The Valley Part 6 - Waiting for Players

The time for the Valley is coming up soon enough.

Summer activities are messing with our sessions as much as usual.

Dale’s schedule will be back to its erratic phase, starting in August and ending in December. So he will obviously have to stop running his game for a good deal of time.

He wants to resume the game some time (possibly after the Valley), but from experience, I give that less than a 50/50 chance. Things change too much to make solid plans, but I’m certainly not against returning to the Order of the Mithril Dolphin.

So that means we’ll be playing the Valley in early-mid July.

Next on today’s menu – Why am I playing 4E if I dislike it so much?

First and foremost, I don’t hate D&D 4E.
I’m just not happy with a good chunk of the crap they’ve served us this time around; overlong combats, increasingly more complex powers, every class is so balanced that they are all equally bland and boring, nerfing monsters to boredom so they don’t hurt so much (rust monster), not rolling for hit points, and so on.

I see a lot in the game that has potential, but there was a lot of potential in the suck-fest known as 2E.
In 2E we had house-ruled so many things that the actual rules in the book were all but ignored.

A year ago my liking of 4E was high. Now it is just a hair above 2E.

“So why don’t you play one of the other versions of D&D, or a different game entirely?”

- Because I am not the only person in the group.
I’d like to play Basic D&D, Dale would probably like to go back to 1E AD&D, Mike is happy with 4E, and so on.

- Because when we lose players, very few potentially new players will be interested in playing an old version.
D&D is the most known RPG and therefore has a better chance to pull in new players than any others. By not playing the latest version, you lose more than you gain.

- Because no one wants to drop $40 on a book without knowing they’ll get their $40 out of it.
I’ve literally bought books for a new RPG, only to play one game of it. Bye-bye money.

I’d rather use my experience and others to determine ways to fix or work around 4E.

Others have worked up ways to improve social skill challenges. I’ll just use role-playing and then have the players make the appropriate checks at certain points.

There are plenty of ways to speed up the combat.

And you can bet your ass the morons who nerfed the rust monster can kiss my hairy ass. When I use that monster it will not be some pathetic creature that has to hit the defender several times before it hurts. It will be the same exact creature it was before 4E – a force that makes the fighter jump behind the wizard, just like in the drawing in the 1E AD&D DMG.

“What about the all the equipment that gets ruined by the rust monster? It kills the game.”
Shut up.
You’re not dealing with some amateur DM that does crap to his players out of some immature control freak need to be malicious to the players and let them know who’s the boss.
I’ve played under those DM’s and they suck at it. I consider them to be worst than Monty Haul DM’s by far.
If I throw a rust monster at the party, you can bet money on there being a fair compensatory reward afterwards in addition to standard rewards.

Now you’re saying “Ok, I’m still waiting for information about the Valley.”

Well so am I.

I tasked the players to make three character back-stories so I can prepare a game based around the characters. Then I give them parameters to give the 3 characters stats.

“Why three?”
A lot of reasons really.
The last time I had players send me back-stories we ended up with no healers. This helps prevent that from happening.
It allows the player to have a back-up PC, just in case.
It spreads the work around. I’m keeping one of the PC’s for myself to be used for my own needs as a DM.

What if the player doesn’t make three PC’s?
Then he obviously is not vested in making the game entertaining, so I won’t be putting any effort into making his PC’s part of the story.
No quests, no special stories, no special consideration from the DM to help him out in the form of treasure.
If a player is just showing up to the game to be entertained and thinks I’m going to be a conduit to throw monsters at him so he can kill them and take their stuff, then that player is doomed to disappointment.
This isn’t high school D&D.
I’ve had actual Valley sessions where there was only a single die roll the whole night.
The campaign will not be a simple formula of 1 – snag plot hook, 2 – fight #1, 3 – fight #2, 3 – boss fight, 4 – return with plot hook item, 5 – reward, then next week repeat.

So far I’ve received a few histories, and some partial histories. At least a two of them did not even bother to read my “campaign packet” or even the blog entries so far.

Now once everyone has sent me their histories and we’ve hammered out any issues with the histories, I’ll be giving them special parameters that they can use to make their PC’s. Those parameters will be special abilities, penalties, equipment, and so on.

