Previously in Chatty’s game (Part 1 and Part 2):
A group of young adventurers gets invited to the Harvest festivities by the region’s biggest Halfling Robber Baron after saving one of his numerous Coastal Venture Forts from the hated Human pirates. Late after the day’s festivities, they get attacked by an Ape Man assassin whose tracks lead to a recent crevice, 4 days north of the City of Hobble’s Port.
Exploring the crevice uncovers some long lost ruins filled with traps and a mischievous infernal. After a climactic battle against Skeletons, a Drake swarm and some fiendishly placed Ooze, the adventurers are ready to continue their explorations.
Quick reminder: We’re playing Goodman Games’ Dragoras’s Dungeon, a 4e adventure written by my new friend Harley Stroh.
When imp rhymes with annoying little git.
Fizban, played by Eric was absent. As this is wont to happen often in our group, we let his character fade out in the background as this is the simplest way we found to deal with it.
When the player characters were done with the Gelatinous Cube, they rested for 5 minutes, wary that the invisible Imp would retaliate with yet another dirty trick. It didn’t.
After they busted open the trapdoor found at the bottom of the room, it opened on a damp corridor leading to a thin 5′ wide, 10′ long bridge spanning an underground river/waterfall.
Being wary of being screwed by the diminutive spawn of evil, each PC crossed the bridge carefully. As expected, once the last PC (Naquist, the Elven Cleric) crossed, he got shoved into the waterfall by a gleeful devil laughing manically and it flew away and vanished before the other PCs could retaliate.
Naquist got battered (and bathed) by the fall (both actually) and was rapidly recovered by his more athletic friends.
Imp 2, Party 0
The Temple of Fridge Logic
The party arrived into an Octogonal room with a simple granite altar, a very large glowing stone globe near the vaulted ceiling and a Stone Pyramid directly underneath the Stone Globe.
At this point, my good friend Math launches, semi in character, into a passionate soliloquy about the sheer stupidity of such a design for a temple by the inhabitants of this underground complex.
It was quite entertaining and appropriate, although with hindsight, I see that Math’s reaction was probably fueled by the lack of Supercool his character suffered from since the start of the campaign. I somehow missed that clue. Dun Dun Duh (Foreshadowing music)!
I told him to ‘step away from that fridge’ a few times, to general hilarity. Math is this super logic, hyper concrete guy. I pegged him as a supercoolness-seeking player a long time ago, but I forgot to address this so far in the campaign.
The PCs searched the room and found a mechanism on the Altar that needed a 5-headed dragon key that had failed to find. Roco the Rogue went to work on it and opened the room’s two secret doors.
One lead to a shimmering portal and the other lead to an obvious trap of a 10′ wide corridor/ramp leading to a 5′ wide bridge over a seemingly bottomless abyss. Said bridge led to the top of a pillar on which stood a chest apparently made of solid silver. On the map, I made a point of writing ‘Lootz’ on the chest just to drive the point home. Mike, one of our resident World of Warcraft player, even added ‘Fat’ over it.
Guess which path the PCs took?
Steven Spielberg called, he wants his Boulder back!
So all the PCs but Naquist the cleric (another missed hint, although Math is somewhat a risk adverse player) set out on the bridge with Bjerm the fighter in the lead. As the Fighter set foot on the pillar and grabbed the worryingly light lootz chest, an echoing click was heard and, predictably, the huge 9′ wide boulder in the Octagonal room fell from the ceiling, hit the pyramid at just the right spot and barreled down toward the PCs.
Each one got an action:
Masaru, Takeo and Roco moved to the legdes found on each side of the cave’s entrance.
Being on the pillar, Bjerm tried to jump and hang from the pillar, hoping to dodge the boulder. Yan (Bjerm’s player) failed his skill roll and I gave him the choice of jumping in the darkness or to stay on the pillar. Not seeing a true choice there, he stayed on the pillar, hoping that the boulder would not reach him before his next turn.
Math (Naquist) told me that he wanted to kick the Boulder out of the way so it crashed into the wall and stop its mad descent toward Bjerm.
That’s where I ignored Math’s third subtle request for supercoolness and made a DMing fumble.
Chatty:(Not too sure how to handle this) “Hmmm it’s a really big boulder…”
Math: “Come on man, it hasn’t gathered a lot of inertia by this time… it should be easy!”
Chatty:(Sets himself up for the royal fumble) “Dude don’t bring logic into this, it’s just a game!”
Math then promptly exploded into a flurry of frustration along the lines of “Fine! Whatever!”
Ouch. Even with 25 years of experience, I still manage to be less than stellar sometimes. Writing this a few days after the fact, I now realize that Math was just asking for a chance to shine like a cool hero, whereas I was too focused on the ‘cool’ effect the trap would feature if triggered and kept uninterrupted.
