First a minor nit, the names Phandelver and Phandalin are too similar. Also Phandalin is a village on the frontier with tribes of goblins and bugbears around and it has no defenses, no militia, nothing. It's a miracle it hasn't been wiped out yet. I would expect a ditch and wooden palisade at the very least if not a stone wall surrounding the place.
Second, the maps. Cragma Caves reminded me a lot of the map in Murria's Revenge in the old Runequest Borderlands box. It's a good map and the similarities might be accidental. In fact most of the changes are improvements, still you start on the left side of the stream and circle around and cross to the right. Weird coincidence.
Third, I like the way they aimed for a sandbox but the pacing was odd. Maybe I misread something but it felt like there is a bit of hurry to save the missing dwarf brothers, but you aren't really high enough level so first right away, so you do a side-quests or two to level-up before hand. Very video-gamey and artificial. It would have been better if it started in Phandelin against ruffians, then side-quests and sandbox fun, and on one of those the party is Ambushed > Cragma dungeon > Cragma Castle > Wave Echo cave for the win.
Lastly the module missed a chance to explain how to run urban adventures in Phandelin. They needed details on how to handle encounters, how to dole out rumors, maybe an encounter table. Instead they just list out the important buildings and leave it all up to the DM. They leave you the feeling that the players need to go door to door knocking and asking questions for quest hooks which is silly. They should have had carousing rules of some sort. Not the kind used throughout the OSR for XP, but some fun tables to handle the celebration that was likely to spring-up when the players took out the Redbrand Ruffians. Tables that helped introduce NPC and dole out scenario hooks.
So it was a good module for my parties intro to 5E and re-intro to RPG after a couple of decades.
When I read about the Death Saves I didn't like it. It seemed characters would be impossible to kill, which seemed unrealistic, and the threat of death is a big part of low-level play I like. Then we had a character go down in the middle of battle, the Cleric of all people, and were were mostly playing rules as written, so I looked up the rule:
Death Saving Throws
Whenever you start your turn with 0 hit points, you must make a special saving throw, called a death saving throw, to determine whether you creep closer to death or hang onto life. Unlike other saving throws, this one isn’t tied to any ability score. You are in the hands of fate now, aided only by spells and features that improve your chances of succeeding on a saving throw.Roll a d20. If the roll is 10 or higher, you succeed. Otherwise, you fail. A success or failure has no effect by itself. On your third success, you become stable (see below). On your third failure, you die. The successes and failures don't need to be consecutive; keep track of both until you collect three of a kind. The number of both is reset to zero when you regain any hit points or become stable.
He failed two times, and on the third round the Bard healed him making a third roll unnecessary. It felt like a cheat. The guy was dead, but those are the rules so I let him live to fight another day.
Then later I talked to the Colonel and the Death Saves came up. It wasn't his character that went down but I don't think that would have changed his opinion. He really liked the way it worked. He fought in Iraq and said you had guys go down and you had a certain amount of time to treat them or they were gonna die. That meant one of their fellows had to stop fighting and help the injured person if a medic wasn't immediately available. Suddenly the combat had two less guns which could be very bad. They would stabilize the injured and send them off to a M*A*S*H unit to get proper attention later. Anyway he felt the game modeled the tactical situation pretty well, so I've been rethinking my dislike of the Death Saves as my life of technical writing has not really put me into a lot of combat situations but it has taught me to trust subject matter experts.
The one catch to all this is it makes a total party kill a bit more likely as you lose a combatant, even for a round, can really turn the tide of battle.
Our campaign continues through Lost Mines as the old group learns 5E and we all learn how best to use Roll20 from different timezones. Here are a few things I've learned about Roll20 along the way in case anyone is curious.
We had problems with audio and video through Roll20. Every session started with tech support of trying to get everyone to hear everyone else. Then one of the kids set up a Discord server and we did all the videochat through that and turned it off in Roll20 and haven't had a problem since. Win!
Small thing but Roll20 has two icons, one for selecting things and a second for moving the map around. Its a pain shifting between the two (or forgetting to shift between the two). Turns out you can just use the select icon and right click on the map to drag it around the way you would with the hand icon. Very nice. Wish I'd found this earlier.
To keep track of everyone I turned on the Token names. They appeared beneath the token the entire time but eventually as we got into big brawls the names started covering up whomever was in the squares nearby which was not ideal, instead I turned on Tooltips to have names appear with a Mouseover. I may end up removing even that as the token images are enough now to tell who is who. How to do it?
1. Select the Token and bring up the Token Settings (lower left circle when you select token).
2. Deselect Nameplate (beside the character name).
3. Scroll down and select Show (to the right of Tooltip).
4. Add the info into the Tooltip field.
I found out how to set it up so the system rolls player damage automatically. It even adds critical damage which is nice. Saves a lot of time because my players were slow between I hit and figuring out how to roll damage. Now I need to disable the always roll at Advantage so it doesn't add that extra damage to the rolls when not wanted. I also need to figure out how to auto-roll monster damage.
I found out how to roll for most anything without pulling up the character sheet each time. This was a game changer for me. If you do it right you select a token and get a series of buttons across the top of the map. Click a button and the game rolls as if you had brought up the character sheet and selected that thing. Because I once was a technical writer I wrote down how, but there are YouTube videos for those that prefer to sit through a half hour lesson on how to do it.
Select a token and bring up the NPC character sheet.
1. Click on Initiative
The initiative rolls in the chat.
2. Put the cursor in the Chat typing field and hit the Arrow up Key on your keyboard.
The code for rolling initiative appears in the typing field.
3. Copy the code.
5. Go to the NPC character sheet
6. Go to the Attributes & Abilities Tab.
7. Select +Add (on the upper right).
8. Select the Pencil
7. Replace the words New Ability with a title and select the Show as Token Action button.
8. Paste the code into the empty field.
9. Put the mouse over the empty spot to the right of the title, the select the Checkmark to save the ability.
So the system is starting to work out very nicely.
Using average weapon damage instead of rolling speeds up the game. I've been doing it in Roll20 because the system doesn't automatic...
