I figure some of the various shenanigans, monsters and other things I make in my games might be of use to other DMs here. I currently run two games, a Dark Sun game called The Builder's Cry and an Eberron game called Dark Prophecy. For many years now at the end of each session I've usually wrote down things about how the game and general thoughts. Seeing some other campaign description threads around here inspired me to put these up for the general benefit/use of others. Both of these games are maptools/Ventrilo.
Here are my session notes from Saturday's Dark Sun game, The Builder's Cry. For those playing in my game, these are not really spoilers and can be safely read:
The game started pretty well after most of it was taken up with glorious token making, with everyone tied up to a large stone column in the center of the arena with a horrible monster (an id fiend) consuming some unfortunate prisoners on the other side. A group of templars of Kalak overlooking the arena and the ferocious crowd raring for blood (anyone's) set the scene (Noting my game begins shortly before and then during the period that Kalak is killed). The PCs could escape in billions of different ways and this wasn't intended to be a particularly difficult part of the game. Especially as the manacles were designed really for poor, malnourished slaves and have suffered huge damage from various monsters attentions. They all escaped and picked up weapons from other fallen competitors that littered the arena.
I was very curious how the id fiend would go. For one thing, a level 1 solo is a bit of an odd concept to me and not something I would ever actually run normally. For another, it actually felt like quite an appropriate start to have the PCs fighting for their lives against a large hungry lizard like beast. Although a pretty intelligent abomination overall, I felt the "fear effect" they produced in their opponents and intelligence made it quite suitable as an exotic "arena beast". Plus the emotional manipulation the creature performs on the crowd would make it a fan favourite/hated beastie. In any event, Mr. Id (as I called him) ran in to spread terror and eat the PCs!
The party composition is:
Hadithi (Dragonborn Shaman, plus his lightning elemental Miliki)
Othagal (Tiefling Pyromancer)
Eshara (Human Battlemind)
Zephan (Human Thief)
Ka'Cha (Thri-kreen monk).
Othagal was quite obsessed with attacking the templars in the stands. It was probably poorly conveyed, but there were a good chunk (5 templars) up in the stands and numerous general soldiers to Kalak around the arena. Doing so would have provoked quite the flurry of spells and general arrows of doom towards the party - which I suggested to the player. Although I did feel a bit fascist, there is more than enough murdering various Templar in this game to satisfy the player once they escape from the arena when all hell is breaking loose when Kalak bites it (and he will). Once focus was on the immediate threat of the giant angry lizard trying to kill them, combat began.
Initiative started with the id fiend, with its mighty +0 initiative bonus rolling surprisingly well and going second with 17. Only the Ka'Cha was able to go before the beast and moved into an advantageous position, absorbing an OA. This unfortunately produced a brutal critical hit from the id fiend straight up, giving it an overall bonus of +1 attack on its next round due to the crowd getting riled up behind it (yes, even monsters can appreciate a good bloodthirsty crowd). The 11 damage wasn't completely devastating, but enough to drop the monk almost to bloodied immediately. The attack then wafted against the creature, so overall making for a generally poor PC start.
The id fiend then decided he had enough of this, whacked the monk again to bloody him and then moved into the center of the arena (unconcerned with provoking an OA). Here he could plan to use his manifest fear power and catch quite a few PCs later on. I choose to leave the action points for melee attacks, so didn't use the power immediately - might have been interesting to have done so though. The remaining PCs then scrambled to damage the id fiend and stay some distance from it. The battlemind had a particularly poor first round, as the monster was able to use its interrupt to knock her on her rear end. Prevented from getting adjacent to the creature it would have more or less free reign over the battlefield for the time being.
The next turn was somewhat more productive for the PCs. They were able to bloody the id fiend, causing it to attack the PCs with its bloodied " Manifest Fear" reaction. This oddly caused it to fall prone and be immobilized (due to thiefs ambush trick), so Mr Id wasn't going to be chewing on delicious squishy leader/controller adventurers like I planned. To compensate, on the Id Fiends turn I chose to eat Ka'Cha and Eshara instead. After some thought, for dramatic purposes I used the creatures action point to drop Eshara into bloodied territory and knock Ka'Cha unconscious. It then tried to hit the thief with its attack penalty power, as he had been the most reliable attacker in the game thus far but failed. After that turn the PCs hammered their advantage and Hadithi got Ka'Cha back into the fight.
