Good bye fun campaign

It is time I accepted it. The most recent D&D campaign I’ve been in has fizzled out.

Moment of silence.

Okay. What did I get out of it? It was my first experience with Roll20 and it was my first experience with fifth edition, outside of being in a play testing group. I got to virtually hang out with three old frIends who I haven’t had a chance to hang with in years and meet some other cool folks.

I got a Hell of a lot of it.

We had a total of fourteen sessions (I counted) and I only missed one of them. We were third level and fourth was clearly in sight. (Our DM used milestones instead of tracking experience points but we just saved our Viking village from demons and actually got tokens of esteem so that sure looked like a milestone to me)

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wish the campaign would keep going. Beyond being a lot of fun and letting me hang out with distant friends, we were just hitting the point where we were really starting to be heroes and deciding where we wanted the story to go.

Still, it was a campaign that was played over three different time zones and where a good chunk of the players were parents (one of the key concepts for the campaign was adult responsibilities had to come first. And, yes, I can’t say that about every game I’ve been in) Running from April to January, I’d say we had a good run.

Good night, Late Lurkers. May we eventually rise again.

Our DM says it’s time for demons

Session 14 of the Late Lurkers

(For those of you keeping track, I didn’t do a write up of session 13. That’s because I couldn’t make it due to holiday travel. My character didn’t die and that’s all I know :P)

This was another session where only three of us were able to make it. As I’ve said before, playing online through Roll20 makes the game possible at all and gives us a lot of flexibility but there’s sometimes only so much we can bend.

The Nordic-style village that is the characters’ home was getting attacked by Manes (really weak demons, by the way) Amusingly enough, the  adventurers are all more disposable villagers so we’re more like dog catchers than heroes :D And we got stuck with the job of finding out where the Manes were coming from.

The Manes turned out to be the slaves of a Shadow Demon (easily the least imaginative named demon in D&D and that includes the old Type 1 - X naming convention) It had been accidentally freed from a forgotten altar (There’s a shocking number of those in the setting. It’s a low fantasy setting that may have been a high fantasy setting in the past)

Frankly, a Shadow Demon was a brutal fight for three third-level characters. Luckily, our druid cast Faerie Fire on it, negating a lot of its shadow abilities. And the cleric used radiant energy attacks, which burned the demon like an oil-soaked moth on a griddle. 

Afterwards, we got what might have been our first major reward from the Jarl. I even got a hovel of my very own.

That was a really fun session. Yeah, it consisted of two fights with some skill checks in between. However, they were good fights and stuff happened that furthered our characters’ stories. That’s pretty good for two and half hour session.

While it apparently wasn’t easy, judging by the DM’s swearing, the dynamic lighting and sound effects from Roll20 were pretty good.

A bumbling side trek

Session 12 of the Late Lurkers

It had been close to two months since the last time we had played. Of course, part of the whole deal of this campaign was that adult responsibilities had to come first so that wasn’t a big deal.

Thanks to Thanksgiving, half the folks who planned on making it weren’t able to play. Playing via Roll20 and the power of the internet makes things very flexible but you can only bend so much.

So we ended up with only three players. The GM toned things down so he didn’t wipe us out and he made it a short session.

The three party members who were there split off from the rest as we followed two different trails of the cult members we were dealing with. We ended up finding a tiny hamlet where one of the residents was a secret cult member, complete with zombies and a living rug. The GM has a real tendency to use living furniture.

I’ll be honest. It was tough to get into character this time. Between the gap between plays and being down so many players, I think it was tough to find our footing and I think we let the NPCs bamboozle us more than we should have. I just became a spell caster and I didn’t use any of my new spells.

That said, our biggest goal, hanging out with long distance friends, went off without a hitch. We had fun and, once we realized that there were a smokehouse full of zombies, it all fell into place. And setting the place on fire and maybe starting a forest fire, that felt good.

I try to think about how Roll20 affect our experiences. At its best, we forget about it and just play. Even though this was a relatively weak session (and, honestly, this campaign is strong enough that a ‘weak’ session is still a pleasure), it still was fluid and moved well.

And I have a feeling we will be a lot quicker to judge potential cultists.

Wait, we released a Lovecraftian horror?

Session Eleven of the Late Night Lurkers

Real life stuff (including being a later time zone than everyone else), I ended joining the game about halfway through the session. We had been exploring a cave/dungeon in a mountain pass where travelers kept dying.

And I came in right when we were in the middle of a fight with a variety of fungus monsters and in a fog of poisonous spores. The group had also found a mildly toxic fungus that gave dark vision so I decided my character ate the wrong mushrooms and spent the first half thinking the entire party had become gnomes with shoes with curly toes.

