Fodder For My Detractors

I was asked if I could give an example of my playing style, and so I recorded this, last night, with my regular party.  There was no rehearsal, but a mic has a way of making people talk less ... so I wouldn't say my party acted quite within normal perameters.  I did ask for people to be a bit more focused than usual.

We picked up with the party exploring a tunnel that they'd come across by breaking through a stone wall associated with an underground home on a river bank.  The recording describes them exploring the hole and finding something unexpected.  The two files on YouTube run over 15 minutes, and do not come to a resolution.  I let the mic run until one character was making hand signals to another that Ivan should use a rope, and then you can hear me at the end goodnaturedly prodding the party about it.

This fifteen minutes passed quickly for us.  No one believed it had really been that long.

What happens next is that the party interrogates the assassin, finds out he's working for his ‘master’ as a sentry. They force the sentry to lead them to the master’s lair, whereupon they find the master's pet: a catoblepas.


I ran the catoblepas so that it petrifies with its gaze rather than causing death, but the party did kill it. The way that was done was nice - the 2nd level mage/thief wound up being close enough to it to cast a blink cantrip, which for one round suspended the catoblepas' gaze attack, while the illusionist cast a chromatic orb of blindness. The catoblepas failed its save vs. the blink cantrip (rolled a 1) and against the chromatic orb (rolled a 4). After that, it was just a matter of killing a large, blind monster.

Of course, with my mass rules the catoblepas weighed 2,500 lbs., had 85 hp (I rolled low, average was more like 117), and caused 3d8 damage per attack. Unfortunately for me, it only got one attack, causing 19 damage to the mage/thief immediately after he cast the blind cantrip. Dropped him to -7 hp, but he lived. I say it was 'unfortunate' because I like slamming the party as hard as I can.

But it was loads of fun. In spite of the party's success, they now have four petrified party members, who were all transformed in the first two rounds of fighting. But now they're in the position of worrying about what the master might do once he learns his pet is dead.

It was a short session, as we quit halfway through the night to run the other campaign, the one run by my daughter. She wasn't quite ready for us at the beginning of the night, so I ran at the beginning to give her some prep time. Besides, I wanted to make the above recording.