Okay, as promised here's an AP account for the game I DM'd last Sunday. I apologise for the length but I don't know how to structure it in a less verbose way.

The Campaign: D&D 3.5 as described by me in http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17455.0.

The Session:
The main DM suggested that some of us might like to do guest sessions, and I took up his offer. This is my first session as a DM in two years, and only my second in five years, so I'm pretty nervous about it.

The Group:
Player 1 - The regular DM. A lot of experience with this kind of gamist D&D, but not much outside. He has the books for Alternity, but I don't know if he's played much else.
Player 2 - Been interested in D&D since his youth, but has never really played until now. Seems very keen, and of course he hasn't had time (yet) to get jaded.
Player 3 - Another experienced gamer, haven't talked to him much about gaming generally but he's definitely played in other D&D games, and WFRP as well. The few comments he has made suggest pretty gamist play.

Player 1 is taking a paladin (a new character, and the lowest level in the party), along with my regular character (a sorcerer, highest level in the party). Player 2 has a cleric and player 3 a rogue.

As I mentioned in the other thread, almost everyone has a PHB and is happy to look up rules, spells, feats etc. Giving the sheer volume of stuff in the core books alone I don't see how I'd run this for players who wouldn't do that.

None of the above knew each other or me before the start of this campaign, although there is another player (missing for this session) who has known Player 1 since way back. Everyone is male, and in their twenties I think (I'm 26).

The Prep:
As came up in my previous threads, I need meaningful decisions. I'm also *really* into revisiting locations...it makes them much more 'real'. So I need a big adventure site with more than one route to take and that can't be cleared in one session.

So, it's a tomb complex with a big map and random (undead) encounters that start when the party enters and get harder every time. If the party don't eventually retreat, they *will* die.

Of course, this group is used to 'find the macguffin' adventures which they succeed at. So I want to give them good odds on that. On the other hand, if they're definately going to win then there's no fun. But a party wipeout would be really bad. 

So they're looking for a holy book, and I add a previous party that took the same mission, and the one survivor is there to be interviewed ahead of time. He tells them (more or less) about the ramping up of the defences. He tells them that the item they're looking for is somewhere in the east of the site. Added to that, one of his party had a nice anti-undead item that might still be on the body. That's up in the northwest somewhere, where they died. So the players have an incentive to explore a bit.

The mapping style I used was topographic (i.e. subway stations, not satellite survey), which really helps my creative juices flow. Measuring distances can be a real drag to creativity, I'd much rather just throw some ideas down on a sheet and join the dots. This, of course, rather interferes with players who make maps on squared paper...like we do, damn. But I don't think anyone minded...I'll ask about that next session.

All in all, I'd guess spent about three hours on prep, including making myself a printed monster reference by cut-and-pasting from the SRD.

The Play:

I'm conscious that time spent in town isn't where the action is at, and it's "not my world" so I'm keen to get into the adventure area as quickly as possible.

First mistake...when I actually run the briefing scene, I forget to tell them about the extra anti-undead item (with the party corpses). Luckily, I do tell them about the location of the book. But the danger there is that the scenario becomes to easy, because they've got fewer distractions. Luckily, they helped themselves out into a fine pickle later on anyway.

****The Forest****
I hadn't realised ahead of time, but the world map means that the PCs have to travel through the Ghost Chime Forest before they get to the swamp. So hasty re-fit, put the first on-route encounter in the forest.

So, the first encounter is when they meet some weak creatures of a sort they'd run into in the first game session. These things have orc-like stats, and are only really there because (a) They provide a nice "look how far we've come" effect and (b) because they're supposed to be native to the swamp, so provide appropriate Color.

This is where I bog down a bit. I want to use the D&D movement rate rules, so that the gamist material laid out in the books remains effective, but we're not using a battleboard and that makes it difficult. I'm very conscious that when I used to GM years ago, we usually didn't use boards and fights would often deteriorate into "everyone is kind of next to each other", thereby removing movement from the game entirely.

