Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Die rolls and becoming a wererat

My online Fifth edition game has had its sixth session. I'll be honest.
While we still have a ways to go before we master the Roll20 interface, we have reached the point where it just feels like we're playing Dungeons and Dragons.

The jarl who we serve (and I'm sure there will eventually be some kind of breaking point if we play long enough) sent the party to investigate the near murder of the son of a noble. So, crime investigation. 

In my experience, those can be rough. If players miss clues or misconstrue them, it can throw everything in a tailspin. There's a reason the Gumshoe System was designed, where you will always get the clues, or InSpectre, where the players help add the clues.

In one short-lived but hilarious campaign I was in, the players got drafted to solve a murder mystery. Instead, they just burned the house down to solve the problem.

Fortunately, some of the other players who are smarter than me figured out that a wererat infected the noble's younger son and then tricked the older son into trying to kill him.

It probably didn't hurt that it was blatantly evil person turned out to be the wererat.

In another campaign I was in, one player was incredibly successful at dealing with intrigue by using genre instead of proof. He'd just go gunning for the NPC most likely to be secretly evil. Kind of turned the campaign about the characters being the real villains, though.

Story wise, two things happened that I am pretty sure will have future ramifications. First, we ran into a 'random' ghoul who had distinctive jewelry. And this is a low fantasy world so the walking dead are very unusual. Second, our druid got infected with lycanthropy.

Mechanically, the most interesting thing that happened is that our dwarf cleric kept on rolling ones when he used the macros. Literally at least six times and I want to say ten times but memory is probably building up the story. Next year the story will be that it was twenty rolls.

And, of course, when he finally just used the die roll tool, he rolled a twenty and critted the wererat out of any chance of becoming a reoccurring villain.

Right now, I would say the two coolest things about Roll20 for me are still getting to play with distant friends and making short sessions feel satisfying. If I had to drive somewhere for two hours of D&D, that'd feel like a waste of time. Doing it at home feels like a good use of time.

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