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Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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Tonight we're going to be continuing through the Tomb of Horrors adventure co-written by Mouseferatu and Scott Fitzgerald Gray. This will be our second session in the tomb (the first is described here).
Unfortunately, we're down to three players this session (from four), so I may have to tone down some of the combat encounters. The question is this, though: how many combat encounters will there be? Tomb's really well-designed with lots of non-combat encounters to puzzle the characters.
(At present, it seems to be missing meaty role-playing encounters, but they might turn up later).
The PCs we'll have will be a Druid, a Bard and a Paladin. How they'll deal with what's coming up will be fascinating. Martin's Druid got past the first "puzzle" of the Tomb took about 2 second flat, but there are more dangerous encounters coming up.
We've been using the D&D Fortune Cards in our sessions recently - all drawing from a group deck of about 80 cards that I've provided. We had them during last weekend's awesome Death's Reach session, but Epic characters didn't really need their help and the players basically ignored them. Meanwhile, we used them extensively during our 4th level Eberron game and the Tomb of Horrors.
I expect that if players were creating their own decks, they'd be a lot more effective, but at the moment they provide points of variance from spamming of at-wills. 
There's the possibility we might get another player or two tonight if we're very, very lucky. I've created a couple of 10th level D&D Essentials characters for the players (slayer and thief) just in case. One of the lovely things about the Essentials characters, and especially the slayer and thief, is they're very easy to understand and they're very effective as well: which means that someone diving into D&D can hit the ground running and enjoy themselves. Of course, diving into D&D with the Tomb of Horrors might not be my recommended way of starting the game, but at least the 4E version offers more than simply "wrong choice and die" puzzles.
I've often used "Previously..." introductions to session, but it's been a long time since I've formalized them. It's time I started again. (When I was at university, a number of us saw the same production of Sondheim's Into the Woods on TV, which led to me starting up sessions with "Once upon a time... Later..." to their great appreciation).
Do I really need to say, "A friend came to you for help. You then spent half the session trying to get someone else to help him?"
Probably not.
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Ramping up my reviewing.
