Three days in, the distance began to grow between the two groups. Group One was initially behind because of some bad rolls that kept them in their cell for an extra day, and then fell further because they didn’t work very closely together as a team. I had to institute the initiative system not as a way of keeping track of combat but as a way of determining who got to act when the group was trying to decide on a plan. Things were complicated a little bit by the player who is in both groups, who I had to give an actual warning about metagaming. Since Group Two had befriended the goblin, he was convinced the same tactic would work with all goblins. The rest of the group, though, wanted a fight.
Armor and Weapons
They wound up compromising a bit. Using torches, they lured the goblins back to the jail cell, then tried to traps them behind the bars. This worked for one of the goblins, but not for the other one, who saw the centaur and freaked out because of the famous goblin fear of horses. The other PCs managed to push the goblin into the cell, though, locking the two monsters away.
With the goblins out of the way, it was time to choose armor from the room the critters had been guarding. This segued into choosing character class. Group One consisted of two fighters, a rogue, a wizard, and a rogue/wizard. I kept the classes to just the basic four, but for the rogue/wizard I used the bard as a general model, just as I used the magus as a model for Group Two’s fighter/mage.
The group then proceeded into the next room, which included several chests and weapons. Whereas Group Two had divvied the weapons up with no problem, here everyone wanted to take what they could for themselves. The rogue/wizard did a search of the previous room and found five silver pieces, which he pocketed for himself without telling the rest of the group. Everyone else seems to be following suit, which is a shame. Because nobody could agree on how to divide the treasure, we went back to the initiative count. Time ran out before we could get everything sorted out, so they had to wait a day to get their gear.
Wilderness Adventures
Group Two kicked off by picking out feats and skills, which were mostly assigned by me for convenience. With Axel and their goblin friend in tow, they opened the door and found a long hallway which led to a chamber with a table in it. The table contained a potion and a loaf of bread, and a hole in the ceiling led out. The catfolk did some searching and found a mouse hole in the wall, but there was no easily accessible way out. Eventually, the group clued in that the potion and the bread were a riff on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The bread shrank them, and the potion enlarged them. Four of the group shrank down and crept through the mouse hole, which led them to the surface. They then returned to normal size and lowered a rope they found to help the others out. Once they reached the surface, they found themselves in a forest clearing. A pair of wooden statues stood next to them and then sprang to life, attacking the group. End of session – what a cliffhanger!
Group Two ended the day ready for their first fight with all the rules in play. This session didn’t have a lot of die-rolling, mostly focusing on role-playing and problem solving. I think the only die roll made was when one of the PCs tried to blow out a fire. It was an action that didn’t have an ability score that I could tie it to, so we got to break out the percentile dice and assign a probability of success.
During this session, the site coordinator came in and took some video footage for reference for future courses. Sarah has suggested running this course in the fall, which would have allowed her to hone her GMing skills while teaching kids. That never came to fruition, but a return to this style of class is something I have thought about often…more on that later.
Images: Lewis Carroll, Paizo Inc.
The Screamsheet 