running odnd for the first time
I have 20 mins before my birthday party (thank you thank you thank you) so here’s notes on my playtest of a dungeon from my AAJ (insert link here later) region.
Man odnd is weird. My playtest rules are here
I ran mostly using FMC with a few changes. Players loved the Martial Artist from Press the Beast
Neither of the players had really played OSR before so making a character took much longer than I expected (and no one bought torches, my bad).
My biggest surprise was finally hitting combat at near the end of the session and realizing Oops that good summary of how combat works is not from FMC at all but from LBB.
I loved rolling encounters every turn. My dungeon was implicitly not incredibly dangerous via encounters so it just brought so much life. I also have the experience that I can riff on what ‘1d6 groveling staff’ (little crying rat people who exist only to serve and hand out little cat o’ nine tails and their backs when they fuck up) and ‘1d20 guests’ (I had a little life path generator for fighters I used to make a few people up) means at table time.
The dungeon I wrote as a bunch of Bite Sized Dungeons linked together and that worked great. The place is dream-like/a little fun-house-ish so I left it as a point crawl. It’s still a place so one could still punch out a window and land somewhere else but doors and up and down don’t always track to what they should be. And the disorientation was pretty effective!
I will need to add dimensions to rooms or figure out how to rule on searching for secret doors since there are many of those and I had to scramble.
Each player played two characters and that worked great. Both are seasoned rpgers so they had no issues getting into two pairs of shoes.
They definitely would have died if they hadn’t made a blood pact with some pixies which is awesome.
The dungeon explicitly has a time limit (only exists at night), and night is weird in antarctica, so hopefully that will come up later but the 8 hours I gave them was plenty to walk out with 600-ish silver and a magic item. Not sure if I should tighten up the time or make more traps that cause delays or not
Both players are pumped to play again.
Thank all I got for now, cheers!