Current play?

[larsdangly]

I'm giving this thread a 'bump' back to the top page so people will have a place to post their initial experiences with actual play using the new materials.

I ran a session today for a campaign I've been running approximately weekly since the PDF's dropped last fall. So, the players and setting and rules and so forth were all well understood at this point, but this is the first session where we got to use the new materials - i.e., the MH tiles, hex maps and chits.

A bit of background: We are playing in a pretty elaborate sandbox setting. It is the accumulated product of many years of newly made material and even more material adapted from other systems, and there is so much stuff jammed in there that it sort of runs itself. Most recently, the party fled a large city where they had gotten into hot water with a couple of groups, and stumbled across my adaptation of Keep on the Borderlands. They are now a half dozen sessions into sustained raids on the Caves, and this week were trying to work their way deep into the Gnolls' lair.

It's all going swimmingly, but I was quite curious to see how game play would be effected by going all-in with the MH tile approach to assembling the dungeon on the table top in real time. It was a great experience, and I would say the larger scale of the new components was a critical part of the success. My group gathers by Skype, so it is pretty important that people be able to see what is going on. Everyone was quite happy with the end result, and had nothing but good things to say about the overall system of hex and chit components.

My one immediate thought is that it's a good thing I have a second set of MH tiles coming in hte mail, because it really requires a lot of them to assemble a significant stretch of dungeon map and leave it up while people run around. I think I won't be comfortable with my ability to do it unimpaired until I've got a third set (or fourth). This is more important than getting more chits (though we wanted some of those as well - I had to ad lib a big fight with a swarm of giant ants). So, the good news is the physical materials are awesome for facilitating play, but start thinking about getting that collection of components built up to the point where it can handle the task!