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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5414056" data-attributes="member: 3448">Deforch's fourth adventure--now with another player!My son and I played another game of D&D last Wednesday--his first game with another player.We briefly tried to play on Sunday, but my son was too hyped up for it to really be feasible.  We talked a little about what powers he wanted to get as he leveled up--my son chose to have Deforch's mommy teach him to be extra skilled with his sword, so I gave him the Heavy Blade Expertise feat, and then he chose the Hunter's Privilege utility powers.  My son also said that Deforch wanted to learn his mommy's sword power, "Overstrike Sword Pinwheel," but I said that he needed to be higher level to learn that.  "Yes," he sagely agreed, "you need to be 15th level to learn Overstrike Sword Pinwheel."  So I guess Deforch's mommy is Paragon Tier.  I also thought that "Overstrike Sword Pinwheel" sounded like a completely plausible 4E power.  But at that point, things got too chaotic, so we decided that my son would just make up a Deforch story instead of playing D&D.A few days later, we got together with my son's friend to play a game of D&D together.  His friend is about the same age as my son--a couple of months older--and he's played a few sessions with his dad, but this was both of their first experience playing together.  His friend's character is an eponymous human fighter, which led to a little confusion, because my son had trouble understanding that his friend's name was both the player's name and the character's name.We began the adventure basically where Deforch's last adventure left off.  First, we introduced his friend's character, saying that he was old friends with Deforch and had come by to visit Deforch's family's castle and to go on an adventure with him.  (I personally assume that Deforch and the other PC fostered together somewhere, since the implied setting details make them similarly aged nobles who are friends, but I didn't really want to explain the idea of fostering to two four-year-olds, so I kept this assumption to myself.)  The friend's PC knew Deforch's family, but Deforch introduced him to Freezie.  Then, Deforch's father, a wise and learned wizard, explained that he had translated the runes on the door in the dwarven hall that Deforch discovered.  The runes said that two dwarven warriors should pass through together, and I drew two special stones for standing on in front of the door.  He also explained that teamwork would be really important for this adventure, and that nobody had seen any dwarves in many years.  With that, the adventure began.The two boys quickly figured out that they should stand on the stones, and the door rolled open.  They then went through into the next room.  Two zombies and two skeletons attacked them.  My son correctly inferred that the undead were undead dwarves, which is what I had planned but not wanted to make explicit, for fear that it would upset the boys.  They dispatched the enemies without much difficulty, but we discovered an interesting problem along the way:  combats with multiple players take much longer than a combat with only one player, leading to some frustration and attention wandering on the part of the two players.  My son got pretty upset about waiting for his friend's character, both skeletons, and both zombies to go before he got his first turn, and he also kept wanting Freezie to fly by and blast the zombies with its breath weapon.  But with a little gentle effort, my son calmed down and got into the game.  Still, it was a good thing that both the friend's dad and I were working to keep things focused, because otherwise the fun of spending time with a friend might have overwhelmed the ability to play the game.With the undead dealt with, they saw that there were two doors out of the room.  Initially, the boys decided to have their characters split up, so each could go through one of the doors, but with a little nudging from their dads, they decided that splitting the party was maybe not such a good idea, and went through only one of the doors.  Behind that door, they found an ancient dwarven statue that spoke to them.  The statue explained that no dwarves had been in these halls for many years, and that they should explore and find out what happened to the dwarves.  Perhaps, if they found the dwarves, they could reunite them with the good humans and make everyone happy.  The statue also told them that they might find some useful treasure in these halls, but to be careful, as there were some traps that would not recognize them as allies.They went into the next room, where they found another round door with stepping stones in front of it, but this one had three stones.  There was also another statue in this room, but this statue didn't talk.  There was also another door out of the room that was covered with rubble--I made it clear that they would not be able to move the rubble in the scope of this game session.  They immediately identified the puzzle of how to open the door; with a little nudging, they started trying things.  First the other PC and Deforch each stood on one stone--the stones sank into the ground, each with a different sound effect, but the door remained closed.  Then my son's friend's PC tried moving from one stone to another really quickly, but the stone he stepped off came up before the other one went down, and the door remained closed.  Next Deforch tried standing on one stone and pressing down on the other with his swords.  I thought that was a really good idea, and I considered letting it work, but I ruled that the swords couldn't exert enough pressure to cause the other stone to go down.  At that point, I prompted them to look around the room to see if there was anything else they could use.  My son said that they would try to move the statue.  Deforch got a truly woeful Athletics skill check, but his friend did better, and I said that they slowly dragged the statue across the room.  This was all done with moving around minis--I had a mini for a living statue that I used to represent the perfectly normal stone statue.  Throughout, my son definitely, and I think his friend as well, found it much easier to interact with symbolic representations on the battlemap then with purely imaginary concepts.  (This had also showed up with the insistence that we needed minis to represent Deforch's family, even when they had never been in combat in the game.)  With the statue on one of the stones and the two PCs on the other two stones, the door finally rolled open.In the next room, they found a magically enchanted crossbow that could fire on its own (an arbalester from MMII), and a bloodthorn vine.  The friend's dad improvised minis for both from his collection of random gaming supplies, which was great because I had nothing to represent either in my minis collection.  Deforch won initiative, and I explained that the crossbow looked really dangerous, but not very tough, while the vine looked really tough, but not very dangerous.  Deforch immediately decided to attack the vine.  Oh well.  The friend's character initially wanted to stay back and use his bow; since he's a melee-oriented fighter, and substantially tougher than Deforch, that could have been disastrous, but his dad persuaded him against it.  The fight was satisfyingly challenging--Deforch was bloodied and the other PC took some damage before they destroyed the vine.  But with the vine destroyed, Deforch was able to run up to the enchanted crossbow and start attacking that as well.  The crossbow fired even when Deforch was right next to it, allowing Deforch an extra opportunity attack (which is a concept that we've now introduced, but without really explaining the rules--we just say things like "if you walk there, then the monster will get to attack you, but you can walk to here without the monster getting an attack.")  Finally, they finished off the crossbow, and found the treasure.  There was a treasure chest with 200 gp and a potion of healing, as well as a magic sword that could split into two magic swords (a Paired Sword +1, basically intended for Deforch).  They also found a book that explained that when earthquakes began to shake the dwarven halls, the dwarves moved deeper into the earth (since they think of deeper as safer).  So my son and his friend realized that the blocked passageway must have been from a collapse during an earthquake, and that if they wanted to find the dwarves, they would have to go deeper.  With that, we ended the session.Overall, it was a success and both boys had a lot of fun.  That said, wow, the chaos level involved in GMing for two four-year-olds is vastly higher than for one.  Also, combat is much slower.  My guess is that each fight balanced for two takes between one and a half and twice as long as a fight would if balanced for a single character.  And that in turn makes the attention side of things much harder.  The game probably ran 45 minutes or an hour, and that really pushed the limits of both of their attention spans.  At the same time, they really enjoyed playing together.I'm also amused that the little adventures that I'm throwing together for them are starting to develop more of a story and an ongoing campaign feel.  I don't really know what the story of the missing dwarves is, but this is clearly going to be an ongoing storyline over the course of the next several adventures.As an addendum:  On Chrismas, my son gave me the D&D Monster Vault, a collection of monster descriptions and counters for each monster.  He was clearly as excited to be giving it to me as I was to be getting it.  I think this marks the first present he's given to either of his parents where he actually understood why they would want to get the present.  I look forward to using it in a game with him soon.</blockquote>

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