This is a continuing series on my current D&D campaign with my buddies.
I had no illusions that this week’s game was going to be stellar.
My 1st goal of the evening was to get with my pals for the 1st the of the new year and celebrate my 35th Birthday (which was yesterday) and my 25 years of DMing. I had ordered a catered Sandwich plate and 2 bottles of French Sparkling wine. Beer was also brought.
My buddies also gave me 2 boxes of the latest D&D Mini collection and I got me a cool Ogre, a second large Fire Elemental and Bruenor Battlehammer!
The goal was attained. The whole booze and food things was fun. Needless to say that I got pretty drunk, pretty fast, my hangover the next morning can attest for it .
I actually was too drunk to DM properly… so I’m telling you in advance that the details of last Friday’s game are a bit murky, and, much like the 1st game of this campaign, we ended spending most of the night fighting an encounter that was just too much for the players.
We were missing a player who called in at the last minute (Stef, Nogard’s player), making us short one front-line fighter.
I usually make missing players fade in the background, it’s easier for us to deal with and the break in story continuity does not bother us all that much usually.
I also decided against adjusting the evening’s planned encounters, which were a bit over the group’s power level.
In theory , they were good but not too hard challenges. Well, theory decided to take a beer and get s#17faced with me.
After the meal, I recapped the end of the last session for Math who had missed the last game. I explained that the group had visited the Styx’ Oarsman, the very intriguing, newly-opened inn in Ptolus’ Necropolis.
I described this Fiend and Celestial-packed tavern. There, the character had met with a strange Gith (Which aren’t in the OGL by the way) called Rule-of-Three that always speaks in trinary stances: “Well met, Greetings, Good day to you renowned Heroes of Ptolus”
When they left the inn, a group of Yugoloth Mercenaries (Neutral Evil Fiends, my campaign’s main bad guys) were waiting to collect the PCs on some sort of contract.
Welcome to Planescape… Yugoloth Mercenaries are a dime a dozen!
The fight started! All Yugoloths (3 Mezzoloths at CR6 each and a Nycaloth at CR10) initiated hostilities by summoning a pal each.
I have a hard time with summonings. I had initially house-ruled that all summonings would now work 100% to bring a single weaker Yugoloth (or multiple weaker ones if done by a powerful fiend) but that the summoned creatures would work exactly like the Summon Monster spell, i.e.:
- Take 1 full round to appear
- Hang around for 1 round per caster level of the summoner
- Be subject to Dispel Magic
- Summoned creatures are unable to cross a protection from evil effect.
Well it didn’t quite make the situation easier… because:
- I made all Mezzoloth summon another Mezzoloth instead of the much weaker Skerelot (CR3)
- The duration of the Summoning was well into the 10 rounds or more… making it no different from 1 hour for a fight that lasted less than a minute.
- There is no cleric in the party, so no Protection effect.
The Nycaloth ended summoning only one Mezzoloth. I now had 7 seven Mezzos creatures and a BBEG. All with Damage Resistance and Spell Resistance… Making this an encounter suited for a 13th level party (mine is 9th).
What is it with me and Outsiders? It’s like I want to kill my players on purpose!
The players attacked while the fiends were busy summoning, and a few hits, including a Cixi-brand critical hit that failed to drop a Mezzoloth, was scored.
The doubled-up party of fiends attacked, including casting one Cloudkill on the whole group. The Nycaloth went invisible and was untraced by Lillie.
The players, faced with repeating constitution damage handled it quite brilliantly considering. Aravar the Arcane Archer casted Swift Fly (a free 1 round flying spell) and grabbed Cixi to get on the Inn’s roof.
When Math asked me if he could carry another character I had a gut feeling he couldn’t but I waived the verification and called it successful per the Rule of Cool. (I just checked, turns out he could…moving at a speed of 20′)
Cruger charged into the fray to leave the cloud, putting him away from his pals. He got hacked to bits and was saved in extremis by some Crusader powers and Lillie’s wands of Healing.
I did another round with the Mezzoloth only to realize that I would slaughter the whole group. So I decided to trash my Summon house-rule and play it as is with the chance of failure, this made 2 Mezzoloth vanish.
