I Love Ptolus… especially since I did away with the whole Prison plane and Chaos cults thing.

It’s been called the Lexus of RPG accessories and it lives up to its luxurious comparison.

I guess all that adrenalin has to go somewhere, eh?

Anyhow. I’m glad no one was hurt. That’s the main thing. Now, onto the game!

It’s good to see Ptolus getting some love. Ptolus is, seriously, the bestest campaign setting ever (excepting possibly the Traveller universe). I plan to return to Ptolus with my players soon. First though I need to get them immersed back into D&D. One step at a time, eh?

I told you hit point pools rocks! Heh. Glad they worked for you too. They certainly give you more room to think about the game, rather than think about the rules. I kinda like the odd times when a weak blow downs a foe who should otherwise survive - maybe he was weak from a previous fight, is faking death or the player got a lucky sucker punch. Life’s like that. If it doesn’t work for you, skip over his death and let the next sucker bite the dust instead. Dramatic appropriateness is more important than the dice, every time.

Otyughs rock too. It’s impossible to run them without thinking about That Scene From Star Wars. My players are convinced I’m going to set the walls constricting when they’re around one. Maybe I will, one day

I agree about the Grappling rules, and I’ve not found a good solution to them either. If 4E does nothing else, I hope they fix those.

Oh, the and the MIC is great too. I’m fond of the “Mother of All Treasure Tables” from Necromancer Games too. With those two books I can create treasure for 1,001 adventures, and beyond - and they’ll all be unique and memorable. Lovely stuff.

I so totaly see your groups as a DM of the Ring-like sketch where the DM’s droning in the background and we see word bubbles of RPing over the DM-text!

Thanks for the kind words Noah. I will give the players more RP down time soon enough…

The session sounds like it went fairly well, though, all told.

Oh - I ran the ‘HP pool’ thing by my GM on the way down to our Lacuna game…

“Oh, yeah, I totally do that for Ravenloft all the time. It works like a charm.”

Heh!

Yan, I can sympathize with your feelings; sometimes jumping in, in media res, is good. The beginning of a new campaign, sure - it really adds urgency to the introduction, and the players are involved from moment one. A session later, though, and we’re inclined to be chatty at the beginning of the session.

(Man, I wish we could get started at 7:00 pm sometimes…we’ve been really chatty of late.)

My problem (and that of a few others in my game) is that if we get into a really good RP groove, we often don’t want the DM to intrude! Not that we blow him off, or anything, but…we’ll be down there, arguing or doing or whatever, and there’ll come this voice; “Did you all hear what I just described?”

We’re honest enough to say, “Uhhh…nope! Our PCs were chattering away, so, we missed it!” and move on from there.

Well noted. Give player some ‘me’ time at the beginning of an adventure…

You gave us a setup of where we where and right then, the hook came, euh… i mean the guy arrived with the request for help.

It came too quick and i was still in the blog/crash discussion feel and had not move into character. I fought the urge to say “Here comes the track guys”.

I was hoping for some role playing at the start of the session to at least give a little bit of story between our character. So far we’ve been in a lot of fight and we did not have the time to create any in-group chemistry.

My perception the others might agree or not.