Hi !
First time poster; please be gentle !!
Just wondering what any of you have done for starting out characters as to what equipment they have on them when the town first gets attacked.
Suddenly overrun by Hobgoblins and no time to go back to wherever the PCs were presumably staying to get all their kit.
Do you have them somehow with all their armour and weapons on ?
Doesn't seem to make much sense if they were just chilling at the tavern after a day at the fair !
Any thoughts/suggestions ?
Thanks.
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First, the initial setup says that many of the PCs are visiting Phaendar for the Market Festival. Sensible travelers on the wilderness roads to Phaendar would wear armor. If the armor is sufficiently comfortable, such as padded armor or leather armor, they would not have changed out of it. In a fantasy setting, villagers accept that adventurers wear armor as their casual clothing.
I had told my players the premise of Trail of the Hunted in Session Zero, that their characters would spend a lot of time hiding in the forest. Thus, they created high-Dexterity characters good at Stealth. All of them wore light armor, including the champion.
For PCs staying at the Taproot Inn, their weapons would be upstairs in their rooms, easy to reach in two rounds. If someone did not rent a room, them they would have to carry their weapons for lack of a place to put them. The druid in my party was staying with his friend Cleric Noelan at the Riverwood Shrine, but he fought with spells and cantrips rather than weapons.
Second, I had changed the beginning of the game a little. Aubrin the Green was not injured by a ballista bolt shot through the door of the Taproot Inn, because a villager ran to the inn with a warning when the Ironfang troops first appeared. But Aubrin is disabled, so she asked the PCs to accompany her. In Oreld's Fine Shop, she told them to grab any supplies that they needed, free of charge because the town was in an emergency. Then she sent them out to guide refugees over the bridge while she carefully sneaked over the the bridge with Oreld's bomb. Visiting villagers' homes would give an opportunity for resident PCs to retrieve their armor and weapons.
I had planned for Aubrin to die by holding off the hobgoblins from crossing the bridge when the bomb blew it up. She was surrounded by four hobgoblin soldiers and could not retreat quickly without provoking Attacks of Opportunity. Instead, the players cleverly distracted the hobgoblins so that she could safely retreat, so she lived. She stayed with the refugees as their leader and protector. She sent the party out to scout the path ahead and battle the dangers.
Depriving a martial character of weapons significantly handicaps them. Don't start the campaign on a disappointing note. Instead, let the players play their characters as designed. They won't have any opportunity to buy replacement weapons while hiding in the forest, though they could scavenge weapons off of the hobgoblin soldiers.
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They won't get much chance to get more equipment except for what they can glean from encounters and what the other refugees might be able to make or have brought with them, at least until the end of the first book (when Novvi appears), so give them plenty of opportunity to grab what they need on the fly once things get going, but for their baseline inventory ...
Have them come up with their equipment lists beforehand and then even if they are sitting in the tavern chilling you can have their equipment make its way back to them via narrative means.
For example - one of the locals grabs the PC's gear as part of a large bundle and hands it to them, or some of the incidentals like rope and rations are grabbed by the PC as they run around town, or they are gifted some items from a villager's whose handcart has gotten stuck as they escape.
Thank you both for your input :-)