2020-03-23 08:37
Played a few hours of D&D yesterday afternoon, with me running more of A Hole in the Oak. We got through a bunch more of the dungeon. As someone noted a lot of it is either symbolic somehow or just plain weird. Having read much of the module, I think it's just weird, at times a little too much so when it is all jumbled together. As a whole there are a lot of positives to the usability of the book. The map is clear, and marks off both locked doors and what monsters are in which rooms. The room descriptions have nice bolding of descriptive elements with non-bolded further details and then separate headings for main elements that can be interacted with (traps, monsters, treasure, etc.) That all works quite well even if you haven't prepped ahead, but there are a few places where some more overview would have been helpful. There are a bunch of black skeletons in the dungeon, and it is only in the description of part of one of the rooms that explains that they are all inert unless a specific action is taken. The other rooms with the black skeletons do reference that room, but the actual part about the inertness is only explained via the "doing this causes them to come to life" part, which I totally missed the first two times looking at that page. Also there a bunch of monster factions, and while the introduction provides a quick summary of them and how they feel (or not) about each other, I feel like the specific encounters with each are often lacking in any good direction on how to handle the factions. Just a little extra on wants and tactics and such would have helped a ton in figuring out how to play them.
I definitely was getting tired by 3 hours into being online (though it was probably about a half hour until we started playing), so I think for the future not going that long would be good. By the end I kind of just wante to hand wave away one of the combats, even though it came at a point where half the party was drugged/asleep, which put the other half in more danger.
We tried Trivial Pursuit via Zoom last night, which works out pretty well. I just read all the clues from our set, though the fact that our game is from 2003 makes some of the questions extra hard where they go into contemporary (to the game) culture.
Started a second story today, while I let the first one sit. Trying to remember the maxim someone said, to always make sure to stop writing when you still have something to say, so that the next day you know where to start and don't waste time sitting in front of a blank page.