Saturday, March 14, 2009

Sometimes Planning Pays Off

I had just confessed to Tony the other day that I had been spending a bunch of time recently planning for my next few D&D sessions, but I feared it was all going to be for naught. You see, we're finally moving on to H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth after taking the better part of 19 sessions (wow!) to get through the first adventure and change. This means a new base town, set of NPCs, and quest hooks to establish and keep straight. It feels like I usually execute poorly no matter how much planning I've done. Either I mess something up in the delivery, don't have the knowledge I need at my fingertips, or make horrible errors in combat rendering them mostly meaningless. Even when things do go well, you can get sidetracked by a bored player who tries to pick the pocket (or worse) of every NPC in sight.

To my relief, I think this week went extremely well. I suppose the two party members who semi-regularly read this can bring me back to Earth in the comments section if I'm delusional. Everyone got a quick tour of the new "town", a number of quest proposals were delivered, I kept my characterizations straight, and we mostly kept bored party members in check despite not having a real combat in the first 3 hours. When we did get to the combat, my planned tactics worked well for once. Thoes pesky Bloodreavers ate up a pretty decent chunk of party resources for a level-1 encounter. It would have gone even better for me if I hadn't made a horrible error about 5 rounds in, but what are you gonna do?

Have no fear, I'm not about to turn this blog into a campaign journal or anything. Just wanted to toot my own horn for a second after the first non-frustrating session as DM in awhile. It's good motivation to keep putting the same level of thought and care into future sessions.

Speaking of motivation, apologies to those of you expecting a post-Watchmen entry by now. I have a bad habit of talking to readers in person about things I would post about and losing my motivation to actually put it out here. For those of you who I don't talk to as much, there is a post forthcoming. I just need to work it in between today's trip to the Electric Fetus and our planned evening of local music and a friend's St. Patty's Day celebration.

2 comments:

Jeff and Carey Huebert said...

No problems with campaigning from my perspective. I'm having fun, even if I complain about dying or not dying soon enough. And if you manage to strike Theogris down, Theogris II/III/IV/... shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

bjkail said...

Me too! Even if I make you draw me maps, seem annoyed by intense combat sessions, grumble at obscene crit rates, or overly frequently remind you that all the cool DMs provide colorable pictures for their players :-).