We played D&D and ended up feeding a goblin to wolves
I DMed my first game of D&D today. It went well! I'm jotting down, for myself as much as anyone else, what happened, what worked, what didn't, and what I've learned.
(If you're planning on playing the starter set of D&D5e, spoilers ahead)
Our adventure begins with the party on a wagon, escorting some goods to Phandalin. They are the halfing rogue Finnan, dwarven cleric Ilde and human fighter Jost.
The party is encouraged to introduce themselves to each other, having been thrown together by their employer.
Shortly, they stumble across the dead horses of Gundren, the dwarf who hired them, as well as his bodyguard Silden, and are promptly set upon by four goblins.
Slaying the goblins, they find a trail, and follow it to the goblin's hideout, Cragmaw Den.
They spotted two goblin guards hiding by the entrance, which were swiftly slain by an arrow and a javelin to the face, and then snuck their way in – past a kennel where three wolves were chained up.
Heading further into the cave, they are spotted by a goblin on a shaky bridge 20 feet up, who calls to others in the waterfall room behind him to release a great flood of water out of the mouth of the cave.
The party withstand the deluge, and proceed to hurl axes, javelins and arrows at the goblin, wounding him. He then calls out for a second load of water to be released, which knocks Jost off his feet, He is swept back to the entrance of the cave.
Meanwhile, Ilde uses her Thaumaturgy to create a lound thunderclap immediately behind the gobling, who flees to the west of the bridge in fear. Her and Finnan experiment with ropes, and manage to climb their way up on to the top of the bridge, where they are shortly joined by Jost.
They head down the path the wounded Goblin fled down, and shortly find themselves face to face with him, five other angry allies, and their leader Yeeken. Yeeken is dangling a wounded Silden over a ledge which would almost certainly fatally injure him, and he demands to talk.
He says he'll let Silden go, if the party bring him the head of the Bugbear Klarg, who runs this branch of the Cragmaw gang – and if they give him all the gold in their pockets.
The charming and persuasive Jost talks Yeeken into giving up on the gold, and agrees to kill Klarg. He even convinces Yeeken to let them rest up around the campfire to recuperate, and to assign them a Goblin guide and ally, named Rox.
While recovering, the party interrogate Rox about Klarg, and his plans. Rox happily provides the information, having been told by Yeeken to help, and the party start to get concerned: Klarg sounds quite hard to kill.
Rox helpfully reveals the existence of a back way into Klarg's den, which the party likes the sound of – but then they come up with an even better plan: leave with Rox, kill him, wait for Yeeken and his group to fall asleep, return, and sneak Sildren out that way.
SPOILERS: The plan is not very good.
Even better, the first half of the plan is discussed in front of Rox. Realising their mistake, they switch to Dwarvish to discuss further, but that just causes Rox to call Yeeken over, who accuses them of plotting to betray them.
Jost – charming, lovely Jost – manages to convince Yeeken otherwise, explaining that they were only speaking Dwarvish because it's got so many useful words for cave features.
And hour later, recuiperated, the party heads off back to the wolf kennel, which Rox says has a back entrance to Klarg's room. They let him lead the way, with the intention of getting the jump on him, but Rox, who still doesn't trust them – and is, after all, a Goblin – isn't caught unawares when Finnan does eventually try to slip a knife between his shoulderblades.
A swift hammer to the head from Ilde, however, and he's uncounscious, while the wolves in the kennel strain at their chains. Finnan picks him up, and hurles him at the dogs, hoping to calm them. They do calm down – and promptly set upon the not-quite-lifeless Rox.
The party, apparently OK with that, head back to the bridge, where they set up camp and wait for Yeeken to fall asleep.
Half an hour later, two goblins cross the bridge above them, and spot the lantern. Yeeken, unsurprisingly, hasn't fallen asleep: he wondered where they were, and sent a search party out.
The party kills one of the goblins, but fails to stop the other from running into the waterfall room and alerting two more goblins. The party follow, and kill all three goblins, but the third is only taken out with an arrow shot as he runs into Klarg's chamber.
Worse, Finnan is mortally wounded. Ilde cures his wounds, and the party brace for an attack from Klarg… which never comes.
(The Bugbear is, in fact, hunkering down and hoping to ambush them as they enter. They never do enter, and so his ambush fails)
They debate killing Klarg, but realise that they nearly lost Finnan just to a battle with some Goblins, and doubt they could handle a Bugbear. And realising their foolish plan for Yeeken to fall asleep will never work, they come up with a new one: Finnan will sneak in past the goblins, free Sildan, and they'll both sneak out.
