The Restart

After a fairly long hiatus for Christmas (and other things), the campaign resumed yesterday. It's fair to say that the first session did not go entirely to plan - there was a little investigation, and then the party was engaged in a combat in which they found themselves badly overmatched, followed by a retreat and another fight where the party was... less overmatched, but with the problem that three members of the party were surprised (and then there was a flurry of terrible dice rolls).

The upshot is that by rights the session should have been a TPK. And, in all honesty, that may have been for the best. But since I'm not quite ready to walk away yet, we contrived a way out for the party, and we'll see if we can pick up the pieces.

One of the problems, the lesser of the two, I think, is that the two encounters were deliberately right at the top end of what the party 'should' be able to handle. That probably wants adjusted down, slightly, for the future.

Another problem is party composition - I wrote the adventure assuming a standard mix of characters, but we've actually ended up with two barbarians, a monk, and a druid - three strikers and a controller. That lack of a dedicated healer and anyone to soak up damage makes this interesting.

But even that would be fine if the party were able to bring their damage-dealing characters to bear, and to focus their fire. But in the case of the first encounter the party was already somewhat split and then some characters hung back, while in the latter case the surprise meant that some characters were disabled even before they were able to act.

So there's certainly some food for thought going forward.

And since I'd prefer not to be entirely negative, I should note that the exploration part of the session did go pretty well, revealing some of the background of the underlying adventure and teasing threats to come.