Lessons Learned 22

Welcome to the last Lessons Learned of this arc of my campaign. I have, over a year and about 4 to 5 months dragged my party of players, kicking and screaming, through 2 campaign arcs, 1 interlude, and their characters up level 10. Or 11, I have not done the last experience point disbursement, and too tired to go mess with it right now. I am handing off the party to the one player in the group who was dumb brave enough to agree to run a couple of sessions to let me catch my breath and also get in some playtime.

Finally, we got to the boss battle. Like many tables, mine is fairly loose when it comes to attendance, not that I could really enforce any strict rules with these players. If I did try to enforce a strict attendance policy, I would have to find new players as all of them have missed multiple sessions. This is why I make them leave their character sheets at the end of every game with the understanding that if they miss next week, someone else will be playing their PC. However, with the end of this arc of the campaign, I had to take 3 weekends off before I could get them all together for the big final battle. I did not want them to miss out, and also did not want the party to suffer because someone was not there giving the best performance of their PC. 

The players knew they were close to the big bad, and knew generally where he was at, but they just couldn't ignore the secret door nearby. It did lead to the big bad's personal chambers and treasure room (and she-devil lovers, which, by the way, "semen demons" is the funniest thing I have heard in a while from my players). You never can tell, there is an entire and admittedly empty section of that dungeon my players showed not one lick of interest in, but even as close as they were to the final battle, a whiff of secret treasure hoard and they were all over it. Though I couldn't get them to search in the right places for the treasure room's secret entrance until one of the PCs - half dead from the encounter with the erinyes devil girls - decided to take a breather and sat down, leaning on the secret door. I don't want to kill the PCs, I want to see them win but cannot hand it to them on a silver platter - that just robs them of all of their agency and makes it not fun. That is something I get accused of online all the time when all I have done is created a world that makes sense to me and not allowed every race, class or option to my players. *shrug* Oh well. But when i have to, I work with whatever my players give me, because in the end, I am rooting for them, too.

After a long hiatus, I finally got my 3d printer going, upgrading it to a glass bed - which has made levelling a breeze, utterly negated any curling or "elephant foot" I had previously experienced, and vastly improved the bottom of my prints. I had previously printed up a bunch of OpenLock dungeon tiles, thinking to make some very Dwarven Forge-like dungeons, but those, printed before the glass bed, had not come out very consistent and are just not great. As we have been running almost all of our combats on a hunk of Plexiglas with a grid underneath it, the tiles weren't as useful, and I realized what I really need are walls, not floors (which is mainly what the tiles are for) and I needed more "scatter terrain" - tables and chairs and pillars and chests and fountains and thrones and altars and summoning circles and so on. 3d printing is a wonderfully complex and fulfilling hobby that, if you can find a need or want to fill it with, can be very rewarding with only a little in the way of resources. Tabletop RPGs and wargames have a lot of needs in the way of miniatures (and their accoutrements) and terrain that a 3d printer can satisfy, but while it is relatively cheap - my printer I bought new for a little over $200 and the filament is roughly $20 for a 1kg roll that prints a lot of pieces - it is very time consuming. Multiday prints are more the norm then not, and while I am not actively maintaining the machine that whole time, it is a very long time between hitting print and pulling the finished piece off the bed. Anyway, deciding on scatter terrain, I have started with a basic set of pillars (every good medieval fantasy needs pillars in it) and am currently printing up a bunch of basic walls I can use to add a lot of depth and flavor to my admittedly bad drawing skills on the Plexiglas board. Next up, tables and chairs.

Here are some pics of my last setup from the final session, which I had to recreate afterward because I forgot to take pictures during the session. You can see the 3d prints I have made recently (the black is the filament I printed them in, the gray is my rather poor painting skills to make them look more stone-like), printed them from this file and this file, the actual miniatures are a mix of WizKids Deep Cuts and Reaper Bones, both fantastic, affordable options for the modern gamer (and not painted by me), and the printed paper minis are Rich Burlew's fantastic A Monster for Every Season, of which I've talked about many times before. And the marks on the Plexiglas are my usual feeble attempts at relaying what is going on with dry erase markers (hence, why I'm printing out scatter terrain), so the dwarves are crouched in a trench outside the ambush area, our heroes (the minis) are crouched in cover, and the dragon, cocky old thing, has landed and is about to relay his ill temper, right next to the pit trap filled with spikes. The stone pillars and walls are barricades the players and locals have placed in this area for what little protection they can offer.

