Players are about to skip dinner with strahd
Hi reddit,
So im running CoS for the first time, having played it once (with some homebrew).
I prepared as well as I could for the dinner, what they where gonna eat, what strahd was going to offer each one of them, how to set them up against each other.
But....
They only focussed on getting the large dragon skull out of the castle, as their sole goal. Their plan was to give it to a party member who could fly. Cast reduce on the skull, give it to him, and have him fly to Village of Barovia.
Once they started the plan (3 hours before the dinner) they cast Knock to get it off the wall, and only then found out that Reduce only lasts for 1 minute, and the gnome with a STR score of 8 would be crushed by it once it would enlarge again.
Now they all scattered, once they heard Rahadin coming up the stairs. 2 of them trying to rush the skull outside over the bridge, the rest scattering all over the castle.
Now i'd love to hear your idea's how you would handle this. It's 3 in the afternoon, so Strahd's sleeping.