The Library Job, Part One; Campaign Diary #015

everybody Matt Koval here we played D&D last week and we're gonna play tonight at seven o'clock Pacific whether you like it or not you're watching this video you might as well tune in last week was quite a lot of fun I actually had a blast running especially in the encounter at the end of the evening this is a campaign diary where we talk about what happened last week and I kind of narrate it to you folks and then I talk about how I think things went this is the downtime between two adventures where the players have the opportunity to pursue their own goals and also to keep their ears to the ground listening for signs of new contracts they could take new jobs for the chain of Acheron they just met with the curator who is someone who can procure magic items for them they now have some new magic items of others they're gonna have to wait for so the first half of the session was the chain of a cron meeting with lots of different NPC's in the world the political game is starting to ramp up a little bit the heroes are split up boots Tom's character who is the lieutenant the second command of the chain of Akron is staying at the princes footstool with the junior officers and the chain of a cron that's sort of a middle class tavern and then the rest of the senior officers are staying at the Pharaoh's dream the session begins with Baz the dwarf who sort of runs the day-to-day operation of the footstool for the stone shank grant approaching Boots's table and slamming a mug of dwarven ale down in front of him he says on the house held trooper low though such charity pains me I deemed this may smooth the way between us he's there to basically apologize for Krotz the stone giants attitude telling boots that they know that the chain of background didn't have anything to do with what happened last night and that grant because grot owns this place he tends to overreact I had a lot of fun playing Baz in my setting dwarves are basically short Klingons so I often enjoy just playing them extemporaneously but nothing happened in that encounter it was literally just boots getting to know the people who run the inn that they're staying at we then cut to the Pharaohs dream and the heroes are having brunch in the hanging garden which is one of the three different restaurants inside this very expensive tavern and a very pregnant ryokan woman approaches the table this is Demelza Montano she is an agent for the office of exchange integrity she's the associate director of domestic affairs she works for the fulcrums spy agency but she's not a spy she's just sort of a mid-level bureaucrat the office of exchange integrity are the fulcrums spy network but they are also a legitimate bureaucratic division of the administration of the island they're not secret or anything Demelza really is in charge of making sure that people in the city are paying their fair taxes and stuff like that they're just also spies and political agents so Demelza is here to ask the chain of Akron if they would be interested in maybe helping with getting the mercenaries that have taken over the Citadel out of the Citadel or out of the Citadel this is where politics starts to ramp up and it's gonna grip up like this it's not going to be a slow burn it's gonna get very complex very quickly because Demelza is here to explain that the mercenaries the shooting star that took over the Citadel which is a military building on this island they are in the pay of the Church of st. Paul Oreo the aspirant so that night that the heroes met the other night commander Donegal - the member of the black gloves the order of the black gloves he is a knight in service to the Church of st. polari Oh the aspirant and that church is one of the churches under the domain of house Navarre house and Navarre is sort of the official religious house they run most of the churches in cities so this is where things are starting to get a little thorny because the fulcrum are on a great house shoroma the leader of the fulcrum is effectively Duke or Duchess they control this island The Citadel is on the island house Navarre one of its churches paid these mercenaries to take over the Citadel which is an important asset it looks as though this is the beginning of a move on the part of house Navarre against the fulcrum right now it's just a bunch of mercenaries but she explains that by the depending on when the chain of Acheron take the job it may be a lot more it may be the mercenaries and the Knights of the black gloves it may be the mercenaries the Knights of the black gloves and any army they are able to onto the island and of course they would probably you know hide their livery or pretend to be some other organization so that they you know they can't it's more difficult for for instance the papers to link house Navarre to what's happening on the Citadel but the sooner the chain take care of this the less they have to worry about that I really enjoyed playing Demelza Montano I imagined her as essentially Olivia Colman from the night manager if you haven't seen the night manager holy crap is that a super super good incredibly well produced BBC miniseries it looks like a movie and it stars Tom Hiddleston as basically James Bond and Olivia Colman is amazing in it she's amazing and everything and she's pregnant in it and she's a spymaster she is she is Tom Hiddleston's Handler and so I thought I'm just gonna have some of that so she's really not what you would expect from a spymaster she's like wow this place is nice innit you folks are doing well for yourselves she's also starving because she's pregnant she finds if she's always hungry now so she's asking leech if she can have some of his food and he's like oh are you hungry and slim played the gift they get the Yankee played by physicists of course she's hungry look at her she's full of eggs she's probably got 30 eggs which is I think