How to prevent one of Talakeal's Gaming Horror Stories: PC Edition

[Quertus]

I did my best to defer to Brian, but I am not sure how to handle that in the future.

Ask Brian. I'll suggest the counterpart to a "swear jar", that you drop a quarter into every time you do it; when it's full, you buy the group pizza.

Tiana, pixie priest, healer, and trickster

I hadn't caught that your healer is also your frailest member.

Fritz, one of our only surviving passengers, uses subtle magic to hold the ship together.

Why subtle? Was he hiding his talents? If so, is he still doing so?

(OOC: This was a long skill challenge. It was fairly poorly designed, as there was a penalty for failure and as new characters we don't have great scores, which meant that it was long, frustrating, and used up a disproportionate amount of our party resources. Still, it wasn't terrible, and was fine for a first time DM, and I did my best to keep Bob from bitching).

You didn't like it. What about the rest of the table?

(And here we get the problem of an evil party. Nobody actually wants to form the party, even when it is in our mutual best interest to work together. We kept the argument in character, but after about an hour of this I saw we were boring / frustrating people, and I kind of broke character and said we should table the argument for later... or just hand-waive it.)

I don't need to say it, right?

We offer them a position with our crew,

We? Or you? Has the group taken on your mantra?

talks about how the forest spirits are misbehaving, but there is no sign of the druid.

We eventually find a corrupted totem that is drawing all of the local animal spirits into it.

It is made of wicker and bones,

The town's barber / surgeon is able to identify the bones as belonging to the druid

the spirits of nature are freed and fertility is returning to the region.

Um, continuity?

So, have crops only been failing since the Druid disappeared? If so, in what way were the spirits misbehaving beforehand? Crazy questions: do forest spirits naturally misbehave, and could the misbehaving forest spirits have made the corrupt totem themselves? Assuming the answer to both is "no", then why would whatever caused the spirits to misbehave in the first place have allowed them to return to normal so easily?

(This was a frustrating fight. An enemy that is both super tough and super mobile isn't fun. But, I wanted a higher difficulty, so I suppose I can't complain.)

Describe what "hard, but not frustrating" would look like, to you.

I visit the alchemist and by several potions of anti-venom, healing, and invisibility to undead. I also visit a naturalist and talk about starting a colony of scavenging crabs in our bilge, we have a lot of rotting bodies and I foresee a need for a lot of skeletons in the future.

So, did you get to make use of your downtime action advantage?