Mine was a battle against a rival gang (we are working with them for backstory reasons), they had a manticore and we are level 3 so it was intense. Most of us finished with 2 or so hp! But looking forward to finally be level 4 after a year.
Mine was a battle against a rival gang (we are working with them for backstory reasons), they had a manticore and we are level 3 so it was intense. Most of us finished with 2 or so hp! But looking forward to finally be level 4 after a year.
I'm back. I ran my weekly session of mage and it didn't go well. I am mildly cursed.
The players encountered a magical murder and theft at the end of the previous session. Someone had walked in to an apartment tremendously accelerated, shot a dude, stole his magic book, and left.
The players had dealt with the spirit of murder that had manifested at the crime scene, though they got pretty banged up by it. The other room mate came home and was like what the fuck, my room mate is dead , who are you, get out.
So the players left. Most of the clues and leads in there largely unexamined.
They didn't ask any questions after the initial introduction. Which was made by the NPC. They didn't ask the room mate "do you know what your friend was working on? Why did he have a map of our friend's house?"
The next morning they tried to brute force teleport to another group that's gone missing. They tried before and failed because there's a high withstand rating and clash of wills involved. They know this. They tried anyway. The dice were not in their favor. They could have been. It was 5 dice versus 8. One of the players was very cranky about this.
So they went to talk to another member of their order. She told them explicitly to go investigate the murder. The players decided not to.
They went back to the library to do more research on the haunted house at the center of the story. But they don't really have any new information from the last time they did this, so I couldn't think of much more to give them.
It doesn't help that one of the players has rather low system mastery. One of the other players gently pointed it out. She said she wasn't offended. But it's a little annoying. It's been 12 weeks. That's a lot of time to read the book.
She also seems to have like anxiety about there being too many plot threads open. That might just be an incompatible preference thing because I do tend to have games where there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's up to the players what they want to focus on. Some of it might be connected. Some might not be. Maybe the new street drug is related to the ghosts. Maybe it's not. That's for you to find out!
So it kind of sucked. I think one of the players had an good time, one okay, and the low mastery one a bad time.
Is really hard to make everyone happy, in my group there are 7 people. 3 of us are 24 and the oldest is 47, we are like very different but it helps that our dm is 32 so he is between all of us in age. I really like how diverse is everything, but combat tends to be chaotic because there is some of us that know the rules of the game and there is some of us that dont.
Perhaps you have to talk about or try to gess what may interest to all of you (like a ben diagram). Or perhaps you could go for an adventure of the week where you explore a individual interest of the player that week (includig DM obviously). Also, is hard to make a mistery game if note everyone is involved, except if the soultion to that mistery is whatever players think is the correct answer. Like i know that guy died and we have this clue, but as a dm you don't have any idea of what is happening and you write the next clue using past game as a reference.
I wish you a nice next game!