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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5874847" data-attributes="member: 92305">We played a 12 hour game yesterday, climax to our first story arc.  That took us about a year, real time.  We played about 12 sessions.  The PCs aged from age 11 to between 14 and 15. It was a damn good game--proably the best we've had so far.  I may write about it in another thread. One of the reasons I started this thread was that I was contemplating going from throwing out in the open, as I've done this entire campaign, to how I used to do it--throwing behind the screen. Whelp, I made the change last night...and I really think my game was better for it. Too many times, games are focused on dice throws, not the action at hand.  I think this is a real problem with 3.x games because there are dice throws for all sorts of things right there in B&W in the rules. A couple of game sessions before, I had stopped using Active Defense, where the players roll their defense instead of using a static AC target number.  That not only helped speed up combat, but it also encouraged a better flow, more visual style to combat.  Instead of the players automatically knowing if they were hit or not because they've seen the dice they rolled for defense, they got that information in a more visual way as I described what happened. Rolling behind the screen only enhanced this.  I've removed from their sight as many dice throws as possible, re-focussing the game on my narration of what their characters are seeing and feeling. It was a definite good move for us.  It even livened up simple encounters. Amazing what a little mystery can do for a game.</blockquote>

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