Game went pretty well last night. Had to work around some technical glitches with Roll20 (one player needed 3 tries and a reboot to finally be able to see the map. And it decided, for whatever reason, to not let my players see the default goblin token I had picked out. I had to delete and recreate them all on the map with a different token) and my DMing skills are really rusty, but I think everyone had a good time.

I think I figured out my goblin problem (I had the tokens half-linked to the "character sheet" I put all the goblin macros on. I didn't want to fully-link them because I was concerned about changes made to one affecting all of them. But it apparently put them into this weird broken state. Removing the link appears to have fixed it.)

Side note, I sent an email to my players asking for feedback and one of the questions was "What was your favorite part of the session?" The first answer I got was "Worfgar getting hit with a cat."

So apparently I was playing the Pathfinder goblins properly.

That's awesome.

In one of my old notebooks I have the quote, "you could always spit on a spider". I have no idea who said it or why but it must have been hilarious at the time.

One of my favourite quotes, at the end of an adventure we'd just one a battle against the big boss, and it used the trope of having the chamber start to collapse as soon as we'd finished him off, forcing us to run for the exits. One of the players piped up, "Bad luck chaps, that was a load-bearing villain!"

Then there's my own staple prayer to the gods of Greyhawk: "For as it is written, whenever four to six of you are gathered together in my name, roll initiative."

Laga- Yeah, random quotes with the context lost to time are always fun to come across.

BT- We've made cracks about "load-bearing monsters" at our table as well. I used the trope a few times in my early gaming years, then wisely moved away from it.

I did resurrect for one campaign, though. One of players mentioned he missed the cheesy old-school kick-door-in, assemble-the-five-parts-of-the-Mcguffin style games we played when we were kids. So I sat down to try to figure out how to run a game like that with modern sensibilities and came up with the idea of an ancient vampire sorceress who wanted to end her existence, but do so by going out in a blaze of glory.

She crafted a talisman to counteract her powers, broke it into pieces, set each piece in a specially created dungeon with creatures to guard it, then started a war with the kingdom that traditionally had produced the most heroes and sent its king a taunting letter containing clues to where the pieces of the talisman was hidden.

The heroes promptly took the bait, went off to find the pieces of the talisman, and in the process became powerful enough to face her before confronting her in her fortress and putting her down for good.

As she vaporized, a note fell to the floor. It thanked the adventurers for their service and then said that certain rituals needed to be observed in situations such as this, at which point the fortress started collapsing.

Needless to say, the party was a little stunned to discover they'd been used for "suicide by adventurer" but the players still say it was one of the best campaigns I ran. (There were tons of side plots as well involving everyone's character histories as well, so there was still some RP goodness mixed in amongst the dungeon crawls.)

That was also the campaign the party foolishly decided to try to rest in a red dragon's volcano lair and woke up on fire when said dragon ambushed them by swimming through the lava and the person they had on watch blew their Spot check to notice it raising its head out of the pool on the far side of the room.

man you sound like a way big fun DM, Kalshane.

I appreciate the compliment, though I feel like there are a lot of way better DMs than me out there. I read other people's campaign notes and writhe with jealousy at what they've come up with.

Even among people I've played with, I wish I could RP like one of our DMs, or world-build like another, or think on my feet like a third. The DM I've played in the most games with (and ran the campaign I made Kelric for) weaves incredible, epic stories that I wish I could emulate. His weakness is he tends to make give his PCs too much in the way of loot and power and we can sometimes stomp all over his carefully planned encounters. (The funniest, in a sad way, was a high level 3.0 game where he let my brother make a sorcerer to play as a one-off while he was in town visiting. The party is about to square off against some heavy-duty badguys, and the DM spends several minutes describing them to drive up tension. Initiative is rolled, the Sorcerer wins. "I snap my fingers to trigger my Contingency, casting Haste on myself. Then I cast Horrid Wilting on them twice." A few dice rolls later and the badguys were all withered husks.)

The campaign I played in with the one that did fantastic world-building also had great, memorable NPCs that you actually cared about, but he also liked to add new fiddly mechanics that didn't always work that well and sometimes caused frustration.

