D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[Ogre Mage]

Annoying. The DM brought out an encounter which targeted my weaknesses. Other PCs did pretty well. I was reduced to 20% of my HP and struggled to contribute.

 

[Richards]

In last night's "Ghourmand Vale" session, the PCs:

• Were asked to put a stop to a bunch of bandit raids that were taking out farms several hours away from the Vale (five farms attacked in a week)
• Figured out all of the farms were within an hour or two of an old abandoned watch station
• Upon reaching the watch station, we sent our elven druid (wildshaped into an eagle) and my PC's grackle familiar to scout the place out; they found nobody on watch but my familiar heard some voices within the interior rooms are was able to point our where they were concentrated
• Had the druid land by the gate and revert to elven form so she could open it and let us inside
• Found one room with a lone hobgoblin, but he called for reinforcements before we could kill him
• Fought six more hobgoblins in the next room, which was made easier once the druid cast a stone spikes spell that pretty much prevented them from moving
• Fought an invisible barghest and two hobgoblin sergeants that had been attracted by the sounds of battle with the hobgoblin warriors, killing them off without too much trouble
• Went down to the lower level, where we killed a vampire spawn that had been an ally before being turned undead; we killed him, then followed his mist form to his coffin (he'd been part of an earlier group trying to take out the bandits)
• "Killed" a dead body waiting to rise as another vampire spawn, then our paladin sensed evil behind an iron maiden
• Had our halfling rogue figure out how to open the secret door behind the iron maiden, only to have nine wolves enter via the opened passageway (it turns out it was a true vampire in the form of a wolf and eight summoned wolves)
• Concentrated fire on the vampire and turned him to mist, then followed him to his coffin, where we cut off his head, looted what we wanted from his body (a magic ring, magic armor, and magic sword), then set fire to the coffins
• Let the summoned wolves skedaddle, as they weren't inherently evil

It ended up being a long session for a Wednesday night; we start playing around 6:30 PM and try to end around 9:00 PM, but this one went a bit past 10:00 PM.

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

Tonight's "Ghourmand Vale" session left a bad taste in our mouths. We were sent to bring a contract for a stone giant clan 2 days away to sign, which would have them bring quarry stone to the Vale so the Stone Keep could be enhanced in size and structure. When we got an hour from the quarry, we saw four bedraggled stone giants clamber down a hill ahead, yelling at us to flee for our lives - a red dragon was hunting them. They were unarmed and their leather clothes were burnt and singed, and one of the giants (the leader we were sent to meet) was helping a very wounded one to limp along at his best speed. So we got ready for a decent red dragon fight, out in the open where the dragon's tactics would be to his advantage. Only:

• After the DM said the dragon was 750 feet away, I looked up the range of the ice storm spell and found out my 8th-level sorcerer could cast it up to 720 feet away, so I said I'd wait until it was in range and then I could cast four ice storm spells at it (my daily limit for 4th-level spells) before it could get into attack range. Then, suddenly, the dragon - who had been chasing the four unarmed and wounded stone giants in an "if you can evade me for 24 hours I'll let you live" game and had nothing to fear from them - suddenly was retroactively hugging the ground as it flew, and because the crest of the hill was in the way we wouldn't be able to see it until it was only 80 feet away. Despite the fact that if we couldn't see it, it couldn't see us, and it would have no reason to fly low - in fact, flying up high so it could keep an eye on the giants it was chasing would have made much more sense.
• The "you can't see it until it's 80 feet away" ruling also nicely nerfed the elf archer, who can effectively shoot arrows at targets up to 330 feet away (or something like that - I'm going off of memory). My son was originally going to run a ranger PC for this campaign until the DM offered to let him try out the archer class, and then has seemingly since gone out of his way to prevent the archer from getting to use any of her long-range sniper abilities. (My son built her specifically to be able to take out incoming threats from a distance. In our 26 game sessions thus far, he's been allowed to have her do so only once before, slaying one of five orc guards from hiding before all of the others suddenly spotted exactly where she was and immediately hid from view.)
• My sorcerer's other attack spells are scorching ray (useless against a red dragon) and magic missile. So naturally, the red dragon, chasing after four wounded stone giants with no spellcasting ability among them, made sure to have a shield spell already up and active, preventing me from doing any damage. (Once we got it down to the ground - one of the unarmed stone giants leaped up and grabbed its tail as it flew overhead, dragging it down with its extra weight - and I could no longer target it with ice storm spells without also harming my allies, I had to resort to a 0-level acid splash spell to deal 1d3 points of damage.)
• Before being grounded, the DM made sure to keep the dragon high enough that our half-elf paladin and halfling rogue had no way to do any damage to it - granted, by that time it knew the PCs were there and that's only smart tactics on the dragon's part, but it made sure the players of those two PCs felt like they were being nerfed as well.