The id fiend had 11 HP remaining with Eshara's and Ka'Cha's turns to go before the id fiend went again. With 1 action point remaining, it looked like the id fiend was going to have someone for lunch 1st session if one of those two didn't kill it on their turn. Eshara took the conservative approach and chose to second wind, hoping the HP and defense bonus would be enough to stop her from being eaten. Ka'Cha was not so enthused with just waiting for that, using both his second wind and the first action point of the campaign to finally strike the id fiend down. The crowd celebrated and the templars frowned in annoyance as the prisoners they really wanted dead banded together under a common cause: Not being horribly eaten.
Overall I was pleased with the id fiend: It was a solid first encounter and the monster is actually pretty well designed. It lasted just around 3 rounds as well, which is long enough for a good fight but not long enough to be a big problem (this is including some terribad accuracy on the PCs part). Curiously, I continue my general trend of rolling absurd amounts of critical hits in heroic tier, I got 3 total in the session. While that was the last encounter of the day as well, just due to time spend making tokens I very much enjoyed the game (I haven't played DnD for around 3 months due to various IRL shenanigans). I was disappointed I didn't get to the next encounter, but I did decide to have some kind souls in the crowd throw the PCs some healing fruits for their performance. This should also allow the monk, who gains a whopping 5 HP per surge to get a bit more efficiency out of his healing.
Generally pleased overall, need to put more emphasis on the amount of templars and general arena guards there are (probably bringing in a named character templar the PCs know is general trouble might reinforce this concept better). Need to tweak some of the later encounters though, but looks like the party composition should work well.
So in the tradition of the Dark Sun game, I had my second weekend game (two games on a weekend seems to be the optimal amount of DnD these days for me actually). Dark Prophecy is set in Eberron and I wanted it to have a different feel and theme to Builder's Cry, which is about non-stop brutality and how the world conspires against the PCs.
One thing I constantly think about in Dungeons and Dragons - probably even more than various tentacled monstrosities - is how to begin a campaign. I've always felt that a good tavern brawl or something that involved combat was a good start: A reason to bind the PCs together under a common cause. This campaign though I wanted to try something inherently different and almost promote a "board game" like start where the PCs didn't have to work together at all. The natural fit was Dungeon Magazine 176, Cross City Race.
Cross city race has a fascinating premise in many ways. For one, it is a really unorthodox way of beginning a campaign because combat is secondary and it is effectively 4 "encounters" of skill challenges. So it takes a good session to get through - especially if you're running it as "every man for himself". I made the prizes as follows:
1st Place: 300 GP, a magical item (uncommon) and a healing potion.
2nd Place: 150 GP and a magical item (common)
3rd Place: 70 GP and a jolly good pat on the head.
So this was purely mercenary, but I figured there would be a secondary goal to the race anyway - with the PCs generally trying to conspire against the 5 NPC runners. After all, they are the *last* people they want to win. But before I describe anything, here is what I think I should have changed/thought about more and in fact what I got right too about this.
Firstly, the adventure is set up with the PCs starting in a neutral area (the city gates) and needing to go through five separate routes with their own hazards and obstacles to get to the end of the race (a large tower). Each region is broken up into 3 different skill challenges and then the final rush up the tower. Unfortunately, there were a few flaws with this set up that I didn't think through enough. The first flaw was while I was pretty lenient on checks in general, I should have reduced some of the DC a bit to compensate characters who had less physical stats that others. You can imagine that acrobatics and athletics are *the* two skills for such a task (I want to emphasize this is no less of an entire adventure than delving into a crypt to murder things). Additionally, if I had thought about it more beforehand I would have changed some areas more to allow for backstreet bribery and more social skill interaction to allow "cheating". This would have balanced out the skills a lot better and evened out the advantage from high acrobatics/athletics characters. While the skill challenge doesn't allow repeated rolling on one stat - a good thing at that - it does limit checks considerably.