If I had to rate myself, I'd say I was somewhere in the middle, with game mechanics being my strongest suit by far, and RPing being my weakest, while being passable at storytelling, world-building and improvising. Thankfully, I have players that are perfectly happy to RP with each other, so I just need to use the NPCs to provide a catalyst.

I will say, one thing I love about the internet is the ability to borrow ideas from other DMs and put my own twists on them. I'm discovering that's especially helpful with a published adventure like Rise of the Runelords, where I can actually get blow-by-blow accounts from players and DMs that have already been through it and see what works and what doesn't as written. Obviously, a lot of it won't apply to my game, because the players make each game unique, but it gives me some ideas for when my players decide to go off the rails.

That was also the campaign the party foolishly decided to try to rest in a red dragon's volcano lair and woke up on fire when said dragon ambushed them by swimming through the lava and the person they had on watch blew their Spot check to notice it raising its head out of the pool on the far side of the room.

Because nothing says 'safe resting place' like LAVA.

I had a fight once with that setting too (fighting a red dragon in a lava chamber). This was with my primary Living Greyhawk character. When I was living in Philadelphia, I felt the need for a hobby that got me out of the house every once in a while, and that's when I decided to get back into D&D. Third Ed had just come out. I decided to build a CG rogue/wizard, using the Character Builder CD they packaged with the PH at that time. (Dex and Int were the major scores, of course. With hindsight, I'd probably have nudged Con instead of Str, and he did manage to die three times over his career. ...He got better.) His backstory developed more or les entirely from mulling over the name the character generator had given me, "Kerrick of Nyrond". I took him off to a local Con for my first D&D play experience in maybe 15 years, where he performed serviceably in clearing some kobolds from a gnome mine and narrowly avoiding a TPK against a druid-led lizard folk village, and I was hooked once again.

Anyway, once 3.5 came out, the new DMG had as one of the base prestige classes the Arcane Trickster. Perfect for my character's ambitions. That became my new goal. In truth, once Kerrick started multiclassing (he'd started in rogue levels), he was sadly underpowered. His sneak attack and BAB had fallen behind the curve, as had his best spells, and there wasn't much synergy between the two. But when he hit his 5th wizard level, he learned to fly, and suddenly it all came together. He could hold his own as a flying sniper. When he gained his second Arcane Trickster level, he was even a bit of a monster in the right encounter. For at this point, he had access to the orb spells - and to improved invisibility. Ranged touch attacks, no save, no spell resistance, and an extra 3d6 of sneak attack. For the final touch, I crafted a wand of Orb of Force. 10d6 of damage, and virtually nothing had any kind of resistance to it. All this delivered by an invisible, flying wizard with max ranks in Hide and Move Silently.

So anyway, here was our party in the lava room for the final encounter of the adventure. Up pops a huge red dragon and it's on. We had a decent party, but with the exception of Kerrick, we were a bit weak on ranged attacks, and the dragon was using the lava for concealment. A lot of our damage was coming from summoned creatures. I figure we had the dragon down to less than a third of its hp, but most of the party were close to collapse too (except Kerrick, who by this stage had Improved Evasion and was mostly shrugging off the fire breath). They all decided it was time to beat a retreat; the dragon took that opportunity to fly for the volcano's vent and take to the air.

I asked the GM, "Hey, dragon's aren't maneouvrable. It's going to have to change direction when it gets to the vent. Can I get one last shot at it?" He glanced at the dragon's remaining hp, shrugged and said sure. I hauled out my wand, took a shot from 150 feet away - and rolled a crit. 20d6 and one cheering party later, the dragon plummeted back into the lava pool. (We summoned a couple of fire elementals to retrieve the corpse.)

Later on, Kerrick racked up a one-shot kill against a huge white dragon (sneak attack with an orb of fire, did over 50 points of damage; it failed its system shock roll). The path leading up to his home is now flanked by the preserved heads of two huge dragons. he likes to maintain a low profile.

he likes to maintain a low profile.

nice.

once Kerrick started multiclassing (he'd started in rogue levels), he was sadly underpowered.

I always have this problem multiclassing rogues, especially when it comes to Disable Device.

I always have this problem multiclassing rogues, especially when it comes to Disable Device.

Multiclassing is fraught with novice traps in 3rd ed. Still major fun, though. (Not to mention chasing prestige classes.)