August 2: What is the best game session you have had since August 2015?
Over the past two years I've been lucky enough to be a part of a group than can consistently have weekly sessions. We are all expatriates in the United Arab Emirates. Most of us are English teachers but we have one house husband and a couple of university students that play as well. Between this group and Roll 20 I've been able to play more games than I have in the past thirty years of off and on gaming. That brings me to today's question and what was the best session of the year.
We have had some very memorable sessions. Sometimes I run and sometimes I play. I'm going to be a narcissist and choose a session that I ran. We started The Curse of Strahd campaign just before summer break. I didn't want to get too far into it because we would soon be on hiatus, so I ran the Death House. ******SPOILERS FOR DEATH HOUSE******The party was a dragon born paladin, a human monk, a dwarven cleric, a halfling rogue, and two gnomes--sorcerer and wizard. There were a couple of moments of real tension--the railroady mists of Barovia pushing the party forward as pursuing wolves howled in the distance and the encounter with the Durst children in their bedroom brought borderline scares to the grown men. The part with Walter Durst and his nanny was so disturbing as written that I decided to soften it a bit to give a "happy" ending. From the combat perspective the adventure could have been a TPK if that's what I wanted. The Animated suit of armor very nearly killed the cleric and the halfling rouge pressed her ear right up against the mimic door to near death results. After the encounter with the ghouls I had to give the guys an extra rest or just kill them outright. It resulted in the ghast encounter being a little anticlimactic, but I just didn't think they could survive otherwise. The most memorable part for me was that the party manged to remain loyal to each other...at least so far. Throughout the adventure I had Strahd targeting the paladin and the cleric each time they used their divine powers. He also targeted the halfling because of his weakness for the ladies. I passed several notes between these players asking them to sacrifice one of the gnomes in exchange for partial rulership of Barovia. I left the monk to his own devices until he ended up touching the altar toward the end of the story--at which point I gave him a note also. In the end, nobody chose to 'Make Barovia' great again and all of the characters managed to survive...although the gnome sorcerer wasn't conscious to enjoy the victory. #RPGaDay
No comments:
Post a Comment