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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5479382" data-attributes="member: 3448">The Ninth Adventure of Deforch:  Introducing Fire Boss VillainI ran a quick Dungeons and Dragons game for my son and his friend yesterday.  My son was still excited about fighting "Fire Boss Villain," so I wanted to include that in the adventure.  Also, Deforch and his friend's character had reached third level, so they had some additional powers.  I gave my son a choice from among four 3rd level encounter powers, although that was really too many.  He more or less wanted to have access to all of them, and then he picked the worst one out of the group (a power that is essentially Twin Strike with a push--in a game like the one he plays in, which is not particularly tactically complicated, powers that allow pushes aren't very good).  Amusingly, his first comment was "I can't push opponents--I don't use a shield," because he knew that his friend's character has a shield push sort of power.  After some back and forth, I persuaded him to take Leonine Surge instead, which is also a Twin Strike-plus power--in this case, it allows two attacks, and if they both land, it does extra damage and knocks the opponent prone, which can be pretty useful.Anyway, we started out by reminding the boys of the dwarven halls beneath Deforch's family's castle that they were exploring.  I explained that the rubble from the cave in had been cleared away, revealing a heavy stone door with a strange key hole in it.  They spent a while trying to break down the door, hitting it with their magic swords, ramming their shoulders into it, and so forth, but they couldn't get it to open.  My son's friend immediately picked up on the fact that they were going to have to go on an adventure to get the key, but of course they didn't know where the key was.  With a little prompting, they then went to ask Deforch's dad if he knew where the key was.  He suggested that they ask Freezie the Dragon, who knew where lots of things were.  Freezie, in turn, actually had the magical key in his treasure hoard.  He said that he would fly back to get it for them.  They asked if they could come with Freezie, but he explained that while he was their friend, dragons are touchy about their treasure hoards, and he didn't really feel comfortable with having anyone visit his lair.  So Freezie flew off to get the key.  He told them that he would be back in about 2 hours.  Two hours later, he hadn't returned.  Four hours later, he still hadn't returned.  The next morning, he still hadn't returned.I had planned on having the Cup of al-Faisal activate and show them a vision of Freezie, who was now trapped in a cage of fire, but without waiting for that, the heroes immediately decided that he might be in trouble and that they should go to his lair to see if he needed help.  My son suggested that some villain, maybe even Fire Boss Villain, might have taken Freezie prisoner.  His friend went even further, saying that maybe the villain had cut Freezie's head off and killed him.  I was a little worried that that would upset my son, but he seemed relatively unperturbed--perhaps he was distinguishing between what his friend was saying and what was actually going on in the game, or maybe he was just taking it reasonably well.  I'm not sure.  In any event, I made it clear that they would have to go and investigate to find out, so off they went.I then ran a quick skill challenge of them climbing up the icy mountain trail to the mountaintop where Freezie's lair was.  There were a bunch of Athletics checks to climb rough sections of the trail, and what was more or less an Acrobatics check to cross a slippery ice patch.  They then came upon a rough cliff.  I expected them to just climb it with more Athletics checks, but they decided that they needed some way up it.  They talked about the possibility of using their magic swords to change it into a smooth walkway, but I explained that their swords weren't powerful enough.  They also discussed using a parachute, but I pointed out that while that would work for going down a cliff, it wouldn't really help them go up a cliff.  Then they decided to make a ladder, so I had them make Nature checks to find wood to make a ladder from, and then they reached the top of the mountain.At the top of the mountain, a group of skeletons (4 decrepit skeletons (minions) and a blazing skeleton that could throw fire at them) attacked them.  I used a map from a D&D game day so that they had an image of a snowy mountaintop with a tower on it to help them visualize, but I'm not sure it worked as well as I had hoped--it's hard to say how much it helped their visualization.  This turned out to be a pretty dangerous fight--my son's friend, in particular, rolled very badly on some of his saving throws, after an orb of fire from the blazing skeleton lit him on fire.  They quickly cleared out the decrepit skeletons, but even with pretty lousy tactics and my ignoring the blazing skeleton's fire aura, the other PC got down to single digit hit points.  Still, he got to use his new power effectively, and then Deforch rolled a critical hit on his new Leonine Surge that destroyed the blazing skeleton.  With some prompting, Deforch used some snow to help put out the fire on the other PC's clothes, while the other PC rolled to put it out, and they had won the battle with no permanent harm done.At that point, they made their way into the tower, where they saw Freezie trapped inside a cage of fire.  A powerful efreeti met them there, but he declared that he did not want to fight them right then, since he was still weakened from the effort of capturing Freezie, so he would seek his revenge later.  He disappeared in a blast of fire, smoke, and scorching hot air.  The heroes released Freezie by throwing snow on the cage of fire until it went out.  Freezie thanked them, and told them that that was his old enemy, Ignemesis (which I explained was the ancient language for "Fire Villain").  The dragon warned them that Ignemesis would be very angry at them for thwarting the plan to capture him.  The players seemed suitably impressed and excited about the idea of facing Ignemesis later.  With that, Freezie gave them the magic key, and we called the session after saying that in the next game they would be able to open the door in the dwarven halls.From a behind the curtain perspective, my plan had been for them to fight Ignemesis this session as well, but the game had run long and the kids seemed a little over excitable.  As always, a 2-child game takes much longer to do anything than a 1-child game--a game with two fights and a little other material would be well within my son's attention span on his own (and I suspect his friend's just as easily, although I haven't seen it directly).  But with the longer fights with two characters, in particular, the game was running too long.  Also, their attention was much harder to keep focused--whenever one of them started to have wandering attention, he would distract the other one.  I still wanted to introduce Ignemesis, partly because I knew my son was excited by that idea, so I had him make a short appearance but left the actual fight for some future game.All told, it was another fun game.  There is the difficulty that 4e fights are really long for small children.  And it is a constant effort to keep both of them focused on the game.  But it ended up being another fun game, both for them and for me.</blockquote>

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