one of the best lines backwalk we've had so far completely improved I used and I basically shut down the game for about 45 seconds as we all have to at it cuz gifts are etched apparently this is something that filled those a lot more about gifts lore that I do they say they're gonna have to think about it which now has become code for we're gonna go find out who you are because we now have our own little burgeoning spy network and we don't want to get bit in the ass by taking a job from somebody and then only finding out we don't mind that things are more complex than they seem things are always more complex than they seem there's always unintended consequences to anything the chain is gonna do they just want to have more intelligence more of their own Intel that they've gathered on these organizations so she has made her case they have said they're interested but they're gonna have angel look into it and they don't tell her this they're gonna have their spy then their spy network investigate the office of exchange integrity and find out what is actually go speaking of angel a young woman she looks bad Laurie and she has blonde hair but she is dressed in the Rio and style comes into the princes footstool and approaches Boots's table she sits down she orders a drink and she says we have a mutual friend a guardian angel sent me this is or Landry Adagio Tay she is Angel's first recruit in their new spy network the players said they wanted to know what's going on with this library job a herald working for the Royal Herald Rick's society offered us a job to go to the one of the other islands off the coast of capital still hugely urbanized still part of the city proper one of the smaller islands off the coast called the pellet and go to a library to retrieve a government document because this library is also effectively like a City Hall there are lots of these dotted all over our capital this is something the players had asked for before it was one of the first directives they gave angel they're like we need to find out who these people are they're offering us jobs and one of the jobs we got one offer is the library job who are these people what is the Royal are all during society and what is it they actually want this is the first chance the players have had to use their new spy network this is a mechanism from the forthcoming product kingdoms and warfare which we are going to kickstart there'll be a link in the doobly-doo if you want to get signed up and get an alert when it comes out these are rules that I have used in previous editions of D&D we're just tweaking them for a fit petition it's up to Tom to make the espionage role but instead of using Boots's stats he's using the stats for their spy network which is a level 2 spy network higher is better you're gonna add the level of your spy network to the role and just having a spy network means you're proficient in this which means I think it's plus 3 so it's plus 3 because you have a spy network and then plus 2 because it's a second level spy network higher is better and they spent a lot of money and they put an experienced person in charge of it so instead of starting with a first level network I decided to have a second level network I didn't know that Tom basically couldn't fail in my notes I had written down what information they would learn depending on their result including if they failed and I decided that if they failed completely they would still learn basically what anybody who was raised in this city ended and paying attention would know about the Royal heraldic society and the library so they would still get some information it's just the kind of people live here would know that would still be valuable to the chain because they're not from around here they don't know what's been going on in the city for the last 10 years then they got one level of success which was dc5 so they got some more information but they didn't get the juiciest stuff because he rolled what she describes the Royal heraldic society as being just one of dozens and they make their money inventing noble lineages for guild members so that those guild members can get invited to the right parties she explains this is a long tradition here in capital the players are starting to understand that a noble title is it's really just a tradition it's not a law of physics or nature or anything like that even the long-established family's house Navarre house alvaro they once were just bloodthirsty you know warriors and they declared themselves a noble house and no one could do anything about it I think the players once had a pretty simple attitude toward the legitimacy of a noble title and that it came from some great objective organization but in fact it's it really is just a tradition and if somebody says I am a noble and they're willing to back it up with steel and they are a noble that's how it works in the real world by the way she says if they offer you knighthoods maybe don't accept it because they do work for sure owe me they're part of the fulcrums infrastructure which means if you took a knighthood from them you wouldn't know that you were working for a seroma you would just you would appear to be independent operators you would act like independent operators until you were relying on those knighthoods to do something at which point an agent from the fulcrum might come along and remind you that they are your patrons and they can take those knighthoods away unless you help them out the players they don't like that that's the kind of stuff anybody who lives in the stays would know but then she tells boots the stuff you get for a minor success she says of course you know you'll be fighting tons of undead so be prepared for that and boots is like undead she's like yeah because the library is built on top of an old mausoleum mostly what capital is built on is old capital and parts of it go back thousands of years