'The Goudafellas' A Summary of Session 5 of Lost Mine of Phandelver
Summary of Session 5: The Goudafellas
In this session our adventures returned to the redbrand hideout, made a grizzly discovery, defeated a nothic and got caught by a goblin raiding party in the woods on the way to Cragmaw Castle.
Good
- All my planning went according to plan! Amazing!
- My players now try and talk first, they look for the non combat option. Its nice :) They don’t assume everyone has evil intent … now to figure out how to use it against them!!! #maniacallaugh
- They have fallen in love with an NPC
Bad
A bad environment can ruin the experience for a player and lead to frustration. One of our players was not in their usual space this week and this lead to them having to constantly mute and unmute their mic which they were not used to … it left them feeling a bit out of it and frustrated at the end of the session.
From my point of view, I have to learn to empathise with my players situation and if they are feeling a little distant make sure they are involved in. This obviously applies in person and remote, but there are differences in managing it, but as the GM we have to make sure the action is distributed fairly and everyone gets their chance to be awesome.
Ugly
The cheddar goblin. My eyes. My brain. My soul.
I really am sorry if you haven’t seen that before.
You can see how I prepped for this session here.
Souped up nothic
My souped up nothic did the trick. The forced saving throw across the whole party, some luck on my part with 3 out of 4 failing and then forcing them to reveal a secret, led to some nice roleplay and some reveals. When they eventually decided to kill it, it didn’t last long, but it was super fun making them scared of it. For the voice I used my best impression of the peadophile old man from family guy. This obviously instantly creeps some people out.
The cheddar goblin
During the goblin attack my players captured one of them and questioned them. They offerered them cheese as an incentive. A star was born.
After literally gettinig them to eat out of their hand and some fine deception and charisma rolls, they gave our little goblin friend a new start in life and told him to go work at the newly liberated ‘The Sleeping Giant’ in Phandalin. It was super fun to play.
Deception
My players, after levelling up and getting access to some neat new tricks were quite in to trying out some deception.
Deception attempt number 1: Nothic
Before fighting the Nothic, our players tried to bargain with it. As they knew it was guarding magic weapons and it somewhat explained to them that it was drawn to magic, the wizard of the party tried to pass off a necklace they had as a magic necklace by making it glow with a bit of Thaumaturgy. Needless to say it failed.
I never said my players were bright.
Deception attempt number 2: Goblin camp
As my players stumbled upon a goblin camp on the way to Cragmaw Castle, they managed to sneak up real close and the ‘Eldritch Knight’ of the party offered to use ‘Disguise Self’ and go try and chat to the goblins.
Forgetting that although he would LOOK like a goblin … he couldn’t SPEAK goblin.
OK, so to make this a little fun, I obviously assumed common and like a lot of multi-lingual folks I had my goblins move in and out of common and goblin as they talked to each other. This allowed me to ramp up the suspicions of the goblin party without constant deception check or dice rolls, as my player would be unable to make sense of the entirety of the conversation.
Hilarity ensued.
Failure can be more fun than success
See above.
Maps, Maps, Maps
My players set out to buy maps of the area. I kind of stalled in game on this and said we would discuss it after. Need to think about what to do :S