I caught an Intellect Devourer to the face and was reduced to seven Intelligence. I lost all of my cognitive ability to plan attacks and execute strategy. by the time we all got back to Troll Skull alley, I've really just become the bouncer of the joint with a fondness for our chef's soup
My group's party just got stuck in a maze, and for them it seems to be endless!(im the DM). its a lot of fun for me, but when it comes to my players they seem to struggle with puzzles so they're having a hard time getting out of the maze, but everyone is having fun!
In my last game my fellow adventure's nickname had been 'Stabby'. He ended the game with a potion of speed, a shortsword of speed and an extra attack option. He ran up and stabbed the undead spell caster 5 times, killing it easily. It was the best ending to a session that I've ever seen.
I had a situation like that before. Our party (numbering three at the time) were ambushed by twelve meaty orc bois. We were doing fairly well but then the warlock (who had teleported across the map for reasons I don't entirely comprehend) was knocked unconscious. Then, the ranger who was next to me also got knocked out. I had a choice. Did I stabilize the ranger and hope that she could get up, or did I try to take out one of the orcs next to the warlock? The following is a transcript of my logic:
The Ranger's right here...
But porridge.
But I might get overwhelmed.
But porridge!
Eventually, I decided to fire at the orcs near the warlock, which meant he had one less to deal with when/if he got back up. The ranger managed a nat 20 on her death save, so she got up well enough. She's still a bit salty at me, but have you tried the warlock's porridge? It's good stuff, man.
In our last session we were looking for the friends of our bard. (Party: female half-elf bard, male dwarf cleric, male half-orc barbarian and male wood elf druid (me))
Context/Backstory: Our bard seems to have stolen something, from a guy who turned out to be some powerful crime lord in the city she's from. When our group was resting at an inn nearby, someone entered the room the bard and my druid were sleeping in and left a threatening letter: [Heard you were coming to town. We have some business to conclude. Meet me in the alley behind The Fallen Man tonight. Bring your new friends if you want, but if you try anything your old friends will pay the price.]
We then went into the city. Our bard and cleric then planned that (most likely accompanied by our barbarian) they would try some ruse when they'd meet with the bad guy, while my druid would turn into a cat and search through the bad guys' place to look for her friends. But first, we wanted to see if her friends were actually in danger, or if they were safe, that we'd tell them to lay low for a bit. We found three of her friends: Topaz (male Tiefling) was hiding in the back of a fellow tiefling's (his name is Red) magic item shop, Jym (male Human) was at the market (Topaz brought him back, while we went to look for Desi) and Desi (female Half-Orc) was in a pit fighting club. The only one of our bard's friends, who's still missing, is a female Tabaxi called Three Thundercloud. We made it back to the Tiefling's shop and our session stopped when he locked the door behind us.
While there was no fighting, we had a lot of RPing and it was really fun xD one very memorable moment
I have a campaign where I was like, ‘let’s put my 4 level 1 players up against about 200 monsters!’. The DMG said it was a medium fight. So, 43 Crawling Claws in, at least one of my players were permadead. They wouldn’t have lived without an acid dragons breath to the face.
Ok. So I run an arena always recruiting PvP campaign. I had a fun idea, so I went to the DM’s guide and calculated things. Crawling Claws are CR 0, s9 10 xp, so 200 of them would make a Medium level fight. Or so I thought.
I dumped a bucket of 43 of them, and a warlock was bludgeoned 3 times over their health, a ranger and sorcerer were knocked unconscious, and the hexblade with a shield lived. I mad a quick call, since this was in the Arctic, that their dead hand bodies died of hypothermia. Then, the last enemy before the next wave appeared. And my warlock had said ‘i breathe acid on it’ and barely killed it.