this was once you know an outpost of the caelian Empire and then basically its capital city she says yeah it's dangerous to go down there and every new library administration locks the place up declaring it unsafe but then they run out of room to store documents in the library and they're like well I guess we got to open this place up and start using it again or they need to go down there to get all documents that were stored by previous administration so it's a cycle of oh it's too dangerous lock it up and oh we need room better open it up that's as much as the chain knows there was more which if you're a patron at the five-dollar level or above you can go read my notes for this session if you don't want to spend any money you can just wait once this adventure which is probably take another I would say one or two sessions once this adventure is over and the notes are complete right now they don't get you to the end of the adventure then I'll put them up online for everybody tom has to then make the second part of the espionage role which is did the fulcrum learn you were spying on them and it's an opposed role Tom rolls and he rolls pretty well but where's the the fulcrum were all better so the fulcrum knows that the chain is digging but they didn't learn anything extraordinary or crazy so I'm not sure if anything is gonna happen from that but I made a note of it we then cut back to the Pharaohs dream and a herald announces the arrival of the marquee damasco and the marquee damasco strides in he's working military uniform basically I said looks like Patrick Stewart from around 1980 force like dune and he's got you know medals instead of wearing a Rio and nobles outfit he's wearing military uniform and he dismisses the Harold tells him to shut up he's not he's not down with all this finery and a frippery the players immediately recognized this guy he is the same nobleman who stopped them when they were on their way into capitol and boarded their ship and inspected the somnium to neveress he's a member of house Verona they run the Navy the players have since learned that that passing of inspection the reason I was so easy was because house Verona wants everybody and capital to think these guys work for us which is apparently working it's one of the reasons the fulcrum didn't try to arrest any of them when they were using magic on the promenade they have learned he approaches these senior officers of the chain of Akron and treats them like officers in a military company he is an officer at a military organization he says would you be interested in a guest lecture at in doing giving a guest lecture at the academy at the military academy you would be free to pick the subject talk about whatever you want the Chronicle alone is an valuable piece of military history we've got lots of records of what happened in many of the battles listed therein but only one side of the battle and you folks have the other side plus he points to slim and says you know we get with you and he'll oh he wants to talk to slim and say the things the way get the fight the battles if you've seen on the astral see no one in the Academy has seen anything like it so the marquee damasco has made his case it seems as though the senior officers like the idea says we can get in touch with him he stands up pleading goes oh I forgot by the way a friend of mine in how he names the person in house Alvaro gave me a couple of tickets to the Opera I hate the Opera he describes it as women who eaten too much singing till they dropped dead while women who haven't eaten enough twirl around in the background and 60-year old men pretend to be lovestruck teenagers he tosses the tickets on the ground he says I'm told you haven't visited capital until you've seen the Opera but I have no use for these you're free to use them if you want the players interpret this as a show on the part of the Marquis damasco trying to transmit to everyone around that yes in fact the chain do work for house of Verona remember that obviously they work for us look how nice and charitable we are to each other look I gave them a couple tickets to the Opera that's basically the end of the first half of the session the half elf that works for the Royal heraldic Society comes back to the heroes and says I hope you've thought about the job we really need you to take care of this and they negotiate regarding a fee and the players come up with the idea that we don't want to be made Knights and we don't just want money we would like some money but instead of paying us as much as the last guys paid us however if you pay us less and you come up with some documents that will demonstrate that boots who is a real win was born and raised in capital he left ten years ago so a lot of stuff going on now like magic carpets and stuff apples him but let's come up with some documentation legitimate documentation demonstrating that boots is the scion of some noble house The Herald agrees to this they sign a contract and now these senior officers of the chain of Akron are on their way to the pellet which is a small island still again very urbanized a small island off the coast of Capitol considered by everybody to be part of the city proper there are fairies that go back and forth all the time there are bridges that connect it to both of capital and the stays and now they are on the library job I described the pellet to them and has two different districts it's got the olive district and then it's got the columns there's a gate there's a wall separating the two districts and a city gate they're able to get past relatively easily because they have been given courier seals from The Herald and this is how they're going to get on the island with their weapons it's explained to them that these courier seals don't they don't allow you to take what couriers aren't allowed to carry weapons however they look basically the same as a knight seal