accomplishedThe gaming group got down to business in this session, doing some samples of the combat system of Shadows of Esteren. You can read about the characters the three players -
spross, Tammy, and Douglas - are playing in this blog entry. The session started with a refresher course about some snippets of the game world, due to the changes in characters that have been made, and was followed by a bit of time spent on the game mechanics. Then it was deep into the combat system, with sample combats to learn the combat system from actually playing it, rather than from the point of view of reading/learning about it. I started off with some one-on-one combats between the player characters, working them all the possible combinations of player vs. player. This led to some basic revelations about the characters and their combat capabilities, with one exception that I won't go into here. This was followed up with some sample combat against villagers, brigands, some dwellers in ruins, and a couple of other types of non-player characters.
To be honest, I didn't get to the point of setting them up against some real opposition, using foes to the end of the session that were pretty much their equals or slightly lower (other than Doug's character), nor was I able to have them take on some animals. The first part of the game session took longer than I had expected, to be honest, and we just straight out ran out of time for the session.
Still, it was an entertaining session of Shadows of Esteren for me, and showed me more about the players and their characters within the setting. There are some unforeseen complications that I encountered, but otherwise, it went smoother than I expected, and the players seemed to have a good time.