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| #1Tony_VargasFeb 19, 2015 20:57:50 | Over President's Day weekened I ran six 4-hour 'introductory' 5e game at DunDraCon. (The oldest D&D convention on the west coast, visit their site if you're curious about it.)
I went into the convention with some trepidation for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I go to several conventions a year, and DDC is the second since the release of 5e. The first was PacifiCon where I also signed up to run introductory 5e games - it was not an encouraging experience. I was the only DM to answer their call for introductory 5e games, they put me in a figurative closet (probably a 'salon' or something) with the Adventurers League, across from the ballroom hosting the Pathfinder society, and I was running the "Seek the Keep' scenario from HotDQ. As was my experience with Encounters, the PCs - pre-gens from the starter set - got pretty handily massacred. Between the tepid interest and hosting the same HotDQ trainwreck over and over, I was a little discouraged. Though, I did get to run one AL scenario, that went OK, and play in another that went quite well, so it wasn't all bad.
I got myself a DM screen and fudged numbers like crazy. Ignored crits, softballed damage results and the like, depending on the circumstances, to keep most of the player in most of each fight, most of the time. Trust me, this did not make the game seem 'too easy' - there were still PCs getting dropped in any given fight where they failed to roll over the monsters in the first round (anytime they were outnumbered and didn't cast Sleep, for instance).
Instead of converting monsters to 5e stats, or even using the stats in the books, I ballparked a lot of things, and, instead of carefully tracking hps, I'd have a monster drop when it seemed appropriate. I rolled only one initiative number for all the monsters (and occasionally fudged it low), and let the players who beat it go in whatever order they wanted. I couched it as keeping things 'simple,' but it also makes it a lot easier for the casters to launch AE spells before the melee types close, and for the rogues to get in sneak attacks by, conversely, letting the other melee types get in there before them and provide that handy adjacent ally, all without any risk of ceding initiative as you might when delaying.
I leveraged the inherent position uncertainty of TotM to let PCs reach enemies, make attacks at short range, be in range for spells or catch plenty of enemies in AEs in ways that couldn't be fudged if we were using a grid.
I also took advantage of TotM by varying the number of enemies in the middle of the fight - the players couldn't just count monster minis, and I would give them imprecise counts of their enemies (several, a dozen, etc). Thus I was often asked 'how many are left,' and could adjust my answer to fit how well they'd done so far - acting as if a monster or two had never existed or adding one or two. Particularly handy with a scenario called for a relatively large number of enemies - something that gets very dicey in 5e. Similarly, it was easy to skip a monster when rolling their attacks, sparing a PC here or there. I played the monsters 'dumb.' Not literally, though a lot of 1st level monsters have pretty low INT, which makes it easy enough to justify, but in a metagame sense. I'd pick actions that fit the monsters, but were bad choices mechanically. Most notably and consistently, eschewing focus fire, for instance. Also, the way I handled initiative put the monsters in a 'block,' but I consciously avoided using particularly good coordination of their actions unless it was just absolutely called for. A monster doesn't have to be dumb to to be played dumb: you can use arrogance, cruelty, overconfidence, etc as reasons, you can even leverage disconnects between tactics that make sense historically or IRL or in genre, but are mechanically sub-optimal.
I softballed surprise rounds on the monster side. A lot of scenarios call for ambushing players, and when those ambushes worked, I'd rule some melee monsters positioned just beyond their speed, so they'd have to 'dash' instead of attacking, have ranged attackers fail to focus fire, and the like. Now, none of the above is going to come as much as a surprise to all my fellow old-school DMs - some of those are things we've been doing for decades, practically second nature - but, I did have to remind myself to start doing them again after finally getting used to /not/ needing to them when running 4e (a problem only for those of us who did take the trouble to get used to running 4e, those who skipped it should hardly even notice).
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