Hey, folks… it’s looking like there are going to be more people out tonight due to schedule things than were last week, and I have a feeling I’m going to be crashing early myself. (I went to bed early last night and then was wide awake at 5 this morning.) In light of those facts, I think there isn’t going to be a session tonight. I’m going to be trying to get a hold of the missing folks (the ones who I don’t know will be back next week, I mean)… if they’re not available, we’ll just keep going and I’ll add replacements to the group after the adventure wraps.

Have a great week. I’ll try to do some more blogging here more often.

If you’re lurking in late, give me a holler on Skype and I’ll add you to the conference call.

Just a reminder to everybody in the Wednesday group that tonight I’m back and ready to resume play. If you’re in the Wednesday group and happen to be checking the site today, please comment and let me know that you’re around.

Alright, I’ve got everybody online but Burke (who said he might not be around) and Aurora… Aurora, if you’re at the computer please put on Skype and pick up.

…was Aurora’s rather brilliantly conceived plan to get the skeletal archer off the roof using Storm Spike. It could have moved two squares without running out of roof, but as it was kind of a steeply pitched affair I was going to make it roll an Acrobatics check to keep its balance. Even if it succeeded (at an untrained roll), the act of balancing grants Combat Advantage.

But then she rolled the Good Guy Crit Of The Night, while using her Earthroot Staff… which restrains the target instead of adding extra damage dice on a critical hit. Oh, well… that meant the thing took an extra 4 damage when the Storm Spike hit it again on its next turn, which is slightly above the average result the +d6 from another weapon’s critical would have done.

It was a good plan, it went astray, but not in a terrible way.

Hey, Wednesfolks… I had a little trouble trying to work out how to best switch between two large groups of players in Screen Monkey, which works mostly by means of persistent sessions (i.e., if I close it and re-open it, all the same PCs are still there exactly as they were)… my initial attempts at making copies of the session files and then switching between them ended up screwing up your session.

(I did figure out the easy and obvious way to accomplish this, afterwards: have two entirely different installations of the program with the folders and shortcuts named for the campaigns/days).

So to make a long story short, you’re going to have to re-add yourselves to the server, which is now up. The password is the same as it was before. It’s no rush since we all know the system, but you may want to log on at least a little bit early to get that taken care of.

Some information that will be known to Aurora, Alaya, and anybody else trained in Nature skill: between the Wyrmpriest’s ice breath and the Dragonshields’ cold resistance the Kobolds you fought clearly venerated white dragons. Given how temperate it is outside, they seem to be a little outside their habitat.

One of the things I felt went well about about the combat was that everybody pretty much got to have their moment. Even Gallifreya, who it seemed the dice were against (and who may be revising her character slightly before next Wednesday… she remade her character almost literally at the last minute after losing her original file, and there may have been some errors), pasted a runner with her wand power. There was some nice characterization in the opening rounds, that… perhaps because of character design following from character concept as much as anything else… seemed to follow through even in purely tactical actions… but there were some fairly dramatic hits in there.

What did everyone feel was their big moment or moments in the combat? I could probably name one or two things that stood out for each character, but I’m curious what the players’ impressions were.

Well, I think the first session was a great success. The bulk of the time was occupied with the “tutorial encounter”, which I ended up using a slightly-harder-than-average encounter group for. (1055 experience for a party of eight level 1 characters… average-on-the-nose would have been 800 experience).

I wanted to make it slightly less likely that the party would manage to blow through the first encounter without any challenges or choices, so that it would be a better preparation for future fights, and I think I succeeded on that account.

The first change I made to that effect was to change the encounter type from undead to kobold… with two paladins and a cleric, an “average” undead fight would have been easy, even with no Turn Undead. The second change I made, after seeing what an average kobold fight would be, was to add two dragonshield bearers so there would be someone with some more durability protecting the priest and slingers… and in fact, they were the last two kobolds standing.

The party was still learning their tactical roles and how to work together, but as they were eight strangers just meeting for the first time, that made sense. They were flanking and throwing each other bonuses by the end of it. When the razorclaw shifter caught fire, there was a concerted effort to put the cat out.

Future fights—especially smaller ones—I’ll do more to encourage attack narration as I do in my tabletop games, but there was a lot of adjusting to the interface and such this time. Even without a lot of that, though, people brought a lot of their characters into the fight, which was good. It seemed like people had an easier time stepping into their characters after the fight, which was good… sometimes, combat jars people out of that.

