Ok, so last weekend me and my friends finally got together to play some D&D! My Basis Starter game had arrived, I'd read through the encounters, and - for the most part - Ben and Howard had their characters.
We quickly went to a local(!) game store were I got myself a copy of The Keep on the Shadowfell (just in case) and Ben got himself a miniature (unfortunately causing his character to end up somewhat confused as to what it's sex, and possibly even sexuality, is! Still, an F to M short, fat, drunk Half-Elf is part of the fun, right?)
We arrived home around 2 and proceeded to settle down. We needed to create Patrick a character to use and as we had the living to ourselves I booted up my PC and installed Wizards’ Character Creator! Ingenious piece of software!
As a short aside, the hardest thing Patrick found about making his character, a Half-Elf Cleric, was choosing his Deity!
We double checked Ben and Howard’s fighter and wizard with the Character Creator and got ourselves ready to begin our very first encounter…
My first mistake (of many!): I laid the board out before our Heroes (Quarkala, the Half-elf Fighter, Mordred the Half-elf Cleric, and Balasar the Dragonborn Wizard) had even gotten to the entrance to the Dungeon…
Hmmm… Should this be a good time to tell anyone planning on getting into D&D and the Basic Starter game to LOOK AWAY NOW for SPOILERS!
So, Old Kellar had separately approached the Heroes to ask them to help out the village from the raiders. Quarkala, sat in the Tavern was drinking her/himself into a stupour and would only talk to Old Kellar if more booze was involved – I’m having issues as DM with Quarkala’s Choatic/Evil alignment mixing with the other Heroes’ Unaligned/Lawful Good alignments – we shall see how it pans out.
Anyway, I digress. Quarkala, Tavern, more booze. Quarkala tried to intimidate the Elder and I had him roll a skill check to gain an additional 5gp onto her/his reward money from the Elders. I kept the DC to a 10 as Old Kellar was, well, old and frail.
Neither Mordred nor Balasar attempted to get anymore money from Old Kellar and so we moved onto our first encounter…
…which, as I said, had been laid out from the get go, so was not very surprising for them.
As I only have three PC’s I should have probably lowered the amount of Creatures fighting them, however they succeeded anyway – granted, there was some fudging going on on my part. So the scene started with three goblins sat around the table staring at the PCs, and my two Goblin Blackblades who were lurking in the shadows. I say lurking in the shadows but I screwed up the roll for ones stealth check and stuck him on the table before I released he had a +10 stealth mod. D’oh! As the PC’s now knew of his existence, I left him on the table. I kept the other hidden, properly, until I felt the urge to get him out and did so without saying so. It wasn’t until about three rounds later that Quarkala noticed there was suddenly more Goblins than he first thought – I guess if I was role-playing this properly I would have made some comment about him leaping out of the shadows, weapon in hand… We are all having a little angst getting into the Role-playing side of this… it’ll come in time, I’m sure, when we all relaxed more into our roles.
The tokens that came with the basic game are all numbered, so it made it easy for me to keep track of who had taken what damage, and it amused me that one goblin blackblade had a full bill of health considering the others were all taking a beating! Bad rolls on the Wizard’s part.
My cleric wasn’t doing his job so well and wasn’t really healing people – the teamwork aspect is in need of work. My wizard was slowly getting bogged down with the complexity of the rules, but managed to emerge from the quagmire unscathed! My fighter had his nose buried in his PHB making sure we all had an understanding of the abilities, skills, powers, etc, in use – I think if he continues with that I’ll be happy. He also had to remind me to make sure I made a note of how many javelins the three goblins had left – I neglected to read that they have five each.
Once all five Goblins had been successfully dispatched we decided to call it a day as Patrick had a friend arrive. We had been playing for the better part of 6 hours, and it had taken us about 2 hours to do the one encounter.
Table Rules:
We had a brief conversation about what constitutes a minor action; We decided that putting away a weapon, and unsheathing another would be one minor action, but this was disregarded towards the end as it seemed too… Well, a look in the rules after set us right. One table rule scratched.
We also agreed that if a die fell on the floor it would be re-rolled. Also, I was using a CD bag-type thing as my DM board and sometimes the die rolled under the leaves so I couldn’t see. Instead of making it up, or possibly having the PCs not trust what I rolled I said I would re-roll on the table, too…
Patrick kept getting calls from his Father on his mobile which threw in an added distraction. Ben and Howard are ok with not having mobiles on, or at least on loud, until the game has finish, so I think this should be a table rule.
Overall, everybody enjoyed themselves, even if the last few minutes felt a bit rushed as Patrick’s friend had arrived… We can’t play again, now, until the end of the month – should be interesting to see what we remember.
I’d appreciate peoples comments, if anyone has any?
