Be careful what you wish for.
the last season of Encounters had been lackluster, with high initial turnout and then dwindling to nothing shortly thereafter. I wasn’t there for that previous season, but knew that I wanted to grow it at my store so that we had people coming in for D&D regularly. It’s my little action that I can take to grow the hobby person by person, so I’ve got a lot of passion.
So much passion that I made 3d terrain for session five! I’ve been getting into cardstock modelling, so I rebuilt the terrain of the encounters with some of my own miniatures and with some cardstock cliffs I made based off of templates I bought from Worldworks Games. I also have been using Gale force 9′s Dungeon Master’s Token Set, which I love! So there was a lot of flash here.
Did I forget to mention that we had eight people? All it takes is for three returning people to bring friends, and instant playgroup extension! I was pretty surprised at our sudden growth, but I certainly wasn’t going to turn anyone away from the table. I found some extra character sheets from the previous season and tossed those out, and then I spent a few quick moments to beef up the encounter. In the end I threw another shaman into the group for more domination hijinx.
The game was awesome. The scenery really helped, but I was able to help the new players get into the game, and the experienced players already brought a lot of cool combat narration. The big mechanic in this encounter was an ankheg that could be swayed to one side or the other during each round. I played that up with players : ”The ankheg is ravenous, but what you know about ankhegs is that they are not discriminating in what they eat, and are easily persuadable.” This pushed the players to describe some pretty fun ways that they distract and redirect the ankheg. That and some good rolling kept the ankheg as an ally until it needed to eat PCs.
Something else I made was some more mechanics for Rallo. I gave him basic stats, but then I also made cards with little powers on them. Right before the encounter, I roleplayed with the players talking and trying to make friends with the dwarf. Anyone who succeeded in making an impression received a card that allowed them to trigger an ability from Rallo when his turn arrived in the initiative order. It was a fun little mechanic in the battle and a way to drive some more roleplay into the encounters.
The session ran a little longer than I expected, but the juice definitely was worthy of the squeeze. We might need to expand to more than 1 DM, which is so far away from where we started.
Tip: Be Flexible.
I certainly could have turned away the seventh and eighth players. We didn’t have any character sheets explicitly for them and the encounter was definitely not balanced for that number. But the second part of taking ownership is being flexible. I knew that with a little extension that I could accomodate other players so I did so. Especially with the goal of expanding the presence of D&D at the local gaming store, it just doesn’t make sense to turn away people who want to learn the game and play.
Sometimes you get thrown a curveball. Stay open-minded, stay fluid, and adapt.
As always, I run Encounters at Myriad Game’s Salem Store.
Art provided by Kyle Ferrin.
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Nice review, GF. A suggestion on character sheets — Use the D&D Dark*Sun gameday sheets (they’re on the site). Since they’re also level 1 dark sun characters, it works well. We even whipped up some level 2 cards for the characters (you can email me for them if you’d like).