GM Reflection: Attack on Kome Village

I've written a playreport for this session here in case anyone is interested. 

For the post itself I want to focus on what I did and what I can do better. My group uses 5e with some modifications (such as simultaneous initiative). Their level 1 PCs are from a smallish village and the adventure starts with an attack.  

Thoughts on how I ran the session

The idea for the attack is simple: a horde of burning zombies attacks the village, any buildings lost cannot be used and any NPCs dead cannot perform services for them in the future. So when the smith died, the players lost their ability to order new arms and armour and when the apothecary burned down they lost the stored potions in it. 

To run this fight I divided the smallish village into abstract zones. To go from one zone to the next would take an entire round of combat. This to prevent me from having to use exact feet or a grid to track the exact location of everyone. 

I knew the enemies would come from the southwest, so they had three zones they could 'start' in. For each I rolled d6 to see how many enemies would head that way. This worked pretty well, but I forgot two things: 

1. Ranged attacks can hit the undead as they approach before reaching the village
2. When do reïnforcements arrive?

To keep things abstract, I ruled that the hilly surroundings meant that the cleric could get 5 shots off with their crossbow (3 with disadvantage) before the undead would arrive. This worked fine, but having a better idea of how this would work in advance would have saved me some stress. 

I had the first wave of reinforcements approach 1 turn away from the town after they beat the first. For the third wave of reinfocements (a single undead) I rolled a timer die inspired by ICRPG (d4) to determine the amount of turns it would take. This ended up being too much cognitive load, so I had it arrive when I remembered it was still there. 

A system where I used dice to visualize where each group of undead was and how long it would take for them to advance would have been nice. Something to keep in mind for the future. 

Undead impact was determined on a d20 roll. n+5= npc in zone stays alive, n+10=building doesn't burn down, n is the number of undead. If a successful save is made by armed NPC they down 1 undead.

Undead only moved if an area was ablaze and devoid of living NPCs. I randomly rolled to see where they would go to next. 

Both of these procedures worked well, in part due to simultaneous initiative, which made it easy to track when a combat round was over. 

Lastly, one PC probably only survived because I was unsure of 5e rules for stabilized characters who are down. We decided that it would take their total hitpoints in 1 attack to die, but that made him borserline invincible. I don't mind them living, but the ruling I made was awkward. Next time I should allow myself a breather to think of appropriate ruling or just google the rule. 

Thoughts on the events of the session

I don't mind that most of the important buildings and NPCs are gone. It gives the choices of the players some weight. They were far less smart about it than I had anticipated though, two players constantly choosing to take passive damage by attacking the burning undead in melee or ending their turn next to them. 

I am genuinely unsure of how to deal with that in future prep. On the one hand, as someone neck deep in OSR style refereeing, I don't want to have to think about balance as such too much. Problems are for the players to be solved and they had plenty of options to try to more effectively defend the town. On the other hand, if the sort of problems I present to the players are consistently too difficult to solve effectively it really puts a damper on the fun of the game. As am educator I have been taught to present problems just outside of the confortzone of my students and I feel like I am currently not doing that for my players. 

Maybe I'll try to emphasize that actions outside of what is on the character sheet are not only permissable but encouraged. For example, I really enjoyed how one player looted the leather apron and gloves from the dead smith to protect themselves from the heat, so may'be I'll refer to that to make my point clear.  

One decision I am unequivocally happy with is to have leveling take a day in town. I have escalation calendars for the various problems around town and needed an incentive to have time pass. This change was well received and seems to work as intended.

Thoughts on where they're headed next session

They've chosen to investigate the tomb these undead probably came from. I have this one prepared already, but haven't though about travel to and from the tomb other than it being 'about half a day's journey'. Some impactful random encounters as well as some thoughts about navigation would probably make travel a bit more interesting. I'm already thinking of ways to attack parts of their character sheet that isn't HP.