lfr2010

Colin ran How To Hunt A Demon for our second game of the charity gameathon. I played Cine; the other players were Pamela and Matt B. (who run a Columbia game day that we wanna go to sometime), Stacey, Marc, and Mark B. This time we played low and Colin complained about it the whole time until he accidentally killed Mark’s warlord. I told you so, Colin! I think possibly part of my earlier crankiness about Cine was because Spellgard was getting a bit claustrophobic, because this time he was pretty fun. Moving people around the battlefield continues to rock.

Games & Stuff does a charity gameathon every year after Thanksgiving, so this year instead of waiting in line for Black Friday sales I went down to Glen Burnie to play a bunch of LFR. We set up three adventures for the day; I ran Shadows of the Knights to kick things off. My players were Colin, Mark B., Mike McK, Stacey, and Marc. Playing high was probably a mistake – any second year adventure, you should take the high/low distinction seriously. I wound up underplaying the final fight a bit to avoid demolishing the PCs, which normally I wouldn’t do but who needs a bad start to a charity event? I like the mod a lot, though. Plenty of room for roleplaying.

[gallery] Marc C. crits a party member and rolls max damage on his crit dice.

I ran Enemy of My Enemy online last night for Matt, Oskar, Dareus, DanMathMan, Genolen, and Joey. I was pretty interested in seeing how the module held up under the assault of Matt’s wizard. Answer: pretty well, given that I spent some time thinking about tactics beforehand. I dropped Matt once thanks to a lucky critical, and came very close to dropping him again towards the end of the second fight. If I’d thought a bit harder and pushed him into the Stinking Cloud rather than the Wall of Ice, I suspect he’d have gone down. I also had Genolen’s cleric nearly dead, and all in all things went quite well. The module is challenging but not overwhelming for optimized characters. ...

Susan, Mark B., Peter S., Noah S., Amanda, Jimmy, and I playtested The Sign of Four last night. Jimmy ran. I won’t talk about the adventure at all because, you know, playtest. I think, however, I can legitimately say that it rocks even in the non-final state. I picked a couple of nits and made some suggestions cause that’s how I am, but you could publish the sucker right now and you’d have a fine module. ...

We finished up with Agony on Sunday morning.. Bill W. ran for us, which is cool, since it was fun playing with him on Saturday. We only had four players – me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda. This is just about right for a Sunday morning game; keeps it from being over-lengthy, and it’s nice to play with familiar people. I loved the way this mod brought together almost every Dalelands plot to date, with a sprinkling of Dragon Coast material to boot. I really, really loved the use of Kira and Dayan Nenthyn. Reed happens to be one of my PCs who hasn’t played The Prospect, which is a shame, so he didn’t have the emotional hooks some of my other characters would have found, but it was still cool stuff. ...

J.D. McCoy ran First Strike for us on Sunday evening; the players were the now familiar cluster of me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda plus Brian S. as our fifth. Brian played a warforged fighter who did the meatbag schtick, which let’s just say I’ve seen warforged doing it before, but his build was interesting. Lots of focus on defenses. 30 Will at level 14 is quite good. He gave me some stuff to think about with Collin. ...

I didn’t sign up for The Blinking Eye of Fire (original), but there were in theory two open slots and no defender playing, so plenty of room for Collin. Also the experience would get him to level 14 and upgrade his bracers, so why not? Unfortunately, our prospective leader wasn’t feeling well, so he bowed out, which left us with Kerwin running for me, Bennet O., George O., and Joe G. No leader. If they’d had a fifth player I would have bailed, but without me, no table. I wasn’t too worried about Collin living through the mod, given his self-healing capabilities, but the bracers were a high tier reward and the vibe from the table was a bit weird… ah well. ...

Enemy of My Enemy is the sequel to Killing the Messenger. That was maybe the best paragon module play experience Susan and I had together so far. This run pretty much lived up to it. Rob B. GMed for us; Jimmy and Amanda played with me, Susan, and Bill W. Mustering was a pain in the butt because people kept overcomplicating it, but in the end I said “look, us four want to play together, we need one defender out of the two available, and Brian over there will play a leader at the other table. Problem solved.” And lo, it more or less was. ...

Our GASPcon (original) fun began with a My Realms on Friday night. I don’t mind admitting I was a little nervous about playing some random guy’s My Realms adventure, particularly at P2, but it turned out to be really good. The set up was the kind of thing you’d find in a heroic tier adventure, but the GM – Michael Grancey – really played up the slew of adventurers who’d tried and failed to solve the problem before. Our characters were Baldur’s Gate’s last hope. I liked that. ...