Session 2

  I started the session with a change of policy concerning rogues and surprise attacks. For some time I had not been happy with the way we had played with the way rogues can hide and attack, usually every round. This is especially true with hobbits who can hide behind other creatures... hide shoot, hide shoot etc. I had been reading a few articles here and there about it, and recently I found one that had a more reasonable explanation, which is the concept of not only being unseen, but also unknown.

The idea is that just because a rogue hides behind a rock or a corner doesn't mean the viewer doesn't know about them, and when the rogue emerges from cover they are not unseen because they are known and expected.  The gain unknown you have to distract the target or make an effort to remove yourself from their awareness. 

The argument here is not about sneak attacks, they can get that fairly easily. We are talking about having advantage every round. Anyway that is what I explained to my players, and obviously the rogue wasn't too happy, especially as I had been using the very same thing for 3 yrs myself.  My reply here was that me as a player is different from me as a GM. As a player I am after advantage. As a GM I am after balance and fairness, and a touch of reality.

Anyway we moved on, less happy. So tonight I explain that instead of shadowing the main party I have decided to loosen the story to allow me to add in extra stories that might be some distance off the main path. To that end the mission changes from shadow the dwarves to 'go to Rhosgobel and lend aid to Radigast the Brown'. So off to the High Pass they go... and they run into some fighting mountain giants, find a secluded cave, fight a troll then the floor collapses and they fall down into the Goblins world.

For this part of the story I had a pile of tiles they had to work their way along, revealing a new tile as they progressed forward. Each tile would have a number of goblins based on how many squares were on the tile (1 per 2 sqs). These goblins were fairly average orcs (AC14, 25hps), so it was just a issue of crowd control and speed at moving along the tiles. At the start of every round I rolled on a table for random events, which put pressure on the party to be effective or they would get more random events, which were mostly bad... a boss mob etc.

The first few rounds saw some lucky rolls for the orcs and they got in some criticals, plus the scholar was caught out of position initially and took a lot of damage before the rest of the party could tidy things up. This early set back felt like it put pressure on the party because it didn't look like they were going to be able to rest anytime soon.

Eventually a random roll came up that allowed one member of the party to fall down into the darkness and leave the main party. First option went to the hobbit burglar, he took it. I offered Sam an option to follow as the protector but he was in the front line at that moment and decided to stay. So the burglar went on a side mission, fought a big spider and got a magic ring for his trouble. Eventually one other character fell and joined him. The two of them managed to avoid further problems and escaped the mountains. The rest of the party is still making it way through, although they did manage to defeat a boss mob that allowed them to take a short rest.

At one point they rolled a random event that allowed them to see Gandalf and the dwarves smashing their way through the goblin caves, and this gave them all inspiration.

The session seemed to work reasonably well, with pressure on the party at the right times. One thing it did show is just how amazingly tough fighters can be in AiME once they have a few virtues under them. One of the party has a bane vs orcs weapon and vicious trait... he does 1d8+16 to orcs... at level 11 he does that 3 times a round... very nasty. But needed in a game that lacks area of effect magic.

Next week they escape the mountains and travel to Rhosgobel, where Radigast will ask them to escort him to Dol Guldur (the scene where he goes there for the first time in the movie), to discover there is something in the fortress.