This continued to plague me inside the graveyard itself, because most of the areas were 'islands' raised above the swamp, and characters could move through the swamp water (at half normal rate).

Question: Does anyone have any suggestions for how I could do movement better, given that the group doesn't seem very interested in using a battleboard?

I was getting pretty worried at this point that we'd been 'playing' for over an hour and nothing exciting had happened yet. Looking around at the players, nobody seemed very excited. Possibly I was over-reacting here, but I've sat through so much rubbish where boring stuff took hours that I'm hypersensitive to this kind of thing now.

What do people think? Is an hour of railroad and not much ok?

Later, the PCs have to sneak past an encampment of the creatures. Player 2 fumbles his sneak roll, and Player 3 fails to take out the guard with his crossbow. At this point, it makes sense that the encampment would wake up and attack them.... but I wasn't willing to waste any more time. The players said they were going to try and get away, so I just let them.

In some ways, I could have skipped these encounters entirely. They had no gamist content whatsoever (because the enemies were so weak), and perhaps I only put them in because I felt there "had to be something there" to give a sense that the journey happened and that the swamp.

Thinking about this, that sounds plausible. The forest and swamp are now more concrete in my mind because I can 'remember' the events that happened there in a very visual way.

**** The Graveyard****
The players moved pretty swiftly, heading dead easy and fighting skeletons. Interestingly, they seemed to have taken the hint and tried to keep moving rather than stand and fight. Soon they reach the book, the Cleric turns the wraith that was guarding it, and they could go home....

But they're not confident that they've got the right book, and Player 1 is very keen to investigate the stairwell leading down at the back of the book temple.

**** Underground ****
Of course the wraith is now lurking down here, what fun!

An oddity with the Wraith: in 3rd edition, any incoporeal creature has a 50% chance of ignoring any attack from a physical source, even if it's an enchanted weapon. Two of the PC's have magic weapons, but in four or five hits this happens every time. I try to make it apparent that something is happening ("the creature sees your blade coming and fades out of existence as it passes through") but the players decide that their weapons were useless against it.

This immediately made the Wraith a lot more dangerous; in the end, the cleric burns most of his spells by turning them into Cure spells, which damage undead creatures.

Question: could I have done this any better without telling the players directly? Would that have been a good idea?

(I suppose I could have said for one of them "You nearly get to contact the creature, then at the last minute it sees the blade". They might have responded to that.)

While fighting the wraith, and afterwards, the PCs are set upon by a mixture of skeleton warriors and a few owlbear skeletons who try to force them out. The PCs are stubborn, and force their way down a narrow corridor, arriving at the edge of an underground lake. All the while, there’s a 40% chance per minute that a new encounter will occur, and we're now into the nasty stuff, ghouls and wights. These are a real threat to the party now, and my concern is that they'll get trapped in here. All the corridors and stairs in this area are about 5ft wide, so no chance of running past a tough enemy.

I'm also conscious that Player 1 hasn't latched on to my sorcerer's (powerful) Haste spell, so I intervene and have him cast it. The sorcerer only made level 6 last session, so no-one has (Generally, I felt the character was underused in that he reached the exit with magic weapon, and bull's strength castings still unused. But I find that hard enough to do, myself, when I'm just playing him, so I suppose that's to be expected.)

The PCs hack on for a bit more, and a random encoutners come up...ghouls and a zombie, coming from outside and which come down the stairs. They deal with these, but they still seem more interested in going off into the lake. So, I have Player 1's character (the Paladin, who has some kind of 'sense evil' power) feel "a sense of rising evil all around").

There was also an element of time pressure here; Player 2 had to be away by 5PM, and by the time I first looked at the clock it was already 3.30. I didn't want to split the actual adventure over sessions because it would wreck the tension.

At this point, Player 1 leads the rest of the party to leave, which they manage without much difficulty, although they have to run past quite few Wights and other horrors, which is cool.