Secondly, this adventure type (Skill challenge heavy) on maptools without having a working mic was a poor situation. A mic would have let me react quicker to players questions and ideas very rapidly. An example of this was when Walker (the Warforged Assassin) wanted to use perception to find a more stable route around the crumbling walls of the old city gate. I was unable to describe quickly enough before the player made a harder check - without the considerable bonus to another check (Athletics) I was giving him. I allowed him to switch the check of course, but if I had my microphone working it wouldn't have been such an issue. This also limited me a bit because I couldn't describe things on the fly as quickly and easily - typing often gets lost and isn't responsive. This also slowed the game up a *lot* as players were frequently waiting for me to type responses: In a long skill challenge based adventure as this it can make life much more difficult.
Additionally, there were two important aspects that I believe I firmly failed to properly explain: The first was switching from one route to another. This is actually a pretty strong idea if you're struggling with a particular routes skills and challenges. It can be possible to go to one of the combat maps, risking dogs or a particularly unscrupulous thief in the process for example instead of getting rather stuck elsewhere on a challenge that seems out of reach. The second mechanic was sabotaging. There are two general was of harassing other racers, if they are on the same "track" of the skill challenge (represented by boxes with the successes) you can directly attack them with powers to force them back. If you were ahead of them, you could destroy obstacles or similar to make some checks harder than others for those behind you in the skill challenge. Again, not having a mic really hampers the communication and having to type to respond to questions, tell people what is going on and adjudicate decisions means subtle rules differences can get lost. Also I am pretty certain between turns players in maptools tend to look at other things unless there is something pressing happening to them, so text typing can be missed while voice chat is picked up more consistently.
On the other hand, where I got things right was definitely in the competitive aspect of the race. Effectively the PCs opponents were really one another (most of the other NPCs got eliminated except one). Additionally I identified and solved a problem that can really break this particular race. Some maps are "Combat encounters" and not directly skill challenges. The flaw with these maps is that unlike the normal skill challenge encounters, they don't limit action economy anywhere near as much. For example in a skill challenge you can make a check and sabotage an opponent behind you. You could "attack" someone adjacent with you to try and pull them back. Or you could change route and attempt a check there to get around a more annoying area that isn't suiting your skills. But these maps posed a problem: They are frequently able to be crossed easily by blowing an action point and effectively triple running. With a move of 6 you can get 24 squares in one round. This easily allows you to avoid the creatures in these, who are typically minions (one isn't, but he'll ignore you unless you go out of your way to beat him up).
This naturally put a huge disadvantage on anyone who was trying to do the series of 4 checks (taking 4 rounds) vs. someone who blew through one of those combat encounters. So I had to modify the adventure to limit the actions players could take in the combat maps as well. Effectively, everyone could take 1 move action (Noting that standing up was fine) or make 1 check (Athletics, thievery, bluff, diplomacy) and a move. Or make 1 check and a standard action and similar. Basically, players couldn't use the "normal" action economy to just power move their way through an area trivially. Action points were entirely eliminated as giving an extra action: Instead they gave an immediate +5 bonus to the next check (and had to be used with a degree of pre-planning). Each "segment" of the race counted as an encounter, but I moved the additional action point to right before the tower (the end of the race) for dramatic purposes. Due to the nerfing of an action points effects, there is also no limit to how many the PCs could use in the challenge. So someone who gets to the tower with 2 APs and near to the other players would have a good advantage!
These maps were still good though, because they don't require special movement checks and can be more directly combative: Giving struggling PCs an easier way through. They don't effectively allow a "1 round" jump to avoid other PCs needing almost 4 rounds to advance the same distance. So became quite nicely balanced overall with the other skill challenge based areas. Had I not done this, it would have resulted in PCs "lucking out" and being able to rapidly get further ahead of others without much opposition. The actual session itself went pretty well, despite the fact my lack of voice communication and combined with the five other NPCs in the race. Checks were made and various shenanigans ensued as the players attempted to get across. I ended the game for the day after the turn a player reached the tower (which was Walker in this case, oddly the hobbling Warforged was the first. Ironic!)
The PCs in the race are:
Walker (Warforged Assassin) - Reached the tower just before Ryske did.
Ryske (Drow Rogue) - Is behind Walker.
Marhu (Hobgoblin Paladin) - Is currently going to be beating up a thief: Presumably for his money.
Squinter (Gnome Wizard) - Is getting lost within the massive market crowds and might need to change route (or do something dramatic).