Anyway, lessons learned:

1. Smaller file size on maps are a must. The grassy texturing on my tiles might look neat but all those pixels cost kb, yo. Future maps are going to have a solid background and I’ll paste on the interesting features (so, this one would have been a green background with the road and trees pasted in, an indoor map would be a grey background with walls and furniture.) As I said before, the map isn’t meant to be a simulation of the world, just a point of reference.

2. Testing an interface with one or two people is not the same thing as testing it with nine or ten. ScreenMonkey actually saves the entire map as it exists on my end as a JPG and then uploads it to everybody’s browser any time something changes. It wasn’t that slow when we tested it, but with nine people with varying connection speeds… yeah. The lag made the interface clunky in some pretty inconvenient ways, which slowed things down further. As much as I love the simplicity of the system, I may be changing in the future (not before Sunday, though.)

3. I need to make print outs of everybody’s character sheets to have in my hands. I tried opening copies of all eight of them on my laptop, so I could use that as a reference while running the game from my laptop… it got up to seven while taking longer and longer to open each one, and then crashed on the eighth one. Not a huge deal, since I had the plaintext copies in ScreenMonkey… but it meant I didn’t have copies of each player’s power cards in front of me, which led to some confusion on my part. (Fortunately the player knew his powers.)

4. While ScreenMonkey is wonderfully streamlined for rolling initiative and producing a working order, I need to copy it down into Notepad so I can keep referring to it. This also gives me a handy place to note temporary HP, which ScreenMonkey doesn’t track.

5. I need to use physical dice. While everybody else might be rolling two or three times each turn, I have to roll attacks and damage and miscellaneous nonsense for every monster. Even with minimal lag, that time adds up.

Biggest hitch of the night, not counting unexpected lag, was my internet connection dropping. It took some jiggering to get everybody back in the same Skype conference call.

Coping with the static, feedback, and background noise of nine open mics took some getting used to, and threw me off my narrative stride at a couple of points, but the open mics were better than having people mute when they weren’t talking… and forget to unmute when they were. I think as I get more used to it, it will throw me off less.

All in all, it was fun… I’m excited for Sunday and I’m really excited for next Wednesday. We broke off actual play at about 20 till midnight, and the group was just starting to get a picture of what was going on in the area around them.

Sunday’s “intro fight” will be shorter, of a necessity, because there’s more story stuff going on right away in the Sunday game… I think it will go faster, too, for the practice I’ve had. Not that Wednesday’s group doesn’t have a story… it’s just more of a backloaded one.

I have everybody’s character sheet except for our Artificer, who is getting computer access back later today. I have added everybody in Skype… I just need everybody to accept the invitations so I can add you to a contact group. The only thing left is to get everyone in ScreenMonkey. Right now, there’s no character for Kavay, Aurora, or (Thanks, folks!) the Artificer.

I thought at one point Aurora was in there. It’s possible there was a glitch or that her player removed her… either way that brings me to an important note I should have thought to make earlier: don’t use the remove button to take your character off the map. It actually deletes them. It’s so quick and easy to add a character in general, but any notes I’ve made on them goes with them. If you want to take your character off the board, just click on the little thing in the top corner that says “Off Map”.

My face-to-face gaming group can tell you that I have two bad habits: backseat DMing, which I hope Gamingdragon doesn’t mind too much because generally I’m doing it by taking the DM’s side pre-emptively, and “driver’s seat PCing”, which means I find myself giving advice on tactical considerations when I’m DMing, simply because I know the rules and the interplay of powers pretty well and I feel that pointing out an opportunity here or there can help players learn to recognize them on their own.

This is my approach to “Character Optimization”: make the character you want and then figure out the optimal strategy for using them. Below the fold I’m going to have advice on power use for the Wednesday characters for whom I’ve had the sheets emailed to me. I’ll add more as I get them.

I’m putting this below the fold because it’s perfectly possible that someone’s not interested in my advice, and that’s fine. I’m putting it here in a post so I don’t have the urge to blurt it out when we’re playing.

It’s very possible that some of you will read this and go, “Duh, that’s why I picked the power.” I don’t know everybody’s exact levels of experience and their approach to the tactical part of the game, though. So I’m just addressing the post to everybody. It kind of expands on some of the points in the Combat Primer, with specific suggestions now that I know what everybody’s using.

Anyway, take these as suggestions. If they clash with your character or you have your own ideas, you’re neither going to get your head bit off nor have your character vindictively slain. Again, this is just an extension of the combat primer… even if you disagree, it might help you think about what powers are better suited to what situations.

And of course, this is all dealing with normal attacks made in normal combat situations. Creative power use is still up to your own creativity.

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