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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5405897" data-attributes="member: 3448">Deforch's Third AdventureI ran my son through his third D&D game today.He insisted that the game had to begin with Deforch arriving at the castle and seeing his parents.  That was fine, so Deforch hiked for another week or so and reached the castle.  In order to open the castle gates, Deforch had to count backwards from ten--that was all my son's idea, although now I'm trying to come up with a plausible explanation.  My best guess is that there are dopplegangers or other impostors/possessed people who for some reason can't count backwards, so having people count backwards is a way of checking for impostors.  But we can leave that aside for the moment.  This was also quite funny because my son set the challenge, but then proceeded to have difficulty with it.  I counted up to ten, and then prompted him again, and at that point he was able to count down with only a little additional assistance.  (He often has trouble with the sequence 6-7-8, in either direction.)With that accomplished, the guards ushered Deforch into the castle.  My son then insisted that we pick out miniatures for Deforch's parents.  I explained that we usually only need figurines for characters that are going to be involved in combat, and that the rest of the time we can just use descriptions and our imaginations, but my son was having none of it.  He was grudgingly willing to accept that we didn't need to draw out a map of the castle on the battlemap, but he demanded that there be figures for Deforch's parents.  So I picked out a female armored warrior-type figure for his mommy and a wizard figure for his daddy (after checking that it was okay to have his dad be a wizard), and we were able to move on.  I also asked if the castle was Deforch's parents' castle, or whether they were guests there, and he said that they owned the castle.  Apparently Deforch comes from a noble family--who knew?  He also said that this was their second castle, because their first castle had been destroyed.  I thought this was a great potential hook for the future, but my son then explained that Deforch's mommy didn't like the first castle, so she had it knocked down with a wrecking ball and built a new one.  Alrighty then...Deforch spent a little while talking with a friendly dragon in the castle, which he kept on calling white but I insisted (somewhat successfully) was in fact a silver dragon.  My son informed me that the name of the dragon was "Freezie," which is very consistent with his overall naming convention of naming things by adding "-ie" as a diminutive to a descriptive word, but that also makes Freezie's draconic nature die a little bit each time his name is used.  Orichalcum suggested that it might be short for Freezax or something.  I'm not sure that helps...Deforch then met with his parents, and gave his mommy the flowers he found in the crypt in the last game.  She was touched, and thanked him and mentioned that Deforch's daddy used to give her flowers from dungeons all the time.  Deforch's parents also complimented him on his accomplishments on his previous adventures.  We then had a bit of an issue:  my son wanted to speak for other characters besides Deforch.  I let him do so to some extent, but my son kept pushing for more.  Anyway, at that point a cook rushed in, curtsied to Deforch's parents, and told them that one of the serving boys had been attacked by some form of monster in one of the store rooms of the castle while he was fetching some flour for the day's bread.  The boy's injuries were being treated, but everyone was very worried about the report of monsters.  Deforch immediately said he would go to deal with the monsters--I was prepared for his parents to send him, but I was glad that it wasn't necessary.  He said that he would go with Freezie, which did catch me a little off-guard.  I asked if Deforch wanted to fly on Freezie to get down to the storeroom quickly, and my son enthusiastically agreed.  After they flew down, though, he found that the circular staircase down to the store room was too small for Freezie to go down, so Deforch would have to go on his own.Deforch failed a Perception check, so while he noticed some blood, he didn't spot or hear the monsters.  My son then said that the blood must be from a four-armed skeleton with blood on its swords, based on the Monster Manual picture of a "skeletal tomb guardian" that he had been very impressed with before.  I said that he wasn't ready to face the four-armed skeleton yet and that the monsters were something else, and he got pretty upset.  There's an interesting issue here--to what extent should I let the game move towards just freestyle make-believe versus trying to maintain some sense of actual adventures where he controls Deforch and I fill in the gameworld.  But it caused a little bit of tension--I also think that both my son and I were not quite at our best in terms of mood, focus, and so forth today.  But I insisted on this point, and once the game got moving again, he calmed down and seemed to forget the issue.In any event, as Deforch went forward, he was attacked by four kruthik hatchlings.  For people who don't know the 4E Monster Manual well, kruthiks are kinda like dogs crossed with crabs with a large dollop of viciousness added--they're quadruped hunters with chitinous armor, nasty claws, and an aggressive willingness to attack people.  Three of them moved into position around Deforch, but only one of them could attack during the surprise round, and it missed.  On Deforch's turn, he did his encounter attack that attacks all of the enemies adjacent to him and hit all three, killing each of them (as they were just minions that only take one hit to defeat).  He then moved next to the last kruthik and spent an action point to take an additional action and to attack it as well, killing it.  With the kruthik defeated, he noticed the tunnel that they had dug to enter the store room.  With a little prompting, Deforch climbed down the tunnel to find if there were more of the kruthiks.My son was insisting that Deforch was going to find a room filled with a bunch more kruthiks, or as he referred to them, "me-mes" (apparently the noise he thought they would make).  