Tybalt (Human Artificer) - Got stuck in a fenced off area with a lot of vicious dogs. Is currently on 2 HP and needing a desperate "Vault over the wall" escape or might be puppy chow. At least 2 of the dogs were distracted with delicious meat.
Highlights included Squinter using his summoning power to first disperse and then distract the crowd of people impeding him at the start (dancing zombies are dancing). This gave him a good start, but the crowds and people started to get a bit much, slowing him down considerably over the bridge and the market has proved a pure killer. The Assassin and Rogue pursuing one another over the halfling quarters dirty chimneys and incredibly narrow side streets. Marhu commandeering a ship after failing several relatively easy DC athletics checks to jump in frustration. Finally, Tybalt managing to get himself in deep dog
as fifi, bobo and butch look to turn him into dinner.
The NPCs managed to spectacularly fail in this race, with only one persisting so far and will he make it to the end?
Lynda Lightfoot (Elven Ranger) - Fell afoul of the terrible pigeons who staged a coup on her, eliminating her from the race (just couldn't get past those damn pigeons). She fell and dislocated her arm. Oops.
Two Teef (Half-Orc Barbarian) - Ended up having his money nicked by ally thieves and ran off to retrieve it.
Garth Cooper (Human Fighter) - Member of the watch, he's a bit unscrupulous and has a few tricks up his sleeve.
Gazunda (Gnome Rogue) - Got lost in the crowds of humans and didn't feel like going for a swim anywhere else. So she gave up.
Tom Burgher (Human Rogue) - He almost had a good run and then fell into the river. Originally I described him as "Drowning" but chose to retract this. I didn't want to "grimdark" up something that was not serious (albeit Tybalt being generally mauled by dogs is probably qualifying - but they don't kill intruders, merely disable them for their batshit insane owner to come and deal with). So he got swept to the old wall where he could recover and get out.
Overall it leaves an interesting situation. Can Walker push his advantage to get over the line before the other PCs can catch up? Will Garth ever get to throw out his secret weapon? Will Marhu beat the thief to death presumably to steal his stuff? We shall have to see. While it wasn't quite as well thought out and planned as I would have liked, it's certainly been a unique start to the campaign. It's a bit different and more novel than "You meet in a bar, someone throws a chair and zOMG roll for initiative!". Not that there is anything wrong with that.
The Builder's Cry
Here are my session notes from Saturday's Dark Sun game, The Builder's Cry. For those playing in my game, these are not really spoilers and can be safely read:
The game started pretty well after most of it was taken up with glorious token making, with everyone tied up to a large stone column in the center of the arena with a horrible monster (an id fiend) consuming some unfortunate prisoners on the other side. A group of templars of Kalak overlooking the arena and the ferocious crowd raring for blood (anyone's) set the scene (Noting my game begins shortly before and then during the period that Kalak is killed). The PCs could escape in billions of different ways and this wasn't intended to be a particularly difficult part of the game. Especially as the manacles were designed really for poor, malnourished slaves and have suffered huge damage from various monsters attentions. They all escaped and picked up weapons from other fallen competitors that littered the arena.
I was very curious how the id fiend would go. For one thing, a level 1 solo is a bit of an odd concept to me and not something I would ever actually run normally. For another, it actually felt like quite an appropriate start to have the PCs fighting for their lives against a large hungry lizard like beast. Although a pretty intelligent abomination overall, I felt the "fear effect" they produced in their opponents and intelligence made it quite suitable as an exotic "arena beast". Plus the emotional manipulation the creature performs on the crowd would make it a fan favourite/hated beastie. In any event, Mr. Id (as I called him) ran in to spread terror and eat the PCs!
The party composition is:
Hadithi (Dragonborn Shaman, plus his lightning elemental Miliki)
Othagal (Tiefling Pyromancer)
Eshara (Human Battlemind)
Zephan (Human Thief)
Ka'Cha (Thri-kreen monk).
Othagal was quite obsessed with attacking the templars in the stands. It was probably poorly conveyed, but there were a good chunk (5 templars) up in the stands and numerous general soldiers to Kalak around the arena. Doing so would have provoked quite the flurry of spells and general arrows of doom towards the party - which I suggested to the player. Although I did feel a bit fascist, there is more than enough murdering various Templar in this game to satisfy the player once they escape from the arena when all hell is breaking loose when Kalak bites it (and he will). Once focus was on the immediate threat of the giant angry lizard trying to kill them, combat began.