And there are some fantastic groups on Facebook (FB's only purpose, in my mind, unless you want your family to endlessly send you the same memes everyone else is and everyone argues endlessly about politics) that talk about nothing but 3d printing terrain and miniatures for tabletop role playing games and wargames. You should check them out - Tabletop 3d Printing Guild, The Horde, 3d Printing for Gaming Terrain, and 3d Printed Terrain & Miniatures.

The party is heavily using the polymorph spell to turn various party members into dragons to use in combat. This isn't early level bad guys, we are talking CR 10 to 13 bad guys, so I have decided they know that little trick and don't go after the dragons, they go after what looks like the most likely spell casters and wail on them instead. Or cast dispel/counterspell as often as the players can. Either way, whether those spells get countered or the spellcaster fails a concentration, that doesn't actually matter, as long as the spellcasters are worried. That's what makes the game exciting, a sense of danger and struggle.

In D&D, go for the ones holding Concentration spells, not the high HP tanks.

In addition, when I am building up my big bad's, especially as I am translating a lot of this from 3.5 to 5e, I do not follow any of the established character guidelines - they get what I think is cool. Wizard/sorcerer spells and cleric spells, plus thematic cantrips and multiple initiatives, and Billy Badass in hand to hand with a high AC and big HP pool? Yup. You know my players (and yours, don't fool yourselves) are a bunch of rule twisting munchkins and they'll destroy your precious BBEG faster than you can blink, so make it interesting. And if they are draining the HP too fast, make the pool bigger and deeper. It is all about the tension and the worry.

My players chose during the fight with the big bad to have an argument about the mathematics of dice probability. Well, okay, two of them tried to argue with me, but my side got taken up by a third player while everyone else sat out. Including me. I don't argue probability curves, especially with my players or anyone who thinks they know them but really don't. If you ask nicely I will explain it, however I don't care if you think you know but are wrong. That is your problem. The two most important things you have to remember are this - dice have no memory, otherwise known as they do not "remember" what they just rolled when you roll them the next time; and the more dice you roll equals less random results and more average results, also known as why do we continue to roll 3d6 for stats, why not just go straight to a d20 and be done with it?

Even with this being the final two sessions of the campaign arc, your players will be as flaky with their attendance as any other session. Just remember, no matter how hard you stress being there or arriving on time, it just does not matter as much to your players. Feel free to punish them accordingly. I kid, I can't punish them, they just don't take the game as seriously as I would like them to. I guess that is why I am the DM and they are the players. I think the only other thing that really bugs me about my players - because the lateness and missing sessions is easily my number one, being former military it drives me to distraction - is that I have been trying for well over a year to get my players to do a flashback at the beginning of each session, kind of remind everyone where we are at in the story and what they were planning on doing this session. I start every game with "Last time, in the continuing adventures of [INSERT PARTY NAME HERE]..." and then I have to hand hold them through a quick flashback. They never just go back and say what they did last session, they always, ALWAYS, go back to the last thing they did. Time is linear folks, start at the beginning and then move towards the end. You would think after more than 50 sessions they would figure this out, but you would be wrong. Huh. Maybe they're doing it on purpose to push my buttons. Never thought of that.

Okay, last lesson I learned from this campaign - if no one else in your group is willing to DM or GM or Referee or whatever your game calls it, just go for it. It isn't like the bar is very high, as it is literally "did you have fun?" "yes" "SUCCESS!!!" So you can't do all the voices Matt Mercer and the Critical Role cast can, no one else but they can do that, trust me. You're not as experienced as Matt Colville, but even he doubts what he is doing constantly. And if you stick with it, eventually you will be as experienced as he is, too. You may not be as creative as Gary Gygax, but the world (and your players) doesn't need you to be, they just need you to keep trying, and they'll meet you in the middle. Does that mean you shouldn't try to improve? By all means, no, keep learning and trying to make the game more exciting and fun, but don't despair that you're not the best when you start.