Once the stone giant dragged the Large juvenile red dragon (168 hp, CR 10) down and the paladin could smite evil and the rogue could sneak attack, we slowly whittled it away, with the only ally death being the stone giant grappler. But I was down to 3 hp and the rogue wasn't too much above me by the time we killed it. And all of this after the DM had come to me with advice beforehand and I warned him 3.5 dragon CRs were built for a party that knew beforehand they'd be up against a dragon and what type it would be so they could make appropriate precautions (mostly protection from its breath weapon), and that a surprise attack against an unprepared party of the same level as the dragon's CR could easily end with a TPK. So naturally, he threw a CR 10 dragon encounter against our 8th-level party - bad enough at that, but the sudden "nerfing" is what made it that much worse. Had my sorcerer and our archer been able to whittle it down from a distance - as they were built to do - we'd have fared much better, and it just seemed like he was in a "I want to bend things to my advantage at all costs" mood tonight. (He got his start decades ago with AD&D 1E, where he was a player in a campaign with a very adversarial DM; it seems every once in a while he reverts back to what he knew about DMing from those days, although when he plays in my son and my separate campaigns he gets to see DMs very much on the opposite side of the scale, so I don't know what the problem is other than an occasional desire to "win" D&D as a DM.)

Johnathan

 

[Andvari]

Prepared too far ahead of time, so I forgot a lot of important things once the game started. The party are in a set of flooded catacombs where they are often waist-deep in water. In Pathfinder 2E, this means they have a -2 AC penalty due to being flat-footed, but I forgot about it, which made combat significantly easier. Though at least I remembered to have their lizardfolk adversaries use their Swim speed to make it difficult to engage them.

But worse was one of the rooms I had created which had a massive, glowing blue crystal suspended in chains between the room's central pillars. It covers the entire room and slightly beyond in an anti-magic field. The lizardfolk know this and set up an ambush with purely non-casters there. But I replaced one of them with a hag for story-related reasons, shapechanged into a lizardfolk. She didn't cast any spells in the battle due to the anti-magic field, but she also should not have been able to disguise herself as a lizardfolk, and thus should not have been there in the first place. To make matters worse, I forgot that all of the party's magic weapons and armor shouldn't have been working, so they destroyed the lizardfolk easily with their +1 striking weapons. Duh.

 

[Sulicius]

Last night we played the 50th session of the Theros campaign. So far the challenges have not been bound to dungeons, but they finally entered a real dungeon! A big one this time. Filled with listless undead, creatures from the Underworld and locked away plagues.
The session started off with the champions of the gods arriving in Asphodel, a necropolis inhabited by the Returned. In Theros, one can escape from death by a legendary path, but it tears away your memories and personality. That is what the Returned are: gold-masked undead.
Pretty quickly, the party realized these guys were not all insane or evil. Instead, they asked the heroes to help them. Both them and the heroes do not have a good relationship with the god of death. Because of that, they steered the group into a crypt where they would find their next McGuffin.
Inside the crypt, they came upon an Archon, a knight of law from a tyrannical age, and they had a tough fight with it. He almost turned a pc to dust.

Now I need to flesh out the dungeon fully before next Wednesday! 68/90 rooms done!

A bit more about this campaign: it is a murder mystery where the pc’s are uncovering a big plot from a conspiracy of gods who killed the god of love. I found love significantly absent from the setting, so I homebrew that into the plot!

