DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 44B: Time to Fly

 Tor grabbed up Agnarr’s body and turned, churning his way down the hall.

The twisting vines continued to confound their orderly retreat, but several of them had broken free now and were running back across the lounge. Tee, who was still trying to assist Tor’s retreat, tossed Nasira her magical lockpicking ring: “Get out! Quick as you can!”

Nasira reached the door to the long hall of whores and swung it open. Looking both ways she sighed with relief and called back over her shoulder, “All clea—“

The door at the far end of the hall opened. Two of the armored serpents and six unarmored ones poured through. “There they are!”

As I mentioned in Prepping Porphyry House, this adventure has been enhanced with an adversary roster. And it’s a pretty great example of the kind of dynamic play that having an adversary roster can unlock for you.

In the early part of the session, you can see that the players have already internalized the consequences of dynamic dungeons: When they stealthily take out some of the guards, they know they can’t just leave the bodies lying around, because it’s very possible that they’ll be discovered by other cultists moving throughout the building.

But a little while later you can see the evidence of me actively using the adversary roster:

Tee, on the other hand, did head into the room and quickly inspected the well (finding nothing unusual about it – it was a perfectly ordinary well). She was about to move on to the equipment in the corner—

When a patrol of two fully-armored serpent-men came around the corner in the hall.

One of them immediately turned and ran back around the corner. Tor, Agnarr, and Elestra quickly converged on the remaining serpent and hacked it to pieces. But by the time they were finished with it, two more had appeared at the end of the next hall in a four-way intersection between several doors.

The PCs get spotted, some of the bad guys run to raise the alarm, and things begin to spiral out of control.

Last week, Dave Oldcorn asked, “Does this not happen an awful lot of the time with adversary rosters?” And the answer to the question is complicated.

The first thing to recognize is that the PCs made a mistake and then got unlucky with their dice rolls: The mistake was leaving most of the party standing in the hallway (a high-traffic area) while Tee was searching a room (a time-consuming activity). They might have still had the opportunity to avoid catastrophe, but they rolled poorly and didn’t hear the guard patrol coming. And then, on top of that, they lost initiative, so the guards both had the opportunity to see them and run reinforcements before they could do anything.

Mistakes and bad luck will happen, of course, so it’s not necessarily unusual for this sort of thing to happen. But you’ll also see plenty of other examples in this campaign journal where the PCs didn’t make mistakes and/or the dice were in the favor, and so kept control of the situation. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine how just one thing going a little differently might have caused the entire Porphyry House scenario to play out in a completely different way.

Which leads us to a second important principle when it comes to adversary rosters: They shift some of the responsibility for encounter design from the GM to the players. By the point where the PCs were facing off against multiple squads of guards, an angry spellcaster, and a giant stone golem, they were clearly in over their heads. But that wasn’t an encounter that I created for them. It was, in most ways, an encounter they’d created for themselves.

This creates a really interesting dynamic where (a) the players feel ownership of their fate and (b) they can engage in truly strategic play, often controlling the difficulty and pace of the encounters they’re facing. (What happened in this session was, ultimately, a series of strategic failures followed by some strategic genius that ultimately allowed them to escape a rapidly developing catastrophe.)

In order for this to work, though, the GM needs to play fair. An important part of that is respecting the fog of war: The other reason “every monster in the place descending upon you instantly” isn’t the default outcome is because it isn’t the automatic outcome of the PCs getting spotted by a bad guy. That bad guy has to decide to run for help; the PCs have to fail to stop them from doing that; and then it takes time for them to fetch that help. And even once they have gotten help… where are the PCs? Did they just stay where they were? If not, how will the bad guys figure that out? What mistakes might be made within the fog of war? How can the PCs take advantage of that?

Above all, an adversary roster is a tool that lets you, as the GM, easily roleplay all the denizens of the dungeon. Truly embrace that opportunity by putting yourself fully in their shoes — thinking about what they know; what they would prioritize; and the decision they would, therefore, make — and playing to find out.

The final thing that pulls all of this together is the Dungeon as Theater of Operations: If the encounter in this session were glued to a single room — or if the players felt like they weren’t “allowed” to leave the borders of the battlemap — this would not have been compelling session. In fact, it would have almost certainly ended with all of the PCs dead. It’s only because the PCs were able to strategically duel with the actively played opposition of Porphyry House in an engagement ranging across fully half of the building’s first floor that (a) the PCs survived and (b) the session was a thrilling escapade from beginning to end.

Campaign Journal: Session 45A – Running the Campaign: Recognition as Reward
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Guaranteeing Failure Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Thus Endeth the Campaign Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Exposition Dump Handouts