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How do you play in your game? Can anyone join? I have been playing D&D since 1981. I play now in a large group. We have 10 people total. 4 DM's. They switch off running a game. We play in the forgotten realms. We have a detective agency called the Warg Wolf. That gives us a great way to introduce new games. This game with the Warg Wolf has been going on for 8 Years now. There is 4 woman and 6 men. I run a 13th level MU / 12th level thief. I enjoyed reading your post.

Al

Being a former game store owner and RPG writer/designer, I can pick my players from a very large pool. When I opened my game up before, I ran up to about 16 players before I stopped it. For some reason, people think you're a better DM than you really are when you run a game store and write gaming books.

This new game is 5 players, and I have a rule that says that all new players must be approved by everyone at the table. I don't think we're adding any players any time soon.

It sounds like you have your hands full already with 10 players in the group. Also, it sounds like you're playing 1st Edition. Is that true?

Woohoo!

Big storyline/character development adventure last night, and one that furthered a lot of mini-DM goals for me.

*I like for the PCs to explore the world. This adventure took place on an island off the peninsula that holds the PCs' home city.
*My players have to include a secret in their history. This adventure forced a player's secret into the open. We'll see how much he'll share with the players. The rest of the group wants to know exactly how the rogue knows this cleric of the evil god of terror and what is this "reward" the evil cleric mentioned for returning the rogue back home?
*Yet another important person in the city turned up as a captive of the slavers. Surely they can't be randomly incidents. Maybe once, but not twice. Who's doing this, and why?
*The cleric got a chance to shine--literally. A pile of dead bodies got up and started getting hostile. One wave of his holy symbol was all it took to blast them to pieces. The player was charged about it, too. "Baby's first turning," he called it. That's exactly why that encounter was there.
*I almost misjudged the lethality of an encounter. In fact, it was too harsh. It didn't kill anybody, but it was a mere guard room, not intended as a major encounter, and it took much longer than I planned for. It also deterred the party from pressing on when I had intended for them to continue. I think I'm going to start lowering the AC by 1-2 points on grunts of this scale. It should be a delicate enough touch to move things in the right direction for next time.
*My wife, playing the druid, even felt helpful outside of her normal druidy environment. True, she was just a walking pile of cure spells, but she had a chance to contribute to the party. Until druids start shapechanging, they don't get much air time.
*The paladin, after a bunch of misses during the guard encounter, hit the big villain at the end with a huge crit--doing 25 of his 28 hit points in a single swing! It was great luck when the party needed it.
*Considering that this adventure really focused on the rogue, all of the players had their bit of attention last night, and that's a big sign of success to me.

Actually we run arms law. We have also combined D&D with shadow run. We are 2nd edition. We also run some spell law. We didn't like all of the rules so we augmented them. We try to play once a week but don't always get together. The problems with big groups. We are not playing again until June 23rd. I always look for another game. At one time I played two games a week. In our games good triumphs and we don't steal or kill members of our own group. It is not unlike one of us standing in to take another's attack for them. Especially when they are prone.

Al

Planning for the new week.

Planning this week was a chore. I had nothing to go on except my campaign outline notes: action, city.

So, it's going to be light on storyline or character development, heavy on dice-rolling, and take place within the city. Not that I can't tie this week's events into the storyline later, but the intention is to have it be irrelevant.

That puts off-limits the iconic NPCs in the game--no rulers, key NPCs, church heads, etc.

Having a lot of monsters in the ogre/griffon/dragon sense in the middle of a city stretches the bounds of plausibility, even in a D&D setting. And since they just fought slavers, I'm reluctant to hit them up with too many human types, so it'll have to be subtle. Maybe more traps and puzzles than I normally run.

Obviously, I can't share what I decided until I run it, just in case a player reads this, but I decided to go with one of my old standbys. The PCs will be surrogate cops, hunting down criminals within the city. Based on that, I prepared my weekly handout, titled it "Chicken Feed" based on what they'll get paid and what they'll be doing, and e-mailed it to the players.

Okay, "Chicken Feed", Thursday's episode, went off fairly well. The build-up was slow, and there was more giggling at the scenario than I expected (someone's stealing chickens!), but the mood turned serious once the words "evil cult" turned up in conversation.

My planning was a little bit looser than normal, forcing me to ad lib.

Now, I used to ad lib nearly everything, just planning out major monster stats ahead of time. For the past couple of years, I've been planning in great detail, even down to dialogue notes and several contingency plans. Either style can work for me, but if I'm out of practice, I'm not as good.

The ad lib went fine, thanks to the dictates of the "Evil Zen" philosophy of game mastering. The new girl got snatched up "at a dramatically opportune moment". The bad guy burst in throgh a window "at a dramatically opportune moment."