Initiative started with the id fiend, with its mighty +0 initiative bonus rolling surprisingly well and going second with 17. Only the Ka'Cha was able to go before the beast and moved into an advantageous position, absorbing an OA. This unfortunately produced a brutal critical hit from the id fiend straight up, giving it an overall bonus of +1 attack on its next round due to the crowd getting riled up behind it (yes, even monsters can appreciate a good bloodthirsty crowd). The 11 damage wasn't completely devastating, but enough to drop the monk almost to bloodied immediately. The attack then wafted against the creature, so overall making for a generally poor PC start.
The id fiend then decided he had enough of this, whacked the monk again to bloody him and then moved into the center of the arena (unconcerned with provoking an OA). Here he could plan to use his manifest fear power and catch quite a few PCs later on. I choose to leave the action points for melee attacks, so didn't use the power immediately - might have been interesting to have done so though. The remaining PCs then scrambled to damage the id fiend and stay some distance from it. The battlemind had a particularly poor first round, as the monster was able to use its interrupt to knock her on her rear end. Prevented from getting adjacent to the creature it would have more or less free reign over the battlefield for the time being.
The next turn was somewhat more productive for the PCs. They were able to bloody the id fiend, causing it to attack the PCs with its bloodied " Manifest Fear" reaction. This oddly caused it to fall prone and be immobilized (due to thiefs ambush trick), so Mr Id wasn't going to be chewing on delicious squishy leader/controller adventurers like I planned. To compensate, on the Id Fiends turn I chose to eat Ka'Cha and Eshara instead. After some thought, for dramatic purposes I used the creatures action point to drop Eshara into bloodied territory and knock Ka'Cha unconscious. It then tried to hit the thief with its attack penalty power, as he had been the most reliable attacker in the game thus far but failed. After that turn the PCs hammered their advantage and Hadithi got Ka'Cha back into the fight.
The id fiend had 11 HP remaining with Eshara's and Ka'Cha's turns to go before the id fiend went again. With 1 action point remaining, it looked like the id fiend was going to have someone for lunch 1st session if one of those two didn't kill it on their turn. Eshara took the conservative approach and chose to second wind, hoping the HP and defense bonus would be enough to stop her from being eaten. Ka'Cha was not so enthused with just waiting for that, using both his second wind and the first action point of the campaign to finally strike the id fiend down. The crowd celebrated and the templars frowned in annoyance as the prisoners they really wanted dead banded together under a common cause: Not being horribly eaten.
Overall I was pleased with the id fiend: It was a solid first encounter and the monster is actually pretty well designed. It lasted just around 3 rounds as well, which is long enough for a good fight but not long enough to be a big problem (this is including some terribad accuracy on the PCs part). Curiously, I continue my general trend of rolling absurd amounts of critical hits in heroic tier, I got 3 total in the session. While that was the last encounter of the day as well, just due to time spend making tokens I very much enjoyed the game (I haven't played DnD for around 3 months due to various IRL shenanigans). I was disappointed I didn't get to the next encounter, but I did decide to have some kind souls in the crowd throw the PCs some healing fruits for their performance. This should also allow the monk, who gains a whopping 5 HP per surge to get a bit more efficiency out of his healing.
Generally pleased overall, need to put more emphasis on the amount of templars and general arena guards there are (probably bringing in a named character templar the PCs know is general trouble might reinforce this concept better). Need to tweak some of the later encounters though, but looks like the party composition should work well.
Dark Prophecy
So in the tradition of the Dark Sun game, I had my second weekend game (two games on a weekend seems to be the optimal amount of DnD these days for me actually). Dark Prophecy is set in Eberron and I wanted it to have a different feel and theme to Builder's Cry, which is about non-stop brutality and how the world conspires against the PCs.
One thing I constantly think about in Dungeons and Dragons - probably even more than various tentacled monstrosities - is how to begin a campaign. I've always felt that a good tavern brawl or something that involved combat was a good start: A reason to bind the PCs together under a common cause. This campaign though I wanted to try something inherently different and almost promote a "board game" like start where the PCs didn't have to work together at all. The natural fit was Dungeon Magazine 176, Cross City Race.