I see the problem - multiple attackers are always more problematic than solo attackers even 23 ac will get hit once and its a crit with 20 attacks per round on average and at first level thats maybe all she wrote. - the DMG guide even applies a difficulty multiplier for groups. (no extra experience earnt from the multiplication. Its just to try to limit the death by mob accidents)
A medium challenge for 4 characters is an xp 200 cap - 50 each. The crawling claws at 10 each, with the little handful easily surpassing the 15+ group maximum on multipliers which caps out at x4, would have had a challenge multipier of X4 and 43x10xp? x4 gives 1720 estimated threat (but only 430 xp earnt)
In other words - unless:
They all built heavy armour variant humans with heavyarmour master they were going to die in round one,
(or the party had initiative, dropped oil, somehow set it alight and stood in it, letting each attacker die when it tried climbing them. Sure they would have died on round two of the flame but sometimes you have to aoe yourself)
But still, ouch - experienced similar when a DM dropped 100 'mini' violet fungi on a party with a fighter, a ranger and hexblade of level 4, 'they didn't have 10' reach wasn't really much of a consolation considering the map was three colours: tiny dot of the party, little bit of unoccupied cavern and surrounding fungus. Dodge was the fighters only hope to stave off instant death and they relied on the ever present reaction from the fungi wandering past to kill the rest of us to get an attack in. Bonfires and repetitive wrist strain from round after round of attrition build up :)
My Venomfang encounter was challenging for both sides (me as the DM, and the players, but only at first). My table's party of 6 pcs and 2 NPCs spent time in Thundertree's barracks plotting their attack on the dragon when I decided that Venomfang would try to go on the offensive and parley for their treasure in exchange for their lives. Well, the dragonborn paladin who is an adamant follower of Bahomet was having none of it. I played up Venomfang's attempts to convert the dragonborn to embrace his true potential with the power that flowed through his blood. Unfortunately, the paladin missed his attack, and took a breath-weapon that even when he made the save, left him with only like 10 HP. Then, VF grappled the paladin with his claws and flew up, dropping him after 20 feet in height, which took him out of the fight. The rest of the party lobbed ranged attacks until the half-orc barbarian jumped from the roof onto the back of the dragon, which then meant that he went on a ride high into the sky. The barbarian had a 10' spiked chain that I applied a series of checks to allow him to throw around the dragon's neck and use as a reign. Eventually, though, the dragon was able to shake him, and he took a 210' fall, but because barbarian rage gave him resistance to bludgeoning damage, was only down a little over half his HP (facepalm & smh). Between that and a elf ranger with ridiculous rolls for his longbow, the dragon went down to half HP quickly (due to combat economy, I maxed out VF's hit dice for HP)
The fight then moved to the wizard's tower and I was going to have the dragon use lair actions. I made the wizard's tower significantly larger than the LMoP map suggested, so there would be room to fly if it came to that. Well, the party grouped up nicely outside the lair, so I had VF go on the offense, and he downed 3 of the 6 that was in the group with another breath weapon (rolled instead of taking the average; party is 4th level). Once again, the barbarian leaped upon the dragon's back, and wrapped his spike chain back around VF's neck. The fight moved into the tower, where the dragon was going to be able to deal with the barbarian one-on-one. It worked, got the barbarian off his back, and he connected with his 2 claws on the half-orc, but the ranger showed up, and began doing some serious damage with his longbow. Our sorcerer fired a chromatic orb, and a wizard connected with a fireball which VF dodged, thankfully, just as he fled. The party successfully drove off Venomfang, dealing 203 damage to him in total out of a total of 208 HP I had maxed him out at.
So last session we are still running through Waterdeep and head up to the Field Wards to stop some fights. Immediately encounter some prick who is dragging "his wife" by the hair. We all have different reasons for stopping this myself (Warlock) and the Rogue like the woman, the two Barbarians like a fight and our Paladin (who is the only Lawful aligned character in a party of Chaos) doesn't like the injustice of it all. He immediately brings out 3 friends I fire off Mirror Image and use a bit of Thaumaturgy to make myself (all 4 of me) look a bit scarier, our "human" Paladin pulls off a shock reveal as he starts spewing black smoke and sprouting skeletal wings!!
As an aside I had already suspected he wasn't quite what he seemed from our first session when we went somewhere dark and he didn't require any light, then when we met Ulkoria of the Watchful Order of Mages and Protectors, as the only two spellcasters we had to sign on to defend Waterdeep and he had to check with the DM that something wouldn't be revealed if he signed this magical contract, plus there were a couple of other things that seemed a bit off but back to the story.