Without writing a whole article, Evil Zen at its most basic says that the worst thing possible happens at the worst possible time. Just when the trap the PCs laid was closing in, one of the trappers got kidnapped and the trap fell apart. Just when the PCs are closing in on the evil cultist, reinforcements arrive. Used in moderation, it's a great way to maintain pace and excitement in an action-oriented adventure (like this one).

This was also the group's first encounter with damage reduction in combat. Unfortunately, none of the group had any weapons that could bypass the DR, and the wizard had already blown his magic missile. It was a tough, tough fight, but once they killed the evil cultist, the monstrous creature's motivation changed, and it tried to escape--preferably with the intended sacrifice lying on the altar. When it could not escape with her, it flew out of the window, despite desparate ranged fire from the party into the darkness.

The title was also a double-entendre; it referred to both the missing sacrifice animals and the reward the party usually gets for doing stuff. As I've mentioned, I like to keep 'em poor.

Okay, a bit about Thursday�s game.

As in the week before, I allowed myself a little less prep in story outline (although I had to do more for setting, room description, and stuff like that). It worked out well, because major actions required a lot of in-character discussion between the players.

The characters met a slave (slavery is a part of this setting) who was afraid for his life and the life of his wife & sister-in-law, who all belonged to this dude. �This dude� happened to be a guild officer in the Mages� Guild. Known as the Lorekeeper, he�s essentially the secretary of the arcane spellcaster�s club.

The party decided to go to his place and check it out.

Now, they were concerned about the legality of what they were doing. I make it clear that my game has repercussions. If the players are caught doing something illegal, they can go to jail. They might get a hand lopped off, or be exiled out of the city, or even executed. So, you can understand why they want to make sure they have at least an arguable reason for going into this guy�s back door when he nobody answers the knocking.

A brief search turns up the sister-in-law and an alarming story, but no proof. No real evidence that you can take to the cops and say �check this out.�

Probably half the game was in-character discussion of what they were going to do rather than the actual doing. Which is fine with me. It�s nice to know where everybody stands, who will break the laws if they have a chance of getting away with it, and who won�t, regardless of the danger to an innocent individual.

The one combat the party entered was the wizard�s brother�who happened to have enough levels of monk that when he decided to throw the whole party out of the house, it looked like he could do it. He took out the party�s rogue with one swipe (it was a crit for 16 damage), which was enough to remind the rest of the party �you know, we are trespassing. Maybe we should leave.�

How did this fit into my campaign plan? Well, I knew from the beginning it was not a story-developing adventure (at least not now; the wizard might become important later on). The campaign outline called for �horror, city�, so I had this creepy adventure with a powerful necromancer-type figure planned out. The room descriptions began a little odd, and then the fear was going to mount along with the tension throughout the adventure.

Well, the players sat down in a playful mood. Everybody was in pretty good humor, and I didn�t feel like I could comfortably establish a horror mood. Some of the techniques I use for that are a little harsh, and it�s possible to hurt somebody�s feelings if you�re not careful. They�re GOOD techniques, but if you take it too far or do it at the wrong time, or the adventure doesn�t live up to the expectation you build, you can upset your players.

So it didn�t work this time, which is fine. They�ll get plenty of horror in season 3 & 4.

Unfortunately, we had to cut the adventure short for real-life reasons, and we didn�t get to a fun encounter. Well, fun for the DM is not necessarily fun for the players. I also decided to resolve the action �in narrative summary�, which is where the DM just tells the players how it turned out. Something like �You rescue the princess, find a bunch of gold, and the king gives you the half of the kingdom that�s in rebellion.�

Fortunately, I think I can salvage the fun encounter for later. I had hoped the party would press on into the wizard�s home just a little bit further. In this case, they essentially scored a �partial victory� because they didn�t press on. However, that�s not their fault! It�s just another bit of feedback for me to leave more clues as to how I measure victory next time I run an adventure like this. If the characters don�t know, the players don�t necessarily know. They might learn how *I* run things and make a guess based on that, but that�s a bad idea. For one, my goals might change with the development of other issues in the campaign. Also, I experiment with different things. Most importantly, I�m still learning this skill after 26 years, and what I do next week might be different from what I did last week.

No game this week, so I sent my players a little present: a 120-page, 40,000 word "Player's Companion", with new feats, new spells, notes on races and religion, new equipment, new magic items, new classes, new uses for skills, and some art I picked up in various places (with permission of the artists).

um if its not to bold but i think if you gave your players more incentive then they would go farther like two unicorn horns that are worth 1000 gp and they are a critical pice of evidence in a crime case so you give them to the people then the person you gave it to is one of the enemys paid men and slips up and the bad guy kills him speak with dead and you know the location and then the paid officers arest you or some of you and you have to rescue them and first get your equipment from the inn

hmm anyone there?