AlexI've not been here a lot lately because I'm busy with work, but I still manage to DM every other week or so! Today we finished our 21st session of Curse of Strahd, and the players took on Yester Hill. Strahd ended up joining the battle to protect the druids until the tree blight entered the fray. They only saw Strahd from a distance, and then he went invisible so they didn't know it was him. But it was GREAT messing with them during battle with Strahd being invisible.
Greater Invisibility combined with legendary actions made them so confused cause they knew SOMEONE was there, just not who or how they were attacking. Like I had him use Blight on Linus (the cleric) on his actual round, and then at the end of Aaron's (the paladin's) round he used a legendary action to move and make an unarmed strike. The fact that this invisible force attacked them more than once on a single round had them confused.
In the end he was just playing around with them, not aiming to kill them (yet). But when the party managed to kill the tree blight, he decided that there was no point to it any longer. So we more or less ended with a cliffhanger of Strahd appearing, clapping his hands and going "I think that's enough for now, don't you think?". My players have been joking so much about strangers being Strahd that they couldn't grasp it was actually him.
They all rolled history checks to see if they actually could tell it was him, only one character actually made the connection (going back to the statue in Death House, the coins with Strahd, and such things). And even then Apollo (or well, Cami who's playing Apollo) went "Wait so it IS Strahd??? IT REALLY IS STRAHD?!" and we pretty much ended with me confirming that her character is pretty damned sure it's Strahd. Their faces were great.
Now we won't have time to play for ~2 weeks since I'm gonna have a terrible work schedule (so looking forward to 9 days of work in a row without a break). At least I'm free until Tuesday, so I'll take my chance to relax now. And try to plan a bit more for next session because I'm not 100% sure where I'm going with this Strahd encounter. With work being so busy I've had to improvise a lot more than I'm comfortable with, but that's just how things are right now.