Finale Session 1/3 Reflections

I may have been too ambitious with the time available.

What I intended to happen in this session was to have the players accomplish a set number of tasks in the defence of their "hometown" and looking back, there are some things I would change for the future. I personally have not run something of this nature before so I am giving myself that at least. Here is a copy of my outline for the 3 finale sessions. The orange are player encounters, the grey is a choice of where to send NPCs for support, the yellow is another player encounter, and the final red block will be the finale session, a massive 10 player combat and epilogue of season 1.

Part 1: The War Council

I was definitely overzealous with the NPCs at this part. My intention was for the players to play a pivotal role in the planning of the defence of the town. I included way too many NPCs, many served no purpose, they were just in attendance for the "Hey, thanks for helping us out in the past adventures". What I should have done was figured out where the conflict was, and hone in my dialogue to accompany that. The conflicting ideals were not clearly laid out, and think it got lost within all of the pointless NPCs. After fumbling around a bit and wasting time, I laid out the intention of the meeting and my plan for the encounters out for the players in a meta way and skipped over the roleplaying. We got some in there, with the players choosing NPCs to talk to and sway to do certain things, and there were discussions of tactics, but not to the extent that I had hoped. 

I was personally conflicted upon starting out because with the fictional timing the players technically had more time than what I intended, about 2 or 3 days in game and I didn't want to rob them of that. But in order to work with my real life timing of wanting to finish this campaign in 3 sessions, things had to be rushed.

Part 2: The Hill Giant Artillery

However in this section the players were given a choice. What I hoped to happen was the attack on the city would start and the guard captain would contact them via magical telepathic link. He would say there is a dragon attacking the north quarter, giants are battering the south wall with boulders, and the enemy are trying to breach the walls with ladders.

Because this entire siege encounter would take place over two separate nights of gaming, the session 1 team would choose one of the three options to accomplish, leaving the other two to the session 2 team, with 1 problem unable to be solved. I was drawing inspiration from my recent play-through of Deus-Ex: Mankind Divided where the player is given a choice: save someone from being captured or break into a bank. Watch the video if you would like more details, but the premise of it is that it forces the player to make a choice that they cannot go back on. Whatever option they do not chose, happens whether they like it or not. When playing this felt very real to me, our decisions in our own live's have consequences; some can be foreseen, others we will not realise until way down the line, but we have choices. I wanted to provide my players with a similar scenario.

Luckily, they were gung-ho about fighting something, whether it be a dragon or giants. That was the conflict they had, both of which would play a major role in the defence of the town. In addition, since some were adamant about going out of the walls before hand and setting traps / scouting, and doing some knowledge checks on giant tactics, they were able to determine the location at which the giants would be setting up. As a result, they were able to set an ambush instead of reacting to the giants, and the walls remained untouched.

The combat in this encounter was great. It felt dynamic and everyone had their chance to shine at least once. Between the barbarian / paladin and the rogue, they can dish out a lot of damage. I could have probably included another hill giant in there and they would have been fine. Overall, this encounter felt like a success.

Part 3: Save the _______

Another choice. This time, the players got to do the ordering around and send some NPC adventurers, the Peacemakers, to one location in the town to save it. Just like the before, between the two nights, two locations could be saved overall: The inn (where all the ale is), the archives (local history and knowledge), and the temple (religion and healing for the wounded). 

My intention for this part was to have the players and characters determine what is the most important. For some characters, knowledge is power, for some, it is their religion, others just like ale or commerce. Looking back, the inn should have been something a bit more prominent. This discussion did happen however, and they determined that at the time, the temple was the most important for right now during this fight. I will have to wait and see how the other group handles it.

Part 4: Out of time

Unfortunately, I had not been as on time as I would have hoped, and we were only able to get one of the major encounters completed before we had to shut it down for the night. I had anticipated each key encounter going for about an hour. Part 1 took up too much time for me to begin another full encounter before the night was out.

Reflecting

To reflect, I believe I should have done a better job of setting the scene and being a bit more descriptive and intensive with the approaching horde. Drums thumping, the ground shaking as dozens of ogres, giants, and thousands of hobgoblins approach the walls. Maybe the threat of the force was not noticed. I definitive need to improve in the macro aspect of my storytelling. However, the outline did provide direction and the encounters seemed enjoyable.