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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7344518" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Sorry in advance if this is too much of a necro.I’m running my first session of Out of the Abyss on Saturday. Wanted to thank the folks here for a lot of good ideas, and offer a suggestion of my own that I’m going to try out. I’ll post again and let y’all know how it went.Anyway, reading the first chapter I was left very concerned about this as the opening to a campaign. It seems like potentially a really long time to leave the players almost completely disempowered, and likely to lead to rash action like players trying to take out the guards and escape without a real plan, which could end up going very wrong. On the other hand, if they do actually try to plan something out, laying groundwork, etc. there could end up being a lot of time spent on boring prisoner life stuff until the right opportunities arise. And either way, once the players do decide to make their escape, what happens if they fail? There are a lot of Drow and Quaggoth in the outpost, there’s no way a group of 4 first level adventures will be able to fight their way out, even if they manage to recover their equipment (and attempting to so actually increases their risk of the plan failing) and the help of the NPCs.So, here’s how I plan to address this: Oceans 11 style flashbacks. I’m going to narrate over the details of the PCs and their fellow prisoners formulating an escape plan, and just jump ahead to the escape attempt, as soon as the players have had enough time to get acquainted with the NPCs and the layout of the outpost. Then whenever something goes horribly wrong during the escape attempt, I’ll give the players the opportunity to pause the action, and play out a short flashback scene, in which they set something up as a contingency for the very situation we just cut away from.</blockquote>

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