Category: Gaming

This was my second run-through of Arts, both times as a GM. Last time I ran it on high; this time was on low, as expected. I was kind of looking forward to finding out how deadly the final fight was on low, but this wasn’t the right group for that, which is perhaps for the best.

I ran down at the Games and Stuff game day for long complex reasons – can’t make it down there usually, but for special occasions I can. It’s nice to meet new folks. The table was Susan, Tom, Trevor, Nina, Frank, and Zach – two newcomers, four fairly experienced players. I’d only run for Susan and Tom before. We had a nicely balanced group with two leaders, a controller, two strikers, and a defender.

I still like Arts a ton. It caters to my tendency to stretch the roleplay. I think we ran about an hour and a half before the first combat, which given that Games and Stuff has limited time available was a touch long. But man, hamming up Torleaf and the teachers is totally worth it. I played him differently than I did the first time – a bit more fey, a bit more snotty – and it was equally fun.

The transition out of the first skill challenge was, once again, tricky. If I ever run this again I need to make sure I really get why the NPCs are going where they’re going, because it’s really easy for one of the PCs to short-circuit the skill challenge. This is allowed for in the text but I keep tripping over the order of certain events.

I DME’d the first fight down a notch to allow for two completely new players. If I’d had more time I might have stretched it out more but I knew I was short, so easier to avoid bloodying the entire party. I then ran the second skill challenge – which is consistently awesome; the effect on players when they realize what just happened to them is priceless. Skipped the second encounter (really sorry!) and hit the third encounter hard. It turns out a non-optimized group will still beat the low level encounter handily if they win on initiative.

So that was still fun for everyone. Lots of rampaging around the room. I kept dazing Frank (newcomer) which I felt guilty about, but then again it’s not my fault if he misses three saving throws in a row!

Someday I will run Arts for a kitted out group of level 4s and I will rock out the final encounter challenge with all my might. But no matter how I run it, it’s great on so many levels: lots of roleplay, excellent combat.

My goal is to play in and DM a grand total of 50 LFR games or more during 2010. One a week, no big deal, right? I run a game day every two weeks, which covers half of that; I have a few more Embers of Dawn sessions to go; I go to conventions, which means a lot of games in a short timespan; and I do home games.

The goal behind the goal is to get one of my characters to paragon tier and foster paragon tier play in the Baltimore area. Right now, play at the two major Baltimore locations is 95% 1-4 and 4-7. Pump up the volume!

I’m using this bloglet for tracking. I will try to record each game, with light notes on how the game went, what I thought of the module, and so on. It’s an experiment in short-term focused blogging.