This week I had a smaller turnout. We didn't have any Hangout players, so that experiment will have to wait till later. I added some new house rules to the campaign, Jack and Matt's slot-based inventory system and a tightening up the temporal wiggle room I'd given the players. Partly due to the (one-way) design of my early adventures and partly due to my bleeding heart weaksauce DMing I'd start every session where the last ended, with whomever's character who happened to be in attendance and damn the torpedoes to explaining how or why characters could pop in and out of existence within a dungeon. It made it easier to ensure the game kept going when we were short a few players, but it's made increasingly less sense as the campaign has continued. That will no longer be the case. It's expected that the party will have to make it out of whatever death trap they've been tramping through if they want to add characters to the mix. If they can't make it back to town or base camp or whatever than they won't be able to add new characters. Obvious in retrospect, and almost guaranteed to make some players complain, but I'm willing to do the bookkeeping.
So on with what happened last session! The party finished exploring the the reservoir dungeon, scoring some loot in a side tunnel they found at the water level. Waiting for them at the top of the spiral staircase in the basement was the witch, surrounded by her cats. In repayment for discovering what was causing the village to sink, the giant crab statue had been raising the water table with sea water, she offered to translate the octagonal books they'd found. One was a historical text, the other a manual of giant insects, and the last a manual for the machinery in the reservoir. With the book, the witch, and a craftsman from Snim they were able to repair the machinery and activate it, draining the reservoir and pumping the water away from the town.Then they all went to a bar and the dwarf got eaten trying to wrestle a boa constrictor in a pit fight.
The issue of what to do with PCs whose players disappear is something I've struggled with as well, especially in dungeon based scenarios.
ReplyDeleteYou say you plan to not allow new PCs to join an adventuring party in the middle of a dungeon (which sounds good to me), but any idea how you'd handle the opposite situation -- where the player of one of the PCs who is already in the dungeon disappears (can't come to the next session, the next 2 sessions, whatever)?
It seems to reasonable to hand that character to someone else for that duration, at least until you head back to town. Or perhaps a table? I think Jeff had a "what happened to my guy who got left in the dungeon" table.
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