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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fusiox" data-source="post: 5420325" data-attributes="member: 97839">Thanks so much for your help! I've finally started (woohoo) and got a nice 4-or-more-encounters session in the works, thanks to you guys. My campaign setting is *very* simple. The single more-experienced player in the group suggested leaving the setting very open-ended in case other players wanted to try their hand at DM'ing. Therefore, if I run an adventure for the exploration of a volcano, and the next guy runs an adventure on a desert in a different continent, if all else fails we can say "When you return, your guild sends you to blah" without the story falling apart too much. The characters are, by now, 4th level. This means they've already been set apart from "standard" (standard being natural humanoids like humans and elves) warriors like guards and bandits, but a good-sized group of them still poses a threat. Leading to my planned adventure. I was hoping to have this adventure span 3+ sessions (beginning, climax, and aftermath, if not others). I was making it war-themed, the players being "mercenaries" of a sort, who are hired to defend a fortress city on the borderlands from a siege. As the character I use to play when I won't be DM'ing happens to be a Rogue, I need to craft the encounter to tailor a party missing striker support (the majority of the players being slayers and power gamers, I think an edible helping of soldiers and brutes sprinkled with a generous amount of minions would be lots of fun to them, rather than having to march up to controllers or artillery all the time). 1st. Session:Characters help save a caravan they happened upon while traveling home. The caravan defenders, who happen to be a secret junction of knights that answers to the Crown of their homeland, inform them of the worsening situation at this certain fortress city (a couple more hooks, mostly reward-themed, are available in case the PCs need a little more "persuasion"). The players travel to the fort, fighting a few battles along the way, and the rest of the session is spent rescuing beleagured battalions, raiding enemy supply barricades, and generally getting ready for the siege, which will be the climax. 2nd. Session:The siege of the fort begins. This session will be nearly wholly combat-based, as the next session will have a lot more RPing than the previous one (once again, power gamers and slayers will probably have lots of fun with this session regardless). The entire session is in "real-time", meaning there are no time-lapses where the players sleep, travel, or rest (although I will let the PCs recharge encounter and daily powers, as well as HP, during opportune moments such as establishing a strong defensive foothold). Instead of strung-along encounters at different times, the actions of the PCs determine the course of the battle in what is a few hours in the game time (and a few hours in the real world), which basically means this session is a "super-combat-encounter". I am hoping to make this encounter "epic" (involving lots of minions the players will need to cut through, like in a real-world castle siege, along with some quite-strong warriors needing teamwork to take down) and very tactically-friendly. 3rd. Session:The players have (hopefully) defended the fort city. If not, the outcome will still be the same, except the Crown will be disappointed (trying to keep it simple and not have to build two different sessions when only one will be in use) with the PCs for failing to defend the fort. This session involves finding key traitors in the Crown military, negotiating with the Crown to gain military support, and leading a counter-siege against the opposing force's nearest main military outpost. Depending on how this session goes, I may make the final counter-attack a short encounter if the players blast through it, or another session similar to the second one if they don't make it to this siege before the game-night ends. As you can see, I have a pretty good idea where the session storyline is going. I'm a bit scared that I'm going out of my league here regarding DM'ing experience (instead of using hobgoblins, which would be the obvious choice for this war-themed, I made my own enemy army [which are humans], although being so inexperienced at the game may mean these monsters are too weak or too powerful, in which case I can wing it), but I think, given a little work and more than a little trial-and-error, it can really come to life. Wow, that was long. Thanks for reading this, and thanks for all the good suggestions! It really help kickstart my adventure! <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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