Despite most of the group either being uncommunicative or more vocally unable to attend the session, I ran another game of The Demigods of Daelen. I’ve told my players from the beginning that one of my goals for this game was to run it in such a way that we’d be able to play with only two players available. That was one of the reasons I bent D&D 5e in the ways I did: so there would be a plethora of class abilities present that would, hopefully, allow two players to fill the gaps made when four or more weren’t available. After all, 5e is build around not just a strict action economy and bounded accuracy, but the availability of a wind-range of class features to meet the general needs of a campaign. If every player character has two classes, that makes it much more likely that the party will have the skills and abilities they need available even if only two players are present. Throw in tweaking the action economy to fit with only two player characters and it solves every probably not already handled by my changes to the “bounded accuracy.” Which means that two of my players handled the climb up the strange “sphere” just fine, were able to make their way through it’s interior with all parties still alive (some only barely), and even got most of the way through dealing with the cult as they tried to shut the sphere down. The third player showed up right around then, which threw a couple wrinkles into the session since there was a lot of subtext and context that the she was missing, but I think some small alterations to how we play is will help prevent the frustrations of that moment from repeating in the future.

We picked right back up where we left off last time: attempting to climb the strange, incredibly hand-and-foot-hold-covered “sphere.” Last time, we had a few characters with good strength scores and even better Athletics skills, so it seemed a lot less daunting. This time around, we had one halfway decent character and one who lived or died by the number on the die. I mean, it would have been difficult for him to die, but it was certainly possible if he messed up enough right near the end. Thankfully, after some close calls, retries, and plenty of dice rolling, the party managed to climb the juddering surface of the sphere to the door they’d picked, get said door open, and then move into the interior. This was also a small obstacle because the gravity and visuals of the sphere didn’t match up to what they’d seen from the outside. Yes, there was still a glass ceiling overhead, but it looked out on a late-evening sky with stars just barely visible overhead, even though the part the players were climbing towards should have left them standing on the ceiling. The gravity of the space they entered, along with its dimensions, abruptly shifted when they passed inside it.

This larger and visually occluded space took quite some work to navigate. Rather than supply my players with a map and force them to explore, I ran navigating this maze as a skill challenge. They needed to make five skill checks to reach the end and succeed on at least three of them to arrive at their destination (if they’d failed too many, it would have kept going until they got three successes), but there were tiers of success that put more or less danger in their path as they explored. It was a pretty high DC to succeed with no danger, but one of the players got that on their first roll, so I figured they’d probably get enough successes to make it through on their first attempt. I think they only failed one time, in the end, and only rolled “great danger” once, but even then my random dangers listed turned up empty that time, so they got through what could have been a very dangerous stretch of maze with relatively little harm done to them. Their NPC companions, members of the cult sent along to watch the Heroes work to make sure they weren’t going to damage or stop the sphere, were not so lucky and were in rough shape by the time they arrived at the door to the center chamber of this contraption.

When they got inside the chamber, things started going south pretty quickly. One of the player characters tried to blast the gears of the massive, super-complex machine they found, hoping to dislodge or break the sets of gears running off the strange “toothed orb” at the center. This did not work, and the cultists would have tried to tackle the player character except he managed to play it off as some kind of “just proving it’s super strong!” kind of thing. Unfortunately, since they all tried to stop him at the same time and there were no safety railings around the gear-pit, one of the cultists fell into it and his essence was slurped up by the machine since, according to what the gear-head player character could tell, the sphere at the center was run off the divine energy collected by her father, the god of engineering, Afflo, as the exterior of the contraption destroyed things as a sacrifice TO Afflo. Even this unfortunate cultist, crushed in the gears as I rolled almost max damage when he fell into them, became a sacrifice to fuel this thing. After that, as the party tried to allay the fears of the cultists while getting close enough to the orb to inspect it, another of the cultists fell-victim to the gears and the remaining ones began to get more and more suspicious of the Heroes. They were, of course, entirely willing to die as a sacrifice to this giant machine, to aid it’s divine mandate, but they weren’t so stupid as to fall for every attempt to deny what their eyes had scene in favor of some stretched, all-but-implausible twist on the truth. Which meant that, as the remaining two accidentally dislodged the orb and the party began spinning yarns about why that was fine, they weren’t willing to trust the orb to the player characters.

