Be Excellent To Each Other

Well, how did it go?

No spoilers since we’ll probably play through it with you, Mr Dave, Squirt, Dr Zoidberg and The Vision but it went well (I think!). The 3-4 hour run time is a bit ambitious but it’s fun to play something that’s quite different to our campaign because this is so puzzle/trap centric. I think there’s another couple of hours left in it so we’re going to reconvene. We had to finish abruptly when my littlest one woke up teething but it was already the back of 11pm so that wasn’t what stopped us completing it.

Interested to hear spoiler free thoughts here from the other players, and views from Dimrill and Myp on what they thought of that style of session vs our overarching story driven campaign. I have the new Candlekeep Mysteries book arriving this week so might incorporate one of them into our game.

There was one section that got solved much quicker that I expected and that was down to general good communication between Dimrill and other Dave and a smart move plus high roll from Wookie (the first room Ronan went to sleep in).

There was one baddie that could have lasted a good few more rounds but GJ went in and absolutely destroyed it with one attack, it went from about 75% health to about 5% in an instant

There were a lot of questionable poems from myp while he did a exemplary job as the party tank, being kept alive by Dimrill and GJ with heal spells.

There was one puzzle that entertained me for much longer than I expected as every member of the party experimented with different items in the room, outside the room, on their person, and in one case their actual entire person

It was great fun! Loved the puzzle aspect. It really added a dimension to the game. Plus I got to be my normal moron suggesting a garter belt on everything.

As I said in the Discord chat:

I was surprised that despite choosing and roleplaying a big dumb melee fighter that I could solve some puzzles just with my fists.

Honestly if I’d known it were going to be so puzzle-heavy I’d have made him less stupid

Low Int, Wis, or Cha characters are some of my favourites when people roleplay to that affect - see Grog in campaign one of Critical Role (intelligence of six, went into haggle for a discount and ended up delighted when the price went up) and Yasha in campaign two (charisma of 7 leading to in character conversations that are sometimes so awkward the rest of the players are having to cover their faces to stop themselves laughing and cringing at the same time). Ronan was a perfect foil to the intense discussion and debate about the best course of action, or what it all meant.

It helped that if we were at an impasse in order to move the story along I’d just hastily blunder in.

Made up for the time I wasted reading poetry

Sounds like it went pretty well! What did the D&D newbies make of it?

Craster's character once tried to infiltrate a building posing as someone shopping for an apartment in it and crit-failed a negotiation roll so hard I almost made him buy a timeshare.

In hindsight, I regret not doing that.

Oh, I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to continuing when we can.

I enjoyed the puzzle aspect too, I'm trying to understand the difference between what we did and a longer campaign though, is it just a larger area with more to do so it lasts longer?

My only issue (and this was a personal thing) was that at that time on a Friday I was already tired so was getting overtired by the time we stopped. I would suggest that in a campaign that is being run in an evening like that if we know it's going to take four hours plus, it might be helpful to make the decision to split it into two sets anyway.

Obviously not everyone might feel the same, and that is absolutely okay - just my personal experience.

I enjoyed getting to know my character a bit too, I keep having a look at the profile every now and again so I can learn her better for next time. There were some really funny moments though, and Gilly as a GM is brilliant, so quick whitted!

Also,

Oh I was absolutely knackered, but I’m usually the party pooper on Mondays as Sal works the early shift most Tuesdays so didn’t want to be the first to admit it!

If we can’t start earlier then splitting it into two parts is preferable. I’d have probably done more “fluff” stuff but I was very aware that we needed to crack on.

I didn't want to spoil anyone's fun either - so glad it wasn't just me!

I'd be happy with that, but obviously it's what works for everyone. I don't have little ones to take into consideration.

In the campaign we're playing through now it started with a mission to accompany a cart on a journey of a couple of weeks and inevitably, the first thing that happened was a week or so into the journey the cart was ambushed. From there, the party start to find trails, or follow clues to deal with the ambushers then arrive at their destination, explore the town, meet different people that live and own businesses there accepting quests and jobs as they go and starting to uncover mysteries and right wrongs. Ongoing campaigns can spend more time introducing NPCs and have much larger locations since you essentially have an unlimited amount of time to play. Since the area you were exploring was relatively small, we were only moving small amounts at a time but in the ongoing campaign the players might say they want to go to the trading post to talk to the owner so we'll cut to there and have a whole scene that is the conversation with the owner. Then they might decide they want to travel to a location they've heard of Orcs camping, so we'll roll some checks to see how well they sneak up there, and perception checks to see if they spot guards, then they can plan tactics for an attack. In our last game, we left the town we've spent most of the campaign in and travelled to a much larger town nearby to deliver a message. This week, the players will start to explore that town.



I definitely should have considered that people might not want to be the one to say they were ready to stop, I think planning a hard finish in would be the best idea next time I run it for sure.



That's so nice to hear
The scariest part of DMing for me was figuring out the "so what". A player could say they want do anything, go anywhere, try anything so what was I going to do in response? The modules and adventures obviously give you a framework to work with but they can't account for all the different ideas your players might have, or random things they might decide to attempt, or things they might want to talk to NPCs about so being able to roll with those things and make it fun was something I wanted to be able to do well.

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense.

While I thought we were doing it in one go, I didn't want to not see it through to the end. I'm pleased we will get to finish it all together.


Honestly, you nailed it. If I hadn't have known better I would have thought that you always knew what was coming.

I was making maximum use of the time between you all saying "What would happen if we tried this random object" and actually saying "DM we try this random object" to frantically think of what the reaction might be when you all spent ages experimenting putting redacted on the redacted to see what would happen.

that was pretty hilarious!