Blog Post 52: I forgot to do this earlier...

Well I DM’ed two and half more sessions of The Forgotten Portal adventure. I should have blogged after one session but I forgot to. Oh well. In case you have no idea what’s going on, the short story is that my players have to get through a dungeon to kill some guy, save a village, and maybe get some stuff in the process. You can read the previous entries if you’re interested in things like the plot.

What amazes me is how quickly they were able to progress through the second half of the adventure. It took four sessions to get through the first half and only two sessions to get through the second half. That’s a big change. Part of it could be the group being able to assemble and start quickly. Another factor is the fact that the challenges they faced included puzzles as well as combat. Combat always has the chance to just drag on an on. Puzzles, even when there’s errors, tend to not take too long.

And I made my share of errors, believe you me. I didn’t pre-read the adventure closely right before I ran it. When you’re running an adventure that is heavy on the puzzles, you need to pre-read it to understand all the details about it. I didn’t, so I had problems understanding what the characters had to do as well as telling them the information that they needed to know. That really was a pothole on the road to adventure.

I also had some problems running the combats oddly enough. I just have trouble keeping track of all the different modifiers and “fiddley” bit. However, when it comes to board gaming, I enjoy complex games with lots of fiddley bits. I play Agricola and Le Harve for Gygax’s sake! Why can’t I run a 4E combat?!? I don’t know. Maybe it could be because when I DM, I can’t focus on just the game mechanics. I have to focus on a bunch of other things during a session (you know, like that plot). I don’t get every detail but I like to imagine that I get close enough for jazz.

Even though running the adventure has some bumps along the way, it also had it’s share of cool, fun stuff. Highlights include players finding their characters prone on the ceiling, accidentally pulling the correct chain (instead of one triggering a trap) on a suicide attempt, and a Princess’ Bride reference. “The game” encounter really stands out to me since it really benefits from 4th Edition focus on tactical movement. The final battle was fun too. I got to throw a bunch of hell Panthers right around the defenders and on the party bard. I managed to get that bard to spend eight healing surges in that battle alone. Have you ever had an encounter where anyone spent eight healing surges? Yet they managed to win even though there was only four of them. They are (mostly) good optimizers.

Now that I’m done Dming for the moment, I’ll turn over the reigns to my friend. This campaign was originally his and I bet he’s ready to step behind the screen again. He plans on starting things over by having everyone write up new 7th level characters. I wrote up a hybrid Paladin/Warlord and I think she’ll turn out to be a good character. Expect a blog post detailing her backstory some time in the future (if I don’t forget to do it).