Our First Encounter

First of all, thanks to everyone for their cost saving ideas and help on my previous post.  The suggestion to play something other than D&D was met with flippance that only a teenage girl can give.  Of course we are going to play D&D, we already made our characters*. 

We sat down on Saturday night, with a makeshift screen that I put together that had weapons/armor tables that I had copied from the books.  I had 3x5 cards with player information, NPC information, and monster information.  Keep on the Winterfell has 3 hooks included.  I explored two of them as one was a "you are going on this adventure because" type thing.  One girl was absent this week and I think this will be a great way to bring her into the adventure when she shows up.  The other two hooks with characters were put in the Goat Town Inn common room.  For the girls to find themselves.    Quick question:  If there are multiple hooks and the characters are sent by multiple people on very similar missions, do they get xp from both? I figure they should get paid for both as if they are making a map for someone and eradicating monsters as they go they are actually doing both.  Thankfully, the players only talked to the one person and then were ready to hit the road. 

Of course, while on the road they are set upon by some Kobolds.  This encounter took a long time.  First was the learning curve.  Although I tried to explain battle mechanics before we started, I had to go over it several more times.  I think there is one girl that is still pretty lost.  Second was the fact that level one characters are pretty weak and everyone was rolling high defensive rolls (including me) and low offensive rolls (sometimes including me).  I did make mention of that in the story by saying that I could tell that they were new to this as everyone was swinging wildly and missing, thankfully the kobolds were no better trained.  It took about twice as long as I had planned.  The final defensive roll on the final Dragon sheild with 3 hp left was a 19, and I picked it up and rolled it again for a 6 (on the sly) just so we could finish the encounter and divide xp and gp before everyone had to go home. 

The Girls seemed to have a great time.  Several have stated that they are going to buy their own dice this week.  We will have season 2 of community for them to watch the D&D episode next time they get together.  Everyone is supposedly bringing $5 for pizza as well.  No vegans, but have one member that keeps kosher (found that out the hard way).  My daughter has been informed that this is a one adventure deal for me, and at the conclusion, one of the girls will need to take over as the DM.  That way it can be at different peoples houses and we don't have to host. 

*one girl was a warlock and most of her attacks used constitution added to her roll, well she had assigned herself an 11 constitution.  So after we were done, I talked to her about it and showed her in the book that Warlocks needed high constitution, intelligence, and something else.  I explained that he attacks were all using it and that is why she wasn't hitting.  she reassigned her values and she should be much more successful on future encounters.  I figure that at level one, for first tiem players, playing with the numbers is pretty normal. 

So far so good.