D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[Umbran]

Okay, so, at the moment I am playing in two games. I will call one "Featherstone" and the other "Quarantine Blues" I played in Q-Blues back on Thursday. Today was Featherstone...

Today was... full of saving throws.

Tactically, a fine session - two major combats. One made us deal with constrained space (we were fighting on a 5' wide path up a cliff when a half-dozen harpies attacked, we took a lot of damage, but got a short rest afterwards, and were able to recoup. In the other, a bad stealth check alerted our enemy, so we had to go charging in before he could set himself up for defense. Luckily, we were quick enough. and while his spells hit hard, we got him on sheer number of attacks.

The Featherstone characters are apt to hit 5th level soon. And that's a major boost for my character - proficiency bonus increase, access to a new spell level, and extra attack.

 

[werecorpse]

Moved my weekly game onto roll20, miss the dinner and catch up but still got the game...

Running a heavily adapted Out of the Abyss, the party were a 6 person 13th level group and trying to kill an advanced medusa in Blingdenstone, they had killed her minions the session before. This session started with the parties bard disguising himself as a drow and casting speak with dead on one of the big bads dead minions to get some info about the coming encounter. The battle itself was fine but the steps I had put in place to help seperate the party worked too well. Half the party got trapped in a cavern collapse and due to dice rolls one character ended up trapped out of the fight for 3 long rounds, then when he walked in he got immediately petrified, then when restored petrified again.

so all up a bit frustrating for some players. They got down to a single character several times but mass cure wounds and greater restoration saved the day.

Now they are 14th level and retreated to heal and level up after killing the medusa and looting her lair - but they still have work to do as they didn’t deal with the stone curse in the area or her pet Neothelid which still prevents their allies the deep gnomes accessing their teleportation circle, so that’ll be this week. Might need to add some stuff. My grab bag for wandering monsters apart from earth elemental creatures includes demonic oozes, wererat gnomes and ghosts. I’d like to use ghosts but I haven’t come up with a good enough “lay to rest” story yet, and let’s face it ghosts you just defeat through combat lack something, may as well be spectres or wraiths.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Today, a kobold "bunny" came hopping by our encampment and dropped off a basket of healing potions. Our dwarf tried to kill it (and missed) but had no problem accepting the potions. Since we had an almost total wipe yesterday, we had a couple of drow bounty hunters join us, along with a suspicious dwarf who was tailing them, "because the drow are bound to attack SOMEBODY." Since the drow were after the same people we were, we decided to let them join us instead of tripping over them all the time anyway. The dwarf just followed suit.

We almost cleared the dungeon, although the big boss fled, but they don't realize that almost all the good loot has gone. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the dragon eggs when they discover them.

My character has been more involved in tactics than I usually prefer, because my teens keep forgetting that they are lower-level now, and therefore a lot more likely to die. I also had to remind one of them of the main reason we were in the dungeon in the first place, along with potential consequences if we ditched it for a while to run back to town.

 

[DammitVictor]

Tonight was Session Zero of my first pay-to-play campaign-- AD&D Spelljammer, using class/race houserules to make it "more authentic".

I suppose that it went as well as could be expected, for a game in which 4/5 players had zero experience with the rules, the DM hadn't touched it in twenty years, nobody knew which books they needed to own-- and so forth. We got characters 90% of the way completed, and our worldbuilding-- homebrew Sphere-- off to a solid start.

I am optimistic about the future. The players went in way more interesting directions with their Sphere than I was planning.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

In my modified version of Storm King's Thunder, the 13th level characters stepped through a magical portal and arrived at Skyreach Castle in the middle of a thunderous storm that kept most of the defenders indoors. The characters' goal is to find and free Hekaton, high priest of the giants, who is in thrall to the Zhentarim. They also know that the storm giants have enslaved an ancient blue dragon and possess an orb of dragonkind. Respectively, those are a potential short-term ally and boon.

I intentionally introduced the storm to give the characters sufficient cover to sneak through Skyreach, but they triggered a series of rolling encounters that could bring the whole castle down on them.

The characters arrived in the lower courtyard next to the main gate. They took shelter near one of the guard towers. Atop the tower was a storm giant defender and inside were four Zhents huddled around a fire. The drow priestess NPC used scrying to locate the blue dragon. Scrying takes 10 minutes to cast, and the players spent at least 30 minutes debating where to go next, so it was no surprise when they were spotted by the courtyard's guardians -- four air elementals.

