Dungeons & Discourse – Character Creation:Report

So, as you may know, this was the first D&D session that I’ve run (I have played in the past, but never DMed, and had also never played fourth edition prior to this), but I don’t intend it to be the last. I’m going to do these “reports” after each one so I can try and dispense advice to anyone else doing the same and anyone that’s got advice to give, please do so.

Some background first of all. This game was actually the one that’s in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Manual and is 4th Edition, meant to introduce the players and the DM to the game and is called “Kobold Hall”.

I’d drawn some maps on graph paper, had miniatures ready, had snacks, drinks and pizza menu at the ready and sorted out whatever chairs I had for people to sit on.

ArrivalsPeople started arriving around an hour prior to the start of the game. Eventually when everyone was there we had: myself, Ben, Callum, Chris, Keith Tom & Will which made for quite a good campaign. They started off making characters and Will had brought a variety of good information with him.

Character Creation

Ah yes, this is where it started to go askew. I know the old character creation way of roll six lots of six sided dice four times, (known as 4d6 in the game) take away the lowest number from a set of four, add the other three together and that’s a stat. Turns out people were confused and I only had one Player’s Handbook to pass around when people wanted to see abilities and the like. Will & Callum had pre-generated characters whereas everyone else carried on with the misshapen things they had created including a Dragonborn named Tits McGee.

Hook & Adventuring

So I had taken the base adventure of Kobold Hall from the DM’s Guide to get myself used to DMing and the players used to playing. The guide provided a few great hooks, but somehow it was decided (by my players) that the group had gone off on a stag do, and had drunkenly stumbled in to the cave and decided upon genocide of the Kobolds within.

One player got bored and intentionally fell in to the slime pit (later discovered to be Kobold leavings) and was disbanded for the rest of the game. The players triggered a few traps as they eventually sobered up on their travel in to the large hall. A few odd things happened that I wasn’t ready for before the players accomplished the mission.

• A drake killed more than one player due to some natural 20s on my side, but I let it slide for the first game
• The party decided it would be a good idea to capture and interrogate a Kobold, which I was very unprepared for, but managed to fumble through and convince them (in-character) to release him. What a mistake guys…
• A player came up with a novel idea to trap an annoying drake in the newly acquired bag of holding and leave it in there until it died…
• They ran away from the dragon initially, then chose to drag down a Kobold corpse for it to eat…

The dragon was of course, the main boss of this mini-adventure, and though it had some devastating attacks the players knocked it down quickly and then one player gutted it for all it was worth. Tail, heart, teeth, lungs, scales, everything.

The campaign ended there, and next up we have: Nurion’s Treasure.