Dungeons and Dragons: *spoilers, Allie and Hannah do not read
Greetings fellow adventurers! This week I will be detailing the most vital components of what I do to prepare for a session in the "List Post" blog format. Due to how my group's scheduling has turned out, I'll be taking this week and next week to prepare for our final session. This means that there may be some gaps in my planning with this blog, but I will be finishing up details and missed items next week.
All of the components of gameplay that I'll be detailing are intertwined, so the numbering of the list is trivial. Every aspect has its own significance.
1. Review the characters
The most important detail of my storytelling is the motivations of my characters. As such, I need to constantly be thinking of where the characters are physically, as in equipment, leveling, and actual location, and where they are in their character arc. I won't go into too much detail with this, as that will be the topic of next week's podcast.
2. Outline potential scenes
This is definitely the most intricate part of my preparation process. Some Dungeon Masters go absolutely crazy with scene options and storylines, but given that my players are relatively inexperienced they tend to go in whatever direction that I suggest. This makes my job a lot easier in the end. The final session, I'll be sending the players back to Port Swordbreak before they accompany Thess'ahlia to the final cultist stronghold. They'll have relatively free reign to explore the city and have some fun before entering the more serious combat scenarios. The party will travel through the countryside until reaching Balmoral and will battle their way through the outpost.
3. Define lore and secrets
Depending on the tone of the campaign, lore and secrets can add a lot to the narrative. However, I'm running a more combat heavy campaign so lore it not that important. Secrets can be pretty interesting for character motivations, so I'll be hiding a few things through the session in some puzzles that the characters could discover and solve.
4. Develop locations
This can be anything from dungeons, towns, or trails. I made the basics for all my locations before we started playing, so all I need to do is further develop the dungeon and the town of Balmoral. I know that Balmoral will be almost completely ravaged and destroyed, so I'll only have to create a central tavern and a few stragglers who are clinging on to hope that someone will save their town.
5. Choose relevant monsters
My absolute favorite part of planning campaigns is finding unusual monsters for my party to fight. I've mostly been choosing humanoids as enemies, but this session I will be setting up some Displacer Beasts, which are essentially magical panthers, as guard animals. Of course the cultists will be present at the stronghold.
6. Outline NPCs
I have this step mostly taken care of. I've done all of the preparation for Thess'ahlia and all NPC shopkeepers and acolytes at the Temple of Tyr and Torn. All I need to do is come up with some unimportant NPCs for the tavern in Balmoral.
7. Decide rewards
My final session will probably be the last in the campaign, so I will not have much in the way of rewards. If the party succeeds in defeating the cultists, they will gain local prestige and become folk heroes in the region.
And that's it for my basic outline! I'm doing pretty well on following my genius hour and my overall goal of learning how to plan ahead. If everything goes well, this final session should go very smoothly and prove that my skills in planning ahead have improved.
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Genius Hour 2.5
Dungeons and Dragons: *spoiler free for Allie and Hannah
Greetings fellow adventurers! This week I'll be providing a recap of how our second session of gameplay went. Despite my best intentions, I cannot get the audio editing platform I want to use work. I believe part of the issue is that I'm uploading way too large of a file to edit, so instead of recording the entire session I will only record smaller highlights. Hopefully by session 3 or 4 I will be able to post a highlights reel of our session.
This week was also out first real scheduling conflict, so I had only two players present during the game. I knew this would happen eventually, so I was fully prepared to take control of our missing player's character and be them for the session. However, managing a larger amount of characters was quite challenging for me. At some points in combat I was managing four characters, but I made it happen. This was achieved through lots of note-taking to keep track of everyone and my players reminding me of things that I forgot.
As for the actual story, the players were successfully able to investigate the disappearance of Thess'ahlia and track down the cult that kidnapped her. When they were gearing up for the trek to Addersfield, I introduced more items to the players for purchase. Some of these items included health potions, cursed weapons, and types of armor. I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for useless and/or extremely dangerous cursed weapons, and Nyssaadi ended up buying a bow that only hits when the user is blackout drunk. When the players reached the cultist stronghold, they defeated all enemies except for the leader. The players rescued Thess'ahlia and looted the stronghold, where Snargog found a ridiculous amount of gold thanks to a natural 20 investigation roll.
Finally the players took Thess'ahlia back to Port Swordbreak, where she implored them to help her destroy the last of the cult once and for all. The players accepted, and that is where the session ended.
The final three weeks of my genius hour will be highly dependent on everyone's scheduling, so the next two weeks I'll either be working on plans for the final confrontation with the cult or doing a smaller side-quest if we all can find a time to play. The biggest lesson I've learned from this is that scheduling for four people to meet up semi-regularly is more difficult than one would think.