***** Player Response *****
Player 1 and 2 seemed to enjoy the session a lot. Player 1 later said (in an email) that he really enjoyed the way I built up the tension. I don't think he realised quite how much that tension came from their decisions....they could have had a cakewalk or a TPK if they'd chosen differently.

Player 3 didn't give so much obvious body-language feedback, and often appeared bored. At one point, as the party was fleeing, he said something like "I'll charge the Owlbear Skeleton". Given what a previous such creature had done to the Paladin, his Rogue stood no chance and would have been splattered. This, to me, screamed "bored player syndrome" because I've done the same thing (and much sillier things) in the same situation.

So I followed up via email, and the player said (a) he was tired anyway that day and (b) he preferred sessions where he got to stop to think and recuperate between encounters, and also to explore the site. He say that he enjoyed the session overall, though.

**** GM Response ****
How was it for me...in a word, awesome. I came home after that six hour session and I was on an adrenaline high for about two more hours. As DM, the immersion, the flow, and the intensity of the latter four hours was incredible.

I can't remember the last time I felt like that. I'm not sure I've *ever* felt like that for that long. Looking back to some of my earlier GMing experiences, some of them come close I think, though only one was anywhere near that duration.

This, in part, is the advantage of the traditional GM role versus the tradition player role; you are fully involved and making meaningful decisions *all the time*. You don't have any slack time at all. Of course, the nature of the game we were running (high-intensity action in a mapped-out area) meant that I had a constant structure to work from... it was always obvious what the next thing to do was (and it usually involved walking bones).

I found, surprisingly, that I was getting a very vivid experience of the game world. I can turn inside now and see the tangled, mossy trees of the Ghostchime Forest, the lanterns of the camp glowing through the mist, the skeletons chasing the party through the broken monuments of the graveyard, and the flickering candles in the shrine where the book was held.

Most of all I can see the flashing lantern-light lights and hear the sound of clashing blades in the sandstone tunnels under the tombs, as the heroes battled desperately with an army of skeletons....all the time, getting themselves into deeper and deeper peril as the wights and ghouls closed in on the outside.

For me, this is what it's all about. That was an awesome game session, probably the best I've ever had.

Comments and Questions:
The big question for me is: what if they'd failed? What if they'd all died down in that dark hole?

I really didn't want to fudge much. That would have spoilt the experience for me as a DM, and would have had the same effect as a player if I'd known about it. With it not being 'my world', I didn't feel comfortable introducing a deus ex machina. I'm not really sure how to get around this kind of situation....I find it hits too many of my conflicting requirements regarding rolegaming enjoyment, and the D&D system offers essentially no help here.

Overall, D&D 3.5 really seems to work at this level (3rd to 6th). Enough resources to fight numerous monsters and still survive, enough options to allow interesting tactical play, but not any weird things that break the dungeon boundaries (passwall in a dungeon, fly when outside).

Of course, the one of the big complaints about D&D, from a gamist perspective, is that this isn't sustained at higher levels. Hopefully I'll get to test that in this campaign.

The time taken for fights is also a concern. I mean, I've really enjoyed a lot of the fights we've had in this campaign (especially the ones downstairs in this session) but they take up an awful lot of time. Of course, I've been getting so involved that I've barely been noticing the time passing...so maybe that's a good thing.

I should add that we play at Player 1's house and it's great. There's never anyone else there to interrupt the game or provide social exposure. The house isn't large, or far from the road, but the lie of the land means you're totally unaware of anyone outside.

Rob wrote: I apologise for the length but I don't know how to structure it in a less verbose way.

As I mentioned in the other thread, almost everyone has a PHB and is happy to look up rules, spells, feats etc. Giving the sheer volume of stuff in the core books alone I don't see how I'd run this for players who wouldn't do that.

