DM Chronicles, New Player Intro: The legend of the Broken Dice

This post features extensive spoilers for the 1st Pathfinder Adventure path adventure “Burnt Offering”

Last night we played the introduction D&D game I talked about earlier this week. It was a good game and while I completely realize that I might be expecting too much from D&D, it could have gone better…. but this time, it was the Dice’s fault, and not so much my own set!

I traveled to the Sunny south shore of Montreal, way ahead of traffic and I settled in a Pool bar that offered free Wifi so I could finish up on my day’s work.

Franky and his brother Mike joined me and we played some Magic the Gathering and even some pool (at which we sucked… well I did, Mike and Franky weren’t half bad).

At 5:30 PM, we made our way to PM’s where Vince joined us. We were complete so I went through my prepared introduction: D&D’s philosophy, the character sheets, the dice, adventure I choose, a mini lecture about ‘not splitting the party’, etc.

Here’s a rundown of PC choices:

Vince never played a tabletop RPG. He chose to play the 2 swords wielding fighter.

PM, oddly enough, chose the Scimitar-equipped Cleric (Subverting two fantasy RPG Tropes in one shot: ‘Who plays the cleric?’ and ‘Clerics can’t use sharp weapons’). Let’s note that PM played a wicked cleric in World of Warcraft.

Mike played D&D back in the day that Dragons were wimps and elven fighters toped at level 7. He chose to play the Sorcerer.

Franky: You know Franky. He picked the last character, an elven Rogue.

Small detail: Apart from the fighter, all pregenerated characters of Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelord campaign are female.

The game started pretty well, I introduced the characters as a newly formed adventure group seeking historical artifacts and ruins (the main activity of Pathfinders). I actually handwaved a former Tavern Scene. They were in a coastal small town to witness the sanctification of a new Cathedral.

I tried to give them some free time before the 1st scene, but I soon realized that without focus, new roleplayers (and old ones too sometimes) don’t really know what to do. At Franky’s suggestion, I rapidly moved to the adventure’s 1st scene.

Thankfully the ‘DM blabbering’ part of the introduction is rather short, but I did get my feet caught in a bit too many details (Introducing many NPCs, the towns 3 taverns competing by offering their best food at the Sanctification festival…). Regardless, at a certain point during the day’s final NPC speeches, goblins attacked the town!

I must mention that the goblins in that adventure are viscious, insane, high-pitched screaming motherf*&kers! They were an absolute blast to play.

What followed were 3 back-to-back fights against goblins, which ended up taking most of the evening. We played without a formal battle map. Figurines were put on the table, and props on the table were used to represent objects. An eraser became, at times, a Wagon, a Bonfire and a strangely immobile horse. Character sheets were used as buildings and my ‘distance measuring string doohickey’ was used as a barrel. It was soooo cool and refreshing with none of that attack of opportunity crap.

Cool Highlights of the fights:

• PM won the ‘You have Higher Ground’ award by stepping on a wagon in his 1st action.
• A goblin, wishing to get out of Magic missile line of effect jumped into a barrel full of water. The fighter then played ‘spear the goblin’ with his Sword (where Vince discovered the coolness of using a longsword 2-handed).
• When half of the party was in negatives, A goblin bard decided to fight standing on the crumpled form of the elven rogue, stepping on her wounds and cackling like a maniac. Highly ineffective for fighting but who cares when half the party is dying right?
• Some pretty awesome, well timed critical hits occurred. When I saw PM’s face light up like a 100 watt lightbulb after the fighter rolled a natural twenty, I couldn’t resist and pointed out just how deep an emotion a single die roll could generate.
• In the last fight, a goblin broke its sword (called a Dogslicer… cool!) and tried biting the ankles of the fighter when he turned his back on the now weaponless miniature menace.
• In the following round, I asked Vince if he was fighting 2 handed-style with his long sword, which he confirmed. I then described a scarping/sliding metal sound followed by a whoop of glee as I described the Goblin swinging wildly with an oversized shortsword (getting rid of attacks of Opportunity opens up new possibilities).

Pretty cool huh? The thing is, these nuggets of coolness were buried in horrible, horrible bad dice rolls by the players. It was a festival of 2s, 4s and 6s on d20. It ended up stretching the lengths of the fights to a point where players started losing their willful suspension of disbelief.

I did what I could, lowering hit points, reducing the number of goblins, playing them really dumb and insane. Of course it didn’t help that I gave the impression of playing much higher than the players (I did, but let’s not forget that a DM plays a lot more dice rolls than each player).

The damage was done however, while it was only 9h30 when they killed the ‘boss’, we were tired and flustered and it showed in the following roleplaying. The players investigated the cause of the goblin raid (a diversion to rob a grave) and interacted with a few villagers who treated the PCs like heroes.

At one point, a female baker goes to the elven rogue to offer her a loaf of bread to ‘put some meat on them bones’. Franky played the rogue as being deeply insulted by the offer and acted like a real careless jerk. The poor baker ran away in tears.

At another point, both the sorcerer and the fighter got some ‘attention’ by members of the opposite sex. So much so that PM, the cleric, ended up throwing his arms in the air and said ‘what about me?’ That was funny.

I think the players liked the game on the whole, we laughed and there were quite a few ‘yes!’ moments , but I couldn’t shake a feeling of vague disappointment when I returned home.

For those who intend on playing the adventure, you may want to remove one of the 3 goblin encounters. It’s a bit much for 1st level characters, even when you do play the goblins like complete idiots (like using torches instead of swords). By the start of the 3rd fight, the cleric was out of spells and the Sorcerer was down to 4 level 0 spells. (But Daze is quite a good spell!).

Rant-like Aside: 1st level characters are really incompetent as far as high heroics should go, ressources are too scarce and a streak of bad luck is invariably fatal if a more evil DM than I is at the end of the table. I hope 4th edition will address this as D&D 3.5 really hits the sweet spot at level 5.

What’s next: I’d like to continue this game, maybe on a monthly basis or once every two months. But I think I’ll let Franky start his MCWod game with those players instead.

I hope they liked it more than I feel they did…