I’ve heard a lot of cool things about the first season of D&D encounters. I vowed that I would be involved with the next season no matter what. That the second season involves my favorite D&D setting ever (planescape is close second) sweetens the deal.
Encounters seems like the perfect weekly format, as you build character familiarity and momentum week by week but in nice bite-sized bits; People get a sample of D&D play without having to get a full fire-hose blast of several encounters.
Expectations
I love new gamers! I get a special kick out of introducing them to the game and making it as fun as possible. Also, I am an experienced crack-dealer. I will give you the first sample for free and give you a detailed set of next steps on how to best locate and then finance your next and subsequent fixes. New people in the hobby equals a future for the hobby, so I feel this responsibility to do it and do it well. I want to grow the presence of 4e players at my FLGS.
Other than that, I guess I expected to just have fun and help others have fun. I anticipated regular 4e players would participate as well. I expected an equal split of newbies to and vets of setting. Either way, the harsh desert world of Athas is not known for pity; neither ignorance nor knowledge can shield you from the harsh gaze of the sun.
Preparations
Preparations for this game stayed simple. Since WotC made maps using the the Deserts of Athas tiles, I thought I’d use the tiles plus foam board to render the maps for my players. I ran the game off my laptop and used my ipad and a specially created twitter account to retrieve buffs from the Wizards_DnD twitter account.
I of course read the adventure.
The Game
The premise of the first adventure finds the players as the only survivors of a caravan wreck. To their backs is the heart of an obsidian storm –that’s right, Athas is so tough that is rains slices of obsidian — and in front of the PCs are a group of small reptilians called silt runners. Vanguards of a much larger group, these silt-runners wish to “examine” the contents of the ruined caravan and will gladly take the PCs lives for the privilege. The PCs need to supply themselves from the wreckage and escape the onrushing storm and the rest of the silt runners before they catch them.
Phew! That’s a lot of stuff for a first encounter.
Only three players showed up. I let one player take an extra PC and then adjusted the encounter for four players as the encounter suggested. I removed one darter.
I have started up a little “support group” on google wave with another DM who runs encounters. We agreed ahead of time that this encounter could easily transform into a wipe. The monsters were dangerous, the environment was dangerous (2 points of damage every round!) and there were other concerns on top of that.
The best way to prevent or mitigate this was to make each component of the encounter as clear as possible. You don’t want to guide folks too much, as it diminishes the challenge which then diminishes the game. You do want to make sure that people have all the information they need to make proper choices.
None of which stopped the Thri-Kreen Battlemind from getting dropped first turn. The set-up was brilliant. Player new to the class sees speed of thought and rushes forward; player new to class gets plugged by hard-hitting monsters.
The first time I picked up that 4d6 I remember thinking….um, really? Actually, I vocalized this to the players, who echoed it back to me. I played it straight as written , and the characters did survive. I think seeing the damage they could take served to tighten up their play and keep them cautious.
After they picked up the battlemind, the party quickly got in gear. The battlemind tore down the psionicist silt runner before he could really get going, which lead to a quick unravelling for the rest of the monsters.
The players defeated the silt runners with a few rounds to spare before the next wave came. They got supplies from the caravan then ran out of there.
We had a lot of fun with the first scene. Once clearly explained, the players enjoyed the dueling priorities. The high damage monsters kept them focused and working together.
Tips
What is a GM’s main goal in an open pick-up style game like Encounters? If you said “make it fun”, you’re right. But herein lies the challenge –different players have different versions of fun, so there aren’t a lot of “one size fits all” solutions for delivering fun to a group of strangers.
I have two bags of tricks when I DM. One bag of tricks is highly specialized and for people whose gaming style I am familiar with. The other is for games with strangers –players with gaming styles I don’t know.
Each Encounter episode I’ll share the tricks out of my second bag. Here’s the first.
Enthusiasm is Everything
Energy is infectious. When you bring a high level of energy, it raises the level of energy for everyone in the room. I can tell games that are going to be fun just from the enthusiasm level of the DM. Organization, rules mastery, description — all of these things are way down my list after energy.
Does this DM act committed to having fun? If all signs point to yes, we can negotiate everything else. Everything. But if you’ve got some chip on your shoulder against PCs or you act like you’d rather be smashing your head against a brick wall than running the adventure, I’m going to expect that you’ve got other aspects of DMing air-tight.
Here’s the problem with enthusiasm though: you don’t always have it! Infinite are the ways energy can be extracted from the human soul. Fortunately, there is only way I know to be enthusiastic when you in fact are not:
Fake it.
What I do is stand. If I’m sitting, it’s easy to relax and chill and <YAWN> maybe take a nap. This is impossible when I’m standing. It’s very basic, very simple, but it helps me bring a minimum level of energy to the table when otherwise I wouldn’t. It only takes ten minutes of standing and running a game for me to get in the flow. Soon, several hours have passed and I’ve been standing for 5 hours straight! Hopefully we’ve had a great game by then, because I now need to sit.
How do you bring enthusiasm to your encounters game?
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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Great point on enthusiasm! I find that even in my home games it matters. There are nights when everyone is tired and people are starting to fade. It then is up to me to get the energy flowing again. Groups tend to follow their leader, and obviously when playing D&D, the DM is the leader. I’m definitely going to keep the idea of standing in mind. I hadn’t ever thought of that before, but I can visualize it making a difference.
Yeah, I just find it’s a great way to avoid the blahs. managing that vital energy I’ve learned is the chief job of the DM. Again, everything else can be sorted out if you can keep players active and involved and pumped to play.
I was totally that thri-kreen battlemind who got plugged in the first few rounds of our game. Haha, our DM explained very little to us…
Since then we’ve operated much better as a group.
Loving Dark Sun!
yeah, when that happened I instantly wondered, “How many people are going through this?” I figured the number was pretty high
. Did your party get through it OK?
I’ve not tried the standing thing. Perhaps I should. I’ve thought about it. But being 6’4″, its kind of a pain to read, write, check stats when you have to bend over a lot. Perhaps if I had a higher table.
But one of my techniques for DM’ing “fun” has been to avoid the one word answer. I try to never say, yes, no, or worst of all, “miss”. I’ll give “hit” a pass since players like to hear it, but in general, I’ve found players get way more out of the game if you take the time to pepper on the descriptives. A good description can even make a whiff somewhat rewarding, particularly if you describe the action in heroic terms, or talk about how close it game, or if you want to get intimidating, I’ll often describe a miss similarly to a hit, but I talk about how the enemy simply shrugged off the blow, or perhaps got angrier.
When someone misses big, I describe the arrow shattering against a pillar, or the spear clattering across the stone floor. If it’s hit, I make it visceral and mention location and how it effects the monster. I’ll even continue to comment about the hit effecting the enemies movements. If he got hit in the leg and moves 4 squares, he LIMPS 4 squares. Etc. I’ve found that this also tends to make the PCs more descriptive, it engages their imaginations, or more appropriately, their minds eye. Once you have the minds eye looking around, the entire fantasy swings into 3D so to speak.
You are skipping ahead
but yes, yes, and YES. I’ll talk about that next time. Thanks for stopping by!
I can back you up on the standing thing. After five years of DMing sat on my arse, I found myself doing it at encounters as I had to compete with a bunch of other DMs running at the same time – if you stand up, you keep the energy flowing and you keep the players focused on you.
Has anyone found that Darksun has lost some of the charm of the Forgotten Realms encounter series? Everyone sort of already knows FR (it’s “fantasy,” go with it) but Darksun is pretty specialist and you can’t make your own character. I felt a real disconnect with the players this time round – so much so that I stopped running after the first session and took my players to run a different game on the same night.