Chasing The DM

This was Delgado's player's last session w...

2011-11-29T05:03:48.515-08:00

This was Delgado's player's last session with us before she flew back to her native Canada, but by god did her Slayer make an impression! This was our first Essentials PC and it was deployed straight from the character builder with the vast majority of default options intact, and its attack bonuses of something I think in the +19 area eclipsed the existing PC's attacks by a massive margin. This was a hard encounter for the party's level and Delgado was only missing some of his enemies on a 3.

This had been a major worry to me at the time as it suggested a couple of things I didn't like the sound of: first, that the assumptions of the game had changed more than I thought in the couple of years it had been out, and second, that I now had a PC in the party who was going to utterly outclass everyone else. I was already chewing on ways to give everyone free feats and retraining so that we could bring more up-to-date numbers into the game, but as it transpired Delgado was almost immediately removed from play so it didn't turn out to be a problem.

Since then I haven't made many moves to redress the balance other than to inject more money and magic into the team because I'm writing my own material and/or choosing scenarios from Dungeon and other sources that are appropriate for the PC's as they stand. In the end I think the Slayer's numbers were accrued from a variety of small things: expertise feats, a magical weapon better than most other PCs', a Str score built from point buy rather than rolled (which is what we did right at the start of 4E and which I kind of regret), and so-on. But, the fact that he was missing only 10-15% of the time against a level-appropriate foe still said to me that the presumed base-line of difficulty for D&D 4E has ramped up quite significantly in the days since April 2009 when "Worse Than Death" was released. This is an issue which hasn't gone away and may come to bite me again next time a PC is generated for this party.

In any case, what about the rest of the session? Well, while the adventure laid a little ground for negotiation and infiltration, the party soon made sure that wasn't going to happen by camping right on top of the catacomb and making themselves a prime target for a night-time raid... an opportunity of which the Tailor took full advantage. I had to draw that bloody ruined fort no less than three times in the course of playing this scenario, and there may well have been a little vicarious pleasure in watching the flesh golems smash it to pieces as they tried to get to the PC's. :)

no, we don't tend to ask Elumai hows she knows...

2011-11-22T09:57:30.735-08:00

no, we don't tend to ask Elumai hows she knows things, she might tell us, and then we'd be sorry.

This was little more than a combat session but if ...

2011-11-22T06:22:40.710-08:00

This was little more than a combat session but if nothing else it showed these players have an appetite for demolition! No ruined building survived this day.

I seem to have got something of a reputation for repugnant monsters after the Seven-Pillared Hall/Rockworm/Necrotech sequence and boy did I have a lot of fun with the narrative at the fort. Wanna gross out your players? Throw puss monsters at them. Easy.

*Much* more Necrotech grossness to come, by the way, as the PC's are currently delving into the nerve-center of the Surgeon General's domain. We're a few runs behind that on the journal at the moment.

Regular readers of Dungeon magazine will no doubt ...

2011-10-27T05:36:44.345-07:00

Regular readers of Dungeon magazine will no doubt recognise the scenario described here, an unashamedly filler session in which the crew gleefully unleashed everything they had... in a confined space cut in half with Wall of Fire. Much rending of flesh and bone ensued.

Although I've since cooled about it, Wall of Fire was having a massive impact on the encounters in which it had been used, and I was on the verge of nerfing the "extra squares of movement" rider that it still carries to this day. But, I decided to wait. Since then I've learned to live with it as a lesson for the DM as much as anyone about what PC's can start doing when they hit Paragon levels. It really is an amazing power, combining awesome battle-mat control with excellent damage.

Thank you for making my character sound so much co...

2011-08-16T16:22:01.443-07:00

Thank you for making my character sound so much cooler than when i play him!

I'm writing from recordings more than six mont...

2011-08-15T05:52:21.491-07:00

I'm writing from recordings more than six months old now, so these sessions are a little stale in my mind, unfortunately.

This however was a neat, self-enclosed little session where several bits of foreshadowing came together to affect the PC's in a big way. This is one of the big payoffs of a long, stable campaign and the first of many, I hope. :)

The concept of a person's destiny being consumed by a powerful outsider will have a major impact on the Paragon Tier of the campaign... if they don't get their fates back, there'll be no Epic Tier for these unfortunate heroes!

The fight itself was outrageous fun@ the entire basement being translocated to the Abyss and then assailed by demons. You just can't go wrong with that!

What I remember most from this session is a great ...

