Harry Potter D&D

Since I'm pretty sure not one of my players has any idea about a campaign arc or even what happened in the last game, I decided that once we finished the Well of Demons in under Thunderspire mountain that we would switch to more of an episodic delve format for our game.

This past weekend I didn't end up having much prep time so I pulled out an adventure that I'd been eyeing since I first saw it. Danger at the White Lotus Academy is so Harry Potter it's ridiculous, and my players had already been introduced to my Gilderoy Lockhart inspired Prince Erethan of Therund.

Anyway, the adventure as written had four combat encounters and one skill challenge, and I knew that our group can only get through about 2 combat encounters a night. I had to shorten it.

I ended up dropping a fight with poltergeists and doing something a little crazy with the garden fight. Instead of running a normal combat encounter, I sketched a very rough drawing of the encounter area after describing it. I then described what each player saw based on their perception, and asked what they wanted to do. Not everyone got it right away, but we managed to pull off an almost completely narrative combat in less than 30 minutes. Narrative! Mostly roleplay! It was awesome.

It was a lot of winging it, but I had page 42 of the DMG open the whole time, and a general idea of the enemies abilities and defenses. I after everyone described their actions for a round I would summarize and describe some consequences, make some "attacks" and then let the players take more actions. I tallied up successes and failures and took away healing surges for failure. At one failed roll I gave a decision: fail on the attack or take the status effect on yourself as well. I loved this encounter, and I'm going to probably do more this way in the future, just fit a whole delve into one game night for us.

I also toyed with the idea of tweaking monster stats (-25% life, +33% damage, or something like that) to make fights go quicker but I didn't end up doing it. I might in the future, just to see if it makes a difference. I wish I had time to run a mock encounter myself to see how it would work.

Things I learned:

• Solos have too much life. I REALLY have to tweak their HP.
• A choice between a negative effect missing is WAY better than just missing.
• Skill challenges are wicked hard for me to narrate/figure out. Need more practice.

Oh well, never enough time. Guess I'll run more games for my son. :)