We eventually discovered that the cave had been turned into a temple for a xenophobic cult devoted to a corrupted worship of basically a Cthulhoid deity. By corrupted, I mean traditional worshippers of Lovecraftian horrors would feel they made theological mistakes.

The long and the short of our evil temple of eldritch horror experience is that we accidentally released a giant tentacle horror into the world but, by adjusting the statues with the help of divine guidance (the spell), we got it to appear somewhere else.

This is basically the second time we’ve released some kind of supernatural horror into the world. We joked about how it’s going to go hang out with the mummy lord we freed.

We also hit a milestone by completing this adventure so we are all now third level (yea!) As a fighter, this will be fun because I get to choose a path.

I’m going with Eldritch Knight, although it’s not the mechanically strongest choice for me. In part, it’s because it is an interesting story choice and makes sense for the character’s scholar background. I also want to get access to attacks that use different energy types. But really, after dealing with legitimate light issues thanks to Roll20’s dynamic lighting, I want access to the light cantrip! 

The latest night when we almost had a TPK

Session Ten of the Late Night Lurkers

This was the session where almost had a total party kill come right out of the blue. Plenty of other stuff happened but that's what we are going to remember. Forever. And no one was more horrified while it almost happened as the DM :)

I wasn't able to log in on time (you know, adult life) so I missed our druid getting cured of being a wererat and the party agreeing to help the dwarf city where she was cured by checking out a cursed mountain path that killed everyone who tried to go through it. I joined in at the tail end of a fight with vine blights, which I have never actually encountered before.

(It's worth noting most of us are the unfavored by our Jarl so we are usually sent on nigh suicide missions)

Quick overview from there: we followed the trail of the vine blights to a foul cave where we fought a pack of ghouls, a lone skeleton sentry and two rat swarms. The vine blights and the ghouls were relatively rough fights but not unreasonable.

(I will note that the druid neutralized the rat swarms with an entangle spell. When someone asked if we could set the vines on fire to kill the rats, the DM reasonably ruled that the vines weren't really there and the rats were held in place by magic. If the vines were real, the rats could just scamper through them.

The reason why I note this is I have seen the effects of flavor text argued during games, sometimes in the name of suspension of disbelief. This can be a problem because it can throw off the balance of spells by giving them new limits or additional powers)

Okay, so here it is. We found a treasure chest that had strange runes on it. The dwarf cleric goes over to examine the runes. They turn out to be eyes. It's a mimic, perfectly reasonably and traditional monster.

And it crits on the surprise round and drops the cleric from full to zero before we are in regular rounds. The ranger runs up to protect the unconscious cleric. Misses. The mimic rolls another crit and the ranger is down too.

This is where half of us started talking about beating a hasty retreat. And the druid decided to run up and fight the mimic hand to hand since they still had shillelagh up from the last fight. So my fighter closed as well while the warlock and the elf fighter (whose player had to sign off early so the DM was playing him very defensive) The mimic moved and critted the warlock and then my fighter dropping both of us.

Keep in mind, thanks to Roll20, all of the rolls were in the open. None of the rolls were fudged. The DM was more horrified than any of us. He's been running games for over thirty years and he'd never seen a fight go down like this. We really thought we're looking at a total party kill.

Luckily, the druid found a magic chest that was jumping that turned out to be some kind of magic leash for the mimic. (No, this wasn't the DM pulling a desperate deus ex mechina. He has included special items like this in other encounters.) She froze the mimic and was able to kill it.

Some emergency healing later and no one lost a character. For a little bit, it looked like the characters whose players weren't there would be the only ones left. And we still haven't found whose really in charge of the cave that's turned the pass into a death trap but that's for next session.

A lot happened in the session but the mimic fight is what we are going to remember from it. It is the take away. Even as it looked like we were all going to be rolling up new characters, we all agreed this was going to be a great story. And we will be telling that story for literally years to come.

In total, six players ended up playing during the night, albeit there was only a short time when there were all six of us there. That pushed more of a combat session than a role playing session. Which, in all honesty, is really one of Roll20's strengths. If you want to have a dice free, role playing heavy session (which is a totally cool thing to do), you can just use Skype.

Talking? We haven't tried that before

Session Nine of the Late Lurkers

This was the session where we got all the stuff for our first fetch quest, the components we need to cure the druid of lycanthrope. It was also the first session with a new player who promises to completely change the party dynamics. But in a good way :)

The two big scenes in the session were a straight up fight with an ogre zombie in an old battle field (where we got the jawbone of a horse slain in battle needed for the cure) and an encounter with a cult of some kind of elder god.

