I cannot resist the urge to metagame. Reading the DM directives in the book, I had my PC’s and NPCs focus their attack on Ildmane to force her to abandon her mission and run away.
Combat is the least interesting part of playing solo for me. I searched online for tools to automate combat, ideally so I would just press a few buttons and would find the results - who lived, who died, who’s down on hp and what experience they would get. Regrettably, nothing like that exists online and everything I found was more of the flavor of an “Initiative Tracker” - apps that handled the order of each combatant’s turns and maybe had a dice roller app. I realize this is to facilitate actual face-to-face gameplay - players should be encouraged to use their ingenuity, imagination, and vocal descriptions of combat to create unique outcomes that cannot be translated in a simple stat based way. On the other hand, I just wanted to roll a bunch of basic attacks and wear down the enemies’ hp.
Still, by using physical dice, pencil and paper I was able to resolve combat, albeit slowly.
My PCs and all the NPCs (I learned my lesson from Bryn Shander and involved every story NPC in the battle) zerged the Fire Giant in the first round and brought her below half health, where she and her mate retreated. They will return in 5 days with much greater numbers, but I plan on my PCs being long gone by then.
After all, I’m glad this chapter is over and I’m ready to sink my teeth into the much meatier chapter 3. I didn’t enjoy this chapter’s combat scenarios where the PCs are meant to be vastly outclassed in power and would have preferred if combat itself involved a lot less dice rolls and turn order tracking.
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