Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7115821" data-attributes="member: 40592">I ran Goldenfields last night - from where the halfling alerts the town, to when the last few Giants and Ogres ran away and gave up trying to get in and steal all the food.  We had 4 players, and over the course of the session I handed out all 6 NPC's, but no-one ever ran more than one at a time.  The awakened tree and Zi Liang joined later, the halfling dropped out, as did the zhent agent, so it was somewhat dynamic as to who had what, though what was three main fights and some exploration / scouting.I usually try and role-play NPC's myself, but I prefer to give players NPC's to run in combats, so .  So it worked as I normally would like things; to me, it made more sense that it wasn't just 4 PC's vs all the invaders; at least they had a bit of help even if some were not much help overall doe to limited power.  Especially so as the players never tried hard to find guards etc to help defend the town (the setup does give you the impression that the captain of the guard is useless, and no doubt the players thought so too, as well as the usual player thing of wanting to be heroes not just run around telling the guard to do the work).I definitely don't think it's heavy handed to have the PCs control the NPC's in battles, in fact I prefer that approach.  Otherwise it's the DM playing dice with himself half the night (I've been a player in a game like that, once or twice).  I role-play them initially, then hand them over when it's Encounter Time.  I might do some role-play in between encounters, but generally the NPc is in the background, so last night there was very little of that except the zhent guy wanted to run off and check his sheep etc (the PC's mostly blocked him, saying it wasn't safe, which was fair enough; they let him go once they knew the way was safe).I had only introduced two of the 6 NPC's the previous session - Miros the bar-keep, and Zi Liang who a PC had arranged to meet earlier through his back-story.  I quickly introduced three more NPC's as part of the recap / intro last night (just flashed their pictures, gave a brief explanation of the players having met them), then the last NPC (the tree) just appeared from the grove after the P's found and defeated the first group of bugbears etc.  So the PC's prior relationships with the NPCs was quite minimal.  The way it played out, the session was basically the PC's and a few other 'heroes', who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and were inclined and capable of actually contributing (hence, the halfling quickly dipped out after the first fight).Obviously having eight "heroes" instead of our usual 4-5, and a dozen or more Monsters for me, made things slower.  But not a huge amount slower - I tended to use one figure to represent a 'stand' of monsters, and just rolled init for each group (e.g. bugbears, goblins, ogres).  We got three big fights, some exploration and role-play, into a four hour session (less than 4, if you take out the initial start-up pieces like admin, someone arriving late, banter etc).As for telling the players up front that if they keep the NPC's alive they get special quests for each... yeah, that part rubs me totally the wrong way.  I certainly didn't do that.  One NPC did die, which made for good story then and next session.  The others - I might use one of two 'quests', definitely not all five!  And as usual, I'll work them in as 'naturally' as I can, so it doesn't feel like a computer game.  I don't plan on having the mid-game bogged down with a heap of side-quests / random walks; I doubt my players would be interested, either.  In fact, in last night's session, the PC's were already just headed out to find Chief Guh, but were interrupted during their final night's rest.  The 'plot as written', where the PC's can't figure out where the Steading is, rubs me wrong (it stone-walls the players), and would likely frustrate some players too; in my game, the PC's captured a Hill Giant near Goldenfields, and it told them it was collecting food to impress Guh - he doesn't know exactly where it is, but he's now their prisoner and will try and help lead them there.  So eventually he'll help them go there directly, by-passing the need for Harshnag etc.  It will be a relatively 'linear' move from Goldenfields to the Steading, with the PC's aiming for Vengeance (that's the feeling I get, of what they want).  Bear in mind though, I'm intending to play 3 "parallel plots" to use Bryn Shander, Goldenfiels and Triboar, each with different PC's; so one group will no doubt find Harshnag; likely, all five giant lairs will be trashed by the end.Hopefully [MENTION=54629]pukunui[/MENTION] can give his perspective, from a player's point of view.</blockquote>

Verification