The first was fun because we really had to get tactical against a monster who could potentially drop party members in a hit. For the second week in a row :D

However, the significant event was out encounter with the cultists. And not just because it hinted at Lovecraftian horrors (and as a Call of Cthulhu lover, I like that)

Ulric, the new guy and the warlock who might turn out to be evil, has a much higher charisma than almost anyone else in the party. We do have an occasionally played bard but he's a skald whose motto is literally 'I advocate violence' 

(To be fair, not only has the DM not implemented alignments, I am really not prepared to describe any of the characters as good. Loyal to the jarl is as good as it's going to get. Ulric is just a different flavor than the rest of us)

He managed to talk our way OUT of that fight (as opposed to our dwarf cleric who does the opposite) Since we were outnumbered, that may have been a good thing. Particularly since the DM said that afterwards. And we didn't even desecrate their sacrificed member in the name of looting afterwards.

Yes, we've reached the point where we are really asking ourselves what is our moral compass. And since we are in a fantasy ninth century Norse culture, that might not be all that altruistic or nice. But keep in mind, this is fun. 

When we started the campaign via Roll20, we focused on the mechanical side of the game. We were learning how to use the interface and, with sessions being two to three hours long, that really meant that combat was the centerpiece. And I was cool with that being what would we get.

Instead, characters are developing. And I wonder if we will be pushing more towards more and more of a sandbox environment with the players setting the goals.

Everyone unleashes evil undead at some point, right?

When we had the eighth session in what the DM has nicknamed the Late Lurkers since we play after everyone's kids have gone to bed, only three players were able to make it.

There are now seven of us players in the game, although the two new players haven't actually had a session with the rest of us. The DM's whole goal adding players was to avoid having sessions like this :P Well, at least by playing on Roll20, no one had to actually drive to someone's house to find folks missing. (And, in the defense of two players, they gave definite no's ahead of time)

So we ended up having a side quest in the middle of our fetch quest. Although this side quest might end up having repercussions that last far longer than our fetch quest.

Short version: the three of us stumbled upon the tomb of a elven king. It helped that the entrance had been cleared by some now dead tomb raiders. We weathered some encounters with a lion, skeletons and grey oozes without too many serious problems.

Then we opened up the tomb of the king and unleashed the mummy that he had become. Three second level characters against a CR 3 monster isn't an instant kill but we were clearly outmatched and our healing couldn't keep up with his damage. Fortunately, the dwarf cleric had his daughter's ring (we found it in a hidden fountain) which make the mummy think the dearf was her. He convinced the mummy to leave us alone and leave. We were hoping the lion we had left alive would do enough damage to the mummy that we could take him in a second bout but the lion ran away.

So, we ended with a royal tomb's worth of treasure but we had unleashed a relatively powerful undead onto the countryside. 

Mechanically, this session let us explore ideals, bonds and flaws. Basically, we knew opening the king's tomb was clearly a bad idea but of course we wanted to. Looking at our character aspects, which reflected the pseudo Viking culture we were a part of, glory and treasure were too big a driving force.

Storywise, it's fun to push a character's flaws. Yeah, we were a bunch of greedy idiots but that made things a lot more interesting. And this side quest which we played because we were missing too many players may actually create an ongoing villain who could be a part of the game for a while.

This is getting to be a regular thing

We had our seventh session in my first Roll20 campaign. It's hard to believe that we have actually played that many sessions. Despite playing twice a month at best, it feels like the game is just flying along.

Part of that is because the DM, Bart, has had decades of experience running games so he's able to streamline things. For instance, I've noticed that he follows the Order of the Stick's rule for random encounters. You only have one per journey because it gets repetitive otherwise :D Not that Bart's encounters are actually random. 

He also frames the game like a movie, going from important scene to important scene and skipping the transitions in between. While I love the Fellowship of the Ring, I think that Tolkien's detailed, step-by-step description of leaving the Shire has done a world of damage to DMs.

We determined the best person to consult for a cure for our druid's lycanthropy was a dwarven wizard in a city under the mountains south of our jarl's land. We fought a giant spider and some centipedes on the way there.

While our time in the dwarven city included overhearing a heist getting planned and getting set on a fetch quest by the wizard, the real highlight was Shad really getting into character. And by character, I mean being hysterically obnoxious to all the NPCs by acting clueless about all social norms. In his own society.

To cure Ilva's lycanthropy, we would need the jawbone of a horse killed in battle, the corpse of a giant rat and a hundred gold. The wizard was a little vague about the gold being a component or a fee.

On our way to a battlefield to find that jawbone, we were ambushed by four corrupted human thugs and a rabid blink dog. I honestly think that Bart underestimated how deadly the fight would be. Our bard wasn't there that night and the thugs had two attacks and pack tactics that gave them bonuses to hit. It came surprisingly close to a total part kill.

For me, I had gone over some of my specific powers as a fighter, the nuances of playing fifth edition. In particular, I realized I had misunderstood the Protect fighting style. So, I went into this session prepared to handle the fights like they were board games.

