Unexpectedly Running 5e

Before last night's D&D Wednesday night encounters league I was working on some of my many Reaper Bones minis and thinking about how I wanted to level my wizard when the DM pops in early. It seems he has to attend some last minute event, and won't be able to run our table. Given that last week we had 2 full tables, and they were expecting to be able to do 3 tables this week... that was a problem.

The guys at the store knew I ran a game on Sunday, and they asked me to DM my own table.

I wanted to play, not DM... 

What was I going to do? Make my fellow players waste a night? Besides, I'd already read the adventure. So I grabbed the packet for the night and went to dinner. While chowing down on a bacon cheeseburger and waffle fries I refreshed myself on the stuff I'd intentionally tried to forget.

Now, my group is apparently a session or 4 ahead of where the adventure league is supposed to be. We kinda skipped a lot using stealth, and ran roughshod over any actual role playing. The governor barely had time to begin explaining a problem before we were on it. I think we managed something like 7 or 8 encounters in 2 hours.

So for tonight, I wanted to slow things down a bit. I intentionally made my players role play, interacting with the governor and one of the survivors of the attack. Then, of their own accord, they opted to role play with the cultists they were chasing! Seriously, no combat dice were rolled till over an hour of table time had passed! I played the cultists as incredibly lazy and stupid, and the kobolds as simpering cowards. In spite of my players' poor dice rolls for deception, the cultists perception results were even worse. And everyone got involved.

The combat itself wasn't actually all that challenging, but it did end up taking them the rest of the allotted time.
While the players noted the different pace, and one of them was seriously itching for a fight by the halfway point, everyone seemed to have a good time.


Beyond that, I felt like I really nailed it. Sure, there are a couple of things I'd have done a little differently, but overall I'm really pleased with how I did.