Then I added three starting quests to each PC suited to their stories. These quests can be as simple as killing ten goblin minions to as complex and open ended as “find out more about the dreams”.

Then everyone should make 3 PC’s while I populate the NPC’s I’ll need to get the game going.

Order of the Mithril Dolphin #12-13

I’ve been busy the last few weeks, thus you’re getting two posts in one.

I’ve also not posted much about the Valley recently as I’m waiting on the players to do some work on their side before I’m ready to move on to my next step.

That’s one thing about D&D 4E I like; the players must do some more work and the DM gets a slight reprieve.

Unfortunately, there’s not much more I like about 4E. The shine has worn off and I’m ready for Hasbro to sell WotC, specifically D&D, back to actual gamers and out of the hands of bottom-line-watching corporate types.

I’m not full of hate for 4E, I just feel like it’s turned D&D into a bland mash of over-play-tested, ever-increasing options.

4E has a lot of potential, and I’m going to try and put its potential into play.

Bring on a non-Hasbro 5E.

Mike and Brian both like and praise DDI. I will not pay for it, and here’s why in a faux letter:

Dear Ha$bro,
I have 0.0000% intention to use DDI.
Paying $10 a month is not a good deal. Not even close. I wouldn’t even pay half that to you.
I don’t read Dungeon or Dragon magazines.
I see no reason why I’d want to use a character generator. I’m fully capable of doing that with the books I’ve already paid you good money for. And thanks to you, if I wanted to use a character generator someone else made, you’ve forced them to stop.
I can chat on the ENWorld forums for anything I may need.
Thus the whole of DDI offers me nothing.

I see it as a matter of time before you start suing everyone talking about D&D on the internet in a perverse repetition of history.

Do the gaming world a favor and sell D&D to gamers.
How about selling it to KenzerCo?
They don’t take their customers for granted, treat them well, oh and their magazine in on paper.

Sincerely,
My entertainment dollars


Session #12 (levels 6-8).
Shamash (Aaron), dragonborn fighter/cleric, defender
Sephira (Scott), dragonborn cleric, leader/striker
Wildeyes (Me), halfling ranger/rogue, striker
Gorak (Mike), human barbarian, striker
Ergot (Justin), dwarf druid, controller

The week I was out the group had some more battles along to road to find the mage Sammath Narr.

When I rejoined, they had finally found the Underdark stronghold of Mr. Narr. So I really only missed out on XP.

It turns out this mage is an information dealer and a magic item trader to the Underdark, and he’s well protected.

There were all manner of races, evil and not-so-evil, that were there and behaving exceptionally well for fear of the golems and such that would pound them to dust should they begin fighting.

The group talked to Sammath, and they wheeled and dealed.

In the end we would get to chat with some oracle and ask it questions (I long ago forgot why) and also to upgrade several magic items.

I opted out of the process as I had little to trade away for Wildeyes, but had plenty of items already.

In hindsight, I should have joined in as half the group upgraded their equipment more than I expected.

Example: Sephira got a +3 weapon that allowed her a second use of her Channel Divinity powers and did 3d10 points of bonus damage on a crit to undead.

But one thing I refused to do was sign a contract with Sammath for the “favor” everyone else had to do to get these items.

Wildeyes was not exactly polite in his refusal to sign the contract, and even examined the contract for signs of hidden or invisible writing. A natural 20 (for a 32) on the search showed the contracts were on the up-and-up.

Everyone except Ergot and Wildeyes signed the contract to do everything they possibly could to find a Crystalline Void Mace that Sammath wanted.

(Ergot and Wildeyes went along with their friends to help, but never signed the contract.)

The mace was located in an Underdark outpost of the Cult of the Ebony Obelisk; a group we’ve had some run-ins with not long ago.

He told us that this cult was sweeping the Underdark and that drow priestesses, aboleths, and mind flayers were beginning to fear it

We were given directions to their outpost and in no time we had found it a killed the guards they had posted.

Note: that fight actually was not quick. In fact, I’m getting concerned that the fights are beginning to take longer at higher levels. I hope it’s a temporary thing.

With the second fight we started getting a little crude and gave the monsters some special names.

We have an initiative tracker and Dale just tells us the monsters initials rather than give us the monsters’ names. So we occasionally fill in the blanks.