So, it's a tomb complex with a big map and random (undead) encounters that start when the party enters and get harder every time. If the party don't eventually retreat, they *will* die.

Of course, this group is used to 'find the macguffin' adventures which they succeed at. So I want to give them good odds on that. On the other hand, if they're definately going to win then there's no fun. But a party wipeout would be really bad. 

So they're looking for a holy book, and I add a previous party that took the same mission, and the one survivor is there to be interviewed ahead of time. He tells them (more or less) about the ramping up of the defences. He tells them that the item they're looking for is somewhere in the east of the site. Added to that, one of his party had a nice anti-undead item that might still be on the body. That's up in the northwest somewhere, where they died. So the players have an incentive to explore a bit.

So, the first encounter is when they meet some weak creatures of a sort they'd run into in the first game session. These things have orc-like stats, and are only really there because (a) They provide a nice "look how far we've come" effect and (b) because they're supposed to be native to the swamp, so provide appropriate Color.

Question: Does anyone have any suggestions for how I could do movement better, given that the group doesn't seem very interested in using a battleboard?

What do people think? Is an hour of railroad and not much ok?

Question: could I have done this any better without telling the players directly? Would that have been a good idea?

While fighting the wraith, and afterwards, the PCs are set upon by a mixture of skeleton warriors and a few owlbear skeletons who try to force them out. The PCs are stubborn, and force their way down a narrow corridor, arriving at the edge of an underground lake. All the while, there’s a 40% chance per minute that a new encounter will occur, and we're now into the nasty stuff, ghouls and wights. These are a real threat to the party now, and my concern is that they'll get trapped in here. All the corridors and stairs in this area are about 5ft wide, so no chance of running past a tough enemy.

The big question for me is: what if they'd failed? What if they'd all died down in that dark hole?

I really didn't want to fudge much.

Some thoughts:

On uninteresting encounters - you can handwave these. In my last D20 session, there was a corridor that was supposed to have 100 skeletons (old 1e module). I just narrated the fighters wading through the skeletons, and rolled a few fistfulls of d20s to see if any 20s came up (thought on that - I could have abstracted those fistfulls of d20s into a single roll, on the other hand, there is a certain flavor lent by rolling the fistfulls of dice, it also didn't take that long).

On dealing with the incorporeal creature - there's a few things you can do. One is to call for a knowledge check to identify what's happening. Another is to describe the wraith passing through something. My players are familiar with incorporeal, so I let them roll their miss chance.

On not using the battle board - Hal gives some good suggestions. You can also use some sort of crude visual representation if things are really confusing (but not spend time counting squares - I think that's what annoys people most about battle boards).

Frank

Rob wrote: This is where I bog down a bit. I want to use the D&D movement rate rules, so that the gamist material laid out in the books remains effective, but we're not using a battleboard and that makes it difficult. I'm very conscious that when I used to GM years ago, we usually didn't use boards and fights would often deteriorate into "everyone is kind of next to each other", thereby removing movement from the game entirely.

Rob wrote:
This is where I bog down a bit. I want to use the D&D movement rate rules, so that the gamist material laid out in the books remains effective, but we're not using a battleboard and that makes it difficult. I'm very conscious that when I used to GM years ago, we usually didn't use boards and fights would often deteriorate into "everyone is kind of next to each other", thereby removing movement from the game entirely.

This continued to plague me inside the graveyard itself, because most of the areas were 'islands' raised above the swamp, and characters could move through the swamp water (at half normal rate).

Question: Does anyone have any suggestions for how I could do movement better, given that the group doesn't seem very interested in using a battleboard?

An oddity with the Wraith: in 3rd edition, any incoporeal creature has a 50% chance of ignoring any attack from a physical source, even if it's an enchanted weapon. Two of the PC's have magic weapons, but in four or five hits this happens every time. I try to make it apparent that something is happening ("the creature sees your blade coming and fades out of existence as it passes through") but the players decide that their weapons were useless against it.

