GM Commentary: Session 3 wrap-up

This time around only Kat, Chris, and Austin showed up. Austin was playing remotely via the internet. We had him up on Kat's laptop sitting on the window seat like a disembodied head. I had set up my webcam so he could see the game table. It worked out pretty well except for the sound quality which garbled his words at times. I'm curious to hear how it worked out from Austin's side of things and if he'll want to do that again some time.

It was a bit troublesome running two PCs as NPCs during this session. Characters have so many options on what to do each round of combat, and I am still pretty new to all the character powers of 4th edition. I wasn't fully prepared to run two characters in addition to all the enemies who have their own special lists of powers. I think that made a couple of the encounters more difficult, since Jym and Mina were not being played very effectively. In hind-sight, Mina and Jym should have been the ones caught by the pit trap near the end of the session to neatly take them out of the last couple combats which would have lightened my load quite a bit.

I think the discovery and encounter with the slaves wasn't very impressive. It was nearing the end of the session and I hadn't prepared fully for any dialog. I should have realized that the Black Shet encounter would flow directly into the slave encounter. Rather than dragging it out I opted to quickly resolve the encounter without much input from the players. The beggars I took out of the equation, since they would have just betrayed the party at the first opportunity. The party isn't the most trusting group and would have ended up killing them anyways. They wouldn't be worth any XP in that case. I thought Crox and Vismund could have had an interesting exchange being two dwarven craftsmen, maybe with some distant connection, a friend of a lost sibling or a shared clan affiliation, but I was unable to develop this properly. Since Sunny wasn't present I didn't develop the background of the Baroness's mysterious abduction. No one had chosen the side-quest to rescue Lorilass and his apprentice so there was no need to develop that story either.

Progress was made on many side quests. Regnor had already completed his quest of recovering his sponsor's brooch. Aletha took a trophy from Zeb'oltha to prove her death, Vismund found his stolen goods, and Jym discovered the missing Baroness. All that remains is to find the Beggar-King and slay him. After the module is finished I'll remind the characters to go claim their rewards. I'll have to remember to give quest experience to the party at the beginning of the next session. I also need to give more experience for the traps and hazards the party overcame in the last session. I'm hoping the characters can get to 3rd level before we are done with this module.

The party is almost through with the module. There are about six encounters left, not counting traps and hazards. They will be much more difficult than any that have come before so I hope the full party will be there to enjoy it. I may end up rearranging the dungeon a bit to space out the encounters. I may also tinker with the ending to make it more interesting. Either way I'll need to spend some time considering how to end the game gracefully.