D&D: Fool Around & Find Out, part 3

Friday night's session of my D&D Adventure, The City of the Dead, sure was epic. My writing about it has stretched now to three journal entries. As with part 1 and part 2, the title of this session of the game could be Fool Around and Find Out.

Horse Rescue

I left off in my previous blog when the PCs had driven off a wraith and were trying to rescue a horse that had fallen into a collapsed tunnel. I gave them a victory on pulling the (unconscious) horse out of the pit. Well, I didn't just give it to them; I adjudicated the victory with a liberal interpretation of some of the rules because the players (a) really wanted badly to save the horse, so it was a matter of exercising my philosophy that past some the story must drive the mechanics rather than vice-versa; and (b) the players worked really hard to come up with a scheme that would be plausible. Another principle in good GMing is to reward the players when they're really creative and thoughtful in applying their abilities and resources to solve a challenge.

BTW, the reason the whole sub-plot with the horse in a collapsed tunnel was "Fool Around and Find Out" is that the PC whose horse fell into the cave-in could clearly see the gaping hole in the ground. Despite me having given a few warnings that the whole environment was getting increasingly dangerous (a reasonable player would have seriously considered turning around before entering the known-to-be-haunted-with-evil city), the player was insistent on trying to do something as fast as humanly possible, caution be damned! He declared he would ride his horse right up to the lip of the opening beneath the street, rather than, say, dismounting 10 feet back and carefully approaching it on foot.

BTW^2, when the collapse happened I didn't just say, "Okay, everyone falls in." I had planned the collapse as a hazard for this spot. Along with planning what signs of danger a reasonable person would see (obvious crumbling deep hole 10-15 feet across in a stone street) I planned a Reflex save to avoid falling in once the collapse started. The PC's horse failed its roll. I then allowed a Ride check for the PC to leap to safety. The PC nailed that roll (he has a good Ride skill) so at least he wasn't in the pit, too. If he had been, the story might have been a lot more grim!

(Finally) Knowing When to Say When

After rescuing the horse and driving off the wraith, the group finally knew that they'd been beat... for the day. With the extra gear from the dead pack mule redistributed onto the two surviving horses they headed back out of town as fast as they prudently could, aiming to make camp as far away as they could get while there was still daylight.

It was all a good "(Finally) Knowing When to Say When" plan, until....

Undead Return

Back in the big cemetery battle in session 3 the PCs faced a handful of wights, among other foes. Terence the cleric successfully used his holy power to destroy several lesser undead, reducing them to piles of ash, but could only drive off ("turn") the wights. The PCs did try to kill the wights as they fled. They got two but two got away.

And the two that got away came back.

The two that came back weren't damnfools about it, of course. They'd seen that this group of PCs had the power to whup them good in a fair fight. So instead of walking up to the group and challenging them to a fair fight they planned to spy on the group and ambush them while sleeping.

The only problem with the wights' plan? Two PCs spotted them while they were spying on the group from a concealed location. They were hiding behind stone columns on the fence around the cemetery. Yay, Spot check DC 24!

The group quickly decided that they had to pursue these monsters. They sensed (rightly) that if ingored or allowed to escape, the monsters would follow them and attack at the most advantageous time. So Terence slapped a Death Ward spell on the Astrin— protecting her from the wights' level-draining touch— and the group hustled off after them.

Astrin and Herran had horses (Herran's was the one rescued from a pit and healed up by Terence) so they were fastest in pursuit. The wights were already fleeing at that point. They started booking once it was obvious they had been spotted.



The wights ducked around the back corner of the stone and wrought iron fenced cemetery on their second round of movement. Astrin and Herran continued pursuit. "We're probably headed into a trap right now," pretty much all the players at the table agreed.

The funny thing was, this wasn't a trap. Pretty much everything else they'd run headlong and heedless into this session was a trap, but this one wasn't. It was just two undead monsters running for their un-lives. 🤣

The monsters were overmatched. Astrin and Herran caught up to them and surrounded them, foreclosing easy escape. They killed one. Astrin's horse surprisingly landed the killing blow. Duncan, charging in on foot a round later, blitzed the second one. Meraxes and Terence rounded the corner in time to see the fight end.

Finally, finally, the group was done for the day. They left the cemetery, headed into the forest, and made camp for the night. ...Though what's to say they're done for the night? 😨

Holiday Party at a Ping Pong Bar

Saturday night this weekend Hawk and I went to a company holiday party. It was her company's holiday party. My company doesn't really do holiday parties. The one time in the past several years we had an actual holiday party it was small and charming... until a few days later when the company canceled all the $25 Amazon gift cards they'd handed us as door prizes because it was "too expensive". I would have been fine with the modest party if door prizes weren't handed out to everyone, but to hand them out and then claw them back was conspicuously stingy. Though I guess someone in finance being a Scrooge is on-brand for Christmas. 🤣

Anyway, the thing is Hawk's employer, though it's smaller than mine in size and revenue and is cheap in some other respects, puts on better holiday parties. This year's party was at a ping pong bar in San Francisco. Yes, you read that right: a ping pong bar. It's got a dozen or so ping pong tables. And it's a bar in that it serves a full variety of alcohol as well as some food.

We were both sketch on attending. Hawk can't do activities like playing ping pong because the repetitive motions and bouncing aggravate her back pain. She also doesn't drink alcohol (she's allergic) which puts a big crimp in the whole eat-drink-and-be-merry equation. I enjoy these things myself but I wouldn't ask Hawk to do them for my fun. And either way, downtown San Francisco, where the club is located, is a long haul for us just to put in an appearance. But she felt obligated to attend as she's a member of management.

The club party went better than we anticipated. Plenty of other people were not playing ping pong, or were only dabbling at it while preferring to sit down and socialize. I played for 10-15 minutes or so, just enough to have fund doing it while reminding myself that, yeah, it's been over 10 years since I last played.

One of the gimmicks at the ping pong club was a vintage bath tub filled with ping pong balls. Yes, it's literally there for people to "bathe" in ping pong balls and post pictures to social media. All the younger, attractive women in the club who did it got lots of attention with people gathering around to take pictures and video and generally just cheer them on. I decided to take a bath in the tub and got to enjoy 10 minutes of total solitude there. Barely anyone even looked my way. 🤣

We called it a night a bit before 7pm. Yes, that's, like, senior citizen-early. Partly it's that the party started before 5pm. So by 7 we'd had plenty of food, done a bit of socializing, and I'd downed enough drinks for us to feel like we got our money's worth of the company's money. 😅 Oh, and it's also the darn early sunset in the winter. At 7pm it can feel late at night already!