After about seven months of weekly play, typically with 3-hour sessions, my Wednesday group finished Curse of Strahd last night.

They found the last of the artefacts at the end of the previous session, and – having already found Strahd – they began the session by confronting him in his lair.

Two rounds and one action later, he was dead.

It turns out that a wizard casting telekinesis on Strahd works really well and allows the paladin to smite him lots with a certain sword!

The shortness of this fight might upset some groups, but not mine. This is what the main adventure was all about: finding a way to defeat Strahd. They found it, they used it, and he died. Hooray! It is the same thing with Rise of Tiamat. I have run that adventure three times now, and in each case, Tiamat did not show up. The players were good enough to stop the summoning, and they walked away very happy.

I do feel that occasionally we put too much emphasis on the final fight. It has got to be epic. It has got to go ten rounds. When, in a lot of cases, it is hard to balance it that way because (a) players will be players and (b) what if it goes wrong? Just as players can defeat the bad guys in two rounds, perhaps a run of horrendous luck goes against the players!

(Not to say that I cannot run fights that go for ten rounds, but that often relies on me knowing the players well. Writing something that works for everyone in a published adventure? Urgh!)

Honestly, if you want longer fights, just put in more foes. Solo creatures, even with Legendary resistance, tend not to work that well on their own.

Oh, and the wizard of our group? He knows what is going on. Telekinesis does not have a saving throw!

As we had finished the session after less than an hour, I dove them right into the new campaign (It is a City of Greyhawk game, which really excites me as none of these players has played in the World of Greyhawk before).

But Strahd? He is dead. The paladin becoming the new Count of the realm. The wizard has been corrupted by the Amber Temple and might eventually try to overthrow him – but for now, he is going to research in the Amber Temple to find out if he can become a lich. And the cleric and Ireena are on a trip to see the rest of the Forgotten Realms.

(I dislike the Ravenloft setting. For this game, Barovia is an isolated county, just to the west of Cormyr in the Forgotten Realms. I expect the paladin will have fun trying to explain it to everyone in Cormyr what happened – and explain the lack of taxes for the last few decades. Strahd, as it turns out, finds tax collectors delicious!)