My First 5E Campaign Session 5

This session was a full one.

Welcome Craig to our group. (Note: Craig is not the guy we invited then uninvited.)

After a chunk of time of just a few players, it’s good to have a good sized group.

5E, I think, is slowly gaining traction. Pathfinder is still strong, but a lot of people are giving 5E a try.

The biggest complaints seem to be a lack of options and low level lethality.

A lot of people see the number of books in Pathfinder as a problem. It’s hard to get new players into a game like that if they have to buy and read a ton of books to make a PC as good as everyone else at the table.

So I’m thinking that since 5E is new, and PF is losing its more casual players to the more rules-light 5E, Pathfinder is going to have to change somehow.

It should be interesting to watch 2 different versions of D&D fight it out.

Though I still think that 5E could use more monsters and an SRD/OGL.

So for the first time in a long while, our table was full with five players and a DM.

Aaron played Rhoanel, half-elf bard
Dale played Rumi, wood elf monk
Everett played Markus, halfling rogue
Justin played Cedraic, half-elf ranger
Craig played Knox, half-elf sorcerer

Everyone is level 3, and a few are painfully close to level 4.

This night was a mostly combat night, though the group did their best to role-play. Unfortunately the DM set up the situation that what they tried to role-play was doomed to fail.

We last stopped with the Rhoanel, Rumi, and Marcus in Newton and Rhoanel wandering the wilderness (with an -away/afk- tag over his head).

The quests the party had remaining to take care of were making sure that boat travel was made safe again, and making sure that a side road leading to Pirate’s Bay was made safe again.

Two very similar quests with quite a lot in common.

The party started with the path and met Cedraic and a few moments later Knox arrived.

Justin: “You have your name floating above your head. You must be a PC.”
(There was some small actual role-playing, but what Justin said was probably more correct.)

So the 5 PCs travelled north along the slightly overgrown road, which became more and more overgrown the farther they traveled.

They saw a bear along the way. It saw them. They made a bunch of noise and looked big and it ran off.

Then they travelled north some more, until the road all but disappeared into wilderness.

They kept going and began to see things out of the corner of their eye that disappeared when they looked.

At one point they took a step and a ball of light appeared behind a tree. Then they took another step and it was gone.

The sounds of nature also seemed to be a bit less cordial and a bit more feral.

Then they came to a sign saying “Keep Out!” with an old shack several dozen feet away.

They slowly moved forward, ignoring all potential illusions until an old woman came out of the shack to yell at them to “Go away!”

All attempts to parlay with her were met with “Go away!” or something similar. When it came to a stalemate of actions, she attacked, as did her pets in waiting.

Some of the party was surrounded by several blights of all types with the old woman, a green hag, turning invisible until she had a chance to attack a weak target. The rest of the party was scattered about.

A few PCs went towards where the hag was while the rest dealt with the blights.

Knox thought he’d be ok being close to a pair of vine blights, but he was quickly dropped to negatives (even with several of us saying “Are you sure?”).

But the party won after they got their bearings.

Then they set the house on fire…before searching it for treasure. Oh well.

With that quest completed they returned to town and got their reward. Then they rested and headed towards the pier to figure out how to take care of the creatures destroying or damaging shipping boats.

They still had the boat from the last session, so they scouted around walking on the beach, searching the area, and finally they returned to town and bought fishing gear.

Eventually, toward the latter part of the day, a mermaid appeared to them and they began talking.

The mermaid admitted that it was her damaging the boats because she didn’t like them. As she talked further talking with the party, they got her to agree to stop doing it, but she would need them to come to her cave to sign the proper papers.

The party thought it was odd, but agreed to follow her to her cave.

As she swam ahead, Rhoanel decided to try to cast Read Thoughts, and it worked.

She was thinking “I’M HUNGRY!”

So that ruined that role-playing too.

One of them tried to get in the water to deal with her directly, so she showed that one her true face (that of a sea hag) and then swam off to her lair and prepared for their coming attack.

The party eventually found her mostly submerged cave and spent a lot of time scouting it out invisibly before attacking.

Their scouting revealed her and 8 giant crabs, but it did not reveal the hidden squid in the water.

The party spend a fair amount of time preparing, and they tried to go in unison to the cave but their swim checks prevented that.

So they entered the combat nearly one at a time, which made it rough on the first people to enter the combat, but thanks to their good saving throws and my horrible rolling, this fight was a wash.

So they got their treasure and returned to town to get their reward and a few bonus hit points.

The next morning they woke up, heard an odd explosion and looked overhead to see a meteor streaking across the sky.