Final Thoughts on "Storm King's Thunder"

In no particular order:

• It was okay, but not great. The theme, "Shakespearean Giants" really didn't seem to come through in the material we got to. It's better expressed once the party get to Hekaton's court, but by then you've been playing for a year! That's too late to be introducing your theme.
  
  
• The early chapters really benefit from the DM being willing to flesh out the skeleton that is there. That suited me well enough, so that's all to the good.
  
  
• 5e's Exploration mechanics pretty much suck, and Interaction are little better. Given that that's two of the three pillars of the game, that's not a great showing. Again, the DM really needs to shore up those weaknesses.
  
  
• Giants make for fairly poor opponents - they're basically a big bag of hit points with limited ranged attacks and almost no spellcasting or other interesting features. This weakness becomes especially noticable when you're fighting them over and over again, and when running short sessions that don't favour long grindy combats.
  
  
• The TPK was unfortunate, but was an entirely sensible outcome given the way the dungeon in question was structured. If the PCs give warning, it made sense that the fire giants converged with overwhelming force, and the PCs' ability to meaningfully retreat was always limited.
  
  
• Yeah, I was most definitely ready for something new!

It was a fun campaign, and the dynamic around the table was good. That said, "Lost Mine of Phandelver" was vastly superior. My inclination for the future is that a year-long campaign spanning the lower levels, and featuring a wider variety of opponents, is definitely the way to go with this group.

Smitten on Zalto's Anvil

We were finally able to resume our campaign today, and as feared the result was indeed the dreaded Total Party Kill. As is frequently the case with D&D, as soon as the first PC hit the deck the writing was on the wall - the party was then torn between sacrificing actions to bring people back into the fray or just letting them bleed out. And lacking a dedicated healer who could give meaningful amounts of hit points back, any recovery was short-lived.

The group therefore suffered a domino effect, and just found themselves overwhelmed. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

That brings the question about the next campaign into rather sharper focus. And I'm no closer to a resolution - on the one hand, running a pre-written campaign (and, ideally, a D&D 5e campaign at that) has a great deal of attraction to it as it would reduce the workload I have to face. On the other hand, I'm definitely attracted to the notion of running a campaign designed for about a year of play, which probably means going from 1st to about 8th level, and then coming to a definitive conclusion. That suggests that homebrew is probably the way to go.

I have a couple of weeks in which to come up with three options to put to the group, and then a couple more weeks before the campaign is due to start. (In reality, character creation will probably take a couple of weeks, so add a little more again.) That's really not long, especially if going the homebrew route.

All Quiet on the Gaming Front

If you're wondering why there have been no updates on this blog for a while, it's because I'm still waiting for the resolution of the cliff-hanger from the previous session. For some reason, work is considered a higher priority than getting together over lunchtime for a fun game, which means we've been down a person or two, while the tail-end of the holiday season has also conspired to rob us of a quorum.

There is one key lesson from this: you should probably take the view that the game will go on regardless (or as close to regardless as you can manage). Skipping sessions can become a habit that is surprisingly hard to break. (Also, it's much easier to get a quorum with six players than with five - previously, we've gone on up with two people missing, leaving four; having dropped to five we're now skipping when two people are missing, leaving three.)

However, the basic upshot is that we've had three weeks without the game, and it will likely be at least another two before the next session.

What Would Make Them Stop?

One of the things I'm less than keen about in many published adventures (and, if I'm being honest, in my own adventures too) is that just about every opponent the PCs faces will fight to the death. Part of this is because D&D no longer has morale rules, and part of it is that the game is so punitive of attempts to flee or surrender. Nonetheless, it's something I'm not keen on.

As a corollary to that, I always see at least some thought given to what the villains of the piece want, and usually some thought given to why they want that. However, it's far less common, to the point of being unheard-of to see any thought given to the question of what would make them stop.

