Isekai Campaign Session 3

I thought I was prepared. For some things I was, but for others, I wasn't.

We had a bit of humor when our Beastmaster tried to figure out how her healing abilities worked after last time's fight. I wanted her to be touching the target and say "heal." She couldn't figure it out, and finally got exasperated and said "Moon healing powers activate!" which I allowed to work.

In the morning they all saw a notification "Experience points available. Open [status] to use." The characters got to see a simplified version of their character sheets and realized that the world behaved a bit like a video game.

They made it to the village. I thought they were going to go straight for the tavern, but they went to the forge, which is the only place they could hear someone. They talked to the blacksmith, who thought they were from the adventurers' guild, come to investigate the missing sheep. They said they weren't, but offered to investigate anyway. He told them the villagers wouldn't trust unlicensed adventurers. He suggested his wife in the tavern could rent them rooms for the night.

When it became clear they didn't have any money (besides the goblin core stones, which you can only trade in the town), they were put to chores for their dinner and bed.

The smith and alewife's daughter didn't come home, so the party went to look for her. The other kids said she went up to the shrine. Towards the shrine, they found her friend, who said that goblins took her. They tracked the goblins to my first dungeon! They had to fight through 6 goblins and an ork, but they got the girl back. I had thought they would turn back at that point, but they wanted to press forward to the next level. I had the goblins close and bar the door. I know this is railroading them a little bit, but I plan for the dungeon to be like 10 levels deep, and I hadn't planned for that much, and most of the levels are above what they can do, anyway.

They met the smith with some villagers with torches and pitchforks coming to them and reunited him with his little girl. They wanted to go deal with the rest of the goblins, but when the smith (a former adventurer) heard that there was miasma (black fog) in the place, he knew it was a dungeon and called everyone back inside the village walls and had them bar the door to the palisade. He asked the party to take a message to the guildmaster in the nearby town the next day that their woods had a dungeon, and they agreed.

I hope I wasn't railroading. There were a few main story beats I wanted them to hit, and had to guide them there a little. I'm learning how they can catch me off guard and how to improvise to that. I think story beats are fine, but individual lines not as much, since you don't know if anything will lead to those lines. When we get past a this particular story, I'll open it up and they'll have more opportunity to choose where they go. I see this as more of a tutorial mission. A way for us all to get used to the game.

They said it was fun, at least. The one big call for improvement, which I agreed with, was that I could write down things like how much damage they would do so I don't have to calculate it every time. I'm sure I'm making mistakes, but Matthew Colevile says that all GMs make mistakes, and that's OK. As long as we're having fun.