This is episode 17 of my RPG cast here on my micro.blog, and everything’s fine here in North Texas, at least right now.

By that I mean the weather’s nice and all of that.

Anyway, we played D&D yesterday, and we had a pretty interesting game.

The player characters were in a big…

it’s Festival Square in the city where they live and adventure.

And we did a little bit of roleplaying individually with each of the player characters before getting them together, which was…

it’s always fun to do that.

And then I came up with reasons why they would all go to the Festival Square for the big festival that was happening that night.

And they, of course, took the hook because they’re good players.

And they thwarted an assassination attempt on the head of the Merchant’s Guild.

So without going into an excruciating amount of detail of the game, the assassin was hidden in a float.

And the bard saw an arrow slit open in the float.

I made a passive perception roll for her.

And before she could do anything, though, the assassin shot a poison crossbow bolt at the head of the Merchant’s Guild.

But even with advantage on the attack, the assassin missed.

And that really made the game interesting and fun because, well, she was then able to kind of push the Merchant down onto the stage and use Mage Hand to close the little arrow slit enough to really mess up the assassin’s next shot.

The rogue, the arcane trickster, and the cleric, who were also in the party, were able to join in on the fun.

And so they saved a VIP in the town right in front of the town council.

And, let’s see, really, no one actually died in the encounter, which was satisfying.

You know, like, it’s kind of unusual.

Now, so the assassin was running away, and the assassin had a number of really fun distractions that he had set up to cause chaos and make it hard to move through the crowd for the player characters.

But the assassin was not able to get to his ally, who would have helped him, because of the way things ran in the actual combat.

And then the bard was able to use Suggestion to delay the assassin, and then was able to use Charm Person on the assassin.

And it’s the first time in my entire history of playing D&D that Charm Person has actually been used to great effect.

Now, that was after the assassin had been slowed down a little bit by the arcane trickster, who hit him in the back with three magic missiles.

And just for fun, I made a ruling that getting blasted in the back with three magic missiles, the assassin made a saving throw and failed it and was knocked prone.

Probably not going to do that a whole lot in the campaign.

I don’t want to introduce some kind of new complication to combat, but it seemed like it would be a cool thing to do.

So, yeah, we did it, and they failed and were knocked down, and that slowed them down too.

So the assassin did take some damage, but because of really clever use of spells, they were able to apprehend the bad guy, turn him over to the city guard, and sort of become heroes.

And that’s the kind of thing that can happen, though, when you have player characters who aren’t fighters.

Like, there’s no fighters in the group, really.

There’s a cleric, but no really super badass fighters.

So that was fun, and it was also interesting to actually roll to see if the assassin hit his target.

I think in previous incarnations of myself, I might have just ruled, oh, they hit him, and it’s a poisoned bolt, and he’s dying, and the cleric needs to do lesser restoration to save him from the poison.

Like, that’s kind of how I envisioned it playing out, but the dice don’t care how I envision playing it out.

So by actually using the dice and not fudging the rolls to force the game to conform to what I had envisioned, it turned out, I think, to be a more interesting game, actually.

So it was a lot of fun.

We’re going to play again, not tomorrow, but a week from tomorrow, and so we’ll see where it all goes.

But I hope everyone’s well.

Bye.