Weekday Side Quest

Since I have a large game group with players who shift in and out week by week I've been experimenting a little bit with what you might call solo side-quests.

The idea is they keep players who might miss a session in the game when they miss a session or two, plus they deepen that players' conection to some part of the game world relevant to their PC.

For instance:

A few weeks back, Dave's cleric of the Black Grip-Olaf--lost his arm. This is a big deal as spellcasters need to be able to gesture freely and that's hard with one arms that isn't actually, like, there. He asked if there was a Temple of the Black Grip nearby that could regenerate his arm.

The standard choices would be:

-Mean DM says No

-Nice DM says Yes

-Make Dave try to convince the whole party to go on a Quest For Dave's Arm even if Dave won't be there for weeks at a time in the middle of the entire continent being invaded

Instead, one monday evening I set up some miniatures on a table and just texted Dave this:

I further texted some details on the tactical situation:

The general mechanic I'm using for this mass battle is: 2 guys square off and each roll a die, high roll wins, so big dice are good, small dice are bad.

Dave texts back:

Dave further elects to hide his D30 giant skeleton guy underneath the giant skull thing on the left of the map and have it spring out only when goblins roll up.

Further, once the fight starts, he carefully deploys some Fog Cloud spells to confuse the goblin advance and channel them into places where they're easy to take out.

We can watch the battle progress round by round, with the goblins (mostly on square white bases) coming up from the bottom:

The Grip sends the bulk of its forth to the left of the screen and a few elite units go right:

A detachment of goblins probes to the right and gets wiped out by the elite forces. A fog cloud covers the goblin left.

This channels all the goblins through the center...

And they get wiped out as undead pour in from both directions!

The Black Grip wins!

Olaf gets a new arm (but it's a skeleton arm).

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