So I DM’d a LFR module this weekend at my local gaming store and something unusual happened…I didn’t buy anything, absolutely nadda. I know I know our economy is at a precarious position and we need impulse buyers like myself to reach down into the abyss and grab it by the balls and drag it back into the light. I am a little ashamed as I can’t say it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I had it on my mind that I wanted/needed a new set of dice that were a little bigger than the average set. Not the ridiculous novelty size but just slightly bigger, alas I was shut out. The last copy of the Saga Edition Jedi Academy Training Manual and I stared longingly at each other like it was last call at the bar but I guess I wasn’t beer-goggled up enough to close the deal. What is ridiculous is that I know I will absolutely buy it, but what is more ridiculous is I am nowhere even remotely close to thinking about the possibility of contemplating a Star Wars game.
But anyways back to the LFR Game. This LFR group uses an online website site to handle sign-up for the games, which I think appears to be more of a formality, as people tend to ignore such things as full tables or waitlists and generally just show up. So like 9 people descended into the bowels of the game store wanting to play and I am like trying to problem-solve the situation, as I think that 9 might be a tad much. Well problem solving with a group of toddlers would likely have been more productive. So one dude who wasn’t even on the waitlist graciously agreed to pass and then I was like fuck it I will just DM 8, as I could see the table was a little light on self-sacrifice, plus no one wanted to step up and DM…surprise surprise…
So what I had wanted to accomplish with this game session was to address some of the perceived shortcomings/complaints around LFR, namely the lack of role-playing and in my opinion the lack of threat in combat. For the role-playing part I new the background of one of the players, what is really cool is that this cat always puts a lot of thought into his LFR characters in terms of their background and personality (if you put any thought into your character background as a DM I will seize on it and work at least a bit of into the game as I appreciate that kind of effort) so I scrapped the always awkward LFR module intro where you are just randomly seeking employment with a bunch of strangers, although we did start in a tavern, but that because the aforementioned character’s family sells wine. The premise of the module was to help a government official find his abducted daughter. So bickety-bam a high level regional employee of the character’s family business found the pc and introduced the quest as it would be important for business to be owed a favour by this local official that deals in trade contracts. In the Skill challenges I tanked the aid another deal and sort of forced them to tell me what they were specifically doing and saying, none of this “I use my diplomacy” crap. The result seemed to be more personal investment by some for the players and more in character interactions between players and various NPC’s. I also scrapped the second skill challenge for pacing and it was just superfluous, but I gave them the full xp anyways.
As for the combat, I updated the monster damage and statistics per the July Errata. As I said previously I think part of the problem with the lack of threat in the combat encounters can come from the poor monsters having to slug it out against these massively twinked out or gimmicked up characters. What complicated things, was having to run the combat for 8 friggin people. My solution was really to just keep adding monsters on the fly. I added extra monsters at the beginning of each combat in an attempt to scale up the encounter but then waited to see how things went in the first round. When the Adept got nuked before he acted into the first round, no problem as his twin brother stepped out of the hidden door with the Halfling Thief. The result was more intense battles, with multiple characters dropping more than once each of the fights, but never approaching TPK danger.
Overall, I thought it went well and everyone had a good time. It was a little more work in terms of prep, but well worth it. I am not sure how much LFR I will be playing in the next little while as I have joined on online game through skype, which is a little surreal, but more on that another time.