Session 4 Report Hole in the Oak

Previous session report can be found here. Next session report is here. First session report can be found here.

Overall

On Friday May 9^th^, I ran the fourth session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. In this session, the PCs finished buying equipment at the town, and retu This time, the PCs continued their encounter with the suspicious fauns. They had a quick chat with them, realized things were wrong, and quickly withdrew. After that regroup, with one hireling unconscious after being drugged by the fauns, they strategized. After heading back they gave the fauns drugged cookies in revenge. They ended the session by going in and finishing the job with their weapons.

What Went Well

Running combat

I felt a lot more comfortable running combat this time around. I used the reference booklet on my secondary monitor to keep the order of combat up to help. The players also seemed more comfortable in the order of operations. Overall, the encounter was actually quite easy to run, despite there being 11 combatants. Not only was it easy, it was also quite fast! I liked how dynamic the combat ended up being, since there weren’t too many rules to juggle.

Lessons Learned

Division of Experience

I remembered that retainers only receive a half share of treasure. So, when I needed to distribute 100XP to the characters, I could explain the rules stated it had to be an equal distribution. When the time came to actually calculate it, though, I floundered. I had three players and two retainers, so it shouldn’t have been too tricky. What would work is to divide the whole number by 4 (three whole shares and two halves). 100/4=25, which meant I had to divide 25/2=12 still to get the retainer XP.

I realized that this is already a little awkward (dividing twice) but would get worse if they had an odd number of retainers. I’m not going to mentally divide by 4.5. Instead, I ended up grabbing an Excel file, and working it out there. This, ideally, is something I’d like to automate using FoundryVTT. Not only would dividing the XP be easier if it’s automated, now we also have to keep track of the fact that the PCs don’t have this yet until they’ve returned to town. I’m not sure yet how to do that one other than making a note.

Printing out a tracking sheet in advance

Last time, I had used the OSE Dungeon Time Tracker to keep track of dungeon turns. I wasn’t that prepared this time, and it turns out my printer was out of toner. So, I had to improv a bit using just a sheet of paper. That worked all right, but I noticed I did miss out on having some predefined squares, which had me count them to keep track of what turn we were on. It was only a small thing, but a small thing I had to do frequently as we moved, which added up the tiny delays.