The D&D Encounters campaigns have had a rocky history in our town. We started off when they began, and wandered between one and two tables a week. Then came Christmas of 2010, and everyone disappeared. Not just for the holiday season, but for several months after that. This so depressed me that I stopped running D&D Encounters for a while. I’d run the first half of Keep on the Borderlands, but the last half I never saw. Instead, Mick and Josh continued running the sessions when there were enough people.
Eventually, the numbers began to build again, but – unfortunately – our DMs’ appearances were getting rather unreliable. And, because we were running more the next session according to what was last played, the sessions were somewhat behind the printed schedule. (This would be a bigger problem if we had people just wandering in to play a session of D&D Encounters after playing one in Melbourne the previous week. We don’t, though).
So, when came the next occasion where neither Josh nor Mick were available to DM, I pitched in. And kept on DMing after that. Let’s face it: I really, really enjoy DMing. I’ve been doing it for probably over 25 years now, which is longer than Josh has been alive. (It’s a lot scary, let me tell you).
One of the first things I was able to do was get the game back on schedule. We were about to come up to the next season (the latest): “Lost Crown of Neverwinter”, and that had a Game Day scheduled for it. And we were about 5 weeks behind on “Dark Legacy of Evard”. So, with the (enthusiastic) permission of my players, I ran 5 sessions of Dark Legacy in one night. It took about 3 hours. And so we were set for Lost Crown – and to have the actual game day on the actual game day.
The fact that I could run 5 D&D Encounter sessions in about 3 hours has a little to do with much of the setting up/administrative work of running a session could be dispensed with, and a lot to do with how fast I am at running D&D combats. It’s something that is a little bit of a problem with my D&D Encounter sessions, actually. Is it really worth your while coming for only 30 minutes of D&D?
And so we get to the story of my strangest D&D Encounters session. We’re midway through Lost Crown of Neverwinter – which was a really enjoyable adventure – and the group has been sucked down into the sewers by a trap triggered by the Dead Rat Gang. Or Drowned Rat Gang, as the last survivor seemed to be. There, the group had to fight two green slimes and eight kraken tentacles. The tentacles were minions.
Throughout Lost Crown, we’d normally had two groups at once, and this wasn’t the exception. Mick was running one group, and I ran the other. Mine only had four players, but they were good players. A cavalier, mage, cleric and – erm – slayer? I’m not quite sure. Might have been another cleric, actually. With only four players, I dropped a green slime from the encounter to make it 1 slime + 8 tentacles.
So, round one: the tentacles come up and start grabbing one of the PCs. So, Chris’s mage comes up and casts Beguiling Strands. Hmm – that’s it for half the minions. Meanwhile, the first slime drops from the ceiling, only to discover that both the cleric and the paladin are dealing radiant damage. Guess what it’s vulnerable to? After the first round, it’s almost dead, and the tentacles don’t look like they’re going to be much more entertainment – not with Chris around. So, I readjust the encounter back to its original form, and drop a Green Slime on Chris’s head.
Chris says “Ow”. Then he says, “Burning Hands!”, and that’s it for the second slime. The rest of the tentacles likewise were destroyed, and two-and-a-half rounds in, the encounter was over.
The session didn’t have much role-playing in it – although I suppose I could have played up the half-drowned thief a bit more. Well, I did, but even so the group isn’t full of massive roleplayers. So, after about 20 minutes of actual play, we were done. Heh. Off for dinner, and time to prepare for Lair Assault afterwards.
However, that’s only half the story: you see, Mick’s table were having a lot more trouble with the monsters. Mick had a table of mostly strikers and defenders, and certainly no-one with radiant damage, nor a mage with area effects. After about 70 minutes, the group were all down and bleeding to death, and only the arrival of the Sons of Alagondar (who were trying to work out what the hell was going on) saved them.
The rest of my group, who had watched this in much amusement, caught me up on it as I returned with my dinner. If my sessions run at under 30 minutes entirely too often, Mick’s table will run 60-90 minutes. There’s two factors there: Mick tends to score the less experienced players, and my rules mastery. Even when I have the newer players, my tables tend to go very quickly.
It was a big lesson on how you can get really different table dynamics based on class choices and DM style. After we finished the Lost Crown season, I ran half of a follow-up Dungeon adventure to continue the story of those characters in Neverwinter, since the players liked them so much. We got through 2 skill challenges and 4 combat encounters (and some roleplaying) in about 3 hours. I’m big on story progression and combat, but much less so on roleplaying. Not to say that I can’t roleplay, but I don’t emphasize it the same way Mick does. (Mick will very likely go on a lot of tangents, and he’s not a D&D specialist or rules lawyer the way I am).
Later this week, we’ll be creating characters for the new season of D&D Encounters. It will be an interesting experience… especially as I think we don’t have enough copies of the D&D books to go around. I’ll expect I’ll jot down their choices in my games diary, so I can create full character sheets for them before we start the adventure proper the week after.
It is interesting to see the same adventure behave wildly differently with different groups. Even when I was a linking feature as the GM, I ran a Doctor Who session with two groups and one group really didn’t liek it, while the other got really into it.
There were a few factors going on there (including the player who was playing The Doctor leaving early in the first game, turning that character into an NPC and rather souring any Doctor-based conclusion) but it was a great example to me of how the same start can turn into a very different play experience.
Aside: I agreew ith you that 30 minutes of gameplay isn’t really worth coming out for. If you view D&D Encoutners as a sort of pickup game – something that can be ran as a demonstration at game shops – then I suppose the shorter play time makes sense since you can’t get random passers-by to commit to hours of play. If the goal is to get more mainstream roleplayers to try it out, though, then 30 minutes does seem a bit minimal an investment.
George Q