and you look way more like Knights than you do couriers so if anybody tries to stop you just flash these they'll assume you're Knights they'll let you through they have to produce these seals when they take the ferry there are guards there to make sure no one enters the city with their weapons and this is a deception check boots has to make a persuasion or a deception check is up to him in order to trick the guards into thinking that these are Knights seals and they are Knights and of course he rolls another one but because of his bard abilities which I'm pretty sure we miss played by the way his minimum result is still like a 15 or something if we had used the bard rules correctly it wouldn't have been so high but he probably would have succeeded anyway and the players were really worried when they discovered that this was gonna come down to a dire role they start thinking what if we fail the role but all that would have meant and I explained that to me so okay you pass you pass the test you convince the the guards that your Knights you don't have to it's not gonna cost you anything there's not gonna be any greased palms no graft it's gonna have to happen players like oh I get it if we had failed too if they detected that we were couriers and that Knights it would have just meant we would have had to spend some money this is another instance of the players hearing about these cultural realities but treating them like physical laws right the idea that you can't go to capital the city you can't leave the docks with your weapons and they're like unless you have an a knight unless you're Knights and the player is like oh how do we go about doing this how do we get now and they don't it doesn't occur to them that people do it all the time it's just you know there is bribery there is deception these are human beings and acting these rules some of them just don't care about depending on how you get on to the city it's always there's always a way remember the Dragon Knights are incorruptible that's not a physical law that is just a thing that people perceive and everything in capital is just down to perception just like here in the real world you know the idea that these people are nobles the idea that we're lights this is just down to what are you willing to claim and how are you gonna back it up they get onto the pellet without any incident they move through the Olive district which is a lot more sub urban and then they get to the columns which has named that because there are all these buildings left over still being used from the caelian Empire and the kaeleen Empire is basically my Roman Empire analog it's a very bureaucratic district in fact there are a lot of people who live in capital or in the Olive district who then either take a ferry or the bridge or just go through the gate to get to work here in the columns and I described the library I've got a map of the library I've got pictures of the library taken from a real Harvard library that looks like this you know ancient Roman structure and the players enter the library and they need a librarian the library is huge it's marble everywhere there are dozens of people in here working and doing research it's a very impressive structure and the librarian is I described in my notes is like the most ryeowon person they have yet met she is not only a librarian she's also a playwright she's working on her play when they come up to her she's got all these pieces of paper all over the place and different levels of disarray they never asked by the way this we'll talk about this when we get to the post-mortem they never asked like what she was working on or any of that stuff I had all these notes about who she was her background and the place she was working on they say hey we're here to look for this document we were given a number a serial number from The Herald is it here how do we get it she looks at Joe this is gonna be in the mausoleum you folks look like you're able to handle yourself so let's go down there they have a lot of questions for her like what happened to the courier that came here before us so she's like what courier right she's just one of many people who work here and they don't have like they have records of when people check things out but they don't have records of this person went to this part of the library it's a library so the players wanted a lot more information than I thought was instable for just a random librarian to have and there's a lot of creep back and forth because the players have learned that this is a mausoleum full of undead but that's not how the librarian describes that the librarian says well you know this is a very old building and we have records going back that literally thousands of years and there are many noble families who have stored important documents here and they are still interested in protecting them even though they are no longer with us so that's how she perceives it is that the undead down there are just frisky dead Nobles who don't want people interfering with their with their heritage she leads them a couple of floors down to a large metal bulkhead I describe it being like a submarine door she's a huge key she opens it up a blast of cold air comes out now they're going down into darkness they have to get torches I think they cast the light to the bard they're a couple of characters that have I think King and Boots both have lights so they cast light on people's armor and helmets and stuff like that as is traditional and they're now descending into a cryptic classic D&D encounter which I'm wait they only got through one encounter but I'm really looking forward doing more of that tonight again it's only probably gonna be about five encounters of which they've already got through one so this is gonna be a very small dungeon give her to any published dungeon from any edition of D&D but that's about what I think is a reasonable to expect