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.
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