They are collecting pieces of this god of love in the hopes to revive her, and with that bring together the people and gods of Theros before the return of the Titans.

It is my best campaign so far, and the players love engaging with the lore. I am so very happy about it.

 

[Umbran]

Last night a group I play online with finished up Rime of the Frostmaiden, completing that campaign, in a session that was largely just getting ourselves to, and then having, the final climax fight.

The fight was oddly satisfying, even though it was largely the party's dragonborn paladin, who finally felt justified in really cutting loose with smites, beating the ever-loving crap out of the BBEG.

 

[the Jester]

I ran one of my groups last night. It started with them being approached by a group of dwarves trying to buy Thunder, the party's hippogriff, for a mysterious patron. The pcs were reluctant, especially when the lead dwarf wouldn't promise that Thunder would be safe. The party was tempted by the offer; they decided to go meet the patron and see if they could ascertain more.

Turns out the patrons were a group of quom, an obscure but cool monster from 4e. The quom are on a quest to restore their destroyed home world, which was torn apart during the Dawn War between the gods and the primordials. Now they seek out its fragments, one of which was inside Thunder, in the hopes of recreating their world one day.

Would this harm Thunder? The quom seemed to have difficulty seeing Thunder as anything but a vessel for the fragment, and the best they could offer was to "make every effort to ensure that the process is minimally invasive".

After some more discussion, the party, prepped with revivify, decided to go ahead. They let the extraction happen (OW!) and saved Thunder, all without having to fight the quom. The payment? 5000 gp and the first piece of a magic item set- a set of four items that one attunement slot will allow you to attune to together- along with the location of the others.

The party then went to a desert to find and slay a dragon, and we ended the session with the group having spotted the dragon flying overhead and the dragon having detected them as well...

TLDR: Good game!

 

[THEMNGMNT]

I've missed several sessions of the Free League's Twilight: 2000 campaign. In the interest of brevity, I'll summarize what has happened.

Previously, we ambushed a Soviet checkpoint. After wiping out the soldiers, we investigated a car they had shot up. Inside that car was a dying American spy with some useful information to impart. That info led us to travel north, to a city that had a bridge crossing a strategically important river. Not sure of the names, because spelling and pronouncing Polish names is hard! We found the city split in half. NATO forces controlled the bridge; Soviet forces controlled most of the city.

We were pressganged back into service and made part of the 2nd Armored Brigade (or something like that). Intel indicated that a trainload of tanks were inbound to the Soviet positions. With those tanks they'd be able to smash the NATO forces and capture the bridge. We were assigned to a team and given a mission to go behind enemy lines and seize the train. Fortunately, the train had been stalled by sabotage to the tracks. Our CO's plan was to use the tanks meant for the Soviets against the Soviets. Cool plan!

Last night, we reconned the train and formulated a plan of attack. That took a couple hours. We wrapped up the session just as the fight was about to kick off.

Next session: Choo choo!

 

[THEMNGMNT]

52nd session of my Dragon Heist/Deck of Many Things mashup. Three player characters of 10th level: Half-orc cavalier fighter, halfling swashbuckler rogue, and half-elf evoker wizard/grave cleric.

We opened in the middle of a fight. Actually, at the end of a fight. The players had set an ambush at an abandoned noble's estate in Waterdeep only to find themselves ambushed. Last session they got the worst of it, but by this session they had turned the tide and were mopping up. After defeating the minions and rescuing a mind-controlled ally, they captured a longtime antagonist--Astrea, a changeling assassin.

In return for her freedom, she spilled the beans on the master plan of the archvillain, a mind flayer called Tassatar.

Next session: Characters learn the consequences of breaking their promise to a confederation of evil wizards.

 

[Richards]

This week's "Ghourmand Vale" session had us go rescue the stone giants that had been taken over by the red dragon we slew last session and his hill giant minions. So it was a lot of slaughtering of hill giants, plus the occasional ogre and dire wolf. And our archer got to spend most of the session sniping away at hill giants from a tree, so that went well.

Johnathan