the players to get through in fifth edition and if I wanted to do something more elaborate and we're going to then I what I would do is probably try to string together groups of five encounters and theme them all differently so the players still felt like about every five encounters we're making progress it's gray and dusty down here there are cobwebs everywhere it's a different kind of stone than the marble above they descend some stairs and end up in a room with three sarcophagi the sarcophagi have been opened the players are weary but when they look inside they discover that wow there are dead bodies in there people were buried here there are also tons of documents they're just Scrolls piled up in here the players look at some of the scrolls and they have serial numbers on them a lot of them are just written on the back in you know quill ink but then some of them have stamps on them depending on how old they are there's also a doorway in here that is open so the players can continue to the next area but I describe it as looking like this was a secret door like it's good the fitting around edge of it is just gonna completely vanish if it were closed but it's just standing open right now again representing that idea that this once was a mausoleum where people protected you know their treasures and they're dead and now it's just being used as a bureaucratic office so they have no need for secret doors the players inspect the sarcophagi they go through the secret door they go down another layer of stairs are now several floors below the surface they find a couple of statues that have piles of Scrolls at their feet they make a history check and they determine that these two statues are of gods of Commonwealth a Caelian Empire God's the god of life in the god of death and the god of life has her face desecrated you know basically someone's taking tools and hacked at it and the players did something really clever which I had not thought of it they look at the serial numbers on these documents and they're like are these serial numbers closer in order to the one we're looking for or they farther away I'm like yeah they are you are getting closer you'reyou're there's like a four number code at the beginning of the serial number and these are higher up than the ones in the room before and the document you have the number you have is way much much higher than this one implying there's still a lot of dungeon ago and they're able to use the serial numbers because there is some organization down here each pile each room represents a different kind of category of document and they're able to use the serial numbers to figure out are we going in the right direction if there's a branch they can look left look at the document go right look at the document say which one is closer to the one we're looking for and go in that direction and that caused me to have to sort of improvise an entire encounter because when they did come to a t-intersection and there was a left and a right they went down one part of the corridor only far enough to find some documents look at the serial number and I knew that was a dead end and I knew the document they were looking for wasn't down here so that meant looking at the serial number this was lower than the previous one so don't go this way go the other way but there was a really nice encounter down here and it wasn't there wasn't anything about that encounter that I thought was important to the plot I didn't need to use that encounter I just thought it's about time for something to happen so something needs to happen and I had a list of all the different things that could be down here including some planned encounters and then just a bunch of monsters in case I needed them no plan or idea of how I would use them and I decided now is the time to bust some of those happen as boots reaches into one of the sarcophagi in an alcove to grab a document and see what a serial number is judge notices a ghostly figure floating toward them a skeleton that is hovering off the ground and moving down the corridor to ward him and telling me by the way Lars has been really good about when they go into situations like this asking remembering how my world works in the fact that human beings not dwarves or elves or gif or goblins can sense not detect it's not directional they can sense the presence of undead with about thirty feet so when they entered the mausoleum Lars is like do we get that kind of a hare standing on the back of our neck I'm like nope but he's and he didn't ask that in this situation which is which is good because if he had he would have heard the answer was no you're still not near any undead and that would have given away what this encounter was Tom who recognized my gesture from earlier stories I've told him about D&D even though we've never encountered one these before suddenly realized what it wasn't kept his mouth shut if you watch the stream you can see that moment you notice this skeleton kind of it's it's looks like it's floating off the ground it's moving toward you it's gonna be initiative he's scary it's initiative judge steps forward to attack the skeleton and as he does so he goes and squishes hits this it otherwise invisible they made perception checks they didn't notice it otherwise invisible gelatinous wall because indeed this is a gelatinous cube and happily because of the way the initiative order played out the next thing happened after that was as boots is reaching into this sarcophagus to get a scroll looking down the corridor seeing this seeing judge fighting this giant jello mold and going what the heck is going on the sarcophagus trim it sprouts teeth and eyes ago started out its a mimic I had actually put a miniature down showing sarcophagus and the headstone and I had another miniature of the same thing from a Kickstarter a mimic Kickstarter all painted that was that same object but with teeth and