Yesterday’s gaming session was less chaotic, if not precisely
calm. I let the boys run around the school playground for about 15 minutes
again first, which also gave C’s father time to go home and get the character
sheet C had left at home. C’s father had also given me two (!) Player’s
Handbooks and a generous supply of snacks provided by C’s mother --
overly generous, I thought, before the five boys proceeded to put away a
half-dozen packs of Pirate’s Booty, an equal number of Annie’s chocolate chip
snack packs, and two boxes of chocolate-cookie-dough Larabars over the next 90
minutes. Her wisdom in choosing individually wrapped items was proven by the
fact that the boys didn’t fight over nearly as much as they had over the bowl
of potato chips I had last week. I also may need to find a drink option that’s
faster to serve than the OJ and seltzer combo I’ve been giving them -- I can
see our pile of recyclable cans stacking up into the future, argh.
Food (and wise and unwise choices) proved to be a theme of the
day. Having now four copies of the Player's Handbook, A having brought one as well, we started with 20 minutes of remedial character detailing. I’d gone
through and put Post-Its on character sheets asking people to fill in
or explain things, e.g. “Why does the half-orc fighter have 14 HP?” (that was a
mistake with the Con modifier), and I had them do a bit of some background development too, especially B and T, who were supposed to be brothers (which they adjusted to “old
friends” because they’d picked proficiencies suggesting pretty different backgrounds). Then the party
finally got to attack those four starter goblins, which they put away at the
cost of only 6 HP of damage total to the four characters, reduced to 3 HP when
the Tiefling warlock used his soul-drinking healing capability to heal up [note
to self: must check correct name and stop thinking of it as “Uses Morganti
weapon/Stormbringer/vorpal whatsit” as any misspeaking incites mockery with
this crowd, generally led by D: 5th-graders are a brutal audience]. They
searched the dead goblins, but I had to hint heavily to get them to check the
nearby area and discover the path to the goblin hideout with its traces
suggesting the recent dragging away of a couple of large bodies. (I paid them
back with a short lecture on Why You Should Always Search the Area – which
they’ll take from me, being 5th graders, but be bored by, being
5th graders, so maybe that’ll larn 'em not to make the DM have to explain
such things.)
Before proceeding, they decided to take a short rest,
reconstituting their hit points, and make a meal from one of the dead horses
(cooked, once A had checked that their adventurer’s packs contain fire-starting
apparatus), and B, one of the wood-elf criminal buddies, decided to try some
goblin as well. He didn’t say whether he cooked it, and the other characters
didn’t want it near them, so I’m going to say he did not. They continued up the
path, with D’s dwarven cleric in the lead hollering “Maceface!” (the name of
his clan), but since D has a perception score of 16 due to high wisdom (ha), I
gave him a pass on both the snare trap and the pit trap: he managed to see both
of them before falling in (in retrospect I should’ve put my thumb harder on the
scale there, with maybe a -10 adjustment for distraction, but I didn’t
think of it).
They did draw the goblin guards near the cave entrance by having a loud argument over their next move -- a nostalgic moment: that's a lesson everybody has to learn the hard way -- but the guards rolled a 3 for initiative and all the players managed 13 or better, so the party killed both goblins before they could do any damage. The lesson about actions and consequences will have to wait until B's constitution roll next week.
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