Day 9 – What crazy things have happened to you and your group?
We’ve had a lot of fun with this game over the years, as well as some frustrations. A few too many abandoned campaigns as well, for a number of reasons – mostly though because of the physical distance between us now, scattered as we are across the continent. As a result of this infrequent play, keeping the rules fresh in our minds has been a challenge. The players tend to look to the DM to tell them which dice to use and when etc, and when we get into a tricky situation (something that doesn’t involve hitting things), I usually have to dive into the rulebook to look it up, slowing play down and dragging the game on a bit too long.
I’ve learnt from this though.
The last game session we played was fast and loose. Using GF9’s excellent spell cards meant everyone had the details right there to hand, and I had all of my monsters ready as cards too. I wrote out the encounter descriptions on cards and also the key stats for any NPCs. So everything was there, at our finger-tips ready to go and we rolled dice well into the night. Everyone had a great time and the story progressed further than I was expecting. The only times we did delve into the rulebook, my son Sam was way ahead of me and had looked it up (or could recall the rule from memory). The crazy thing for me was that everyone wanted to pick the game up again at lunch time the next day to complete the adventure.
That’s probably not in the spirit of the question though, so I’ll mention one episode from a long time ago where my players were attacked by a number of giant centipedes. They couldn’t hit them for shit! Even with bonuses and whatnot, they just couldn’t roll higher than a 7 (in 5e they’d need a 13 or better). I was going to say “let’s move on” but they were determined to crush these bugs without aid. It took them 40 minutes.