Session 1: Behind the Scenes

This first session ended up being quite short, both in terms of playing-time and content. It took a while to get settled and into the mood for playing D&D.

As a DM, my aim for this campaign is not to railroad the players in the slightest - I have no overarching narrative or main villain that I am expecting the players to play through or conquer. Instead, my goal is to present the players with as many possible story hooks as I can, and allow them to choose which direction to head in, and which quest chains to follow up on.

Because of this, there was no easy way to get started - to introduce the characters to each other. I had vague ideas of the players all being part of some sort of mercenary squad, or bounty hunters, or some other "group" that would require them to work together. However, no one seemed very keen on this idea, and it didn't fall naturally into anyones back-stories.

What ended up happening was a rather awkward twenty minutes in which Malkeith role played too well to want to meet anyone new, Krakon was stuck outside the beer garden for the majority of the introductions, and Lily White had to wander over to the conversation at the bar randomly. The whole thing felt pretty forced, which made me feel like I hadn't set up the situation well enough. Maybe I would have been better off throwing them all in jail for a series of small infractions! That would have forced them to talk to each other!

In order to get things rolling, I threw in an encounter that I had already browsed through - a bar brawl from the Rescue at Rivenroar adventure. The encounter ended up being just as awkward as the meet & greet part of the game. This is partly due to the fact that everyone was still unfamiliar with their abilities and the 4e rules, especially the players who have never played D&D before. This is to be expected, but it does make it hard to keep the action gripping, and the events moving. Hopefully as the campaign progresses this will become smoother. It did lead to a few entertaining moments though, as players tried to come to grips with their abilities. For example, Malkeith was quite excited about the fact that casting Light is a free action to him, and while shouting "LIGHT!" at the top of his lungs, proceeded to cast the spell upon everything around him.

The other reason this encounter was a bit choppy is because I didn't take into account the fact that most of the battle would take place in the doorway to The Hanging Garden. This meant that all of the players were in each others ways when trying to cast spells, or that the hobgoblins were unable to fan out and attack more than just one player.

Still, as far as first sessions go, I suppose it didn't go too badly. I think that in future I will have to try harder to keep everyone on track in order to get through more content in a play session, especially if we continue to play on work nights. Currently, it's just too easy for people to degenerate into random conversations, which personally I think is fine. The problem is when these conversations go for twenty minutes!