eyeballs and so I swapped it out and even though Tom had guessed that's a gelatinous cube don't want it guess that this is a mimic I think Jerry guessed because while he's watching from the control room he's like why there's like lots of sarcophagi in here why did Matt only put one miniature out which I thought was fun so yeah this turned into basically the probably one of the best encounters I've run recently I was just delighted I had no idea of how these two creatures were going to synergize I just thought let's throw a gelatinous cube in a mimic at them but they synergized remarkably it was so much fun for me seeing how the mimic grabbed boots and then judge got stuck inside the gelatinous cube and then on the try this cube stir and it goes and it washes over boots while he's stuck in the mimic so he is both trapped by the milk and the gelatinous cube they fight they try to figure out what the heck's going on slim doesn't have enough movement to get there and slim is dishing out a colossal amount of damage right now while they're waiting for slim leech is zorching his agony his eldritch blast with the agonizer is agonizing blast at the gelatinous cube half the party gets enveloped by the gelatinous cube and it starts digesting them which put it put a big hitch in there get along and then it's boots is turning he has to figure out what I he has an action he can use it to either extricate himself from the gelatinous cube thereby getting him close to the mimic he's trapped with or extricate himself from the mimic and therefore be stuck inside the gelatinous cube and he decides let me get out of this cube so he pulls himself free from the cube and now he's in the alcove which happily is ten feet wide he's in the alcove with the mimic he's like well at least now I'm only fighting one thing that was cubes Church I don't mind realized that this was possible and I thought when I thought of this I will you could see a huge smile on my face because I know what the cube is gonna do and it just I couldn't wait for it to happen boots is now in the alcove with the mimic it's the gelatinous cubes turning it goes in it and Riaan gulfs boots yeah I I admit it is sort of out of the tone the chain of Akron is you know you can't imagine something like this happening to the black company but I love these old classic monsters and Tom and and like Matt O'Driscoll matter Driscoll didn't know when a gelatinous cube was he had never heard of one and he didn't know how to mimic ones so that was a pretty extraordinary encounter I love deploying these old plastic monsters for new players slim finally shows up and he is able to make short work of the cube and the mimic they had both taken a lot of damage but slim on his own just dishes out a stupid amount of damage and now he has a psionic crystal so he can use that to cast manifestations one of which is amplify which gives you an extra I think it's 3d eight on all your melee attacks for the next minute which I thought was gonna make a bigger difference than I thought but 3d eight is only about twelve more damage which I mean that is a lot but slim is six level now and he was already doing between 50 and 70 damage around which is crazy so it is more but it didn't like double it or anything and that was the end of night they bought a gelatinous cube and a mimic and that got asked about 10:30 and I just had a blast I just had so much fun in that last encounter and now they're gonna explore the rest of the mausoleum which might take another week or two so this is the point where we talk about I told you the story of what happened here's how I think everything went I'll tell you that even though I had a blast in that last encounter the first half of the session I was not happy with I generally feel as though the players don't have enough good options and I'm working to fix that I want to make sure that when they're in capital they feel like they have lots of things they can do on their own they I want to make I want to empower them to do things on their downtime and so I talk to the players about that I said let me know what you want to do during your downtime now your next downtime so I can start prepping that stuff and don't be afraid of going off on your own we can play offline we could even do a whole session that we record on you know Tuesday or Friday or Saturday so I think the players understand that and I believe that it's going to get better and it's gonna feel like the players have more agency than I think they do right now but also the thing about the first half of the session that sort of bug me was I do a lot of work on these NPCs and I really enjoy playing them but don't seem to want to engage with them and I think part of that is my fault but I also I think part of it is the fact that a lot of these NPCs they're kind of larger than life and they this is their city and they know what's going on the city the players don't so I think the players often feel sort of like we don't know what to ask they never asked the librarian about what she was working on yeah I really enjoy playing these NPCs and I think part of it is and by the way it says this is not this is not me asking for advice I'm perfectly capable of diagnosing the problem of my own I think part of it is because I enjoy playing these characters so much and because I do have a very very modest theatrical background I was in theater all through high school and college I enjoy you know the role-playing aspect more I think that a lot of the players do and so that kind of puts them on the defensive if that makes sense I feel like I can even see it happening when I'm like Hello and the players like oh they don't they don't lean into these NPCs so a part of it is they often don't feel like they can trust these NPCs because it's capital and everyone's a spy for somebody else and also I think that I just enjoy because I've put a lot of work into it I enjoy