This immediately made the Wraith a lot more dangerous; in the end, the cleric burns most of his spells by turning them into Cure spells, which damage undead creatures.

Question: could I have done this any better without telling the players directly? Would that have been a good idea?

The big question for me is: what if they'd failed? What if they'd all died down in that dark hole?

The big question for me is: what if they'd failed? What if they'd all died down in that dark hole?

I really didn't want to fudge much. That would have spoilt the experience for me as a DM, and would have had the same effect as a player if I'd known about it. With it not being 'my world', I didn't feel comfortable introducing a deus ex machina. I'm not really sure how to get around this kind of situation....I find it hits too many of my conflicting requirements regarding rolegaming enjoyment, and the D&D system offers essentially no help here.

But they're not confident that they've got the right book, and Player 1 is very keen to investigate the stairwell leading down at the back of the book temple.

Callan,

Hell zone sounds good to me.

We had a game of third edition D&D set in Forgotten Realms where I suggested we'd done enough for the day. The other players wanted to finish the dungeon. I agreed we'd go all the way. Because of that decision I was terribly frustrated when they surrendered to the big bad of the dungeon at first contact. I wanted hell zone, not keep going until we meet the plot device.

John

Hi John,

So you declared a goal of taking on more of the dungeon. But found they were just getting to the next plot node and that's what was important to them, rather than recognising the guts involved in making that goal? Further, they deprotagonised you by surrendering and thus cutting you off from showing how invested you were in that goal.

A narrativist equivalent would be a player who decides his PC will risk his life in battle, for his love...and the GM saying 'Finally, now we can get to this cool battle scene I want to describe. BTW, your PC will be jailed during the battle because he looked at an officer funny."

Hi John,

Is this right?

It is like watching a film where steadily the terrible power of the great evil is revealed, only for the hero and it to meet, and agree to let bygones be bygones. The End. No epic battles, no fantastic cliffhanger at the end, no pain and sacrifice as good defeats or at least valiently attempts to defeat evil.

David

diadochi wrote:
Hi John,

Is this right?

It is like watching a film where steadily the terrible power of the great evil is revealed, only for the hero and it to meet, and agree to let bygones be bygones. The End. No epic battles, no fantastic cliffhanger at the end, no pain and sacrifice as good defeats or at least valiently attempts to defeat evil.

David

Callan,

Exactly. The player of the paladin in particular was gungho about defeating evil, until we found ourselves in the same room. I didn't think it was good role-playing for paladin and kender to fold at the first sight of a wizard. What really bugged me was that the other players acted like wanting my rogue to shoot the flat-footed wizard (for sneak attack damage) before she could cast spells was strange behavior on my part. I insisted and missed. While the wizard played with my guy like a toy, the other two players did nothing. I would've been happy in the first place going on with our journey after clearing the above ground and first dungeon level, but the other guys really wanted to fight the necromancer, so I agreed to commit.

The next time I spoke to the GM from that game, he agreed that I had been the consistent one in that event.

In our early games together, maybe for 6 months or so, I'd do the opposite of what the rest of the party wanted. I'd run from the war machine that just killed 10 people in one turn in one game, and attack a flat-footed wizard in another game. I'd split from the party any time it seemed reasonable. I think the guys were playing in the same familiar habits so long that my outsider behavior seemed strange. I still do my own thing, but no one is surprised anymore.

David,

Pretty much. The intention was that we'd agree to be the evil (chaotic neutral, whatever) wizard's stooges in exchange for not being hurt. We never continued that game. I would have ditched the party and gone solo anyway. Trusting either the party or the wizard made no sense.

We had an escalating situation where we had four decision points to choose between being bold and being timid. Each time we chose to be bold. That far into an escalating situation, I'm prepared for a fight to the death. If I hadn't been, I wouldn't have advanced that deeply. I've always liked the idea of letting players decide how far they want to push, instead of only putting easy challenges on the map.

John