I know you read this Math and I apologize.
Now I managed to salvage this, with the help of Yan, by opening the Dungeon Master Guide at page 42 and proposing that Naquist make an athletics check. A moderate success would mean the boulder is partly deviated and would be slowed by the ramp’s walls and buy all other players an extra turn. A hard success would mean that the boulder indeed crashed into the wall and stopped there.
I should have said yes and opened the book on page 42 faster, without resorting to the lame ‘no logic in my game please’ argument that I somehow cling to since I’ve been 15.
Of course, Math missed his roll…
He got over it preety fast. What I like about Math is that while he’ll vocalize his frustrations, once done, it’s done and he dove back into the game within a few minutes.
As scripted, the boulder rolled down the ramp/corridor. It then got onto the bridge, which collapsed under the boulder’s weight. The boulder then gracefully crashed into the pillar (with Bjerm on it) and destroyed the top 15′ of it.
The rest of the party could only be witnesses of Bjerm plummeting into the darkness, surrounded by falling pieces of the pillar and the boulder, but still holding on the chest!
The next part tomorrow…
Credits: Britt martin (Art) and Ed Bourelle (Cartography)
All DM’s have these occasional pimples and rough edges of our otherwise awesome games, and I know that I for one tend to agonise over the smallest errors of style or rule… even ones the PCs have a) forgotten about 2mins later or b) never noticed in the first place. I don’t know if this actually makes me a better DM or not, but it certainly drives me to do more work (quite possibly unecessarilly).
Apols if you’ve ansered this question before (noob alert here), but would you say you’re a more “realistic approach” kind of DM, or was it a case of “damn it, I want my trap!” (and hey, we’ve all been there). Assuming its the latter, do you let people know the style you’ll be playing in before a campaign starts? Obviously it doesn’t work for all groups (I tend to run for a wide number of people, so they can decide group makeup based on the style/setting I’m currently running), but did Math know in advance to tone down his Bullet Time expectations?
I make it out like I was conscious of the decisions I made and hints Math was dropping , but my account is colored by post-game insight.
I didn’t know, at the time, that I was resisting Math’s proposal to save the trap scene. In hindsight it’s clearer that’s what I did and I could have salvaged a cool scene by working his Clerical Stone Kick into it all…
Heck I could have imparted a weird spin on it, slowing it down and crashing the bridge and leave Bjerm stranded on the Pillar while the spiders were climbing it…
I don’t torture myself as much as before. I write the mistakes I made on the blog and deal with them through lessons learned. It’s a lot more constructive than the moping I used to do over the days following a non-perfect game. (Which none ever are).
I currently only have one group that is very well established.
As always, an entertaining resumé so far! Cant wait to read the rest of our epic journeys 🙂
The somewhat anonymous more athletic friend of Naquist the cleric 😉
I really need to start recording our games. After a few days I only remember the highlights.
Please note that Takeo is the one that climbed down beside the waterfall and saved Naquist’s angry Elven butt.
That and your general tendency to overlook detail makes it always entertaining to read the game report… :p
The funny part is that sometime it’s not the same character that does the action in the report then in the game…
It’s only little details and it does not change much for the purpose of the report, so is it really worth the extra work of recording and listening back the game? Not sure. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the goal here is not the absolute exactitude of the report but more to get the big idea in order to learn from it and improve DM skills and general game satisfaction…
Old post. But hey!
On the “recording games issue”, don’t know if you resolved it yet, but I’d stay away from the audio recordings, man! If you play sessions of even two hours or longer (and most of us do, I reckon) it takes up too much time. We have tried it as a group and it takes way too much time, even if you just fast forward or rewind to parts you can’t remember.
We have tried two other methods, first is apointing a player each session (everyone gets a turn) to write down the events of the game. Good about this is that it doesn’t distract the DM, and you get a player-view of the story. Bad thing is that the players see it as a burden (and it is) because they’re jotting down dialogue and action while the others are doing it.
The second method is the one we stick with. The DM records the events of the day. I personally use a matrix where I write down what happens on which in-game day, preferably during breaks but when necessary during play (but not during encounters). Transcribe them into a proper, but summarized, story within a few days and make player-friendly versions (where you don’t say: “the band of Orc mercenaries was sent by EVIL-1 to slow the PC’s down, and he knowingly sent the ragged band of Orc youths to their deaths, incurring the wrath of their tribe). If players have the summary on hand, there will be less recapping and less “we need to visit mustache-man the captain in that lame coastal city without a mage’s guild where I bought my pet monkey”.
Hmmmm…. verbose.