He scares the shit out of me and one of the enemy (everyone else made the saving throw), fight ensues I manage to finish one guy off with Agonising Blast before my view is blocked by the rest of the party which is when I remember my familiar is still sat on the Paladins shoulder from earlier on in the game, the Paladin attacks a guy as he cleaves his sword into the guys shoulder (my turn next) and is trying to retrieve his sword, my little spider familiar crawls down his arm onto the Thug and delivers shocking grasp to finish him off. Fight ends with two guys surrendering the Paladin executes one of them as he is still pissed off (being pissed off triggers his transformation into skeletal winged bastard) worryingly the two Barbarians smiled when the learned this little nugget of information!
I didn't feel like the session I ran was was all that great. We had a person who could not join us so I opted to run a one-off rather than advance the campaign without the missing player. Unfortunately, the adventure I ran was little more than an encounter scenario. The upside was that the battle was pretty fun and my group is one who enjoys a good tactical encounter. We play the campaign again in two weeks.
My last one was just a final boss battle of sorts, Bugbear Chieftain, Dire Wolf, and an Owlbear vs 6 lvl 4's. Encounter took a long time and I was hoping we would get back to town to do some other stuff. But they pretty much got a free direwolf as a buddy, when it rolled double one against being charmed by the group. Didn't even really get a chance to play that out because it got late and erryone was tired, but they rescued the dwarf and are on their way back to town for the next leg of the journey.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Where words fail, swords prevail. Where blood is spilled, my cup is filled" -Cartaphilus
"I have found the answer to the meaning of life. You ask me what the answer is? You already know what the answer to life is. You fear it more than the strike of a viper, the ravages of disease, the ire of a lover. The answer is always death. But death is a gentle mistress with a sweet embrace, and you owe her a debt of restitution. Life is not a gift, it is a loan."
In my last session, we were in Chapter 3 of Dragon Heist. I will put a spoiler box, so no players can blame me if they get a small part of the story spoiled (because most of this isn't in the book at all, I extended some small parts into greater encounters)! This session had some of my players claim it was the greatest session of D&D they had ever had.
My players just finished with Gralhund villa and were promptly arrested. They were put into solitary confinement for ten days, each having to roll constitution saving throws until they got 3 successes, getting 1 point of exhaustion for each failure. Then they were brought into Waterdeep Court where members of the Lord's Alliance reigned as judges, including their buddy Renaer Neverember, on behalf of his father and Laeral Silverhand.
While the magic detective Barnibus Blast wind was the prosecutor and called up several character witnesses, all of their faction agents, some of their employees of Trollskull Tavern (which they actually handpicked from a list I created and conducted interviews before hiring), along with some people they had met in Waterdeep such as Amallia Cassalanter and Esvele Rosznar, who was developing a romantic connection with one of my players). All in all it was shaping up to be a good court session, a good bit of it was me talking to myself as Barnibus and then the witness, but watching my players faces while Barnibus twisted what the witness said into a negative was priceless.
Eventually, each of the charccters had their turn to take the stand, after which Barnibus would again twist their words to make it sound negative, until the last player took the stand and said, "I didn't do [expletive starting with an F] [expletive starting with an S] narrate that." then walked off like a mic drop. All of my players bursted into laughter and Barnibus was stunned.
However, the icing on the cake was when Lady Gralhund walked into the courtroom as she carried the dead body of her husband (whom they liked and left alive). She placed him on the ground and cried out crocodile tears claiming that the group paladin had killed her husband and the group monk had assaulted her in an unforgivable way, both of which were lies and made the players drop their jaws.
Then the coucil of 5 left to deliberate and to a 3-2 vote, the two players that Lady Gralhund claimed did the dirtiest of deeds were sentenced to death the next morning and the case was dismissed. They were left in shock. Thinking of a way out of this, which they couldn't as most had several levels of exhaustion and were surrounded by multiple city guards, they began to admit defeat, until Ontharr Frume, who I relayed as a high ranking member of the Order of the Gauntlet (of which both characters sentenced to death were a part of) had claimed they did their own investigation of the Gralhund Villa and indeed found the tome that proved the Gralhunds were devil worshippers (the players also found this tome) and therefore requested that Lady Gralhund's testimony be thrown out and not allowed to be used in the trial. After a brief deliberation, Laeral Silverhand agreed, and reversed the sentences.
