@Mike: Sorry man, I live way up north where it snows 10 months a year and cheese is called fromage But thanks for the kudos. My players berate me that I’m often too hard on myself, but I write these reports mainly because it forces me to re-think about the game and pinpoint the things I could do better.

It’s been helping me a lot!

The main prop I’ll give to you Chatty, is you admit when you have done something wrong, or perhaps didn’t exectue something as well as you had planned or hoped.. Keep that up because that is a trait that many DMs severely lack!

-The candidate where spread out in a difficult to move environment that most of the devil could ignore since they where flying.
-Most of us had few healing surge left (1 or 2) none in my case, with me being one third short of being at full HP.
-We had no daily left and only Math had action surges left (which he horde and never use :p ).

It took all I had not to give in to desperation, while desperately trying to find a non-combat way of ending this fight.

Still an overall satisfying game and the candy at the end helped to heal any frustration I had.

edit: Post at the same time. Concerning “writing your adventures beats using module” Yep It does and by a landslide.

I must say that I’m highly satisfied with the last 5 sessions as we’ve finally gotten in the groove of building a story. While we have our crunchtastic moments, we also have good roleplaying now.

Yan has been telling me for some time that making my own adventure beats using published ones hands down. It’s now obvious to me now.

Thanks for reading.

Also, good on you for tossing out the dice the next time. We have always done so, especially with motivational speeches (bluffs/intimidates/lies/etc.). I find that if a player has a great story, the dice should never bother them. Even though it might be realistic for a player with little charisma to botch the greatest speech, these are the kind of moments that PC’s shine. Some players shine even more when delivering such moments than when they hack the head of Flubbywubby the Evil Nemesis; but that’s a player type discussion

Anyways, great story, these certainly fascinate me more than a lot of other chronicled campaigns out there!

I’m glad that you could recycle your ideas later in the game and I was happy to see your reaction when the Cambion dropped that +3 vicious Greatsword.

Oh well, cannot win them all, especially when tired.

I did re-use part of my speech to try to convince the devil to leave afterward.