Two of the elemental were tweaked versions of air elemental myrmidons, so they had a lightning bolt which stunned. The aasimar vengeance paladin was stunned by a bolt, picked up in an elemental's whirlwind, and hurled through an illusory hole in the courtyard floor. The paladin fell down the hole, plummeting from the castle and hurtling toward the earth one mile below. When the stun wore off he used find greater steed to summon a pegasus. Normally that spell takes 1 minute to cast, but I hand waved it due to the cool factor. What's the point of playing a paladin for almost 3 years if you can't get rescued in mid-air by your trusty flying horse? The pegasus caught the falling paladin and they flew back to the castle to rejoin the battle.

The characters quickly defeated the elementals, but one slipped into the guard tower to join the Zhent guards. The arcane trickster rogue threw open the door and, swinging on the giant-sized handle, dropped a fireball on the Zhents. They survived, but it was nevertheless an epic moment. Once again, the players made short work of the opposition, but not before the storm giant atop the tower was alerted. And that storm giant roused the storm giant atop the other guard tower. And that other tower is filled with Zhentarim, too.

We paused there. As I said, if the trend continues it won't be long before all of Skyreach Castle is on alert.

 

[Guest 6801328]

My weekly group switched to roll20, but that also takes a lot of prep time, so one member is simply DMing the Tales from the Yawning Portal, starting with Sunless Citadel. I made a human sword-and-board Fighter. 3 sessions in and we're having a blast. Not a whole lot of RP or character development, but good old-fashioned dungeon-crawling. The DM doesn't pull punches: he plays his monsters to win with movement and positioning, so the combats have been really fun.

Spoiler

In the final battle scene of the first level, I ended up shoving the high-AC boss into a deep pit, where he splatted most satisfyingly. Then we discovered that the key we needed was on a chain around his neck.

 

[atanakar]

The D&D game was postponed due to an absentee.

But we played the Burning Bright free Modern AGE quick start mission last night with the pre-gen characters. I had three players. One who knew the system from playing four other sessions and two who had never played. They had a lot of fun and like how the AGE system works.

We will start Modern AGE 1898 Weird Science Pulp campaign in the Fall.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm playing in Odyssey of the Dragonlords, and it's really fun. Enjoying the setting and adventures a lot, but as the party's literal only source of healing, I'm really wishing that A) I wasn't also the party member with the highest AC (sigh) and B) That we had more than me and the Barbarian as "frontline" characters (there's a Ranger with good AC and HP, but she insists on lurking at the back). Also could all three of you there in the back please stop casting AOE spells that include me and/or the Barbarian in the effect? I know, I know, you just want to kill the monsters and you could get more of them in the area that way but I swear to god if it happens again I'm going to be casting Entangle on the lot of you. The fact that the Barbarian gets advantage on DEX saves and avoided damage entirely the first could of times only encouraged them in this further...

Also it was you guys who made Goodberry "dirty", not me, so you now expressing distaste for my "juicy, salty goodberries" (I didn't say any of that!) is a bit much. I mean that's one solution to the "Goodberry problem". The party makes so many schoolboy comments about them that they can no longer eat them.

I am really, really enjoying the anti-murderhobo elements of the setting design. It's Ancient Greece-like, so you can totally be a heroic naughty word or similar, that's fine, but the fact that you can potentially get cursed for breaking oaths, breaking guest-friendship, and robbing graves (to some extent) means that so many points of potential murderhobo-age and needless party bickering are really eliminated.

 

[Richards]

Today I ran my players through the second of five adventures in the Gamma World setting. (It's a D&D 3.5 campaign.) They tracked down four of the litter-mates of the gnome fighter's jackalope mount (so there's now only one left unaccounted for - that'll be next adventure). These four jackalopes had been captured and used as beasts of burden by hoops (Gamma World humanoid bunnies) and, as my son and nephew are Final Fantasy fans, I added some viera (humanoid bunny-women from that franchise) working with the hoops.

Johnathan

 

[The Green Hermit]

We continued on in our dungeon today. Before leaving the cavern we were in, my players finally noticed the trap they had avoided setting off, but didn't figure out what the threat actually was. Fortunately, they didn't accidentally set it off. It was also fun to watch them discover that just because they had previously cleared a room did not mean that it STAYED cleared. Also, they are starting to brave more of the combat rules, so combat is getting much more interesting.

By the end of the session, all characters but mine leveled up, and I had leveled up just two sessions ago.

Now that everybody is stuck at home, I have noticed that although we are playing much more frequently, our sessions are also a lot shorter. We are lucky if we clear more than one cavern at a time.