Well, That Didn't Go So Well...

Last night was the second chapter of my "Eberron: Dust to Dust" campaign, and unfortunately was the second game in the last few months that just didn't seem to work (the first being the Firefly episode "Strawberries"). And, once again, the problems were entirely on the GM side of the screen. (Frustratingly, the problem was also not a lack of preparation - I actually had both enough material prepared and also the relevant material prepared. It just didn't sing.)

The fundamental and biggest problem in the evening was that this session was very definitely a railroad. The players basically had no meaningful choices to make. Unfortunately, I suspect that may have been inherent to the adventure I'm running - I needed to introduce the Draconic Prophecy, the Spell-weaver, and take the PCs to the haunted Lightning Rail station, and in the time allocated that basically meant hitting each of these in turn. Which means that the important lesson there is simple - next time, run a different adventure!

The second problem, though, is an ongoing issue I've found - I don't do well at handling "exploration" scenes. I'm mostly okay with combat (though I'm increasingly coming to think low-level 5e sucks in that regard), and I'm going with interaction, but that exploration pillar is tripping me up. I'm definitely going to have to work on that quite urgently, as exploration plays a significant part in both the third chapter and also in the "Christmas Game" this year! But, for now, suffice to say that some scenes were utterly devoid of any tension, and any notions of resource management fell by the wayside pretty damn quickly.

Regarding low-level 5e combat: I've now run four sessions of 5e, all at low levels, and have had several combats in those sessions. And I'm just not terribly happy. Basically, 5e seems to have taken a significant retrograde step from 4e, and even from 3e and previous.

The issue is partly one of simplification. In theory, this is a good thing, since it frees the DM up from having so many minor issues to worry about, allowing him to worry about the "fun stuff". Which looks like it could well be great at slightly higher levels. But at low level neither the PCs nor the monsters really have many fun powers to play around with. And so a goblin is much like a chitine, is much like a skeleton, is much like a... while the PCs' tactical choices boil down to deciding which bad guy to attack. Even the 3e consideration of how best to achieve flanking is gone.

Fortunately, I think this should fix itself fairly rapidly, as the PCs quickly progress to higher levels and everything gets more interesting. At least, I hope that's the case. Otherwise, it does look like this may be my last-ever D&D campaign, which would be a real shame.