playing them so the players like meeting these NPCs I know because they talk about it they like meeting these NPCs they think they're cool and interesting characters but they do not engage with them so that is something we're gonna work on the politics in the city is about to ramp up very very quickly for two reasons it could go more slowly and I think especially for viewers maybe that if it went more slowly it would be more easy to follow but first of all I don't want the players at this stage to feel like they actually are in control of what's happening no they are newcomers on a very complex stage that's one reason things are gonna get really complex really quickly is because I don't think the players I don't think the chain of Acheron are in a position to be able to decode everything that's happened predict things and act accordingly but the other issue is just purely pacing is that I think things it's Dungeons & Dragons things do need to get out of control quickly so you're going to notice that maybe not tonight maybe you'll start seeing some of it at the end of the session tonight but then almost certainly next week you're going to see the politics are going to be at the forefront of what's happening now it may seem to you watching this that the game is just incredibly complex and have this man hold all the stuff in his head at once but just be aware about a lot of the politics in my setting is after the fact if you've been watching the campaign Diaries you know that the marquee damasco stopped the players as they were to inspect their ship before they entered the city and I didn't really like the way that encounter went I thought it lacked drama and I was like I should have done this better I should have come up with some dramatic moments that give the encounter of some tension it was only weeks later when I was thinking about that I decided I invented the idea that the reason that inspection went so easily was because the marquee damasco wanted the rest of the city to believe that the chain of Akron were quasi officially in the pocket of house Verona I do stuff like that all the time after the fact reinterpreting events in a more sophisticated way that goes a long way toward making the city feel real and dynamic and plausibly complex but it's not stuff I plan ahead of time I'm just looking for opportunities and when I see them I go haha I'm going to decide now that this thing that happened before really meant this that's my way of saying you can do this too it just required don't imagine that I had all this stuff planned out ahead of time nothing could be further from the truth I'm often going back and recontextualizing things that happened before with new information and that makes it seem like I had planned this all along and the things are really complex I don't think the players for an instant imagined that I had invented the idea that the marquee damasco let them by easily on purpose to make it seem like they were in-house Bironas pay they just accepted it so you know the first half of the session I now have this triple consciousness I think all Dungeon Master's need to have double consciousness or they're aware of everything going on behind the screens and how they think the adventure is going from their perspective of how did I plan and then they also have to have this second consciousness of how are the players experiences are they having fun are they bored or do they not are they not engaged to the night of agency so you're always keeping these two different perspectives in mind and now I have a third perspective which is the audiences and I don't think the first half of the evening was very watchable and I think that comes down to the player is just not feeling free to engage and we'll play with these NPCs which we talked about earlier but then the second half of the evening I just thought was a blast we were back in an element where everybody feels like they have equal footing and everybody can participate and that was the dungeon crawl which we're gonna have more of and I just loved that battle that crazy almost a grim - that straps Rube Goldberg device of the mimic plus the gelatinous cube which I had not planned I made that encounter up on the spot and it was just a huge success I felt that was it that was the session and my post-mortem I'm always gonna be working to try to give the place is always a process it doesn't end whenever we do post-mortems like this on a session there are people in the comments good good meaning well-meaning people in the comments who they say you're being too hard on yourself and other people who feel the opposite but really this isn't again this isn't me complaining this isn't me being cynical this is just the normal process of being an artist is I'm always looking at the work and always trying to find ways to improve it the players are having fun but we could be doing better and I will oh there's never gonna be a point where I'm like okay I can stop trying to get better now that will never happen I'm always gonna be looking at the scenario was saying what could have gone better right now player agency the players don't feel like they really understand what their options are in capital I want to fix that I'm gonna fix that's just gonna take a while and also I want the players to feel like they matter more like the chain of Acheron is is as cool and as important as we all sort of imagine it is and right now they're not really presenting themselves as we're the chain of acheron who are you right and I want that moment so we're gonna try and build toward that and that might happen next week I hope that was interesting or informative or entertaining maybe there's a lesson in there for some new dungeon masters I hope to see you all tonight 7 o'clock on Twitch 7 o'clock Pacific there's a link in the doobly-doo until next week peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 73,761

