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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 4806508" data-attributes="member: 2">You're welcome, and I'm thrilled it helps.We played tonight, adding a new player (Kodiak here on ENW, who played Mara in my old campaign) into the game as a wilden shaman named Bramble. We get a leader! I've asked Sagiro and Kodiak to talk a little bit about what it was like to enter an existing game with a brand new character. Learning what we did right, and what I could have done better, might help other people. Tonight's game was about story payoffs and interesting information. Most of the game was roleplaying: the group met Cobalt's mom (who was being used as a practical joke from the NPC halfling Grey Guard member Runcible Parsons), got interrogated by an inquisitor (from Hestos, the God of Death and Justice) who seemed to know a little too much about Elijah Caldwell, met three new Grey Guard members (including Bramble, a sullen human fisherman and a traitorous goliath), and spoke to an elderly elven librarian who translated their acquired map for them. I'll note that the first two of these are related to background hooks in character backstories. There was also a third hook used, but no one caught it at the time so I won't repeat it here.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />A big chunk of tonight's in-game history involved Floodford's "guardian angel," apparently a deva who hasn't been seen in a hundred years but whose defaced armor was found in the hut of the swamp witch. The group is seeking out his now-underwater crypt, using the ritual lower water from Arcane Power to access the area. It worked beautifully; they would have been able to lower the water 40' if needed! My original plan had been to automatically have a combat encounter when the group entered the mausoleum. Instead I decided to tie it into a tricky skill challenge that would lead to combat if it was failed.  I'm glad I decided that; combat is fun, but allowing clever and capable PCs avoid combat by making good decisions can be even more fun. Which brings up something interesting about traps I heard in an old WotC podcast about dungeons. Mearls (or someone - Chris Perkins, maybe?) stated that unseen booby traps aren't great because as soon as you use one the heroes stop at every single other door to check for traps. It slows the pacing to a crawl. Better to use obvious traps that then need to be outwitted or disarmed. I agree with this theory and tested it, making the difficult necromantic trap on the door be really obvious. The fun came in watching the heroes figure out how to circumvent it. I purposefully made the skill challenge a tough one (complexity 2, 6 DC 21 successes/3 failures, DC 15 assist other) because (a) the person who left the trap was formidable, and (b) a failure would also be fun for me - combat! Sagiro can tell you how he thought it went.  I highly recommend the recent WotC podcast about skill challenges as well; I learned a lot from it.You know how I build my plots as narrow - wide - narrow? In other words, I start off focused and then give the PCs more choices for adventures; I toss out a zillion plot hooks and let them choose the ones to follow. We're now entering the "wide" area. The group has three or four different ways to follow plot: enough for me to prep (especially if I expect which one they'll select), and enough where they have some say in their destiny. The world has changed due to their actions in the recent lizardman war, and it'll be fun to see that play out.</blockquote>

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