Then the Nycaloth appeared, doing a flyby attack on the Aravar on the Inn’s roof and flying away, hit and Run style. Dropping HP by a lot.
Things were getting grimmer and grimmer. All players were either dropped to negatives or very close to… Even invisible Lillee had a taste with the See Invisible at will Yugoloths.
The absence of a second tank or at least a front-line backup cleric in that ranged-attacks heavy group hurts performance a lot.
At one point, Eric called in his Key of Helping the Weak to do a Jump attack and kill one of the baddies threatening his pals. He rolled and missed. I told him that he could trade in the XPs he would get in exchange for a reroll…. he rolled and missed again… then I chose to disregard the roll (“I didn’t see it roll again dude”)… and he managed to roll a miss again…
I tried Eric, I really did…
Or did I… That’s what drunkeness got me. Had I been more in control of my faculties, I’d have traded the XP for an automatic success as a “once in a blue moon” power.
At that point of the evening, a few player comments go through the alcoholic haze. Stuff like ‘Why bother with Armour when we get hit all the time, let’s go back inside the inn, etc’. Bad omens, so I needed to save that game… even if it was a bit late.
I looked at my critters stats. The Mooks were down to their last Hit Points, but the Big Bad was barely through half of its pool. That’s when all players focussed on the big bad in a one-round Hail Mary assault and they brought the BBEG to about 75% of it’s hit point. That’s when I ‘decided’ to misread its 196 hp as 143 and sent it falling to the ground… and the remaining summoned Mezzoloths deemed that they had fulfilled their obligations and left.
At that time, it was well after 9h30 pm and we spent the rest of the evening playing an awkward scene where the elven lord of the city invited the PCs over for a meal to explain his troubles with increasing Drow raids. The flimsiness of the plot came to light a bit (which is to be expected with the fight we just had) and I’ll need to re-work this to make a stronger case.
But at that point no one was much into it (or I actually don’t recall the details all that well). So we adjourned for the night and played some Guitar Hero III that Yan brought for the occasion. So the evening ended on a higher note (pun intended… I suck at both games when I’m that drunk).
I left the game table with mixed feelings, but my wife told me we laughed most of the evening and we seemed to be having fun.
Lessons Learned.
- I really have to check my alcohol intake when I DM. Actually I think I would be due for a ‘dry’ run… where I keep my wits for a more complex and involved game.
- If a player announces he won’t be there at the last minute, do review the encounters (at least the 1st one) in light of the missing function.
- I’m doing away with outsider summoning once and for all.
What Players liked:
- Surviving the fight (heck I even forgot to distribute the loot)
- The catered meal and the booze…
- The swift fly on the roof move was cool!
What players dislike:
- An overwhelming challenge (again)
- Yugoloths… I’m sure I’ve established the Hate factor to an all time high.
What’s next:
- Weave a story behind the Yugoloth attack that will make up for the frustrating encounter with a satisfying conclusion.
- Tackle the Drow part of the adventure.
I think outsider summoning can work. What I do is I roll for success while I prepare and check whether it will make an interesting fight. So effectively it just adds fluff. If I want 5 x CR 6 and one summon works, then I just start with four of them and have one be summoned.
And I cannot imagine running a game under the influence. That would never work. Then again, I must have inherited the lousy alcoholdehydroxinase of my Chinese ancestor four generations up… Two glasses of wine and I’m drowsy.
Drow for the win! 🙂
Excellent tip! Keeping the nice fluffy part of the concept and discarding the unbalancing crunch.
Yeah… I usually tolerate alcohol pretty well, but I took way too much that night.
I don’t feel all that bad about the game… it just could have gone better.
As my player know, I’ll make it up in the next game… somehow 🙂
I definitely ditched summoning in my game. I want control over how many monsters are being fought. I know the summoning is supposed to be built into Challenge Rating, but it never _feels_ that way. I’d rather just plan the monsters be there, or not. (and give XP, or not.)
It takes so many drinks to put me out that I don’t give much thought to drinking at the table. Then again, I don’t drink beer or wine, so it usually doesn’t come up. (Except the once when my best friend brought some Jameson whisky)
Out of curiosity, is the one encounter the only thing you did for the adventure? Do you find that’s sufficient play for your players?
