Er-Eret Session #3 – postmortem

Whereas Session #2 was good, this one was, in my opinion, not very good.

Let’s get right into it.

Cool

I didn’t kill anybody. I was afraid that I would seriously mess people up with the second encounter. It had four level 4 creatures and a level 5, and I thought that surely everyone would be pretty fucked up, being only level three. Not so! The worst that happened was that I managed to drop Jesse/Ratha once, in the second fight, towards the very end.

I’m a lot less worried about these guys, despite the fact that we have no defender in the group.

Evan’s game is next week and the week after. OK, strictly speaking, this isn’t related to my game, except that I’m really looking forward to a couple weeks’ of not DMing.

Not Cool

Journey-style play. I really, really don’t know how to do this. This is probably the biggest issue that colored everything else.

I sort of wanted some interesting bits to happen on the way to the Main Thing. I worked on some ideas, and I thought how it should play out. I was unable to communicate any of them, or the ones that I did either confused people or didn’t come off very well.

This is a bummer. My mode of thinking where I sort of go through where, in my head, I explain what’s happening to the players, just didn’t engage properly or I didn’t do it thoroughly enough. Or somethin’.

Magic items & treasure. This sort of conflicts with journey-style play, in that it seems strange to give them money and whatnot when they won’t have an opportunity to spend it for kind of a while. My plan was that, instead of giving out a bunch of treasure, I’d give out a bunch of magic items that people could afford to buy if they had treasure, and they were fairly sensible ones based on what I knew would be coming up.

I’ve also deviated somewhat from the established progression, having leveled everyone so quickly.

Choices. There were some parts where I did not take into account player choice as much as I should have. In another case, I meant to provide a couple of choices, but it didn’t work out. This was compounded by my attempts at journey-style play; I didn’t have some of the fallback stuff that I feel like you get for free.

Outdoor-style encounters are also trickier in that, depending on how they happen, there’s a lot of leeway in how they start off.