Cross city race has a fascinating premise in many ways. For one, it is a really unorthodox way of beginning a campaign because combat is secondary and it is effectively 4 "encounters" of skill challenges. So it takes a good session to get through - especially if you're running it as "every man for himself". I made the prizes as follows:
1st Place: 300 GP, a magical item (uncommon) and a healing potion.
2nd Place: 150 GP and a magical item (common)
3rd Place: 70 GP and a jolly good pat on the head.
So this was purely mercenary, but I figured there would be a secondary goal to the race anyway - with the PCs generally trying to conspire against the 5 NPC runners. After all, they are the *last* people they want to win. But before I describe anything, here is what I think I should have changed/thought about more and in fact what I got right too about this.
Firstly, the adventure is set up with the PCs starting in a neutral area (the city gates) and needing to go through five separate routes with their own hazards and obstacles to get to the end of the race (a large tower). Each region is broken up into 3 different skill challenges and then the final rush up the tower. Unfortunately, there were a few flaws with this set up that I didn't think through enough. The first flaw was while I was pretty lenient on checks in general, I should have reduced some of the DC a bit to compensate characters who had less physical stats that others. You can imagine that acrobatics and athletics are *the* two skills for such a task (I want to emphasize this is no less of an entire adventure than delving into a crypt to murder things). Additionally, if I had thought about it more beforehand I would have changed some areas more to allow for backstreet bribery and more social skill interaction to allow "cheating". This would have balanced out the skills a lot better and evened out the advantage from high acrobatics/athletics characters. While the skill challenge doesn't allow repeated rolling on one stat - a good thing at that - it does limit checks considerably.
Secondly, this adventure type (Skill challenge heavy) on maptools without having a working mic was a poor situation. A mic would have let me react quicker to players questions and ideas very rapidly. An example of this was when Walker (the Warforged Assassin) wanted to use perception to find a more stable route around the crumbling walls of the old city gate. I was unable to describe quickly enough before the player made a harder check - without the considerable bonus to another check (Athletics) I was giving him. I allowed him to switch the check of course, but if I had my microphone working it wouldn't have been such an issue. This also limited me a bit because I couldn't describe things on the fly as quickly and easily - typing often gets lost and isn't responsive. This also slowed the game up a *lot* as players were frequently waiting for me to type responses: In a long skill challenge based adventure as this it can make life much more difficult.
Additionally, there were two important aspects that I believe I firmly failed to properly explain: The first was switching from one route to another. This is actually a pretty strong idea if you're struggling with a particular routes skills and challenges. It can be possible to go to one of the combat maps, risking dogs or a particularly unscrupulous thief in the process for example instead of getting rather stuck elsewhere on a challenge that seems out of reach. The second mechanic was sabotaging. There are two general was of harassing other racers, if they are on the same "track" of the skill challenge (represented by boxes with the successes) you can directly attack them with powers to force them back. If you were ahead of them, you could destroy obstacles or similar to make some checks harder than others for those behind you in the skill challenge. Again, not having a mic really hampers the communication and having to type to respond to questions, tell people what is going on and adjudicate decisions means subtle rules differences can get lost. Also I am pretty certain between turns players in maptools tend to look at other things unless there is something pressing happening to them, so text typing can be missed while voice chat is picked up more consistently.
On the other hand, where I got things right was definitely in the competitive aspect of the race. Effectively the PCs opponents were really one another (most of the other NPCs got eliminated except one). Additionally I identified and solved a problem that can really break this particular race. Some maps are "Combat encounters" and not directly skill challenges. The flaw with these maps is that unlike the normal skill challenge encounters, they don't limit action economy anywhere near as much. For example in a skill challenge you can make a check and sabotage an opponent behind you. You could "attack" someone adjacent with you to try and pull them back. Or you could change route and attempt a check there to get around a more annoying area that isn't suiting your skills. But these maps posed a problem: They are frequently able to be crossed easily by blowing an action point and effectively triple running. With a move of 6 you can get 24 squares in one round. This easily allows you to avoid the creatures in these, who are typically minions (one isn't, but he'll ignore you unless you go out of your way to beat him up).
