Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="!DWolf" data-source="post: 8105855" data-attributes="member: 7026314">Thanks for the update! I too ran a game today (my jungle game) and it worked much better than last time which was dominated by a severe level fight made extremely difficult by very bad rolls and poor tactics. This time the party did much better with the wizard annihilating a severe encounter pretty much by himself in three turns (he did 46 combined damage with a widened burning hands and finished the job with a couple of produce flames, the rest of the party joked that he just needed them to carry his stuff) and another severe encounter saw the party use their lore skills (labor lore to shore up tunnel bracing and creating a winch system to act as a crude elevator) and player smarts (one of the fighters correctly deduced the entire structure of the mini dungeon from a single clue - which was actually erroneous as he had mistaken ghoul claw marks for giant rat claw marks) to greatly reduce the difficulty. Then the cleric just explode a ghoul with a critical disrupt undead while the fighters murderated another- I was actually worried about killing a character in this one because it took place in water and paralysis + drowning + cave ins could’ve nasty, but only one of the fighters actually took any damage and he aced every save.Some things I noticed:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I recently listened to a GREAT GM video about pacing where he advised switching gears every 20-30 minutes or so to keep things interesting. I found this worked very well with switching between travel mode (3 to 4 hour turns), 10 minute exploration mode (or rp mode when there was no danger), and encounter mode. The game never stagnated as the different modes kept things fresh (contrasted with the last session which was dominated by a very long fight).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">We didn’t play in our usual room which was being remodeled and I couldn’t see a clock in the other room (for fortune points and to know when to wrap up the session) so I had one player remind me periodically of the time. At the same time the most common question during travel mode was what time was it (so they could decide when to retreat to their base camp). I figure next time I will make a little freestanding dial with all the watches on it and charge a player with keeping it updated. For the night modes I can even put who’s on watch on it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">1 minute and 10 minute exploration mode are great for keeping up tension: the players see that there is something important because time is being tracked and they know that combat could be just around the corner. I have a ‘horror narration’ style I use when things get spooky, but I didn’t think to combine the two until after the session. I defiantly will next time.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">For feedback the players told me that they like all the decisions they get to make in exploration mode. Made my day <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I feel that I am not getting enough jungle flavor, for next time I am going to retool the random encounter system to add flavor encounters (screeching monkeys, insect clouds, strange bird songs, etc.) to try and bring out more of the environment.</li> </ul>What timescale are you using? I’m designing an urban crawl for the next part of the adventure and I was thinking of using two hour turns.I am less old school than you but I totally agree with this. To me it feels like they really got what makes games fun to run for me and gave it some mechanical support.</blockquote>

Verification