Hoard of the Dragon Queen: Prep Work

After a two year hiatus of not playing D&D, I'm super excited that this kind of fell in my lap!  A coworker mentioned she wanted to play D&D, then more people hitched onto that star, and it kind of snowballed into effect.  I've never run a home campaign (I've run stuff at conventions and gamedays for 3.5 and 4e) but since 5e is pretty free form and not as rules heavy as 4e, I volunteered to run it. However, I wasn't 100% up on the rules for 5e, so we agreed to play the published adventure Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

When you read HoTDQ, one thing becomes woefully apparent: This is not a plug and play game. You are going to have to do a lot of prep work.  The information is scattered around the book and it’s your job to make a story of it. Describing it to a friend, it’s more like doing an Ikea hack. Why buy a bedside table when you can make one out of a stool? (Of course, HoTDQ is more like buying a bedside table and then still having to butcher a stool to make it work.)

One thing I really did like was the bonds. Hoard of the Dragon Queen comes with a list of backgrounds to tie people to the adventure plot-lines. Some are good, some are decent, and some are pretty “meh”.  I cherry picked the best, combined and/or fleshed out some of the weaker ones, and created a few original ones to hand out to the players as well.   I've also gone out on a limb and attached a small power to the starting bond such as a bonus skill or a minor class feature.  This allows me to expand and provide future “boons” to the PC’s for completing goals related to their background and bond. A bit risky as it could overpower the PC's, but I feel that as long as the boons are used as an alternative to treasure, it likely will not overpower them and may foster better role play.

As a group, we decided to go with the Hero Points rule as well as the Plot Points rule.  I’m a fan of hero points as they allow someone to feel more badass at the times where it really counts. They *are* heroes after all!  I worry a bit about their game breaking potential, so we are only doing 5 points per level rather than 5 + level points.  Plot Points are something that I hope I can work with more.  I've been playing a lot of narrative games and while I like to think I can welcome a more “Fiasco” style to the game, we’ll see how it blends with D&D.

I wanted to dive right in to episode one at our first session, however, a brief perusal of blogs and forums really sheds light on the fact that HoTDQ is a lethal adventure.  My conundrum:  A lot of the players in the group were either brand new or coming back to the game after a hiatus. The possibility that they would not have the technical nous to easily navigate a first adventure with a high risk of total party kill was very real and besides, TPK’s are no way to introduce people to a game (I’m not one to fudge dice rolls either). My conclusion was that bringing them up to second level would greatly increase their survivability.  Dovetailing this is that HoTDQ kind of just drops a bunch of people in a caravan for “some reason” and then into a situation that expects everyone to rush towards overwhelming danger with no concern for cohesion. It's not something a character would naturally do and it requires the players to identify themselves as "heroes" and "a team" in a very meta-gamey sort of way.  I felt a better way to do it was to give them a more natural connection and have some minor success to build confidence.

Do they all talk at once? Take turns?
They look like they don't know either...

So I had to dust off some old books and creak into motion to create an intro adventure.  My goal was to create a situation that facilitated connection.  I decided that all of the characters had been with the caravan for less than a week, they were traveling for more specific reasons, and that the evening that we set the game in was the first time they actually sat down together to socialize.  They would start around a campfire and the first encounter would come to them.  While I did not find a module that fit what I wanted, I was influenced by “The Wizard’s Amulet” as I liked the feel of an ambush uniting a bunch of strangers into a team.  I made the caravan leader into an NPC who had a vested interest in the kidnappings that happened in a small town on the way to Greenest and threw in some foreshadowing of dragons and Tiamat as well.  I feel like it went over pretty well. I’ll put the session into it’s own "Episode 0" post.

Baby Circus

The kid likes to hang on stuff and swing. Bike staples, stair rails, pretty much any low hanging bar that she can get a grip on. As an Involved Parent™, the first thing I think of any time she does anything more than once is “How can I channel that!”

A rare moment.

So the obvious thing to do is to find a way to help nurture this, like using a trapeze. In my imagination, she would hang from the trapeze bars and swing to her heart’s content, smiling at me while I bathe in the radiant glow of being a Good Parent™!  So, we signed her up for Baby Circus a few months ago.

Let me tell you, she loves everything about it! She loves the songs they sing and games they play while exercising. She loves the stunts. She loves the little obstacle course they have. She loves the trampoline. She loves the teachers. She loves everything.

Everything, that is, except the trapeze.

About halfway into the class, they let the trapeze down. They are set up to be anywhere from 3-4 feet off of the heavily padded ground. All of the other kids and parents race off to grab one of them and start practicing. Cleo will sometimes very casually mosey over to one, grab it, hang from it for a second, and then, despite dad’s manic encouragement, she’ll  wander off. Sometimes she won’t even go for a trapeze bar and will somehow skip right to wandering off. At first the irony of the whole situation was amusing.

This dad!  This is the
thing I don't like!

Now, however, it’s become a chess match.

You see, I've learned that if I try to pressure the kid into trying out the trapeze, this is a guaranteed way to get her to have absolutely no interest, and picking her up and putting her on a trapeze results in a kicking and screaming, yelling “No!” kind of situation.  What I have noticed is that if I pretend I’m not interested, she sometimes, SOMETIMES  will go back to the trapeze independently.  This is, in my book, a Huge Win™.

She’s  a pretty perceptive kid so I can’t half ass this. I have to let go of my resentment and really sell my interest. Oh, what’s that?  The ladder that the janitor uses and accidentally left out? Oh sure! Nothing I’d like more than to pay $20 an hour to have you sit under a ladder like you could do at home rather than using the unique item that only this place has that, have I mentioned, allows them to charge us $20 an hour? Yup. Fuck those things. It’s ladder time!

Despite her disdain for the trapeze, she does love the damn class. It’s undeniable. Throughout the rest of the week I’ll hear her playing by herself in her room, happily singing the songs from it. Maybe she’ll grab that bar one day, maybe she won’t. As long as she smiles and sings, I suppose it’s worth it. Besides, what with Cirque du Soleil, who’s to say what’s a circus worthy prop anyway?