My son spent a while clambering around on all fours going "me me" as he imitated them.  It was very cute.  Fortunately, I planned on a kruthik lair as well, so he rushed out to find two more of the kruthik hatchlings and a kruthik young (which are a tougher type of the same creature).  The hatchlings won initiative, and one of them wounded him, but then on Deforch's turn he moved into position to attack all three and unleashed his encounter power again.  He hit the tough kruthik and one of the hatchlings, and then used another power to turn the miss against the last kruthik into a hit.  That eliminated the hatchlings, but the tougher kruthik hit him pretty hard on its action.  He then used his daily attack to hurt it very badly, but it hit him again.  At this point, both Deforch and the kruthik were bloodied (i.e. below half hit points), and my son was pretty nervous.  I was a little nervous too, but I knew something my son didn't:  the kruthik couldn't do enough damage to drop Deforch in one hit, whereas it only had three hit points left, meaning that it was almost guaranteed that any hit by Deforch would finish it off.  Sure enough, a round or two later Deforch hit it and won the fight.My son recognized, correctly, that Deforch had to rest up and regain hit points.  He insisted on going back to the castle to do this, even though I pointed out that he could take a short rest in the caves he had found.  Still, no problem with wanting to rest at home, and this way he got to tell Freezie about what he'd found.Deforch returned to the kruthik cave.  There were two exits--one was a kruthik tunnel that was too small for him to enter, and the other was a break into a square, carefully carved stone chamber.  Deforch sent Freezie's "younger brother, who's really small and can fit and can use his fire breath to burn up all of the rest of the kruthiks" into the tunnel--who am I to argue with a plan like that?  Deforch then went into the other room, which was a beautifully carved dwarven hall, with about a 7' ceiling and relief carvings of dwarves doing heroic dwarven things with hammers and axes.  My son was nodding along happily, when something occurred to me.  I asked him if he knew what a dwarf was and he said "no."  So I showed him some pictures and explained the basics of dwarves to him.  We then got back to the game, and I said that there was a fancy armor stand at the far end of the room with some very nice looking hide armor on it (like the armor Deforch wears) and a chest filled with gold.  i also pointed out a crushed kruthik midway along the floor.  My son figured out that the crushed kruthik probably meant that there was a trap, but Deforch headed across the room anyway, at which point a large stone cylinder swung through the room (like the clean-up bar that knocks down any remaining pins in a bowling alley) and knocked Deforch back to where he entered the room, in addition to battering him.  My son thought about how to get past the trap, and decided that he could jump it (which was one of my planned solutions).  He rolled badly though, and Deforch got battered again and flung back to the entrance once more.  He used his Second Wind ability to get back some much needed hit points and tried once more.  This time, he rolled a 19, which when added to his high Athletics skill, easily allowed him to jump the stone cylinder.  At the far end of the room, he found a lever that allowed him to disable the trap.  He then took the chest of gold and the hide armor.  I told him that there was clearly another door out of the room, but that it was locked and that he couldn't figure out how to open it (because there pretty much had to be, on the one hand, but I wanted the adventure to be decidedly over, on the other--this will provide a starting place for a future session).  Deforch returned to the castle, had Freezie's little brother breath on the chest three times to open it (my son clearly had invented some sort of magical locking mechanism, although I was vague on the details), and told his parents about the adventure.  Deforch's daddy cast a spell and informed him that the hide armor he had found was magical.  Freezie said that it was getting late, and he had to go back to his home cave (again, an improvisation of my son's).  And with that, we ended the session.  As the session ended, I told my son about experience points, and that Deforch had gotten enough to go up to level 2--we'll handle the process of leveling up before the next game.  (I originally hadn't planned on leveling him up yet, but either his next game or the game after that will be with a friend of his whose character has reached second level and gotten some magic items.  I figure that while it can be perfectly fun to play a first level character with a second level character, Deforch has gotten enough experience to level by the book, and it will be more fun for them to be balanced.)All told, it was another successful game, although perhaps somewhat less so than the previous games.  My son clearly had a lot of fun, but we also had an increased amount of friction about the issue of authorial control.  I'm trying to strike a good balance--being flexible, but still maintaining some structure and not letting it just become a pure free-form make-believe, but it's difficult, and I'm not sure that I'm getting it right.  I also think that I need to stat up a friendly dragon as a companion shortly, which isn't a bad thing anyway in a game with a single PC.  (I'll probably find reasons for the dragon to not be along on the adventure when my son plays together with his friend).We also had some new milestones:  the first real trap that he's encountered, the first permanent magic item he's found, and of course the first time he's leveled up.  We also added in some additional rules in my effort to gradually ramp up the complexity and get him to the full ruleset without ever overwhelming him, although there are still some rules that I'm just ignoring (opportunity attacks stand out, for people who care).  And when I asked him to describe the game for Orichalcum at dinner, his first response was "It was great!" so I must still be doing something right.</blockquote>

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