2011-06-09T05:04:56.014-07:00

What I remember most from this session is a great fight with Grioss and his minions, and unexpected heroics from a certain rogue in the party. The only predictable thing about Jonas these days is that you can never be sure exactly what he's going to do next. :)

For Uncertain Futures, I thought long and hard about the old "prophecy that only makes sense after the event" problem, where PC's receive some cryptic foresight that serves no useful purpose and is of no help to them whatsoever. Some of the PCs' reluctance to actually *visit* the place surely spoke of that.

As such, there are decent nuggets of info in those readings that *might* help them in their endeavours, if they make the connections soon enough. We'll see, but in any case, the characters involved were fun to roleplay, and there was a decent air of mystery about the basement which will be cast into sharp relief later in the campaign.

A long time coming... sorry for the wait. Well, I...

2011-05-10T08:34:16.131-07:00

A long time coming... sorry for the wait.

Well, I must say the party pulled a true miracle out of the bag here and survived the crocodile and quicklings with "only" one death (RIP Aerello). Finial must take a lot of the credit for keeping the crocodile out of the water with his Radiant Pulse, preventing those in its gut from drowning while also contending with being crushed, all while healing Berend and smiting his foes. Well played sir.

One of the more interesting observations I have to make here is that it was certainly interesting watching the characters measure their actions against the possibility of being Bloodied... at which point of course they became vulnerable to being swallowed by the croc. I'll certainly have to use that mechanic again.

I honestly expected a near or total TPK here. So much so that I'd already canvassed opinions on the next phase of the campaign, *and* planned the first couple of sessions just in case. As it happens I won't need those notes, but can keep them handy for a smooth transition out of the next total party kill. :)

Once the uncomfortable business of cutting off their own PC's finger/toe had been dealt with, the second assault began, with much hilarity and the promise of a fun and climactic encounter with Warden Grioss, the ancient fomorian overseer of this ancient enclave and, presumably, Seraiya's jailer (although she is nowhere to be seen thus far).

This was intense. What I expected to be a careful,...

2011-01-27T05:59:10.232-08:00

This was intense. What I expected to be a careful, meticulously planned incursion into the Feywild prison of Karrick-Kur turned into a balls-to-the-wall, every action counts fight to avoid a TPK.

As we ended the session, I was pretty convinced the party was finished, perhaps except for Berend and Finial who had the option of surrendering to the fomorians. So convined of this was I in fact, that I started roughing in the first few encounters of the next stage of the campaign. Our avid readers will have to wait for the next journal to see whether that was necessary. :)

I think this session was an eye-opener for all of us in many ways. There is no doubt that as far as I was concerned, the gloves were off. I had been canvassing feedback from the guys on the campaign, as I do every now and then, and something brought up more than once was that there didn't seem to be enough jeopardy. Well, in this case, I played the various creatures of the Kur with utter conviction, without hesitation or compromise... Now unfortunately, when you couple that with the actions of a rampaging dwarf with his hate on, and a tiefling who waited just that little bit too long to try and escape, you get trouble.

There were a couple of rules gaffes in the fight, notably that I was treating escape as a Standard rather than Move action. This was a "doh!" moment but it came too late in the session, and after far too many escape rolls, to be retro-fitted in. The guys took it in good humour and I think they all realised that the crocodile was in such a position of strength in the pool that it wouldn't have made much of a difference. I'm also dubious about whether a huge creature can swallow more than one medium creature, but I ran with it, cos the thing looked bloody massive on the table (you could literally insert the PC miniatures into the thing's mouth)(which we did, often).

In the end we all realised that at Paragon level, you should expect to be hit by something pretty much every round, and you should expect to start chewing through your healing surges much faster than you're used to in the Heroic tier. I'll save my conclusions on this for the comments on the next journal, because I don't want to give away what happened.

In the end, a brilliant and memorable session which I'm sure will remain a highlight of the campaign. I tested them, and they tested me, to the utmost. Who prevailed? Find out next time. :)

Four hours of pure roleplaying and not an attack r...

2011-01-09T10:34:42.827-08:00

Four hours of pure roleplaying and not an attack roll in sight. Who says D&D is nothing but hack'n'slash?

These were important moments for the adventurers as they started to make contacts in high places and (hopefully) began to enjoy a bit more context about what they'd been doing for the last eleven levels. Since much of the Heroic Tier was preparation for what would come later, I'm fully sympathetic to their clamour for more information. Foreshadowing vs. payoff is a difficult line to walk and I've tread a bit too far on the wrong side of it in the past couple of years.

