Lucia’s whirlwind editing continues with the next episode of our Hallowe’en 2019 “one-shot,” All Souls Night from Dungeon in a Box. When we last left our heroes, the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective, Sid Onoso, and her friends were confronting a case of mistaken identity when a band of pugnacious goblinoids accosted them, believing the party to be members of the infamous Black Ram Gang.
Listening to episodes of this adventure really emphasized something for Harold: he’s not as comfortable running other people’s material as he is running his own. During editing, we were often laughing at his uncharacteristically-awkward descriptions (as in last episode’s “the gourds and sticks clattering together make a sound of clattering”). It could be that he was just having an off day, or it could be (as he attests) that there is an extra awkwardness introduced when trying to adapt someone else’s language for your own. Harold has a weird aversion to reading any text boxes verbatim, and so we end up with this sort of awkwardness from him when he tries to paraphrase blocks of descriptive text. Weird.
There’s something to learn in every episode, of course. In this episode, Dyrah critically succeeds at an attempt to convince their antagonists that the party is something it’s not. Here’s a question for DMs: how do you feel about how that played out in the game? Do you think that the effect of that persuasion was appropriate, or was it too much or too little? How would you as a player have wanted that critical success to affect the events and story? Thinking about how you would handle such calls in advance of your own games is how we become more successful in shaping our experiences to go in the direction we and our players agree that we’d like to go.
Let us know in the comments how you’d play it out if it was your game. And, as always, let us know how you feel about ours.