Owlbears

We have started our newest campaign and so far it's a success. The party this time consists of; a half-elf ranger, a halfling barbarian, and a shifter rogue/monk. My husband and I homebrewed the shifter race for this adventure. He wanted to base his character off of the character Geth from the Eberron book series and we used the 5e race format to create his race based off of existing races.

The party started at level one, so the session was really about small encounters to get them leveled up a little before they get to the meat of the quest. I like to have times during the quest where my players are expecting one thing and get something completely different and I got to have a great one of those moments Sunday night. The party was moving through a stand of young trees and they could hear a stream ahead. They started to hear some splashing in the stream and started to sneak closer. Carter, the half-elf ranger, rolled a perception check which resulted in the following. “Through the trees, you, see what appears to be two bears splashing about in the stream.” They debated, should they go around or engage the bears. Hal, the halfling barbarian, wanted to go around but he was out voted. They snuck forward and I reveled the slide showing what they were fighting. “What the fuck is that!” Carter exclaimed. They were not up against two bears per say, they were up against two owlbears. What followed was a pretty impressive encounter that left Carter's character nearly dead.

Sunday was the first time I DM'd without the use of encounter maps. Hal was of course bummed, but I loved it. I think the encounters were much more fluid and it made my players better describe what they were doing in combat. Tyr and Carter are getting used to it, they both kind of like the visual of exactly where they are in relation to everything but they both said they thought it went well. It's only been one sessions of playing this way so I'm going to reserve judgment until we've got a few more sessions like this under our belts. At this point though I'm really liking the theater of the mind over the encounter maps. I'm not wasting time on tokens that didn't properly tie to character sheets, messing with the faulty initiative roller, or having to move tokens for players.