I've just kicked off a rolld20 game of Carrion Crown, and I'm not sure how to do the Father Charlatan encounter. Obviously I can't tell one player to leave the room, nor can I leave the room -- we're one big happy video chat. Father Charlatan is a weird, not very good encounter to begin with so I don't want to dilute it any more than it already is by just running it with everyone knowing everything that's going on, or even with the sole affected PC typing away on text chat and everyone else in the video. Is there a satisfactory solution that others have found? Or am I better off just rewriting the whole durned thing?
I took aside the player in question into Steam chat after asking him to leave and let the whole thing run through.
You could do the same, but replace Steam (or not) with your other chat platform of choice.
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I agree that Father Charlatan is a somewhat difficult encounter. I found different ways to run him, even though I only used the first:
1. Don't take the player aside, plain and simple. When he's knocked down, start with him waking up as described. After he did whatever he wanted to do, go with the rest of the party and describe what they see, the chains and all that. If they are decent roleplayers they will be able to seperate player knowledge from character knowledge - my group at least was able to do so. Also, I only gave him Will saves when they found parts of the story which were somewhat off (in my game, Father Charlatan knew very little of the village outside of Harrowstone, so when the player asked "Say, where is Father Grimburrow?" I allowed him a Will save).
2. The whole group is affected by Charlatan's spell and are in some kind of collective illusion. How exactly this turns out is your decision - when I discussed it with some friends, our scenario was like this:
The group gets overwhelmed by skeletons, but some kind of superspecialawesome cleric (Father Charlatan) shatters all of them with his positive energy, tells them how he handled things, Harrowstone is clear of ghosts etc. pp.
The only way for the PCs to really die in this illusion is if he can convince them to leave the village and forget about Harrowstone, every detail that's wrong about his story and gets noticed by them gets another Will Save (They leave Harrowstone and Old River barks at them instead of being nice, Father Charlatan doesn't know some of the things that happened, makes false assumptions...that kind of thing).