Enter the Assassin

Last night’s session was amazing! We’ve got such a great group of players now and the game is really coming to life. My brother, Carter, joined us for our session; playing an assassin. He hasn’t played in probably ten years but he took to 5e superbly.

Saturday was Hal’s birthday and Tyr thought it would be cool if I gave Hal a present in game. We opened with Tyr and Hal just awakening from a long rest. Hal’s patron deity is Talos, so as he awakened a gift from Talos appeared on his lap, he opened it to find dwarven boots of regeneration (they restore 5 points of HP every round). Then they hit the floor running, starting off the night against a hydra. I expected the hydra to present them with more of a challenge but they managed to make shorter work of it than I expected and no one came close to biting the dust.

They searched some ruins, fought some goblins, grabbed some loot…all the average adventurer stuff. Then came the most magical part of the night, and one we’re sure to talk about through the ages. In our previous session the, dwarves found a medallion in a crypt. One, which they tried to learn more about from the warlock that sent them into the crypt. All he could tell them about it was that it bore the symbol of an old cult but he did not know the name or anything about it. Last night on their path back to Ravensrest they encountered a rogue who made it clear that she had been sent to retrieve the medallion. Tyr turned Carter’s assassin invisible and while Hal and Tyr kept the woman talking Carter snuck behind her and delivered his attack. Assassinating her with one blow! It was spectacular as his magic hand axes sunk deep into her back! She was accompanied by four shadows; the party made short work of them. They decided that they really would have liked to interrogate the rogue so Hal cast zone of truth around her corpse, Tyr cast web on her body to keep her restrained, and then Hal cast revivify on her. They then proceeded with their interrogation. In the end they sent her with her tail between her legs back to her master with a message that they will seek him out. It was one of those great moments for a DM where your players do something totally unexpected; taking the campaign off its rails, but it works out great and just enriches the whole experience.

Puzzling

Our last session was pretty combat intense. I try to balance campaigns out between story line and the amount of combat because I want my players to get caught up in a story not just smashing things. The way it worked out though, was that last night it was mostly combat. There were two breaks from combat and the first of them was in the ruins of a warlock’s tower. The warlock was still there and offered to play them at a game of Loki’s dice, a game I was inspired to come up with. I’ll dedicate a blog post just to the game when I get a chance. Both of the PCs played until they won magical items. 5e is written to be low in magical items but with just Tyr and Hal playing I felt they could use the boost. They are playing well but let’s face it, magic weapons and items are just freaking cool. Then the PC’s got to try out their new gear as they fought their way through a crypt of undead, where they found a mysterious amulet.

We moved back onto the main track of the quest as Tyr and Hal proceeded to a set of watery ruins. They are on an island but the ruins they must investigate have sunken into a small lake. It is here that the boys encountered a medusa and Hal became turned to stone just before Tyr could deliver the deathblow to the Medusa. With only two players I allowed Tyr to transform Hal back to himself with the death of the Medusa.

Their tribulations for the night didn’t end there. After defeating the medusa the next door they needed to get through was a puzzle. There is a mural around the room and a door with a strange locking mechanism. The mural is done in 10 frames. They depict in order; a boar, an elk, a bear, a snake, a fungus, a blink dog, a kobold, a kenku, a medusa, a hydra. The first of the three dials on the door has a snake, a fungus, a kobold, a kenku, a hydra. The second has a blink dog, a snake, a boar, an elk. The third and inner most has a hydra, a bear, a medusa. Answer: snake, blink dog, hydra. It is simply that the animals follow the order on the mural. So the first animal on the mural that is on the first dial is the snake. The nextt animal on the mural on the second dial is the blink dog and the next animal on the mural on the third dial is the hydra.

This puzzle is where we get into some principles of DMing. I’ve talked to a lot of DM’s who say, “When I make a puzzle that I think is easy my players find it incredibly difficult. When I make one that I think is hard, they solve it in seconds.” I thought the door would be easy, especially since I was emphasizing the words “in order” but my players found it too difficult. Granted it was after midnight when they were trying to solve this. Which leads me into one of the principles of DMing that I learned early on; always give your players an out. Never give them something that is impassable and quest ending. With this puzzle I gave the players an out. Tyr started to play with the door and discovered that when he landed on a certain animal there was a “click.” He played with the door until he got the right combo and thus it unlocked. Did I want things to work out that way? No, but everyone was tired and I felt the best thing for the quest was to give my players an out.