After that, each member of the party had a small little solo run, each took about 5-10 minutes of roleplaying with characters they met previously (a run in with the black viper, Yagra Stonefist showed up and rekindled their relationship, Esvele Rosznar proclaimed her love for the group monk, the Cassalanter's children began obsessing with the group paladin [who had made an attempt to take all of the blame for the group so his allies could live], as well as an engagement party for the group wizard).
All in all, it was one of the best sessions I ever ran, and my players absolutely loved it and they said they were legitimately nervous to take the stand and when the death penalties were revealed, they were shook.
So far, my players absolutely love Dragon Heist, but I have made all of the NPCs have much bigger roles, so that their sub plots have much deeper meanings. They have no idea the identity of the Black Viper, along with others.
I enjoyed that Squigs, thanks for sharing. Although admittedly I wouldnt have had the two rescued from their fate, I love the fact you made an alluded to set of circumstances into a non combat encounter and those playing enjoyed it.
I enjoyed that Squigs, thanks for sharing. Although admittedly I wouldnt have had the two rescued from their fate, I love the fact you made an alluded to set of circumstances into a non combat encounter and those playing enjoyed it.
I enjoyed that Squigs, thanks for sharing. Although admittedly I wouldn't have had the two rescued from their fate, I love the fact you made an alluded to set of circumstances into a non combat encounter and those playing enjoyed it.
Keep enjoying your gaming!
Thanks for the kind words! I didn't want to just kill them off, mainly because they would have thought that was railroading them to be killed just because and I didn't want it to come off that way. I wanted it to have the effect of "Oh my gosh I'm about to die", but then reveal it before the thoughts of "Well he won't actually kill my character this way" starts to enter their minds lol their characters have full backstories that I have plans for after the module, so bar them doing something absolutely stupid and killing themselves, I don't want to take them out that way!
I caught an Intellect Devourer to the face and was reduced to seven Intelligence. I lost all of my cognitive ability to plan attacks and execute strategy. by the time we all got back to Troll Skull alley, I've really just become the bouncer of the joint with a fondness for our chef's soup
My group's party just got stuck in a maze, and for them it seems to be endless!(im the DM). its a lot of fun for me, but when it comes to my players they seem to struggle with puzzles so they're having a hard time getting out of the maze, but everyone is having fun!
In my last game my fellow adventure's nickname had been 'Stabby'. He ended the game with a potion of speed, a shortsword of speed and an extra attack option. He ran up and stabbed the undead spell caster 5 times, killing it easily. It was the best ending to a session that I've ever seen.
Tried to start a campain. Had no clue how to DM. Two of my players broke up a month later. The campain died on arrival.
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ModeratorWell. Two characters are now dead. One player has the means of reviving one of them.
Oof, that can be an.... interesting situation
I had a situation like that before. Our party (numbering three at the time) were ambushed by twelve meaty orc bois. We were doing fairly well but then the warlock (who had teleported across the map for reasons I don't entirely comprehend) was knocked unconscious. Then, the ranger who was next to me also got knocked out. I had a choice. Did I stabilize the ranger and hope that she could get up, or did I try to take out one of the orcs next to the warlock? The following is a transcript of my logic:
The Ranger's right here...
But porridge.
But I might get overwhelmed.
But porridge!
Eventually, I decided to fire at the orcs near the warlock, which meant he had one less to deal with when/if he got back up. The ranger managed a nat 20 on her death save, so she got up well enough. She's still a bit salty at me, but have you tried the warlock's porridge? It's good stuff, man.
In our last session we were looking for the friends of our bard. (Party: female half-elf bard, male dwarf cleric, male half-orc barbarian and male wood elf druid (me))
Context/Backstory: Our bard seems to have stolen something, from a guy who turned out to be some powerful crime lord in the city she's from. When our group was resting at an inn nearby, someone entered the room the bard and my druid were sleeping in and left a threatening letter:
[Heard you were coming to town. We have some business to conclude. Meet me in the alley behind The Fallen Man tonight. Bring your new friends if you want, but if you try anything your old friends will pay the price.]
We then went into the city. Our bard and cleric then planned that (most likely accompanied by our barbarian) they would try some ruse when they'd meet with the bad guy, while my druid would turn into a cat and search through the bad guys' place to look for her friends. But first, we wanted to see if her friends were actually in danger, or if they were safe, that we'd tell them to lay low for a bit.
