Episode 2 - Silverthorne

For this session I realized that I needed to do a lot more work before hand. The two players are traveling up a river to the head (and beyond) and though I had several cities along the way planned out, I didn't have any real events planned along the way. I felt this was a mistake. With so many places to visit and met the people of the land I should have something, even if it's just a single NPC, planned for each city. And in an effort to pad out the party up to 4 characters to help combat, if needed, I added a new NPC last minute.

For this new character, Giggles McGee, I new what voice and mannerisms I wanted her to have, but wasn't sure I could pull it off right at the table. So I practiced her voice along with the other character Barry. They are traveling with Barry on his barge and Giggles is Barry's girlfriend/bodyguard. Working on their voices turned out to be a great idea. I ended up with a short page of dialog and was able to think of some added drama. Though I think the voice got on my sisters nerves after a while, mine too for that matter. Sorry Sarah. =)

I also ran combat for the first time with this session. It was a little shaky at first since I still feeling like I'm trying to find the line between railroading (forcing character into situations they feel they didn't have any choice in) and option-paralysis (when given too many options, the problem of picking none of them).

I had mapped out the combat as three separate pieces; one outside, one inside, and one underground. The first encounter went fairly smoothly except I had a monster behave in a way that I thought wasn't believable. But I'm still learning. The was a great moment when the Paladin chased a kobold minion into the saloon, where the second encounter was planned, and was surpised to find himself surrounded by enemies. I think the player was just as shocked at the character. I hope so anyway. My fear was the it would look cheap. But I think that's one of the benefits of 4th edition. When the players saw the number of creatures outside they didn't think I'd throw more of them at them. The idea of being able to go from one encounter to another isn't common in previous editions. So the idea of chasing down one last minion only to be surrounded by another 8 monsters was probably genuine shock. The voices tell me that they were humoring me, but I'm still now ready to listen to those voices yet.

What I learned from this session. Read over what each enemy can do, and what each NPC can do. Make sure you have everything organized for that session in one easy to locate/read place. Make initiative cards beforehand, even roll init for the monster and NPC's if you want. Don't be afraid to pull out, or add, monsters to an encounter if you think they might not survive it. Espeically if they go from one encounter to another without resting.