First Impressions of Roll20

Here are my first impressions on using roll20. First I have to say that my preference is always to play in person. I like the human interaction and my DM style with props etc. is just far more suited to playing in person. The situation we find ourselves in does not make in person play possible right now and our only option to continue playing was to find some way to play online. At first, we considered playing over Skype but that uses up a good bit of bandwidth and posed some sound problems. We decided to try out roll20.com and overall I think it worked well for having to play online. My overall review is positive but I’ll go through what I did and did not like.


Pros


~ I can add portraits in to set the mood, something I didn’t do in person.


~ I can import my handmade maps after scanning them onto my computer.


~ The whisper feature is great for passing DM notes.


~ 3d dice roll for those who prefer a dice roller to actual dice. I prefer real dice but Hal prefers a dice roller.


~ I control who has control of what tokens on the board.


~ The “ping” feature lets you draw someone’s attention to a specific point on the map.


~ The drawing feature makes it easy to mark the area of area effect spells. It also allows players to plot out their movements Madden style before actually making moves.


~ You can choose to use video & voice, just voice, or just chat to communicate with other players. You can enable the squares for video and have small or large screens or you can just show the nameplates of players. You can also mute a player, which comes in handy because Tyr and I are actually in the same room. This way I hear his actual voice and not his voice with a delayed computer echo.


~ I control what page players are on and I can view another page while they are on the page I assign them to.


~ Now I haven’t used this feature yet, I’ll be using it when we play next, but in theory, it seems good. It’s called fog of war and it lets you hide parts of the map and reveal sections to the PCs as you play. I had to watch a tutorial on how to use it because it’s not obvious what you need to do to make it work.


~ If we choose to in the future we can look for an additional player through roll20.


~ My players had a great experience.


Cons


~ We used voice only and it kept dropping out. We’d have to wait for it to come back, which held up game play. We’re going to download Teamspeak and give that a try. Which I find inconvenient, it just makes one more window I have to have open on my computer.


~ It takes a lot more time to set up a quest/campaign in roll20than it does to set one up for table top play.


~ Handmade maps don’t match up with the roll20 grid. There are ways to work around this but I still find it annoying.

~ Large maps are hard to use on this platform. You really need a small map that fits into the dimensions viewable on the map screen without having to scroll.


~ This is only an issue for the DM. You need too many windows open at one time and in order to see my word document where my quest is typed out I have to cover the chat box during battles or the whole screen when reading text.


~ It really is not designed for my style of DMing. If you’ve watched Chris Perkins at PAX he generally has his PCs on one map for the whole session and that works perfect with roll20. I on the other hand can go through ten maps in one session and that can be kind of cumbersome on roll20.


~ This goes along with the last con. This was a point Tyr brought up. He has to reenter his HP on every map. Time consuming and annoying. Now, technically as the DM there is a way I could make their HP carry over from one map to the next but then every time they level up I’ve got to go in and redo their token and then if I have maps already made up I’ve got to go in, delete their current tokens on those pages, and replace their tokens on those pages. I’ve got too much to handle as a DM as it is without adding that to it.


Again I have to say, nothing beats DMing in person. If you find yourself in a situation like us then roll20 is a great option.

Dwarven Party

Last night we had our first session sans Omar and it was fabulous! It was also our first night using Roll20.com. We started quest B of the campaign and Hal and Tyr both choose to be dwarves, Hal a tempest cleric and Tyr a wizard. Together they make a formidable dwarf party; splattering the blood of their foes on ruin walls.

For this campaign, I'm doing something that is totally different and my players are thoroughly intrigued at the thought of how it will all come together. In quest A of the campaign I gave them a NPC pacifist cleric, Omar wasted time and space as a supposed rouge, Hal played a human fighter, and Tyr was a drow ranger. For quest B of the campaign the boys are playing their dwarves. Here’s the twist; their part B characters are starting at the same point in time that their part A characters started. When they finish part B those characters will now be at the point in time where the characters from part A finished their quest. The thieves’ guild will then bring all of the characters together to finish off the campaign in quest C. My players have requested that when they start part C that I allow their PCs to kill Omar’s PC, and I intend to honor their request. They deserve it for all of the headaches Omar and his floundering rouge caused them.

I must say that the way Hal plays his dwarf makes a 5e cleric completely bad-ass. Tyr uses his wizard strategically and masterfully. The teamwork in the group is amazing without Omar holding them back. Tyr was a web-casting maestro, holding earth elementals to the ground while Hal skirted the web using his glaive to slash them to rubble. Last night was what D&D is supposed to be!

