SPOILERS - Curse of Strahd Play Report

I started running Death House yesterday, and figured this would be a good opportunity to catalog some of the fun, challenges and issues while running.

You can follow along via our Adventure Log, and I'll add posts here for interested DMs that want to compare notes.

FOR SERIOUS, EVERYTHING HENCEFORTH IS A SPOILER SO, YOU KNOW, DON'T READ IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED.

Some notes for session one:

Curse of Strahd adventure hooks suck. SUUUUUCK.

Here's my approach:

* Have each character describe their day-to-day life in Faerûn
* Once done, improvise a time when that character or the group of characters is alone
* The characters are surrounded by missed and dumped in front of the death house
* The mists circle tightly around the house, and don't let them otherwise explore
* Let the characters react a minute, before introducing Rose & Thorn


Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...O-NOT-READ-IF-YOU-ARE-NOT-DMING#ixzz42KltVxda

Creating Mood

Some techniques I used to create a mood of mystery/suspense

* The house cleans itself up. PCs were moving things around and breaking stuff, once they'd turned their attention away from something, I'd later nonchalantly describe it as back in its place. If a player corrected me, I ask them what they were talking about.
* Constant Red Herrings. The PCs expected something around around every corner, so I gave it to them: a curtain that moved like something was behind it had a slightly ajar window; a wolf around the corner turned out to be a taxidermy.

What didn't work

* The fights are easy. I had two players absent, 3/5, and the fights were over after 2-3 rounds. The PCs were pretty banged up, but a 5-7 person party is not going to flinch at the battles (except maybe the armor, because it's just mathematically tough to hit.
* Combat-oriented PCs got bored The exploration is fun, but the lack of stuff to find on the first two floors gave my PCs the fidgets.
* Cliché challenges The PCs have seen these movies before: the suit of armor, the bookshelf secrets; they're all pretty obvious to the PCs
* Rewarding searching everything This adventure risks dragging on because there's a TON of stuff to find -- details of the walls and such, combined with a lack of time pressure, makes this adventure reward an excruciatingly methodical style that's not exactly fun.

Conclusion

Overall, the adventure was a lot of fun to DM, and reading ahead, I'm very excited for a Sandbox Barovia. Given the design issues level 1 PCs face, I think this is a good intro. It was strange, I enjoyed the history of the Dursts quite a bit, but I'm afraid my PCs aren't going to get very exposed to them, and that it will seem cliché to the point of camp.

Thanks for the input. Our LGS starts running Death House on Thursday.

I've read through the majority of the book now, and it looks pretty fun.

There is a TON of npcs with unique stories and info, but I predict a lot of it will be lost on the PCs. The logistical difficulties of a 7 player game means I will have to combine/skip/speed up a lot of the info. Yes a lot of the fluff is cliche, but that is how Ravenloft is supposed to be. It's the trope. Even young players have seen a million vampire movies by now. Also, OotA had a ton of NPCs and the PCs were pretty much 'over' the npc clutter by chapter 6. They tend to attach to the first cool one they find.

I am happy to see wizards got some love.

Great ideas, thank you.

I printed out a copy of the map in black and white and wrote down what happened/what the PCs did in each room to help keep my memory fresh.

RCanine said:

* The fights are easy. I had two players absent, 3/5, and the fights were over after 2-3 rounds. The PCs were pretty banged up, but a 5-7 person party is not going to flinch at the battles (except maybe the armor, because it's just mathematically tough to hit.
* Combat-oriented PCs got bored The exploration is fun, but the lack of stuff to find on the first two floors gave my PCs the fidgets.

Click to expand...

Good things to keep in mind and to communicate to your players before beginning the scenario. I suspect the combat-oriented players will be less bored at the end of Death House, to the point of complaining how anybody would expect 2nd level characters to survive what the House throws at them. (They will miss that a good portion of those fights don't have to happen, because they've already been trained by other play to presume that every fight is winnable, and led to believe by the early encounters that this module isn't taking their character-building skills seriously. I feel bad for them, really I do!)

--
Pauper

RCanine said:

Some notes for session one:
* Rewarding searching everything This adventure risks dragging on because there's a TON of stuff to find -- details of the walls and such, combined with a lack of time pressure, makes this adventure reward an excruciatingly methodical style that's not exactly fun.
.

Click to expand...

We spent the first 50 minutes of the adventure just taking items out of the house. The judge had the items turn to dust when they left the building; so we had someone holding the door open while there was a constant litany of items being thrown outside (including us). Everything possible on the first 2 floors. Even breaking the glass windows outwards, exterior pieces of woodwork pulled off, constant detect magic was running...It was quite humorous. ...and no basement.

We'll see how the rest goes next week.

Session two is in the bag, and we made less progress than I thought. The PCs tromped around quite a bit in third floor and attic, but the rooms themselves were far less interesting; a couple empty bedrooms, a bathroom again with nothing in it. The encounter with the children is neat, but I think the house probably should have had three floors instead of four.

I've been struggling a bit with how to do the basement. It's winding, narrow and twisty, so it's very tough to give each of the players an opportunity to be their own star. Pretty much the player in front gets to make a bunch of decisions while everyone else follows and looks at their phone.

The grick was surprisingly scary; despite our monk doing more than half its HP in damage in one round, it managed to take a nice bite out of the wizard and nearly kill him outright. I'm guessing that fight is pretty swingy; hemmed in by a well-armored character, the grick's going to struggle. But if it can get close to the squishier players it can really hurt.

We'll find out more next week!

Thanks for sharing your story Rcanine!

I'm running session 2 Thursday night. I'm pretty sure I'll have a full 7 again. Sometimes they are hard to steer, but they work together generally well.

I am pretty bummed that we don't have the special certs to give out though. It's an in-store event and we had our early release, but apparently there is no LC for my state

If you don't have an LC, your RC ought to be able to get your store the certs.

Guys, can you please stop posting in his report thread. It makes it damn hard to follow the story if everyone is saying 'thanks for sharing it'