The first session for any campaign can be a bit daunting for any GM. A new group of people, a new group of characters that no one knows, a new setting, maybe even some new rules and new tech -- it all adds up to a lot to learn, keep track of, and keep moving. The first online Friday night Pathfinder horror game lived up to all of that.
In the first session of using a tool like Roll20, I knew our focus had to be about tech, first and foremost. If the players can't talk, roll dice, interact with me and the other players in meaningful ways, the game is going to be a failure. As expected from pre-session testing, the audio on Roll20 was flakey on a couple people's laptops -- namely in that they could only hear a few of the audio sources, not all. Some players couldn't hear other players. That is a non-starter. Luckily in the background, I had already set up a teamspeak3 server. I gave the IP, password, and download location and we were up and running with good audio inside of 10 minutes.
The first page in the adventure was in town. This gave folks a chance to move their characters around, use emotes (/me), and talk in character over audio. It was a nice time to get folks familiar with the new play style -- role-playing over audio chat. The second page was a local parade that I admittedly railroaded the group into attending. Earthquake and bam! -- they are in the Darklands.
Suddenly torches become an issue and some characters have them. The players now get to play with dynamic lighting and exploring. Leave it to odd chance that the adventures pick the correct of 4 tunnel options right off the bat.
So we suddenly have our first battle. One character is out front and there are goblin dogs -- 4 of them. It is amazing in this horror setting how quickly the party is ready to sign up to running away and letting a PC die. Luckily, they didn't. The fight was tough because of the limited access through the narrow tunnel. To complicate things there was a tentacled creature dropping from the ceiling onto PC's heads trying to grapple them. It took a bit, but the PCs finished off the goblin dogs.
Boy, is the party obsessed with the ceiling now.
So the party found a secret tunnel to crawl through and decided (without investigating the rest of the area!) that they would crawl through it. Two characters were less than happy to follow the party, but had no other option, since they had no torch and didn't want to be left in the dark.
Through to the next area the party had a brief encounter with a venomous snake, found yet another dead body, and ran into more goblin dogs. This time there was a complication -- the sound of the PCs hollaring about goblin dogs drew the interest of ghouls -- lots of ghouls.
Unfortunately, at the end of the session, there was another quake, a large rock fell, and the party's cleric, Isaac, was crushed. He managed to get off a healing surge before dying.
GM Observations
In the first session of using a tool like Roll20, I knew our focus had to be about tech, first and foremost. If the players can't talk, roll dice, interact with me and the other players in meaningful ways, the game is going to be a failure. As expected from pre-session testing, the audio on Roll20 was flakey on a couple people's laptops -- namely in that they could only hear a few of the audio sources, not all. Some players couldn't hear other players. That is a non-starter. Luckily in the background, I had already set up a teamspeak3 server. I gave the IP, password, and download location and we were up and running with good audio inside of 10 minutes.
The first page in the adventure was in town. This gave folks a chance to move their characters around, use emotes (/me), and talk in character over audio. It was a nice time to get folks familiar with the new play style -- role-playing over audio chat. The second page was a local parade that I admittedly railroaded the group into attending. Earthquake and bam! -- they are in the Darklands.
Suddenly torches become an issue and some characters have them. The players now get to play with dynamic lighting and exploring. Leave it to odd chance that the adventures pick the correct of 4 tunnel options right off the bat.
So we suddenly have our first battle. One character is out front and there are goblin dogs -- 4 of them. It is amazing in this horror setting how quickly the party is ready to sign up to running away and letting a PC die. Luckily, they didn't. The fight was tough because of the limited access through the narrow tunnel. To complicate things there was a tentacled creature dropping from the ceiling onto PC's heads trying to grapple them. It took a bit, but the PCs finished off the goblin dogs.
Boy, is the party obsessed with the ceiling now.
So the party found a secret tunnel to crawl through and decided (without investigating the rest of the area!) that they would crawl through it. Two characters were less than happy to follow the party, but had no other option, since they had no torch and didn't want to be left in the dark.
Through to the next area the party had a brief encounter with a venomous snake, found yet another dead body, and ran into more goblin dogs. This time there was a complication -- the sound of the PCs hollaring about goblin dogs drew the interest of ghouls -- lots of ghouls.
Unfortunately, at the end of the session, there was another quake, a large rock fell, and the party's cleric, Isaac, was crushed. He managed to get off a healing surge before dying.
GM Observations
- Having 8 characters is a bit much for such small map grids.
- I can't keep track of all of the rolls happening in the chat window. I need to figure out how to change the font or something. I ended up have all the players call out their character's initiative rolls as I typed them into the turn tracker.
- The turn tracker had to be reloaded on each page? That doesn't seem right. I must be missing something.
- The auto-colors Roll20 uses are never optimal. Can I reset those? I need to check.
- My encounters need toughened up to kill off PCs.
- Need to have my sanity rules ready to go for next time.
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