We found three of her friends: Topaz (male Tiefling) was hiding in the back of a fellow tiefling's (his name is Red) magic item shop, Jym (male Human) was at the market (Topaz brought him back, while we went to look for Desi) and Desi (female Half-Orc) was in a pit fighting club. The only one of our bard's friends, who's still missing, is a female Tabaxi called Three Thundercloud.
We made it back to the Tiefling's shop and our session stopped when he locked the door behind us.
While there was no fighting, we had a lot of RPing and it was really fun xD
one very memorable moment
I have no idea what went wrong.
I have a campaign where I was like, ‘let’s put my 4 level 1 players up against about 200 monsters!’. The DMG said it was a medium fight. So, 43 Crawling Claws in, at least one of my players were permadead. They wouldn’t have lived without an acid dragons breath to the face.
Extended Signature! Yay! https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/off-topic/adohands-kitchen/3153-extended-signature-thread?page=2#c21
Haven’t used this account in forever. Still a big fan of crawling claws.
Im sorry bobo, but whaaaaaat? This needs some more details, Im going to need some popcorn.
Ok. So I run an arena always recruiting PvP campaign. I had a fun idea, so I went to the DM’s guide and calculated things. Crawling Claws are CR 0, s9 10 xp, so 200 of them would make a Medium level fight. Or so I thought.
I dumped a bucket of 43 of them, and a warlock was bludgeoned 3 times over their health, a ranger and sorcerer were knocked unconscious, and the hexblade with a shield lived. I mad a quick call, since this was in the Arctic, that their dead hand bodies died of hypothermia. Then, the last enemy before the next wave appeared. And my warlock had said ‘i breathe acid on it’ and barely killed it.
Extended Signature! Yay! https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/off-topic/adohands-kitchen/3153-extended-signature-thread?page=2#c21
Haven’t used this account in forever. Still a big fan of crawling claws.
I see the problem - multiple attackers are always more problematic than solo attackers even 23 ac will get hit once and its a crit with 20 attacks per round on average and at first level thats maybe all she wrote. - the DMG guide even applies a difficulty multiplier for groups. (no extra experience earnt from the multiplication. Its just to try to limit the death by mob accidents)
A medium challenge for 4 characters is an xp 200 cap - 50 each. The crawling claws at 10 each, with the little handful easily surpassing the 15+ group maximum on multipliers which caps out at x4, would have had a challenge multipier of X4 and 43x10xp? x4 gives 1720 estimated threat (but only 430 xp earnt)
In other words - unless:
They all built heavy armour variant humans with heavyarmour master they were going to die in round one,
(or the party had initiative, dropped oil, somehow set it alight and stood in it, letting each attacker die when it tried climbing them. Sure they would have died on round two of the flame but sometimes you have to aoe yourself)
But still, ouch - experienced similar when a DM dropped 100 'mini' violet fungi on a party with a fighter, a ranger and hexblade of level 4, 'they didn't have 10' reach wasn't really much of a consolation considering the map was three colours: tiny dot of the party, little bit of unoccupied cavern and surrounding fungus. Dodge was the fighters only hope to stave off instant death and they relied on the ever present reaction from the fungi wandering past to kill the rest of us to get an attack in. Bonfires and repetitive wrist strain from round after round of attrition build up :)
Edited for doppelganger words
I actually gave them time. It was a turn before the hands got dropped. They actually could have lighted some oil.
Extended Signature! Yay! https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/off-topic/adohands-kitchen/3153-extended-signature-thread?page=2#c21
Haven’t used this account in forever. Still a big fan of crawling claws.
