Session 3: Phandelin

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.

 

Session 2: Cragmaw Hideout continued

One player missing so we had his PC hang back as an NPC. The rolls balanced out this time and we had one near death and one PC that couldn't hit to save his life. Still the YouTube guy that said Lost Mines is brutal had a very different group because 5E is so forgiving. Perhaps he's a Gen Z. 

Our kid said "his generation could not be as detailed as we are when approaching a dangerous situation."

Maybe that had something to do with it. They went in with military precision, and scouting, and old school tactics like we used to do. I was lenient because the sound of the stream covered most of the talk. still, if you weren't killed in a single blow it would be hard to die. I mean Roll20 auto-generated Elf started with 2 healing potions and Warriors get a Second Wind and even a short rest brings you back up almost the whole way if you're first level.

I upgraded to the Dynamic lighting and that was worth it. It still will take some getting used to, Tokens fill out the full 5 foot square so they don't hide as well as I'd like. Still lots of fun. Next on to Phandalin, probably.

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. 

Getting the Gang Back Together

So I haven't really run a game in decades. We used to all live in the San Francisco Bay Area and played throughout middle school and High School. But I haven't played since I graduated from University in 91 and we all went our different ways to start our lives and careers. 

I've played a few times and kept up on things but I really enjoy game mastering more than playing. So a few years ago (just before this blog) a member of my old gang suggested we play again. I didn't really take him seriously but it started the creative juices rolling I created the Grindstone Games blog in late Feb 2019 mostly posting the tons of notes I still had from my old gaming and things that popped into my head as I caught up on everything that had changed since 1E. Well I ditched the Grindstone name and migrated to Ruprecht in May 2021 when i found there were a few other Grindstone's out there. 

I sort of ran out of material to write about and things slowed down drastically on this blog.

So here we are 5 years later, still no game, when I was at the Sundance Film Festival when the Colonel (one of the gang) suggested we play again and Lord British (another player) thought it was a great idea. The Colonel has a kid who (in 20s now) wanted to play. Well with the kid in the mix the Colonel might be all in. 

A note of importance none of us lives near each other anymore. The cast:

Lord British = San Diego

Lucky Dice = Los Angelos

The Colonel (or Unlucky Dice) = Alabama

The Kid = Alabama

GM (aka me)  = Texas

Scheduling with two time zones and multiple schedules could be a factor. 

There is one more player who has somewhat disappeared. Another from San Diego. Our groups Thief and 5 years ago he cancelled invites to his Housewarming party and I haven't really heard from him since. One note on Linkedin and then gone again. 

So with the kid wanting to play I decided to run 5E. I figured if the kid liked it and our gang fell apart he'd at least know enough to join other 5E games. I also figured I didn't want to dive in with all the options of the full game so I handed out the D&D Essential Rules and I figured I'd run Keep on the Borderlands or Lost Mine of Phandelver to start.

So we texted back and forth discussing how to run the first meeting. Teams and Zoom came up as options. We'd all experienced one or the other in the corporate world, both were fairly easy. Zoom was free in 40 minute bites so we went with that and scheduled our first session to roll characters and shoot the shit. The Colonel didn't respond and one of the California boys didn't actually confirm. We decided a Saturday Morning would be best, we could work out other details afterwards. I sent out the zoom invite to everyone (still didn't have the kid's contact info).

So I started the zoom meeting. First attendee was 5 minutes late. Then not long after the Colonel joined with his kid in the room. The last member joined late, but he joined. So we were all in and I discussed the changes and making characters but we mostly shot the shit. Then, one of the California guys I'll call Lucky Roller (the Colonel was the unlucky roller, doesn't matter the game the best laid plans...) suggested that I just come up with pregens for them all as we learned. Also they all wanted fighters (that should be easier for me, although we'll see about that. I found out the Kid big into vikings these days. We were playing Essentials so there are no Barbarian characters (he doesn't know about them anyway) but when we were done with this the next campaign could be viking related easily enough.

Scheduling could be an issue as weekdays don't work and one of the California guys works every other Saturday, but maybe not super-early. The other California guy can play super-early and time zones dictate that super-early is just normal early in TX and AL so maybe it'll work after all. We semi-scheduled a re-occuring Saturday morning game at 6:30 am (I know, ouch). I guess they are serious as they suggested it but we'll see.

The group agreed that perhaps we should pay to upgrade zoom and they could all send me some cash to cover it (because the 40 minute time limit is annoying). I'm now watching Roll20 videos considering that I might give that a try as they've likely thought of a lot of the problems of a straight video meeting and fixed them by now. Also it's free initially with a limit on players being the only issue. limit of 5 and GM (I think) and our group has 4 and a GM.

So I found a website: https://fastcharacter.com/basicdnd.htm

And created seven fighters with different backgrounds and sent them out along with the URL for fastcharacter in case they wanted to try making their own. Alls good for now. I'll keep posting as the game rolls out.