We’ve had two sessions since my last post about the game, and we’ve just finished the first full adventure. The party reached level 2 at the end of last night’s session.
There hasn’t been a whole lot new to report; we’re all learning the ins and outs of the new system, and seeing where it works and where we want to tweak it for our group. However, we have found out some interesting things, and we’ve been having fun.
In the session before last, I trotted out a couple of traps in the middle of a fight: a pair of spear gauntlet traps with four rat swarms. I decided that the rat swarms weren’t heavy enough to trigger the trap, but that they were valid targets when the trap went off. This allowed me to preserve the surprise of the traps while still allowing the PCs to use the traps against the rats if they could figure out how.
The fact that I used two traps in an overlapping pattern caused some consternation for the party, and it’s something I want to remember for next time. I found that they viewed the traps primarily as an obstacle to be avoided; they didn’t try to disarm the things during combat. They did work out the trigger pattern, though, and used it a couple of times to target the rats specifically.
The other encounter that session was with some zombies. Because the ruins were from the lost dragonborn empire, I described the undead as looking like rotting dragonborn, and the gravehounds as drakes instead of dogs or wolves. The battle took place in a little knot of rooms and corridors, with doors opening to surprise the party with more zombies, and the cleric wound up being cut off from the party while being savaged by a gravehound and a corruption corpse, but they pulled through. We all quite liked the zombie vulnerability to critical hits – it came up once or twice, and then everyone was hoping for a head shot. Very much in the vein of a zombie movie.
Last night, they faced off against a young black dragon. I advanced it one level to make it an appropriate level 4 enouncter for a party of 6 characters. At the start of combat, I began to be afraid that I had made things too tough; most of the party was down a few healing surges, and the dragon used darkness, stealth, and an underground river to get in a few pretty devastating attacks early on. Then the party fell back, regrouped, and did an end run around the river. They managed to trap the dragon away from the river, thanks to a plethora of readied actions and a very cautious advance, and proceeded to kick it all around the place. Thrun, the dwarven fighter, really started having fun with Tide of Iron, Footwork Lure, and Shield Bash, tossing the dragon around. Ssudai, the dragonborn rougue, came up with a neat Acrobatic stunt: grabbing the dragon’s tail on the backswing after the dragon had tail slashed another character and using it to swing around into a flanking position behind the dragon for a sneak attack. That’s the kind of thing I want the characters in my game doing, so I let him roll, and he nailed it, and unloaded with a pretty impressive helping of damage.
In the end, they took down the dragon, though Soren, the human warlord, fell during the fight. He didn’t die, though, so that’s okay.
The last encounter of the evening was with a shadar-kai witch, a chainfighter, and a couple of dark creepers. The players were feeling cocky after the dragon fight, and they’d had a chance to rest, so I didn’t pull any punches. The dark creepers got a surprise round, and the shadar-kai unloaded with everything they had. Level-wise, the fight was equivalent to the kruthik battle from a couple of sessions ago, though with fewer creatures. Still, whether it was because they were all fresh, or because they’re starting to work a lot better together, the fight was pretty easy for them. No one dropped, though Milo the swordmage came pretty close. The chainfighter even got to unload with two Dance of Deaths in the fight, though my bad dice luck minimized that advantage. The fight took a long time in real time, though, mainly becuase the dice were all tired and didn’t want to roll above a six.
So, we wrapped up a little late, but everyone was happy to level up, and seemed to have fun. I count it as a win.
I think I have finally come to grips with the idea that my Swordmage needs feats and buffs more in line with a warrior. I took the feats Toughness and Human Perseverance in the hopes of being able to take a little more hurt than I could before.