In this fight, I used every trick I could pull, including heavy use of terrain to hold our right flank. I eventually got dropped to zero (so did the Druid) but by then, it was enough to for the two standing party members to win the fight and save us.

So, for me at least, the sessions was less about developing some game skills as opposed to Roll20 skills. On the other hand, we (particularly Bart) are getting used to Roll20 enough that we can have a smooth fight without thinking about it.

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.

Into the darkness with Roll20

I hadn't planned on writing about every time the first campaign I've played on Roll20 went but since folks seemed to enjoy me doing it, I'll keep on writing about it until it gets too monotonous. Since we've only been playing a couple times a month, it won't be that frequent.

This session's major learning curve was that the DM bought the Monster Manual as a Roll20 resource. Now he can pop in fully statted monsters with a mouse click. The downside is that, as near as we can tell, it has to be integrated at the start so he had to start a 'new' campaign so all our character sheets got wiped out :D

For me, the amazing thing that Roll20 did was enforce lighting conditions and vision restrictions. My fighter is the token human in the group with three of the other five member having some kind of dark vision.

So, when the Goliath bard, the only other character with normal vision, moved away from me with his light spell, I was suddenly in the dark. By the time I lit a torch, it was a struggle to find the rest of the party. Since everyone else was either less affected by the dark or had their own light source, I'm pretty sure no one else knew how blind I was.

Frankly, that was awesome. Kind of frustrating at the time but still awesome. Roll20 allowed each of us to only see what our character could see so the other players had no idea how lost I was in the dark. It was more 'realistic' and will make coordination more important in the future.

Oh, for anyone that cares, the campaign is set in a fantasy Norway and we finished cleaning out a cave lair of goblin raiders and their orcs mercenaries for the local lord, although the goblin chief got away. And, since we're using milestones, everyone is now second level.

The clicking of a campaign

Over the last couple months, I've been part of an online D&D (Fifth Edition) campaign, one that has the specific aim that everyone who is involved has a life full of adult responsibilities. Which means we only play for a couple hours and we have an irregular schedule. We're also spread out over three different time zones.

The other night, we had our fourth session, counting the introduction session where the DM introduced us all. (All of the players are from different campaigns he ran in the past. I'd like to think this is a greatest hits campaign :D) And that session is where things really clicked. 

Clicked as far as the game is concerned. As far as everyone getting along and having fun, we had that down from day one. But the first couple sessions were basically spent trying to get to grips with the Roll20 interface and each one was basically a minor combat apiece.

Session number four, we finally had a working knowledge of how to use the interface. We also started to do the basic D&D 101 experience, a dungeon crawl. The familiarity and simplicity of that helped us move things along. And the characters' personalities started to come out.

I now know the core concept of my fighter's personality, which is sacrifice. He is always first in battle and will do his best to define the front but not for glory or valor. His whole schtick is to protect everyone else, no matter the cost. Now that that has solidified as a motivation, I know what to do in any given situation. And I think everyone else is in a similar position.

Campaign are fragile creatures. They can break or fizzle out so easily. But now, we have a sense of ourselves as a group, which is a big step.

Two Sought Adventure

After literally years of being interested but nothing ever getting off the ground, I finally played a session on Roll20.

Roll20 is an online site that serves as an interface where you can play tabletop RPGs. Dice rolling, maps where you can move icons, dynamic character sheets, etc. All the conveniences of a game table without having to leave the house.

When we moved to Arizona, I looked into a number of options so I could keep on playing with friends back in the Midwest. While Yucatá did just a fine for board games, I've used Skype, FaceTime, email and forums to try and play RPGs. They all work but none of them really shine.

Roll20 was suggested to me but figuring out how to use it was more than I was prepared to handle on my own (particularly with an infant) However, when an old friend decided to get a game going with his disparate friends scattered over the country, I was on board. I openly admitted I was glad to have someone else do the heavy lifting.

Amusingly enough, the campaign has already had one of the problems I've seen in almost every online game I've been in that lasted more than one session. Attrition. Around a dozen people voiced interest. Eight people signed up. Four people showed up for the introduction session. And only two of us showed up for the first actual play session.

Which may very well have been for the best. The three of us (two players and DM) spent most of the session fumbling through the interface. With more people, it might have been a lot more frustrating and we might not have learned as much about how to use Roll20.

(It's a fifth edition D&D campaign and our first session basically consisted of fighting a goblin)

First of all, I had fun playing. I got to hang out virtually and the DM has been a friend for nearly twenty years. It was really good to spend time with him.

Second, actually learning how to use Roll20 is good. I can see how, once you have your macros set up so the system handles all the mechanics for you, this could be faster than face-to-face.

My current end goal with Roll20 is to run some Quiet Year later this year.