Fifth Session (9 page pdf) – We do just fine against the real encounters of hobgoblins and oni, but the BS nuisance wandering monstery group of four destrachans nearly TPKs us.
I was grumpy about this session. We had a couple things go wrong that made it not-so-fun for me.
The first was purely interpersonal. People were just super distracted. Bruce was Skyping in but the connection and mike were awful and so he couldn’t hear us, we heard him but also got weird noises and feedback. People were making comical amounts of noise on both ends of the line, too, and just not really bothering to not interrupt the GM or other players, or pay attention in general. There was one time during a combat round that I was trying to announce my damage to the GM and got interrupted before I could get it out 5 times from people on both sides of the call. I really was one more away from just saying “fuck it, I’m leaving.” It’s not really even about the game, if I get interrupted 5 times in any other situation I tend to assume my contribution is clearly not valued.
The second was the setup. I don’t really like three month long dungeon crawls, but Paizo insists on inflicting them on us. This one was nicely tactical so far, and we have gotten our enjoyment out of plying tactics vs our opponents. Well, this time, despite having our rogue scout ahead and being wary, we just got plopped on the battlemat pretty much surrounded by four destrachans. The positioning seemed to be more of a function of “well you can only be 20′ away and still fit on the map tile.” And of course they about killed us. 8d6 sonic at will overlapping all of us, plus in this situation it caused a cave-in. In a cave-in, you can do nothing. Most of us spent the encounter buried in rocks. Boring and deadly, yay. And it’s not clear how that makes sense or how they got here.
These two fed on each other – we only did 3 encounters the whole day because of the disarray, and one of them being a suckburger made the session overall not great.
There were some high points. We found the cute little kami’s bonsai tree. And we found statues we could stone to flesh and talk to; the one we destoned seems to be Harwynian’s soul mate.
We play again tomorrow, I’m sure it was just a one time “bad day” thing and the next one will be fine. Even with a good group and good material, not every session’s a winner! You just have to get back in the saddle.
Geek Related 