This naturally put a huge disadvantage on anyone who was trying to do the series of 4 checks (taking 4 rounds) vs. someone who blew through one of those combat encounters. So I had to modify the adventure to limit the actions players could take in the combat maps as well. Effectively, everyone could take 1 move action (Noting that standing up was fine) or make 1 check (Athletics, thievery, bluff, diplomacy) and a move. Or make 1 check and a standard action and similar. Basically, players couldn't use the "normal" action economy to just power move their way through an area trivially. Action points were entirely eliminated as giving an extra action: Instead they gave an immediate +5 bonus to the next check (and had to be used with a degree of pre-planning). Each "segment" of the race counted as an encounter, but I moved the additional action point to right before the tower (the end of the race) for dramatic purposes. Due to the nerfing of an action points effects, there is also no limit to how many the PCs could use in the challenge. So someone who gets to the tower with 2 APs and near to the other players would have a good advantage!
These maps were still good though, because they don't require special movement checks and can be more directly combative: Giving struggling PCs an easier way through. They don't effectively allow a "1 round" jump to avoid other PCs needing almost 4 rounds to advance the same distance. So became quite nicely balanced overall with the other skill challenge based areas. Had I not done this, it would have resulted in PCs "lucking out" and being able to rapidly get further ahead of others without much opposition. The actual session itself went pretty well, despite the fact my lack of voice communication and combined with the five other NPCs in the race. Checks were made and various shenanigans ensued as the players attempted to get across. I ended the game for the day after the turn a player reached the tower (which was Walker in this case, oddly the hobbling Warforged was the first. Ironic!)
The PCs in the race are:
Walker (Warforged Assassin) - Reached the tower just before Ryske did.
Ryske (Drow Rogue) - Is behind Walker.
Marhu (Hobgoblin Paladin) - Is currently going to be beating up a thief: Presumably for his money.
Squinter (Gnome Wizard) - Is getting lost within the massive market crowds and might need to change route (or do something dramatic).
Tybalt (Human Artificer) - Got stuck in a fenced off area with a lot of vicious dogs. Is currently on 2 HP and needing a desperate "Vault over the wall" escape or might be puppy chow. At least 2 of the dogs were distracted with delicious meat.
Highlights included Squinter using his summoning power to first disperse and then distract the crowd of people impeding him at the start (dancing zombies are dancing). This gave him a good start, but the crowds and people started to get a bit much, slowing him down considerably over the bridge and the market has proved a pure killer. The Assassin and Rogue pursuing one another over the halfling quarters dirty chimneys and incredibly narrow side streets. Marhu commandeering a ship after failing several relatively easy DC athletics checks to jump in frustration. Finally, Tybalt managing to get himself in deep dog
as fifi, bobo and butch look to turn him into dinner.The NPCs managed to spectacularly fail in this race, with only one persisting so far and will he make it to the end?
Lynda Lightfoot (Elven Ranger) - Fell afoul of the terrible pigeons who staged a coup on her, eliminating her from the race (just couldn't get past those damn pigeons). She fell and dislocated her arm. Oops.
Two Teef (Half-Orc Barbarian) - Ended up having his money nicked by ally thieves and ran off to retrieve it.
Garth Cooper (Human Fighter) - Member of the watch, he's a bit unscrupulous and has a few tricks up his sleeve.
Gazunda (Gnome Rogue) - Got lost in the crowds of humans and didn't feel like going for a swim anywhere else. So she gave up.
Tom Burgher (Human Rogue) - He almost had a good run and then fell into the river. Originally I described him as "Drowning" but chose to retract this. I didn't want to "grimdark" up something that was not serious (albeit Tybalt being generally mauled by dogs is probably qualifying - but they don't kill intruders, merely disable them for their batshit insane owner to come and deal with). So he got swept to the old wall where he could recover and get out.
Overall it leaves an interesting situation. Can Walker push his advantage to get over the line before the other PCs can catch up? Will Garth ever get to throw out his secret weapon? Will Marhu beat the thief to death presumably to steal his stuff? We shall have to see. While it wasn't quite as well thought out and planned as I would have liked, it's certainly been a unique start to the campaign. It's a bit different and more novel than "You meet in a bar, someone throws a chair and zOMG roll for initiative!". Not that there is anything wrong with that.
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