Keywords: Matt Colville, Matthew Colville, Matt Colville D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D, The Chain, Chain of Acheron, Matt Colville's D&D game, Behind the Screen, Campaign Diary

Id: 9Ghpu7f-DxU

Length: 37min 4sec (2224 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Famous_Last_Turds]

I love the snippets from the actual game play!

[u/EthOrlen]

Re: watchability - I've found that every time Matt has said

Such-and-such part of the stream wasn't very watchable

I've thought to myself,

That was one of my favorite parts!

I'm not sitting in the room, and Matt knows his friends better than I do. But as an audience member, I don't see the players being reluctant to roleplay. I see each person embodying their character equally well with different styles. Not only do I find it watchable, its the most enjoyable part of the stream for me. It shows off who the characters are, but also who the players are; makes me feel comfortable inviting them into my headphones or living room.

I love Lars's personality and interactions with Matt. I love how Anna is always torn between how Anna would react and how Judge would react. I love how O'D adds so much roleplay that is undirected fluff, yet full of personality and flavor. I love how much Phil seems to enjoy embracing the fish-out-of-water and getting outside himself. I love how Tom doesn't talk much, but when he does it's usually hilarious. I love how into the whole experience Töm is.

These are things I feel I rarely get from the combat sections of the stream, but that are always on full display during roleplaying sections. Even the Info Dump/Shopping episode had these things in spades.

[u/Deviknyte]

The updated format of the campaign diary is great. I've been recommending it to gm's old and new. The scenes is such a great teaching tool. I love it.

[u/jgn77]

I sometimes wonder what the stream would be like with Matt DMing for 5 or 6 other Matts. To see 6 people with the level of enthusiasm that he comes with would be a sight to see.

[u/Malazar01]

I loved the encounter - particularly because Matt and I deploy the Gelatinous Cube in exactly the same way - there's always a "decoy" something or other in the cube - usually a skeleton, but occasionally just a sword or other weapon that looks like it's "flying" to grab the players' interest.

There's also always at least one player at the table who has heard me describe (or witnessed) a previous deployment who gets it and gives me the same face Tom had. The "I'm on to your BS" face. It's all part of the tradition.