Dragon Turtle

Last night’s main boss battle was with a dragon turtle. It became an epic battle! The PCs entered a cave where they were distracted by the presence of three merrows, so they didn’t do any checks on the cave. It turned out that part of the floor of the cave was the shell of the dragon turtle. They were trying to reach a treasure chest on the back side of the cave that contained a special jewel, the object of their sea quest. Omar decided that his rogue would head straight for the chest, leaving Tyr and Hal to deal with the gargantuan creature on their own. Omar failed to pick the lock on the chest and even broke his thieves’ tools in the process of failing. In the end, Tyr and Hal managed to defeat the dragon turtle, though it was close. Both of them had HP in the single digits at the end, and Hal the bard had to use knock to get the chest open.

Ship Combat

One of my challenges for this quest was coming up with a sea battle between my PCs’ frigate and a pirate frigate. Sea battles are one of the areas where I wish WOTC would iron out and have a set of rules and stats for. Since there are no 5e rules, at least at this point, for running ships I had to come up with my own. I devised an AC and HP for each ship and came up with ballistas and their stats. My PC’s decided they didn’t like the ballistas because they had to roll a strength check to load them and then make an attack roll to try to hit anything. So when the pirate frigate approached they choose to lob spells until the ship was close enough for boarding. I felt the strength check was necessary because Omar’s PC was a halfling, who obviously did not have the strength to load the huge ballistas on her own.

Shipwreck Mimics

One of the fun things I did in our last session was to incorporate mimics. None of my players ever thought I'd use mimics so it was a real surprise to them. Instead of the usual treasure chest, had some floating debris in the sea. Some of it was sticking to the hull and the rudder of the ship they were on. When they lowered a dingy to remove the debris, SURPRISE!

Liar's Dice

I love using props in game; so last night I added a hands on game in the game. The Player’s Handbook offers proficiency with a gamer’s set for some of the backgrounds but I’ve never found instructions for how to play the D&D in game games that it lists. I didn’t want to use chess or have the PC’s play poker with the playing cards because I was afraid that using such everyday games would pull the players back into reality instead of enriching the role-playing. I decided to have the PC’s play Liars Dice in the tavern. Some of you may have seen Liars Dice before; it was featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest. I think this was very successful because it was something different and it fits in perfectly at the port city tavern.

Fae Forest

Last night’s session was so eventful that I’m going to do a couple of posts about it. Everyone, except Omar, had an absolute blast! The PC’s quickly discovered that the forest they entered was filled with fey which Hal, the bard, proceeded to splat against the trees with his Thunder Wave. Before they defeated the fey, a pixie used Polymorph to turn Omar into a mule. Now Omar, in mule form, could have fought the pixie and violet fungus attacking him or even moved away from the fungus, but he chose to wonder around his square eating grass until Tyr slain the pixie who cast the spell on Omar. In the next encounter, Tyr and Hal hacked and slashed away at a Treant until the mighty creature finally fell.

Room Markers and Tabletop

I got tired of my players using post-it notes on the table to mark the dimensions of rooms. My solution was to use stone spray paint on Duplo blocks to make D&D wall markers for our table. As a side note our playing table is upcycled from a coffee table I hated. I took the top off and wood burned in a grid. The squares are 1.5” by 1.5”, perfect for minis.

Dice Tray

So it was one fall that we started playing D&D and Omar keep complaining because the table we were using at the time was padded and he couldn’t hear the dice roll. Now I agree, it’s nice to hear the dice roll but it doesn’t ruin the game for me when someone uses a dice roller or when the table is padded. It was ruining the game for Omar which, because we had to hear about it on every dice roll, was ruining the game for the rest of us. I let them use a decorative autumn tray I had to roll their dice, with the stated expectation that Omar would come up with a permanent tray. That never happened and my decorative tray got ruined. So just yesterday I finally broke down and repainted my tray to make it an official dice-rolling tray. Why we still need it when they can roll on the new wooden table I don’t know but here it is and this is how I made it.

I started by repainting the tray black. Then I printed off the design on regular printer paper and cut it out. I applied a coat of mod podge to the back of the paper and placed it on the tray. Then I let that dry before applying a coat of mod podge over the top. Just a tip: when you print your design let it dry for a bit so the ink doesn’t smear when you do your top coat of mod podge.