Greetings fellow adventurers! This week I'll be providing a recap of how our second session of gameplay went. Despite my best intentions, I cannot get the audio editing platform I want to use work. I believe part of the issue is that I'm uploading way too large of a file to edit, so instead of recording the entire session I will only record smaller highlights. Hopefully by session 3 or 4 I will be able to post a highlights reel of our session.
This week was also out first real scheduling conflict, so I had only two players present during the game. I knew this would happen eventually, so I was fully prepared to take control of our missing player's character and be them for the session. However, managing a larger amount of characters was quite challenging for me. At some points in combat I was managing four characters, but I made it happen. This was achieved through lots of note-taking to keep track of everyone and my players reminding me of things that I forgot.
As for the actual story, the players were successfully able to investigate the disappearance of Thess'ahlia and track down the cult that kidnapped her. When they were gearing up for the trek to Addersfield, I introduced more items to the players for purchase. Some of these items included health potions, cursed weapons, and types of armor. I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for useless and/or extremely dangerous cursed weapons, and Nyssaadi ended up buying a bow that only hits when the user is blackout drunk. When the players reached the cultist stronghold, they defeated all enemies except for the leader. The players rescued Thess'ahlia and looted the stronghold, where Snargog found a ridiculous amount of gold thanks to a natural 20 investigation roll.
Finally the players took Thess'ahlia back to Port Swordbreak, where she implored them to help her destroy the last of the cult once and for all. The players accepted, and that is where the session ended.
The final three weeks of my genius hour will be highly dependent on everyone's scheduling, so the next two weeks I'll either be working on plans for the final confrontation with the cult or doing a smaller side-quest if we all can find a time to play. The biggest lesson I've learned from this is that scheduling for four people to meet up semi-regularly is more difficult than one would think.
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Genius Hour 2.4
Dungeons and Dragons: *spoilers, Allie and Hannah don't read
Greeting fellow adventurers! This week I will be planning my next session's encounters and creating more world building materials. After completing our first session of gameplay and listening to the footage that I recorded, I found a few areas I could improve on. My biggest issue was coming up with reasonable numbers for purchasing weapons and coming up with NPC names and appearances on the fly. The main goal of my genius hour overall is to learn how to plan ahead and have lots of backup plans; however, I did none of this my first session and I felt like it showed. My players didn't have any comments on this, but they were all first-time players so they would not have known any better.
To better prepare for my next session, I created a few shop names and shopkeepers and kept them in my Dungeon Master notebook to pull from as I needed. I also wrote down a few prices of goods that the players may want to purchase and drew a rough map of the fortress that my players will be raiding next session.
As for what's next in the narrative of the adventure, the players will be headed back to Port Swordbreak after their first mini-quest to accept a larger quest from one of their contacts. This quest will entail rescuing a kidnapped cleric from a cult and investigating the motives of the cult. I know that I want the cleric to join the party for the final confrontation with the final boss in Genius Hour 2.8. I will be controlling this NPC, so I rolled a character from scratch without using any websites for assistance. This was actually pretty difficult, but all of the resources I needed were in the Player's Handbook so I got there eventually. The luck of the dice were on my side for this character, so all of her stats and abilities turned out very well and I couldn't be happier.
Greeting fellow adventurers! This week I will be planning my next session's encounters and creating more world building materials. After completing our first session of gameplay and listening to the footage that I recorded, I found a few areas I could improve on. My biggest issue was coming up with reasonable numbers for purchasing weapons and coming up with NPC names and appearances on the fly. The main goal of my genius hour overall is to learn how to plan ahead and have lots of backup plans; however, I did none of this my first session and I felt like it showed. My players didn't have any comments on this, but they were all first-time players so they would not have known any better.
To better prepare for my next session, I created a few shop names and shopkeepers and kept them in my Dungeon Master notebook to pull from as I needed. I also wrote down a few prices of goods that the players may want to purchase and drew a rough map of the fortress that my players will be raiding next session.
As for what's next in the narrative of the adventure, the players will be headed back to Port Swordbreak after their first mini-quest to accept a larger quest from one of their contacts. This quest will entail rescuing a kidnapped cleric from a cult and investigating the motives of the cult. I know that I want the cleric to join the party for the final confrontation with the final boss in Genius Hour 2.8. I will be controlling this NPC, so I rolled a character from scratch without using any websites for assistance. This was actually pretty difficult, but all of the resources I needed were in the Player's Handbook so I got there eventually. The luck of the dice were on my side for this character, so all of her stats and abilities turned out very well and I couldn't be happier.
And that's all for this week's session prep! Next blog I should hopefully have a highlights podcast of how the session goes if my audio recording and editing goes well.
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