Four out of the five of these guys had already played DnD before, they knew what was going on. The newb in our group listened to them about practically everything in the game. “Charge the Troll!” and he’d do it. “Flank the Giant!” and he’d do it. “Power Attack the Sorcerer!” and he’d do it. We had a system where we rotated who made the decisions. It was the newb’s turn and this time he said he would ‘ask’ for advice. Nobody had problems with that, you need ideas, just ask. That never happened.

So the guys are dungeon crawling a crypt full of Nerull’s cultists, just par for the course and we get to a point were the hall branches in three directions. He decides it would be a brilliant idea if the part split three ways. He (a fighter) takes the right side, the bard and the cleric take the left and the sorcerer and the rogue take the middle. I ask him “Are you sure?”, he says “Of course.”, I ask “Really?”, and he insists. Nobody else in the group felt this was a good idea, but they kept quiet. The fighter falls into a pit of spikes and loses a third of his health before he pulls himself out. Only to die two rounds later when he fails a fortitude check from the massive amount of damage he recieves from a cultist thrall. I didnt even try to kill him… oh well.

The bard and the cleric now check for traps every two seconds. Each time (three times) they attempt to disable a trap, the bard rolls to low and gets hit with half damage. No prob, cleric heals him. While healing him, the cleric (fails his listen check) is death attacked by a cultist assasin. The Cleric makes his save and only takes half damage, but he has no more heal spells. The bard (finally!)rolls a crit and after taking a huge amount of damage from the attack, the assasin flees. The bard and cleric give chase and set off a pendulum trap, kills the cleric but the bard evades it. I tell my friend playing the bard to retreat, back to safety. (I had meant to kill the cleric in my original plans)

Meanwhile the rogue and the sorcerer fight their way through four cultist thralls and a dozen skellies, with virtually no loss in HP. They encounter the wizard who was supposed to be the main boss battle. Rather then fleeing back, they take him on! The sorcerer magic missiles the crap out of the wizard using his best spells on him, while the rogue (who had in a previous adventure been given an item that turns him invisible) sneak attacks the wiz like no other. Due to some great rolls, they kill the cultist wizard in four rounds.

Then comes the test, I have given them three levers to pull. A shiny one opens a treasure room, a red one summons a demon and the black one collapses the dungeon. Earlier in the session I had practically told them which one to pull. They had encountered a diviner who told the party a bunch of useful hints which they had completely and totally followed up to this point. The hint concerning this portion of the dungeon was something like “The bright is true…”

Obviously the shiny lever was the right one… right? Right… my friend who played the fighter thought that this was far to obvious, who told the rogue to pull down the black lever. I thought, “Okay I can still change this to my favor”. I told both the rogue and the sorcerer to take intelligence tests, they both failed. I then asked the sorcerer to try to convince the rogue to pull a different lever… he failed his test. HOW DO YOU FAIL A TEST WHEN IT WAS DIFFICULTY TWENTY AND YOU HAVE EIGHT RANKS IN DIPLOMACY PLUS A CHARISMA BONUS OF +5???? Damn… the rogue pulls the black lever. Game over.

But we had fun and everybody learned how to take a hint… at least I think so.

2000s – I’d classify them as a flip in power to the customer, as new technologies in information access, distribution, and manufacturing allowed customers to get whatever they wanted, however they wanted, wherever they wanted it. So, maybe the “customer era”?

That’s a cool sci-fi plot. Well done.

At least with premature campaigns there’s something to note and miss. Games that fizzle leave no memory of time spent.