In this case we had:
DP = a Death Priest but we renamed him to Double Penetration, and later Donkey Punch as Gorak and Wildeyes flanked him and beat the crap out of him.
FS – a Forsaken Shell, but we named him Foreskin, and when he was bloodied “There’s nothing worse than a bloodied foreskin” – Mike, or “Wildeyes is the right height for a bris” – Justin.

There was also an elite ghoul, a zombie hulk, and a reaper of some kind, but we didn’t give them any special names.

This fight was relatively easy, though not much quicker than the last one.

We were running out of time (go figure) so Dale skipped fight #3 for the night and we jumped straight to the final fight against a Death Kiss Beholder.

The room was tall and cylindrical with the beholder staying in the middle while we were forced to run down stairs along the inside of the room.

Everyone else in the group liked this fight. I was bored.

To me, we could have done this fight without a battle-map as all really needed to do was track how high everyone was.

The beholder had ridiculous hit points (like 400), and even healed itself for a quarter of that when we finally were able to hurt it significantly.

Had it not been for the party’s variety of powers that push, pull, and slide targets then the fight would have been twice as long.

When it finally dropped the whole room began falling apart around us as a new exit opened up to us and we fled after grabbing the Crystalline Void Mace off of a pedestal.

And that ended Session #12.

Prior to Session #13, I called Dale and asked him to spice up the combats, instead of giving us monsters and terrain, throw something else in to make sure it was something more than yet another slog of combat rounds.

And very thankfully, he did so.

This session was an abbreviated one as Dale had some things to take care of, plus Brian and Scott couldn’t make it.

Session #13 (levels 7-8).
Shamash (Aaron), dragonborn fighter/cleric, defender
Wildeyes (Me), halfling ranger/rogue, striker
Gorak (Mike), human barbarian, striker
Ergot (Justin), dwarf druid, controller

The new area of this dungeon we found was not falling apart, so after a short rest and checked out this new location.

It wasn’t good; a square room with several holes in the wall, a fire pit, 2 standing sarcophagi, and a skull resting on a table at the other end of the room.

So we started off very carefully searching each hole, then stuffing cloth into them when we found nothing.

It didn’t take long for that to come to a stop.

We had only stopped three holes before beetles began pouring out of some of the others giving us a pair of lovely Rot Scarab Swarms.

Then the skull animated into life and a pair of mummies popped out of the sarcophagi. Didn’t see that coming did you?

And finally, the fire pit began emitting obscuring smoke.

This fight should have been easy, but Dale did his once a year dice roll freak-fest. Six times in this combat he rolled natural 20’s on attacks, and half the time he rolled max damage when he didn’t crit. And I don’t mean rolling a 6 on a d6. I mean rolling all 8’s on 3d8.

So an average to light fight beat the hell out of us.

Dale expected us to go into the next fight as we were, but we had none of that. None of us had any dailies remaining, and half of us only had a single healing surge remaining. He thought we would still be good to go after 4 standard fights that were our level or slightly above. He would have been correct had the real Dale been rolling, and not freak Dale.

“We’re going to find a Dale-shaped pod in the closet.”

After we explained the situation he let us rest. And that was a good thing, because the next fight would have been a TPK for sure.

It was a long temple room (your standard evil temple with sacrificial altar and such) with several more undead waiting for us (Dale loves undead way too much):
A pair of Boneshard Skeletons (always painful)
A Skull Lord (a minor irritant)
A Skeletal Archer (a big irritant unless taken out early)
A Skeletal Tomb Guardian (a big problem, but we didn’t know that to start with – he gets 4 attacks a round)

And finally a series of scythes randomly came out of the walls and indiscriminately hit whatever was in the way (friend or foe) and you risked being hit if you passed through it.

As usual Shamash tanked their big guy (Tomb Guardian) while Gorak and Wildeyes jumped to strike at the back line and Ergot controlled the battlefield and used his attacks as best as he could manage.

In case you didn’t notice, the only healer we had in the group was Shamash, and he only has two heals in a combat (1 of them a daily).

So while Gorak and Wildeyes tore up everything except the guardian, they were also torn up pretty good in the process.

(A new record for Wildeyes, 62 points of damage in 1 round)

We still won, but it was close.

Thanks to summer, our gaming sessions are sporadic, and our next session may be the week after July 4.