My Venomfang encounter was challenging for both sides (me as the DM, and the players, but only at first). My table's party of 6 pcs and 2 NPCs spent time in Thundertree's barracks plotting their attack on the dragon when I decided that Venomfang would try to go on the offensive and parley for their treasure in exchange for their lives. Well, the dragonborn paladin who is an adamant follower of Bahomet was having none of it. I played up Venomfang's attempts to convert the dragonborn to embrace his true potential with the power that flowed through his blood. Unfortunately, the paladin missed his attack, and took a breath-weapon that even when he made the save, left him with only like 10 HP. Then, VF grappled the paladin with his claws and flew up, dropping him after 20 feet in height, which took him out of the fight. The rest of the party lobbed ranged attacks until the half-orc barbarian jumped from the roof onto the back of the dragon, which then meant that he went on a ride high into the sky. The barbarian had a 10' spiked chain that I applied a series of checks to allow him to throw around the dragon's neck and use as a reign. Eventually, though, the dragon was able to shake him, and he took a 210' fall, but because barbarian rage gave him resistance to bludgeoning damage, was only down a little over half his HP (facepalm & smh). Between that and a elf ranger with ridiculous rolls for his longbow, the dragon went down to half HP quickly (due to combat economy, I maxed out VF's hit dice for HP)
The fight then moved to the wizard's tower and I was going to have the dragon use lair actions. I made the wizard's tower significantly larger than the LMoP map suggested, so there would be room to fly if it came to that. Well, the party grouped up nicely outside the lair, so I had VF go on the offense, and he downed 3 of the 6 that was in the group with another breath weapon (rolled instead of taking the average; party is 4th level). Once again, the barbarian leaped upon the dragon's back, and wrapped his spike chain back around VF's neck. The fight moved into the tower, where the dragon was going to be able to deal with the barbarian one-on-one. It worked, got the barbarian off his back, and he connected with his 2 claws on the half-orc, but the ranger showed up, and began doing some serious damage with his longbow. Our sorcerer fired a chromatic orb, and a wizard connected with a fireball which VF dodged, thankfully, just as he fled. The party successfully drove off Venomfang, dealing 203 damage to him in total out of a total of 208 HP I had maxed him out at.
So last session we are still running through Waterdeep and head up to the Field Wards to stop some fights. Immediately encounter some prick who is dragging "his wife" by the hair. We all have different reasons for stopping this myself (Warlock) and the Rogue like the woman, the two Barbarians like a fight and our Paladin (who is the only Lawful aligned character in a party of Chaos) doesn't like the injustice of it all. He immediately brings out 3 friends I fire off Mirror Image and use a bit of Thaumaturgy to make myself (all 4 of me) look a bit scarier, our "human" Paladin pulls off a shock reveal as he starts spewing black smoke and sprouting skeletal wings!!
As an aside I had already suspected he wasn't quite what he seemed from our first session when we went somewhere dark and he didn't require any light, then when we met Ulkoria of the Watchful Order of Mages and Protectors, as the only two spellcasters we had to sign on to defend Waterdeep and he had to check with the DM that something wouldn't be revealed if he signed this magical contract, plus there were a couple of other things that seemed a bit off but back to the story.
He scares the shit out of me and one of the enemy (everyone else made the saving throw), fight ensues I manage to finish one guy off with Agonising Blast before my view is blocked by the rest of the party which is when I remember my familiar is still sat on the Paladins shoulder from earlier on in the game, the Paladin attacks a guy as he cleaves his sword into the guys shoulder (my turn next) and is trying to retrieve his sword, my little spider familiar crawls down his arm onto the Thug and delivers shocking grasp to finish him off. Fight ends with two guys surrendering the Paladin executes one of them as he is still pissed off (being pissed off triggers his transformation into skeletal winged bastard) worryingly the two Barbarians smiled when the learned this little nugget of information!
From Within Chaos Comes Order!
I didn't feel like the session I ran was was all that great. We had a person who could not join us so I opted to run a one-off rather than advance the campaign without the missing player. Unfortunately, the adventure I ran was little more than an encounter scenario. The upside was that the battle was pretty fun and my group is one who enjoys a good tactical encounter. We play the campaign again in two weeks.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
My last one was just a final boss battle of sorts, Bugbear Chieftain, Dire Wolf, and an Owlbear vs 6 lvl 4's. Encounter took a long time and I was hoping we would get back to town to do some other stuff. But they pretty much got a free direwolf as a buddy, when it rolled double one against being charmed by the group. Didn't even really get a chance to play that out because it got late and erryone was tired, but they rescued the dwarf and are on their way back to town for the next leg of the journey.
