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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9414895" data-attributes="member: 6877472">As for my own game, last session went by much more smoothly. There was supposed to be a major encounter exiting the dungeon, but given that my players were beat down by the Duergar Double Feature and really wanted to escape, I was really on the fence about whether to have the encounter or not.  Then one of the players couldn't make it to the session, and that cinched it.  No possessed zombie dragon encounter this time!On the way back they got ambushed by a wyvern at night- the encounter seemed scary, but the dragon went down fast once the entire party was awake.Then by the time they got back to town, they found the gates closed and four militia members standing guard.They had orders to detain the party, but being outnumbered by powerful adventurers, they were nervous about it.  The captain of the watch arrived with his trained war dogs, declaring the PC's "enemies of the town" and attempted to arrest them, but even though this encounter was deadly on paper, the PC's made short work of everyone, and the captain was forced to flee using thunder step (they were surprised that he was a spellcaster!).  He'll be back later.From there, they dealt with a very apologetic mayor, who was afraid the party would roflstomp his town, having proven the guards were no match for them.  Once they assured him that they were not murderhobos, they began to negotiate with the mayor- they had loot that once belonged to the town and the mayor wanted it back, but had no way to do anything more than beg.An agreement was struck, and the party asked for a house they could use as a base of operations as part of the deal.  I pointed out that I didn't see them getting a lot of use out of the place, as their adventures would take them far from the town in the immediate future (I once got a tavern as a quest reward, and never saw the inside of the place again, so I didn't want the party to have a similar experience), but they assured me they were fine with that.They then did some shopping, finding out to their horror that the apothecary and the smith had things that would have been useful to them on their first visit to town, if they had bothered to check.I then presented to them one of the side quests, to go into a centaur-infested forest for rare herbs.  Of course, the players knew of another potential sidequest, and wanted the info on that, but I was like "oh no, I learned my lesson, if I give you two side quests, you'll spend two hours arguing about which one to go on!".The real reason, of course, is that this one is dangerous, having them face an enemy much stronger than the group, and one of our players will be going to GenCon (lucky SOB) next session.I'll probably break down and give them the info anyways, though.</blockquote>

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