Nighthaven Session 5

Players struggle with trepidation over their next move

Session five was an interesting experience for me as a GM where I finally figured out a few things about the dynamics of my table. The session began an hour earlier than usual since Scar finally made his return to the table and wanted to do some solo role-playing to fill in the gaps between his last appearance and this week’s session. This involved Scar going to a fight pit to try his luck. We muddled through it, but I found myself unsatisfied with the way things turned out. Castles & Crusades doesn’t have great mechanics for hand-to-hand combat, but that will be a subject for another time. Scar made it all the way to the finals, but lost to his opponent.

The rest of the party arrived by 6 PM and after a (if I may so so myself) delicious meal of roast beef, green beans and twice-baked potatoes, the session started…sort of. We introduced a new player, a half-elf wizard named Oliver. This introduction took longer than it should have though because I have a chatty group. I’m fortunate that I’ve found a group of people who get along famously, three players in particular, but the result is a lot of cross-talk and interminable movie and TV references. Once we worked through those and came back around to the session the players began to plan their activity. This leads to one of the problems I have discovered. We have a Discord server set up that was designed to be the place where players could plan the session with each other. I even drop occasional hooks and rumors in the server to spark conversation. The server is hardly ever used for anything other than scheduling our sessions though. Ideally, players would figure out who’s coming to each session and then plan their desired actions in the RP channel. The idea was to cut the planning time out of play time and just get straight to the action at the table. A gentle reminder of the purpose of the Discord may be in order.

During their planning, I was impressed with their ideas, but shocked by their unwillingness to execute those plans. One player came up with the idea of pitting their two current nemeses, Dietrich “The Devil” and “Mugface,” against each other. Tensions between the two have been high since Dietrich has become complacent with his status in The Headless gang and Mugface is on an upward trajectory in power and influence, so bringing their crews together in one place and using deception to bring them to blows would have been interesting. I have a soft spot for the 2004 Thomas Jane Punisher film, so I was ready to recreate Howard Saint versus Quentin Glass should the players set up the board correctly. They even had the means to set this plan in motion that very night. However, there was an air of fear at the table that even that would be too much for them. Instead they opted to follow Mugface back to his hideout and do…nothing. Just observe him. Worse still, they insisted that only two of them go.

I have a fairly large party. There are currently seven players in my group with no class overlap. I understand the desire to not want an entire party including a very unsubtle Barbarian and Fighter to attempt to blend in near a target, but there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be able to lay low nearby in case there’s trouble while the more subtle members of the party do the espionage work. The main thing for me was making sure that everyone at the table got to participate. The argument drug on until the party, with 1 hour left in the session, decided to send Oliver and Flinder alone to follow Mugface. Their mission was successful in that they discovered Mugface’s hideout, but ultimately accomplished little.

I know that some of my players do read these reports and to them I will say, both here and next time we meet, there’s no reason to be so cautious. The worst thing that can happen is your character dying and then you’ll just roll up a new character. That’s all there is to it. While I appreciate the dedication to laying plans, at some point you will need to act on them. As you gain strength, so do your enemies. The game world is alive after all, as I said in session one. Don’t miss your opportunity by overthinking it. I’m not sure what next session will bring, but it may throw you for a loop.