.
And AGAIN he used thunderwave to completely take out a small squad of kobolds, because it's area of effect, and guarantee of doing a small amount of damage to everyone in a group, is perfect for taking them out. I loved this so much: I couldn't have arranged it better, and it's really satisfying.
( What I could have planned better )ETA
Talking it over with Liv, I realised two important things. One was, there was an awful lot that went well that I'd started to take for granted as part of running a session at all, but that's still quite good, even if I feel like I want to consistently do better.
The other was, when I was offering warnings, my voice is often a bit tongue in cheek, and this came across as sarcastic, like I was telling the players, "not this" or "something like this, but not". That's a shame, but it's actually really good: it's nice and specific so it's hopefully easy to avoid.