Session review, 09/06/09

Last night was the first official session of the relaunch of my campaign. Honestly, it didn’t go as badly as I thought it would. I did okay, DMing-wise, and everyone was flexible enough to work with each other despite the fact that two of the members are still total strangers to the rest of the party.

Things I should have covered that I didn’t – I forgot to have one of the players describe his character, and neglected to describe some of the NPCs in as much detail as they should have been described. I will have to correct that next time. Also, the party traveled together without incident for about a month, and I summarized over it. Yes, this helped with gameplay, but I should have had them roll Intelligence checks or something to see what they figured out about each other in that time (everyone seemed to keep to themselves as much as possible even though they were traveling together, so its not like they were sharing sob stories about their character history on their own). Will have to be more mindful of that as they travel together in the future. I also totally forgot to have the new characters roll spot checks for Gazit’s eyes – they are odd, and mark something very important about her past/abilities. I will have to remember to have them do that next time too, in a retcon kind of way.

Things that went well – like I said, everyone was flexible about getting the party together, and even though they knew out-of-character they they were supposed to form a party, they still roleplayed it out very well. Certain things were noticed that implied troublesome things about the new characters, but still they managed to stick together. They didn’t even throw me for any loops this time, and did a great job investigating the plot hook I threw at them. They were actually very creative about that, and managed to talk their way out of a battle, using the skills at their disposal to avoid it instead of randomly slaughtering NPCs. So very good on them, and we stopped right after that, so I hope what’s next will be worth it to them.

Other problems – the only other thing that I need to keep in mind is that one of the new characters, Abaddon (played by Alex) is EXTREMELY overpowered. This is not because of the numbers on his sheet, he just reeeeeeeally knows what he’s doing and how to play his character to the maximum potential. Luckily, the other new character, Galyn, is played by someone (Forrest) that also knows the game, and the rules, really well, so he acts as a great buffer between Alex and the rest of us. Yes, as a DM I should know the rules better, but I don’t, and my focus is really to have fun with this and not worry so much about the technicalities. Anyway, I will need to “beef up” encounters in the future to make them more challenging for Abaddon, and the rest of the party by proxy.

This means that I have a bit more editing to do for next week’s session (though not nearly as much as I had to do for yesterday). They have found potetntial help, but this help is going to test them to prove their loyalty to the good side. This was originally going to be a relatively easy test, and they will still think it’s going to be, but they’ll be misinformed about what they’re facing. Mwahaha. Basically all I have to do is make some of their enemies in this encounter higher level than I planned, and maybe throw a monster in to boot.

So, work for next week – make the upcoming fight more challenging, and adjust treasure accordingly (if its going to be hard, the reward should be worth it). Refamiliarize myself with the bad guys’ classes, too, so I won’t have to turn to the book for information every two seconds. Make sure that Joel describes his character, Dwyr, like he should have last time, and give better descriptions of the NPCs. Have Galyn and Abaddon roll spot checks to notice how weird Gazit’s eyes are.

That’s all for now. If writing things out like this helps me next week, then I’ll probably start writing reviews like this after each session we have. Like always, look for more later.