That’s pretty much what we played… the fight lasted a long time.
A perfect evening features 2-4 encounters, Combat or Roleplaying.
So no it wasn’t enough, but I’m happy we kept it as such to prevent further drunken derailement 🙂
That makes perfect sense, I was just curious. I agree that it’s a good idea to cut a game short if things aren’t going well.
I was in a campaign once (only for a few adventures) where each “adventure” consisted of some narration, then a combat, then more narration. It was mostly older people who didn’t want to play for more than a few hours… but boy, was that unsatisfying for me.
Happy Birthday.
You seem to follow this little motivational quote so i’ll leave it here to remind you:
“Don’t take life too seriously, you will never get out of it alive” -Elbert Hubbard
LOL Andy… I’m not sure if you’re saying I take it too seriously or don’t 🙂 There’s a little truth in both… 🙂
Mine is:
Life is a STD that is invariably fatal.
🙂
Happy Birthday Chatty!
I usually try to avoid alcohol when I GM. If I imbibe while playing it is usually to the tune of one and one only. My GMing style is very improv based, so I like to be able to figure out how to make it all work at the table. I don’t drink often, so I’m never sure how much alcohol will affect me in a given night.
Still it sounds like it was a decent game. Some of what I felt were my worst sessions, were the ones my players enjoyed greatly. It is always one of those hard things to read.
I, too, have a tendency to occasionally write encounters where my players can get into serious (demoralizing) trouble, and then have a difficult time helping to resolve them.
Two suggestions, if you want to give a little more last-ditch elasticity to them:
Instead of trading in XP via an impromptu mechanism, try Action Points (SRD: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/actionPoints.htm)
Action points allow players a recourse when that must-hit critical confirm is a “1”, or the entire party fails a save against Mass Hold Person.
Second, a pool of interesting consumables. Beyond the basic potions and scrolls, you’re free to create interesting one-use items that generally won’t see play until the $#!T hits the fan.
Examples from my own campaign:
– A mystical implement struck by lightning, this holy relic now contains a lightning bolt. A standard action (by any class) releases it as a 10d10 lightning bolt. Used when a dragon encounter went very badly by the party bard, most enjoyable.
– A dwarven charm bracelet made of runic inscriptions. Each inscription contains one spell effect, usable again as a standard action by any class:
knock, spider climb, color spray, shocking grasp, burning hands and web. The halfing ranger currently has this, as in large fights she can run out of productive actions if she cannot penetrate damage reduction.
We do use Action points, a lot… but somehow, players didn’t use them all that much…
Thanks for the one use trick… I use to use them more but we forgot…
I’ve noticed that the Magic Item Compendium’s tables have a lot more one use or limited use items than the standard. I started using it based on Phil’s suggestion, and it does seem to give the game a more interesting flavor (along with a few one-use items of my own invention.)
(Woot my shares are growing…. I hope they never catch on that I’m actually the President of Hasbro posing as a French Canadian Quality Manager Geek playing D&D, best cover Evar!)
We’re using “action points on steroids”– basically, a 1x/session token that can be traded in for an auto maximum roll of the die, retroactive. It works pretty well as a bail out and is good for bridging over the boring…
Little correction Ô dear master. Cruguer did manage to hit the Nycaloth while jumping with a beautiful 20 (and the 8d8 maneuvre). I failed twice to confirm the critical with a 1 and a 2 (me too I did try).
It felt like an Asterix chez les belges comic book. A little boy was placing a target when having an apple on the top of his head. Asterix was aiming at the target with a bow when Obelix sneezed loudly. Nevertheless the arrow when on the bullzeye. Two belgian looking at the scene – Right in the middle but I don’t know why I feel disapointed… (he had missed the apple on the head of the boy).
Like me, I managed to deal around 40hp of damage, but I was so close of something more spectacular…oh well that’s just life I guess.
Oh well, I’m happy to see that the rule of Cool prevailed even when the DM is lost in ethylic vapours!
I’m glad you liked it overall, and you are right, we were both rooting for a Critical hit!