TPK

The Lost Mine of Phandelver has taken a backseat lately as Matthew has wanted to spend our family D&D time running his own adventure. I'd like to see Lost Mine through to the end, but I'm happy to help nurture Matthew's interest in DMing. His adventure involves the heroes exploring an incredibly convoluted lair in pursuit of a dragon that has stolen the local townspeople's treasure.

At first, encounter balance proved challenging for him, as he liked to select foes based not on their game statistics, but on the awesomeness of their miniatures. Now he's starting to understand the types of foes that are appropriate challenges for low-level characters. In one of our encounters yesterday, we squared off against three skeletons and three zombies. For those who haven't played Fifth Edition yet, that's a pretty reasonable encounter for a party of three second-level characters.

Even the best-laid encounter plans, however, often go awry. On the first round, the fighter was encircled by foes and beaten unconscious as a result of some very bad luck on the monsters' attack rolls. The wizard (yours truly) and the archer made a hasty retreat. What followed was a comedy of errors in which the heroes scampered around the map, trying to revive dying comrades and evade the undead.

All three heroes went down at least once, until the encounter ended when the archer felled the last zombie as his two companions lay bleeding to death on the floor. Matthew and Nathaniel had never heard the term TPK -- Total Party Kill -- before that encounter, but they certainly know it now!