Got married on Saturday, so I should be able to start actually posting regularly again. We had an afterparty (it was originally scheduled for Dante’s, on account of good food and no cover, but we had to move when the bartenders kept turning up the music too loud for us to play [in other news, Schultzy’s is an amazing place and the servers are fucking fantastic]).
We dicked around a lot, joked much, and basically things were as I remembered them
Lessons Learned:
• I paced the adventure well, but it could have used a lot more polish. Still, I got back into the swing of running a game pretty quickly: I managed to handle a fractious party of 9 (and almost kill them) without ever putting them into combat. I like PvE puzzly dungeons..
• On that note – I’m going to have to write this sucker down and re-run it later for a smaller group. I came up with an utterly badass idea in play, and it integrated seamlessly with what I already had. Plus it kept the players busy and amused for about half an hour.
• Have equipment lists organized and ready to go – and possibly also a simple character gen booklet for each player. Having 9 players, 4 of whom were buck newbies, really ate into the available playtime.
• Though I didn’t have the time to organize it fully, using booklets of randomly generated spells, and prayerbooks for the Clerics would have sped things up even more. Maybe have a deck of spell cards with the spell summaries printed on them – players can pick one card per level, and then take a semi-random spellbook based on their “discipline”/Master.
• LotFP and Basic integrate pretty seamlessly as long as you can keep the differences in your head. Being able to snap-convert the odds from d6 to d% to d20 helps even more.
• Floating-point rolls didn’t slow down gameplay at all, and actually made play much more fluid (since they made metagaming the rolls essentially impossible) – although the roughly 5 gallons of beer consumed by the players didn’t hurt one whit.
• Jesus Christ I missed my best friends. Steveman and [Redacted] are damned fun to have at a table, and their ladies weren’t half shabby.
• George the halfling has made me want to stat up my own LotFP Bard class (woo, Language skills!), but making it something other than a specialist will be hard. Maybe more skills, but I’m leery of that – still, with Raggi leaning much more to the Morale/Fate interpretation of HP, it’d be a healing class with some badass abilities (roll Bardic skill to cancel/heal/reduce HP loss from forced marches, improve campsite healing, &c.)