The players made it to Phandelin, turned in the wagon and goods for some cash. Turned over a bugbear head, checked into the inn and listened for rumors and such. Learned mostly about the Redband Ruffians. Visited the retired adventurer/apple farmer and decided to pop over to the Taphouse and see the Redband to judge them with their own eyes. A fight ensued and one of the Redband raced off while the group cleaned up the street and prepared to defend the taphouse against a retribution attack. That's when we cut for the day.
The module doesn't mention anything about revenge attacks. The assumption is the party will come into conflict with the Redband gang at the taphouse or elsewhere and finish them off? Or charge immediately into the Redband hangout which would be daft. The module would be better if it gave defensive values for different buildings (with the mining company being the best) and had the possibility of hunkering down for a counter-attack as a possibility. Such a thing should also include what happens to the town if the PCs head for the hills to avoid a counter-attack.
The info in the town section is not organized for the DM very well. I applaud them for putting a little urban adventer into the starter set It would be better to have each NPC listed in a printable roster with roleplay notes, statblock and what they know/rumors/sidequests. Then the town info would be tighter and the DM could have all the NPC info up at the same time. They also need a random encounters table. This is a great place to introduce the concept even if its just who's walking about.
A large number of the encounters in town are womenfolk. For a frontier town with goblins and orcs around that seems odd but it's never mentioned why. Are the men all miners out in the hills? Were a large number of men killed? Is there something about the Shrine of Luck that drew a lot of women to the area? Or did the designers just want to have more women NPCs and didn't really think about the repercussions? or did I miss something?
NPC, especially Goblins should be given names/descriptors. Really anything that will help the GM describe the NPC (one-eye, three fingers, Short sword goblin, etc) so the players can indicate who they want to attack instead of just 'the Goblin in front of Bjorn'. Instead they are all functionally clones with the same weapons and everything. I think using the same stat block is a nice savings in space and all but it wouldn't have hurt Wizards to make Weak Goblin, Goblin, and Strong Goblin and give them different HP and AC. Roll20 should have added to this by changing the weapons and armor on the different goblins and giving each a different character sheet. As is all encounters in a group share the same character sheet which means they roll group initiative, otherwise one initiative roll overwrites the next. Each can be given a different character sheet, I'm pretty sure, but they didn't set up Lost Mines that way (at least the Cragmore Hideout). Its nice how you can roll for weapon hits from the character sheet but the NPCs in Lost Mines are not set up to roll damage from the sheet the way players are which is lame.
When you show up at an Inn the DM shouldn't be told to look at the game rules for pricing. Again this was probably to save space but it's a hassle. Even if the hardcopy couldn't do it right they should have done better in the Roll20 version.
Also in Roll20 its very visual. The module doesn't need building interiors but for Roll20 they really should have them.
Roll20 initiative needs some work. If a player has two character sheets up and they touch one it becomes active, then if they click initiative on the second it rolls initiative for the first. The first touch should make the sheet active, then a second touch would roll initiative. This would be intuitive and not accidentally overwrite another characters initiative. Also clicking on a token should bring up the Character sheet right away, the fuddy controls should be a second click since you rarely use them.
Lastly having a frontier town with a gang defined by red is a bit to Tombstone. To really make this work they should have given each member of the gang a bit of personality and mixed them in with the random encounters table (that they should have included but didn't) and had the players get to see them being dicks instead of just hearing about it. Show don't tell, that sort of thing.
That's all for now, it was a short session but a good one.
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