It's also a challenge building a city when I deliberately took a small-scale view of Cradle Plain and didn't plan the whole thing out in advance. Certain things you can visualise beforehand, certain things you have to decide on the fly. The challenge is to be consistent. We'll see how it plays in later sessions but so far I quite like the city we're creating between the lot of us, a good mixture of the seedy and the exotic.

As the tenor of the campaign world resolves it's also an interesting look into my own take on fantasy, kind of a strange hybrid of medieval high magic mixed with contemporary scientific language and ideas. This flavour comes out in everything from people's names to their manner of speech (not that I'm flattering myself in my ability to create interesting NPC's, believe me; they all sound the same to me on playback).

Things get serious for our heroes in the next session or two, and a death may be involved. I can say no more.

This session was a while ago but I still distinctl...

2010-12-15T05:37:55.938-08:00

This session was a while ago but I still distinctly remember having to come to terms with the actions of the PC's. Elumai, it seems, has been in the company of her friends long enough for some of their behaviour to start rubbing off. It makes for good drama, and the assassins were as surprised as anyone when Chapter 7 of the guild handbook - "Keeping do-gooders at bay with the human shield" - turned out to be nothing but a lie. We shall have to see what consequences come of this. :)

The session was also memorable for me having to improv the entire assassin's lair after the party unexpectedly declared that they were going to storm it. In hindsight this is exactly the sort of pro-active stuff they like to be doing and so I should have seen it coming, but still... in the end, I was quite pleased with the encounter although the ability of the characters to launch a full complement of Dailies at it (combined with the unexpected impotence of the "innocent collateral damage" threat) did make it relatively easy XP in the end. Good fight, though.

"lossed"? /sigh

2010-12-01T06:48:42.959-08:00

"lossed"? /sigh

While the minute details of the session have been ...

2010-12-01T06:48:00.383-08:00

While the minute details of the session have been lossed to our group memories, I can recall a couple of significant moments from this excellent session.

First, Finial transformed from mouth into plate-armoured trousers. His character had, lo these long years, been dispensing justice but the punishment had been unambiguous; no-one, for example, would have questioned his role in the destruction of the Necrotech cultists underneath the Seven-Pillared Hall.

Here though was something else. An entire town of men, women, and children, swept up in the madness of their mayor's rhetoric, turning a blind eye to the murder of complete strangers once a year. Finial was resolute and unmoved by their pleas and, well, let's just say that the fires of Ashenport burned long after the bones of the populace had been reduced to ashes.

This was a shocker for most of Finial's friends (not all), and decisively laid the course for his character into Paragon levels. Bloody excellent.

The other thing it did was reduce the normally sullen and reclusive Jonas into an outburst of grief that no-one had seen from him before. He demanded of Finial that he also be judged for crimes far worse than those of the townsfolk, but the paladin outright refused. Another excellent character beat which will resonate through the campaign, I'm sure.

Satisfying stuff.

A long time coming, but at last the journal for th...

2010-12-01T05:57:33.756-08:00

A long time coming, but at last the journal for this session is available. There are many more to follow (I think I'm now four runs behind.)

Originally the shadar-kai were to have attacked the caravan with the PC's ready to defend it, but because they tarried in Ashenport longer than expected, this was not to be. The Very Unroyals were no match for the attackers and without the PC's to protect them, the Sisters were doomed.

As I recall I got thrown for a bit of a loop on this occasion as I expected the impatient characters to press on to Emerandes after getting back to the the scene of the attack. As always however I underestimated Finial's determined pursuit of justice and they gave up on their plans in favour of a trek across the wilderness to the shadar-kai camp, where a bitter fight brought those evil-doers to a sticky end.

The tremendous upside to this decision was that I was able, after all, to end the session on Elumai's "arrest" by Lord Hyseth, a cliff-hanger which when we started the day I was resigned to enacting about ten minutes into a four-hour session. It was much more fun leaving Elumai's player (my wife, by the way) and the rest of the party utterly stupefied by the whole thing for what turned out to be two weeks. :)

This was such a mega-cool session. Elumai's ba...

2010-10-23T15:39:39.275-07:00

This was such a mega-cool session. Elumai's background finally came back to haunt her and all the players stepped up beautifully into the moment.

Too many specific moments to mention but I particularly liked the party goading Finial into honourable combat with Hyseth when the eladrin's impatience finally gave way and he challenged the paladin to either accompany them to the consulate, or settle it in the street. Finial, of course, maintained his cool.

Elumai's erstwhile mother-in-law was also a hoot to play, and the hatred with which Lord Hyseth was greeted by all members of the party tells me he was a success as well. Good times.