At that point, our third player arrived and we wrote in a funny little entry for said character, to bring them into the scene without sweating where they’d been or what they’d been doing, and the tone of the session shifted dramatically. Prior to that point, the characters present weren’t inclined towards violence. One of them even pointedly doesn’t carry weapons. While they could both participate in combat, it was not a solution that either of them would head toward first, second, or even third. For one, it was a regretable last option when all else had failed and an option chosen in frustration when all reasonable routes had been exhuasted for the other. As such, I’d taken my sparse prep for the encounter chain and written out the potential combat encounters in favor of more skill checks and a tense social confrontation between the players and the NPCs ostensibly there to provide oversight where violence would be easy to ennact and relatively safe for the player characters to choose but where conversation could also be a viable alternative if the NPCs were approached the right way. The third player, though, who showed up in the middle of that encounter, was the violent one for whom violence is the first recourse (they are the child of the god of war and violence, so it’s not surprising). She arrived in the middle of the final parts of the social conflict, where the party was preparing to act after failing to convince the NPCs that they shouldn’t put so much faith in this strange contraption, and though the other players gave her player a quick overview of what had been going on in the session, it left her unprepared for stepping into the conflict outside of her comfort zone: violence and threats thereof.

While it ultimately worked out pretty well (the party was more or less ready to turn to violence at that point), the steps leading up to that decision weren’t great. As we got back into playing, the player asked if she could roll an intimidation check to force the NPCs to hand over the orb. I told her she’d have disadvantage on the roll because of how things stood with the NPCs, but she still wound up rolling really well. Since we were in the teritory of a result that might work, I then prompted her to tell me what, exactly, her character said to scare the cultists and had to tell her that her (very high) roll hadn’t worked because she’d said the one thing that wouldn’t work no matter what she rolled (death threats don’t work against zealots ready to die for their cause). It was a frustrating moment for the player as she tried to find a way forward through the threats of death and violence and I had to rebuff her because, importantly, the NPCs had been telegraphing that they weren’t afraid to die the entire time. All of which had occurred while she wasn’t present and hadn’t been mentioned in the summary given by the other players. We eventually resolved the situation (by the player characters enacting violence and snatching the orb away), but it was still a rough patch that we talked about after the session.

If I’d been more on the ball, I’d had skipped the rolling entirely. What I should have done is prompt the player to characterize her approach before rolling any dice, Sure, the other player characters probably knew better than to threaten the lives of the cultists thanks to how the cultists had behaved during the session, but that’s a bit beside the point. It’s still a much better roleplaying and table management practice to get a description of the action being performed BEFORE any dice are rolled. That way, instead of having a list of contingencies in my head to alter a final DC after the player has rolled, everything can be settled before dice are rolled and I can skip unnecessary rolls where even a natural twenty might not result in success. I mean, I’ve always been of the opinion that super high rolls and critical successes should give my players some amount of narrative control or potentially create opportunities where there were none before, but I draw the line short of altering established reality. I know this kind of denial of high successes is often thrown around as a weakness inherent to social skills (since deciding who will be convinced by what is often fairly arbitrary), but I’m also not going to let a high athletics check allow a person to scale a sheer surface that specifically has nothing on its surface for someone to climb. I might let it represent a jump/run-up-the-wall-a-bit type maneuver, but if my players are trying to climb a sheer, unmarred fifty-foot cliff, they’re not going to do it by climbing the wall itself.

All of which is to say that I need to refocus myself on good GM hygeine when it comes to the conversation around rolls and when the rolls happen. I’ve let myself slack a bit on that front since my players’ characters in this campaign are super over-powered, but I can’t let it go too much. There’s a reason I’m so precise and exacting in getting my players to describe their actions most of the time and it’s because I’m willing to assign advantage and disadvantage or alter the result required for success based on my players’ methodology. It’s a thing all my players know about me, but it is still very easy to fall into the “I want to roll [skill name] to solve this problem” trap when you’ve been playing for a while.

Thankfully, the player was understanding and we got to end the session on an interesting note as the party left the slowly-stopping contraption behind them as they headed home, now with the orb in-hand and the unsolved mystery of how this device got started in the first place. After all, it couldn’t have been Afflo who did it, even if it was his device. He wouldn’t have been the deity getting the sacrificial energy from the contraption if he was, since gods can’t produce that energy for themselves, but the only clue that players found about what might have been going on was fingerprint smudges on all the otherwise clean surfaces within the contrapion from someone who had clearly been spending a lot of time within it sometime recently. There’s no saying what they might find eventually, if they try to get to the bottom of this, but I’ll be interested to see what, if anything, they do about it. After all, two of them don’t much care about the mortals in the world around them and, so far, this a problem that is only impacting said mortals. Who’s to say that the demigods will actually engage with something largely beneath their notice?