"Where words fail, swords prevail. Where blood is spilled, my cup is filled" -Cartaphilus
"I have found the answer to the meaning of life. You ask me what the answer is? You already know what the answer to life is. You fear it more than the strike of a viper, the ravages of disease, the ire of a lover. The answer is always death. But death is a gentle mistress with a sweet embrace, and you owe her a debt of restitution. Life is not a gift, it is a loan."
In my last session, we were in Chapter 3 of Dragon Heist. I will put a spoiler box, so no players can blame me if they get a small part of the story spoiled (because most of this isn't in the book at all, I extended some small parts into greater encounters)! This session had some of my players claim it was the greatest session of D&D they had ever had.
My players just finished with Gralhund villa and were promptly arrested. They were put into solitary confinement for ten days, each having to roll constitution saving throws until they got 3 successes, getting 1 point of exhaustion for each failure. Then they were brought into Waterdeep Court where members of the Lord's Alliance reigned as judges, including their buddy Renaer Neverember, on behalf of his father and Laeral Silverhand.
While the magic detective Barnibus Blast wind was the prosecutor and called up several character witnesses, all of their faction agents, some of their employees of Trollskull Tavern (which they actually handpicked from a list I created and conducted interviews before hiring), along with some people they had met in Waterdeep such as Amallia Cassalanter and Esvele Rosznar, who was developing a romantic connection with one of my players). All in all it was shaping up to be a good court session, a good bit of it was me talking to myself as Barnibus and then the witness, but watching my players faces while Barnibus twisted what the witness said into a negative was priceless.
Eventually, each of the charccters had their turn to take the stand, after which Barnibus would again twist their words to make it sound negative, until the last player took the stand and said, "I didn't do [expletive starting with an F] [expletive starting with an S] narrate that." then walked off like a mic drop. All of my players bursted into laughter and Barnibus was stunned.
However, the icing on the cake was when Lady Gralhund walked into the courtroom as she carried the dead body of her husband (whom they liked and left alive). She placed him on the ground and cried out crocodile tears claiming that the group paladin had killed her husband and the group monk had assaulted her in an unforgivable way, both of which were lies and made the players drop their jaws.
Then the coucil of 5 left to deliberate and to a 3-2 vote, the two players that Lady Gralhund claimed did the dirtiest of deeds were sentenced to death the next morning and the case was dismissed. They were left in shock. Thinking of a way out of this, which they couldn't as most had several levels of exhaustion and were surrounded by multiple city guards, they began to admit defeat, until Ontharr Frume, who I relayed as a high ranking member of the Order of the Gauntlet (of which both characters sentenced to death were a part of) had claimed they did their own investigation of the Gralhund Villa and indeed found the tome that proved the Gralhunds were devil worshippers (the players also found this tome) and therefore requested that Lady Gralhund's testimony be thrown out and not allowed to be used in the trial. After a brief deliberation, Laeral Silverhand agreed, and reversed the sentences.
After that, each member of the party had a small little solo run, each took about 5-10 minutes of roleplaying with characters they met previously (a run in with the black viper, Yagra Stonefist showed up and rekindled their relationship, Esvele Rosznar proclaimed her love for the group monk, the Cassalanter's children began obsessing with the group paladin [who had made an attempt to take all of the blame for the group so his allies could live], as well as an engagement party for the group wizard).
All in all, it was one of the best sessions I ever ran, and my players absolutely loved it and they said they were legitimately nervous to take the stand and when the death penalties were revealed, they were shook.
So far, my players absolutely love Dragon Heist, but I have made all of the NPCs have much bigger roles, so that their sub plots have much deeper meanings. They have no idea the identity of the Black Viper, along with others.
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I enjoyed that Squigs, thanks for sharing. Although admittedly I wouldnt have had the two rescued from their fate, I love the fact you made an alluded to set of circumstances into a non combat encounter and those playing enjoyed it.
Keep enjoying your gaming!
Thanks for the kind words! I didn't want to just kill them off, mainly because they would have thought that was railroading them to be killed just because and I didn't want it to come off that way. I wanted it to have the effect of "Oh my gosh I'm about to die", but then reveal it before the thoughts of "Well he won't actually kill my character this way" starts to enter their minds lol their characters have full backstories that I have plans for after the module, so bar them doing something absolutely stupid and killing themselves, I don't want to take them out that way!
Published Subclasses