Whew!

I just finished about 5 1/2 hours of GMing, more-or-less straight through.

My PCs hit the Caves of Chaos again, again with 4 PCs but this time without Borriz the Dwarf (the player's daughter was sick) but with Father Marco aka Inquisitor Marco.

Fun session. I'll do a longer post tomorrow but we had:

- our first negotiations (and they went well).

- our first secret door detections!

- our first real "treasure room" - a room full of armor.

- real caution and care on the part of the PCs, coupled with real zeal for getting on with killing and looting. Nice combo.

- some good "how to get around corners and bash doors and loot safely" practice, so we're getting towards a real division of labor done automatically. Saves me as a GM and speeds play.

- a giant frog getting bear hugged and punched, and others getting kicked, in a fight reminiscent of every fight Ash every had.

- giant frogs killed and eaten, which let me playtest some rules I've been working on.

Fun session, and it went smoothly. The "everything you say is in character" bit is hard for some players, but everyone likes not looking things up in play* a lot. I did flub rolling damage in front of the players sometimes, and rolled behind the screen. Generally I either re-rolled (who cares?) or just kept it. It wasn't a big deal.

* We made one exception, for GURPS Magic for the cleric's player, since he hasn't run a GURPS spellcaster in a long, long time. Even then we chose quickie PDF lookups and memory over anything else, so next time we won't even bother with that exemption.