There was more towards the end of the session involving a bar fight but this entry is plenty long enough and I'll save that for next time!

As if to balance out the cosmic scales of roleplay...

2010-06-02T13:46:58.282-07:00

As if to balance out the cosmic scales of roleplaying, last week's combat-less session was matched this week by a string of fun little combats which didn't so much test the party as wear them down.

Because this adventure as-written is a little under-powered for the level of the party, I added an environmental hazard to the first combat in the form of the Long Reach of the Sea, a power which allowed the bad guys to unleash a tidal wave on the beach and latch on to the party in order to drag them to a watery doom.

In true form, the party then asked if they could follow the trail of the seaweed back to their source. Doh! Still, it sounded like a good idea to me, and the entire middle section of the adventure was thusly bypassed, and that's just fine by me.

Another Dungeon adventure finds its way into the c...

2010-05-29T14:17:16.612-07:00

Another Dungeon adventure finds its way into the campaign... this one a little more interesting than the straight dungeon crawl of the Forbidden Forge. As usual, the actions of the party have thrown the chronology of the module out a little bit, but that's just the way we like it.

Lots of fun to be had in this session. There seems...

2010-05-22T09:08:30.381-07:00

Lots of fun to be had in this session. There seems to be a murky heart to this party which is starting to come through when they have prisoners to deal with. It's all very cool and we'll see to what dark places it takes us. :)

Like many WotC adventures "The Forbidden Forge" is rife with combat, but I have to say that the only one that felt a bit workmanlike was the scrap with Valsath. All the others had a decent place in the story and pushed the adventure to a new place, but Valsath was just a roadblock, and for that he will never be forgiven! Calmachia, of course, turned out to be a fun and unpredictable villain. If the party hadn't de-activated the forge by then, it could have turned very nasty indeed.

Happy 100th birthday...may there be many more in t...

2010-05-16T00:36:06.906-07:00

Happy 100th birthday...may there be many more in the future.

By the way this is the 100th post on Chasing the D...

2010-05-12T04:21:06.075-07:00

By the way this is the 100th post on Chasing the DM, which makes it the most successful blog I've ever started, by about 97.5 posts. :)

Good to know. :) Berend certainly stretched himsel...

2010-05-10T08:08:31.325-07:00

Good to know. :) Berend certainly stretched himself (literally) that day.

i found this one good fun, i have many years aog s...

2010-05-10T08:05:41.384-07:00

i found this one good fun, i have many years aog stopped trying to understand anything that people say to me, so any inconsistancy went by me without too much perturbation. I enjoyed doing somehitng with Berend other than hitting folk. Certainly not one I'd rather forget, as I enjoyed it.

This session fizzled a little bit. I'm sure I&...

2010-05-10T05:12:04.286-07:00

This session fizzled a little bit. I'm sure I'm not the first DM to trap himself in an inconsistent ad-lib, but boy did I fence myself in during this session! The players noticed, I'm sure, but were good enough not to make a huge deal of it.

In the end though, the encounter with Jelia became a sticky, broken, round-by-round negotiation when it should instead have been a fairly interesting plot reveal.

What I did like about the session in particular were Jonas's escapades with the dragon that just wouldn't let it lie. Staying hidden and/or out of range while it pursued him around the room was good fun, and it's not the first time that Jonas has frustrated an enemy so utterly that killing him becomes its first and only priority (the mercenary camp near the Seven-Pillared Hall being the other occasion). I have absolutely no problem RP'ing a villain in such a way.

Other than that there was one fairly uninteresting multi-Skill check (I wouldn't call it a challenge) in the control room which I struggled to make interesting, and in hind-sight should probably have intensified by requiring one or more PC's to give it constant attention while the fight with the constructs was going on. Another missed opportunity! Gah!

So, then, one to forget. :)

Deeper into the Creation Forge they go... A rathe...

2010-05-01T09:01:26.804-07:00

Deeper into the Creation Forge they go...

A rather standard dungeon crawl with appropriate levels of fun, but honestly not much of interest to talk about.

Not a huge amount to say here, other than the firs...

2010-05-01T08:58:56.814-07:00

Not a huge amount to say here, other than the first few encounters of the Forbidden Forge played very well.

Which is not to say the adventure isn't without its problems -- for example, the map has NO BLOODY KEY ON IT! Grr.

It was also moderately amusing to watch our Rogue fall foul of essentially the same trap twice (albeit in different locations), but it shows quite handily that Rogues are not the de-facto trap finders of 4E the way they have been in the past.