I run Dungeons and Dragons 5e for Baldman Games on their Virtual D&D Weekends. That’s a monthly convention where super fans of D&D can play original campaigns with some of the best DMs out there. I’m proud to have been with the group since the 4e days.
This weekend we had the first Virtual D&D Weekend of the year, and I was tasked with running the tier 4 adventure for the Dreams of the Red Wizards: Obscure Devotions campaign, Across the Glacier of the White Worm.
The party was super optimized. They had some of the most powerful tools in their arsenal. They managed to circumvent two-thirds of act one, jumping to act two, which they went through quickly, avoiding the combat. They conquered the act three combat in two rounds.
The game had only been going for two hours and forty-five minutes. The issue before me was: how do I keep the game doing without depriving them of the benefits of smart thinking and using powerful tools to earn a clear-cut victory? Should they be allowed to finish early and march proudly as gods, or should I pull tricks to keep the adventure going, as if they didn’t manage to beat the module in one fell swoop?
This is a relatively new module, so I won’t spoil plot points. I will explore it in generic descriptions with the intent of showing how my party annihilated the adventure.
The adventure begins with a commoner rescued in a previous adventure telling she’s having visions of a scary place far away, where bad people are doing bad things. She will not tell where it is but insists the group lets her go with them. The quest givers of the campaign reluctantly agree and warn the PCs not to let the NPC get involved in combat. She’s squishy.
So, act one begins with the group going through a portal onto the glacier as mentioned in the title. There are twelve random encounters, covering all three pillars of game play, to be spaced out over the course of two hours as the party travels toward the dungeon.
I went down the list, starting with a skill test, followed by a roleplaying encounter. Then they got to a puzzle that unlocked the ability for them to cast three spells on their spell lists they don’t possess. First they read the NPC’s mind to share her vision of where they’re headed. Then they scried on the area and learned of the opposition awaiting them there. This increased their chances of successfully teleporting past all the other encounters and skipping to the start of act two.
I did not foresee things being manipulated this way. Seven of the random encounters were skipped.
So Act two starts outside the dungeon, where a named red herring baddie makes a scene and threatens to kill the group. He summons monstrous allies to join the combat. My group used meteor swarm to wipe out all the monsters before the vocal leader of the baddies got a chance to make a move (a spell cast by the party had prevented him from taking his turn in the first round of initiative).
The group entered the dungeon, figured out the puzzle that allowed them to go further into the dungeon… but everyone failed their roll to find the secret door that would take them to the act’s combat. In hindsight I should have ignored the module’s DC 20 to find the secret door and let the 17 be good enough. Or perhaps I should have taken Sly Flourish’s Mike Shea’s advice and moved the combat to where the PCs went to, not forcing the combat to take place where it’s described to happen.
The group passed through the rest of the dungeon. There’s a rune that lets the biggest of the bads in act three treat the PC as an ally. It takes a DC 27 to find it. A PC rolled 21… but it was a natural twenty, so I couldn’t deny the player his reward.
The group arrived to find a group of campaign baddies trying to accomplish a task while defending themselves from the guardians of the dungeon. The module says all monsters starts at half hit points to reflect that combat’s been going on a for a while before the group showed up.
The PCs had another potential advantage. On the upper level there was a shield guardian and golem that could be activated as allied NPCs.
The baddest of the baddies was so strong he wiped out three quarters of the campaign baddies before the PCs could engage. The dungeon was built by giants, so there was almost 300 feet to cover before the party reached where the campaign baddies were performing their important task.
Only one of the defenders fighting the baddest of the baddies remained. One of the task masters of the campaign baddies fell due to the baddest’s ranged attack, which affected everyone in 150 feet of it. The remaining fighter rushed to help the task master but couldn’t outrun the baddest of the baddies. Luckily, he dimension door’d his way to help his friend and escape the giant baddest of the baddies.
What happened next? Meteor swarm against two guys with less than 70hp.
The guy with the rune had the baddest of the baddies stand down and not attack his allies.
They collected treasure, and the adventure ended as a portal took everyone back to their safe house. They didn’t even need to backtrack through the locations of act one that they missed… so it made no sense to resurrect that material.
The game ended early. I was not happy that I let that happen. The players were very content of their victory, though they admitted they had hoped I’d throw more monsters to make for a two-and-a-half-hour finale battle, not the fifteen minute massacre.
I consulted some of the Baldman Games DMs and DMs on the Sly Flourish Discord channel. The best idea I heard was to have the campaign baddies mutate into a second form with a fresh set of hit points, once they had been defeated. Let’s see them handle a pair of vampires!
Another DM recommended having a second and even third wave of baddies show up to keep the fight going.
Another DM told me I knew there were powerful wizards amongst the PCs and had seen their ability to cast meteor swarm, so I should have placed some archmages in the final fight to counterspell the crap out of that meteor swarm.
These all feel cheap, as if I was ignoring the resources the party had used… plus good planning and successful rolls they’d made to get all the advantages that caused them to crit the module.
I had an idea almost twenty hours too late of having xenomorphs be on the meteor that hit the battlefield. Suddenly there would be eight Queen Aliens to fight! I could use a generic stat block from Forge of Foes to handle the xenomorphs.
It seemed like a delicate balance of letting the players have their victory from good playing and spending of resources with acknowledging they paid for a four hour game, so I should be able to keep the game going on for four hours, despite the wonderful moves the PCs made.
What do you guys think? Should I have let them end early with a complete and total victory… or should I have pulled some tricks to neutralize their abilities or even keep the final battle going after it’s written conclusion?