But that question is probably one that would give rise to better fleshed-out villains. Can the evil inquisator be persuaded of the error of her ways? Can the warlord be redirected from this conquest to a greater quest? Does the mafia boss have a favoured child who could persuade him to change his ways?

By asking, and answering that question, the door is then opened to solutions other than just fighting through hordes of minions before putting the Big Bad to the sword.

And sometimes the answer might well be "nothing". Some hurts are such that there's no stopping the revenge. Some insanities might not allow for being talked around. And that's fine, and it might even be the norm. But maybe it shouldn't be the only scenario?

Boxed In

We ended yesterday's session on a major cliffhanger - the PCs have brought the full force of the fire giants down upon them, and find themselves boxed in to a corner. Worse than that, the room they're in doesn't have a single entrance they can block up as a choke point - it has two such entrances just far enough apart to cause them grief.

In addition to this, they're in a position where their front-line warrior is really low on hit points and their Warlock is now out of spells.

I really don't see how they're going to get out of this one. Maybe this time it really is going to be a TPK, campaign wipe, and start over.

Of course, my experience has generally been that a TPK comes only when you least expect it, and generally when a sequence of bad rolls lead to a key PC going down unexpectedly, which provokes a cascade of deaths. If I'm expecting that outcome, that probably means it won't happen.

Either way, suddenly things got really interesting!

Rethinking the Next Campaign

I suddenly find myself in a position where I'm looking to finish up "Storm King's Thunder" as quickly as reasonably possible and much less sure that my decision to go with "Legacy of Fire" as the next campaign.

My feeling is that D&D 5e doesn't actually handle high-level play much better than any other version of the game, which means that the current campaign has started to drag. And given our current session times (1.5 hours, weekly), that drag is only exacerbated.

The other issue that I've found, actually with just about every edition and every game, is that a campaign simply has a "shelf-life" - except in very rare cases, once you get towards or over a year of continuous play, people just want to move on to something else.

All of which is probably a reason why so much campaign play, across the board, is in the low-mid levels.

Given that, and given that "Legacy of Fire" is intended as a campaign to run from level 1 to approximately level 20, which probably means 2-3 years of game play, it would seem a poor choice for the next campaign. Indeed, pretty much any of the published campaigns would make for a pretty poor choice.

Actually, the ideal adventure for the current group is "Lost Mine of Phandelver". It's just a shame that we've already used it!

What I'm now thinking we'll probably end up doing is a homebrew campaign, probably set in the Forgotten Realms, sticking to some fairly simple themes of exploration, finding treasure, and defeating evil.

The Emerald Spire Superdungeon

As mentioned in my previous post, I had one last Pathfinder PDF to read through. "The Emerald Spire Superdungeon" was something I had had my eye on for a long time, and when Paizo issued me with some store credit (for a delay I hadn't even noticed), and with my subscription benefits coming to an end, it was an ideal time to pick it up.

As the name implies, the adventure details a 16-level superdungeon. This was a product put together for one of their Kickstarters, and Paizo therefore used their contacts to arrange to have each level written by a different author, being a whos-who of some of the big names in the industry (excluding people working for WotC... can't think why...) The upshot is that each layer has a distinct feel, which may or may not be a good thing.

All in all... it's fine. It's one of those products that I suspect is of more interest as an artifact rather than as a gaming product - perhaps as a guide to how those big names would go about putting together something like this. From a quick glance, it really looked like many of the challenges, especially in the first half-dozen levels, seemed rather weak.

I did feel that there were some levels, notably in the middle of the pack, that were really great - lots of clever ideas, and it just generally seemed like fun. Given that this also matches up rather neatly to the 'sweet spot' that just about every version of D&D (and Pathfinder) has, that's not really a surprise.

I don't think I would recommend this product, those I certainly don't regret the purchase. It's just that there are better adventures out there. It's interesting, but something else would probably serve your needs better.

(And with that, the era really is ended. No more Pathfinder for me.)