Well, the first part works: the halfling rogue easily hides in the shadows as he passes the goblin group, and he slits the bonds tying the human warrior down.
The second part… not so much. A near-naked, half-dead human is not as stealthy, and is quickly spotted by one of the five goblins around the campfire.
The resulting battle is brutal. By the end of it, Sildan, Finnan and Jost are close to death: Ilde has no choice but to stablise them, then set up camp and rest the long hours it will take them to recover.
At least they aren't ambushed: according to Rox's information, there are now just two goblins, and Klarg, left in the whole den. The bugbear, it seems, has decided to wait them out.
The following morning, the group, recovered, ask Sildar what happened, and find that the whole thing was arranged by one "Black Spider" – who still has Gundren!
What worked and what didn't:
For a group of first-time roleplayers, we were always going to be a bit nervous about actually, you know, role-playing. All of us have great experience of games like Baldur's Gate, but clicking on menu options is very different from actually having a real conversation.
One way to break out of that was to ensure the conversations were real. While most of the players tried to start off in a third-person voice ("I want to ask Rox how many goblins there are"), it didn't take long to force them out of that. If the DM answers that questino in a screechy, weird voice, then the next one will be asked directly ("Will you help us fight Klarg?")
So my group was very happy to work with me when I was in character. Rox, Yeeken and Sildar all had some long and involved conversations with the players. But it never felt like I was speaking to the characters: It was still a conversation between Rox and Caroline, or Yeeken and David.
Similarly, the players interacted with each other mostly in the mode of… well, players trying to solve a collaborative puzzle. Which was great fun, but also something I want to push them out of a bit next time.
(And yes, that means that when they fed Rox to a pack of wolves while he was still alive, they weren't really doing it because they were role-playing. That was just something they wanted to do. Monsters.)
I'd been told before I started to never expect the plan to survive contact with the players, and that was right. From the very first event, there were reactions I hadn't forseen: after the four goblins were killed, Finnan very sensibly worried about leaving the wagon unattended to go off and rescue Gundren. The whole first adventure was nearly bypassed entirely!
Similarly, Rox's existence was created by an interesting negotiation between Jost and Yeeken. His whole character had to be ad-libbed on the spot, and not knowing D&D lore too well, I'm still not sure I really made him very gobliny.
But one place where there wasn't much lateral thinking was the combat. I'd been expecting a huge amount of invention, with players making the most of the infinite possiblities to ask to do things never described in any rulebook.
Instead, in every fight but one, players and goblins stood still exchanging blows until one was dead, or firing arrows until one was dead. It was only the thaumatalurgical thunderclap that really surprised me in terms of how a fight could progess.
I think part of that is the prescriptiveness of the rules. Where general adventuring is incredibly loose – essentially describing every challenge in some variation of "pick ability, pick difficulty, role D20, pass or fail" – combat is rigid: turn based, with strict actions and surprisingly high barriers to cross to actually damage someone. (A goblin with an AC of 15 mean that more attacks were missing than hitting, since all the characters had modifiers to attack of +4)
As a result, I think the players felt, each time it was their turn to act, that it was a waste of an action to do anything but try and kill the enemy in the most direct way possible.
That was only made worse by the fact that in the very first fight, Ilde asked if she could use her hammer to whirl round and hit two enemies at once, one behind her and one in front. It's the sort of inventiveness I wanted to reward as a DM, but the rules seemed fairly clear that that's two attacks, not one. I don't know what I could have done better, there.
It's often difficult to give players the right amount of information. If they enter a room, I don't want to say "there is a secret passage at the back"; but too many times if I didn't, the players would take my description of the room as though that was all there was to say about the place, and not look further.
But then… if I did manage to encourage them to interrogate me, how much time would be wasted in normal hallways with no secret passages? It's a balance I haven't yet mastered.
Similarly, roleplaying an NPC convincingly while also trying to steer the conversation towards the one thing the PCs need to know: tricky!
A lot of that was made harder by the fact that passive perception works fine against things like traps – which have a fixed difficulty – but not so fine against things like hidden goblins. I got a couple of odd looks when I told the players "you look ahead, and you see", rolls dice "nothing out of the ordinary".
The players will arrive in the town of Phandelin, meet a lot of villagers, and confront brigands. I'm hoping to do a lot of silly voices, and maybe get some in return!
