Behind the screen for Hoard of the Dragon Queen... again

My Wednesday night Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure league game has been going along pretty well. Like I mentioned last time, we’re ahead of where we’re supposed to be. We just wrapped up episode 2, and will be starting episode 3 this week. And like last time I wrote about it, I’ll be stepping behind the DM’s screen again. Our DM (Adam) is running a number of other games, and I guess Wednesday night is just one night too many.

I knew getting behind the screen last time was a mistake. Once they know you can DM…

All is not lost for my dwarven illusionist though… Adam has agreed to swap DMing duty every other episode. We’ll see how that pans out.. but, as ever, I remain hopeful.

But I’m also going to take full advantage of the fact that some of the best minds of the OSR have taken Hoard of the Dragon Queen and not only analysed it’s faults, but remixed it to address those faults!

Bryce Lynch at Ten Foot Pole does a fantastic job laying out all the faults of the adventure, episode by episode.

Courtney Campbell over at Hack & Slash is working on his remix. If I'm lucky he'll get to episode 3 before this goes live... (writing on Saturday)

Daniel Davis over at Detect Magic has been working on his remix, complete with a nifty little logo.

I’m also going to do my best to weird things up a bit. Now, since this is an official event, there’s only so much I can actually do, but even with that stricture I can make it more interesting and fun for the players (I hope).

On a side note, I do prefer the feel of the paper in Hoard of the Dragon Queen over the paper used in the PHB and MM. Anyone else with me on that?

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.