So I did something I don't normally do, and read the whole chapter before running it. My fear was that I would spoil the player experience for myself by knowing what would happen ahead, but chapter 4 is so much better than the previous chapters that it makes me more excited to play knowing what would come ahead. Sure the story is spoiled for me but I'm now interested in seeing if my party can actually make it through the challenges of this dungeon, and I intend to randomize some of the elements of this dungeon using my solo play resources.
One sticking point though: A Cult of the Dragon airship?! Although there is no reason for my characters to refuse such a generous offer, I personally won't be playing with it since I just DM'ed a game in the Tyranny of Dragons campaign and I can't see the Cult as anything but the bad guys.
Plus, mechanically the airship only exists to avoid making the second round of travel through the North a repeat of the first, but I'll be making up my own random encounters from CR calculations and Monster Manual monsters, so I'm not bothered by it.
I've decided to incorporate a new tool into my solo system, 4th edition style skill challenges. A series of success or failures on skills will manage my party's social interactions, obstacles, and other non combat encounters. These along with random dungeon generation and the Mythic fate chart should create more robust encounters requiring more complicated actions leading to more engrossing play, because playing the encounters as written in the book is very bland and the situations presented are otherwise resolved too quickly.
I probably shouldn't have bought the PDF of the full Mythic system and paid too much for what was essentially just the Fate chart, but I plan to make the best of it and use some of its bundled tools like the Scene Setup worksheet and random Events table. The stripped-down GM Emulator PDF would have been a smarter purchase, but the difference in cost between the two was only $2.00 so I had figured that it wasn't that big of a deal.
STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT! This information is unfortunately spread out between the 1st Edition PHB and DMG, but it details how to track time in turns while playing by breaking it down into how long a turn takes in the overworld or in the dungeon and how far you can move in one turn, etc. I toyed with the idea of breaking time up into 'phases' of a day, e.g. morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, but I figure a stricter, more granular approach of hour-by-hour or turn by turn would be the more proper method, even though I imagine that it would be a total pain in the ass. But I've noticed in live games that proper tracking of time adds to the enjoyment of the experience. And if I'm going to play solo, the only person feeling the pain of tracking time would be me, so I don't have to worry about any other player getting bored or distracted.
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