Storm King's Thunder: pre session 4 part II

The amount of prep work for this session was unreal. By the time I was done I didn't even feel like playing the chapter, just skipping it entirely and automatically leveling my characters up. Most of it felt like accounting, taking stock of distances to travel, resource consumption rates (food, water, living expenses) and planning out directions and sidequests. This is not how I journey in real life or even in video games, and it made everything drab and tiring. Entirely unlike how the live session with my sisters went, where they managed all that accounting separately.

  When I finally sat down to play, I didn't even bother leveling my characters from 5 to lvl 6, because that would involve opening one more sourcebook and doing more accounting. A big feature of this chapter is the involvement of random encounters as you travel through the map, and the adventure book directs you to the Dungeon Master's Guide to manage the random encounters. The DMG uses a lot of words to basically say "DM's discretion", but a small passage provides a method of rolling a d20 and triggering an encounter on a roll of 18 or higher. That's exactly what I did because I didn't want to play through endless encounters for every day of travel. I played through the "suggested encounters" because I wanted to actually play the game and kill trolls, ogres, orcs and giants at least, but combat remains the least interesting part of this game.

In between work and children, I actually haven't found much time to sit down and really enjoy a game of D&D, so I rushed through this chapter as much as possible. Reading the descriptions of the towns, choosing sidequests, and getting involved in the plot is the best part, but the busywork in between all that turned into a real barrier to actually playing. I might just end this solo experiment here, and just read through the book plainly, maybe dropping in my characters at the appropriate level if there was a chapter I really wanted to play through. Perhaps sometime soon I'll have more downtime where I can actually play without stress.