Session 1: The Lost Mines

The first meeting of the old group was on Zoom, which has a 40 minute deadline on free meetings. So we were cut off and reestablished a second meeting right after. You can pay a bit of money to have endless meetings but I knew we weren't gonna use Zoom as there are better options out there customized for RPGs. 

What we did straighten out is that everyone wanted a fighter, and all but one wanted humans. After joking about how one player cheated his rolls he suggested I create the characters and hand them out. 

I decided to use Roll20 because it is free for 5 or less players. I wasn't sure if that included the GM or not but we still fell within the limit. I bought Lost Mines since it was all set up and I didn't want to create my own adventure for the first 5E game. So that cost money but not a lot and Roll20 has a nice character generator and the way it handles the character sheets/rolls made it easy for the players as well. I sent out copies of the characters to each so they could pick which one they wanted and told them to log into Roll20 ahead of time. Two of the players and I logged in and I showed them how things would work and they seemed to like it. The colonel waited until the last minute to do anything which was a bit of a drag but it worked out eventually.

The only real issue was nobody went through the tutorial and I had to explain everything. I used to train engineers to use writing software as one of the tasks in my old job so it wasn't that big a deal except I was learning 5E, Roll20, Lost Mines, and would have appreciated one of them stepping up and taking the tutorial to explain to the rest. 

So we started up on Game Day and with everyone there we had bandwidth problems. Once we reduced the size of everyones video screen (you can even remove it and just have their name if necessary) things ran smoothly. 

When we played long ago I had a pretty steady ramp up from middleschool DM who was barely competent running TSR modules using AD&D to a University Student GMing during summers who was pretty good at running political games across Harn using modified RuneQuest rules (at least I think I was, playing with the same group makes that hard to really know). So I was starting over again with new rules, new adventure, new virtual playground, and old players who didn't know the system (and one new player). Everyone had fun, but I felt it could have been better. There were two faults with our first session. 

1. The fog of war was awkward. The entire crew saw the entire map for a moment. Luckily one said something. Roll20 really should have a PIP showing what the characters see instead of forcing the GM to login as a Player, and then back. Of course horrible Fog of War naturally leads to purchasing a subscription with the Dynamic Lighting. So I did that afterwards and I'm curious to see how that works out. 
2. I heard the Lost Mines could be deadly, and the group was all fighters so I added a Cleric NPC to help heal them if necessary. The NPC was mostly bored in the back of the group. We'd always joked that one player cheated at die rolls, but here we had pre-generated characters and the rolls are all handled by Roll20 and they still had amazing luck. Sure they loved it, they saw the ambush before it was sprung and riddled the Goblins with arrows before they could attack. They cleared out the left half of the caves without taking any damage. I'll see how things go in the second half of the caves and if its still too easy maybe I'll add an extra villian or two to future encounters.

I'm looking forward to Phandalin and a bit of actual Role Playing/Sandbox style play.

Of note, the Roll20 character generator didn't seem to list arrows in the characters inventory which seems like a miss.