Full recap here.
Had a full house tonight and, while the players insisted it was fun, I thought the session was utter crap.
I consider this session a complete failure on my part. For some stupid ass reason, I failed to properly establish why some of the players needed to enter the big climax location, which naturally, led them to … you know, not freaking enter it! Further, for an equally incomprehensible reason, most of my plans revolved around the characters being split up during the final fight so each of them could have their own individualized encounter with some bad guy … but the players logically did not split up once they finally united, which made perfect sense as a firefight was raging around them and they needed to cross through it. And then, I basically railroaded another player to ensure he obtained a magic item for the deux ex machina ending. Ugh.
During the “big fight,” I ended up adding something to the Jade Court vampires on the fly that gimped one PC briefly so as to allow a second one to have “his moment.” This, frankly, sucked. And then, what should have been a tense, stressful climax became a flaccid “meh” of me pulling some shitty deux ex machina crap to wrap up. After five sessions of really solid gameplay, the ending became … this. One out of six isn’t that bad, but if that one is a shitty climax? Ugh. I need to do better. I need to just go to bed, reset my brain, do the recap tomorrow and then move on but now I’m afraid that I’m going to be obsessing over a crap session for a week when I need to be concentrating on starting work for the next story arc. What’s that crappy bit from Demolition Man? “Enhance your inner calm.” I need to do that.
This marks the second time that I’ve Worfed a named bad guy which means I need to do some serious Villain repair on him in the near future. That means he needs to seriously kick someone’s ass or do some stuff that is unforgivably evil – logically, this means Turning a friendly NPC or simply murdering them. I prefer the former since it avoids the whole ‘fridging’ of a character while simultaneously providing pathos for the related PC.
First time I’ve actually deployed a Jade Court vampire … and I did the fricking Teleport wrong. Completely forgot to make the associated skill roll all three times it did its flash step. Further, I need to dig in on Vulnerability – does that ignore the creature’s DR? Don’t think so … which means I screwed that up too. On top of that, I failed to have the player making the attack use the proper dice – he made a Jump Kick which did 1d+5 (he rolled a 6) but as he was doing an “iron fist,” he should have rolled 5d instead. Gah. This whole thing was one misstep after another.
I absolutely need to enhance my inner calm, dammit.