Game Report Sunday June 7 2009
Jun. 8th, 2009 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athorntonWe had an interesting four-hour or so game last night, with Amy playing Anon the Mage and Urgh the Grumpy Dwarf, Rupert playing Father Clancy the Cleric, Keith playing Nugget the Elf (renamed Turdd during the course of the session), and Aimee playing Ruby Red and Bitters, both Elves. (Remember, this is Microlite74: Dwarf and Elf are classes, and there are no thieves or halflings.)
The session started with the players recuperating in the former room of Grono the Bugbear up on L3, near a set of sewer stairs (Grono had been chased down into the sewers and killed in the previous session, but that had come with a big explosion as Clancy had charged into the swamp gas with a lit torch).
It was decided that casting Light on the end of a ten-foot pole would be not a bad alternative. So the party went down, once healed up, to explore the sewers.
And here's where I began to feel like I'd made some impression on them: when they saw, up ahead, that one of the platforms (the sewer level is platforms, connected by catwalks, surrounded by an ocean of icky sludge with occasional mud islands poking up) was covered in webs....and turned around and went the other way rather than face what they (correctly) presumed would be at least one giant spider with save-or-die poison.
When they encountered the Derro mudlarks, they got lucky and most of them were out scavenging the various grates on the level. So there weren't that many, and Sleep is a grossly overpowered spell. Then the Albino Sewer Alligator showed up on my Wandering Monster Chart to take care of the Derro that fell asleep and toppled into the sewage.
Once again, the players were getting the old-school style (this retraining has been no minor effort): after dealing with the immediate threat, they hid under one of the items on the drying platform (indeed, the very canvas cover that had covered up a pit on L1 that they had explicitly chucked down that pit), and did not correct the remaining Derros in their assessment of what the threat had been as they lost a few more of their number beating the Alligator away. And when they did take on the remainder, the party talked Urgh out of attacking the alligator, which reappeared when more Derro corpses went into the water.
There was no argument with a ruling I put together: when describing a near-miss (a miss-by-one), I said "the bolt glances off his armor, striking sparks....wait. You're in a sewer full of explosive gas...." and we decided that a 1-in-4 chance of an explosion, on an attack with a metal weapon against a metal-armored opponent that missed-by-one was about right. In previous sessions such an explosion would do 4d6 at the center, 2d6 for the next set of 5' squares out, 1d6 for the ring beyond that, and 1d3 for the ring beyond that.
Between the cast-sleep and let-the-alligator-get-it tactics, an excellent use of the Big Purple d30 (that would be a Magic Missile that did 23 points of damage), and a lucky shot that explodiated one of the Derro while still a reasonable distance away, the party actually cleared out the Derros without any fatalities (surprised me, anyway), and got back to town, where they had levelled up to 3d level, and could buy a second level spell (Knock) from the Mages' Guild. They were also pretty disappointed to find out what magic items cost (which I took out of AD&D v1, and then pointed out that no such items were available In Town--for something niftier than a Dagger +1, you probably had to go to the Big City).
The session started with the players recuperating in the former room of Grono the Bugbear up on L3, near a set of sewer stairs (Grono had been chased down into the sewers and killed in the previous session, but that had come with a big explosion as Clancy had charged into the swamp gas with a lit torch).
It was decided that casting Light on the end of a ten-foot pole would be not a bad alternative. So the party went down, once healed up, to explore the sewers.
And here's where I began to feel like I'd made some impression on them: when they saw, up ahead, that one of the platforms (the sewer level is platforms, connected by catwalks, surrounded by an ocean of icky sludge with occasional mud islands poking up) was covered in webs....and turned around and went the other way rather than face what they (correctly) presumed would be at least one giant spider with save-or-die poison.
When they encountered the Derro mudlarks, they got lucky and most of them were out scavenging the various grates on the level. So there weren't that many, and Sleep is a grossly overpowered spell. Then the Albino Sewer Alligator showed up on my Wandering Monster Chart to take care of the Derro that fell asleep and toppled into the sewage.
Once again, the players were getting the old-school style (this retraining has been no minor effort): after dealing with the immediate threat, they hid under one of the items on the drying platform (indeed, the very canvas cover that had covered up a pit on L1 that they had explicitly chucked down that pit), and did not correct the remaining Derros in their assessment of what the threat had been as they lost a few more of their number beating the Alligator away. And when they did take on the remainder, the party talked Urgh out of attacking the alligator, which reappeared when more Derro corpses went into the water.
There was no argument with a ruling I put together: when describing a near-miss (a miss-by-one), I said "the bolt glances off his armor, striking sparks....wait. You're in a sewer full of explosive gas...." and we decided that a 1-in-4 chance of an explosion, on an attack with a metal weapon against a metal-armored opponent that missed-by-one was about right. In previous sessions such an explosion would do 4d6 at the center, 2d6 for the next set of 5' squares out, 1d6 for the ring beyond that, and 1d3 for the ring beyond that.
Between the cast-sleep and let-the-alligator-get-it tactics, an excellent use of the Big Purple d30 (that would be a Magic Missile that did 23 points of damage), and a lucky shot that explodiated one of the Derro while still a reasonable distance away, the party actually cleared out the Derros without any fatalities (surprised me, anyway), and got back to town, where they had levelled up to 3d level, and could buy a second level spell (Knock) from the Mages' Guild. They were also pretty disappointed to find out what magic items cost (which I took out of AD&D v1, and then pointed out that no such items were available In Town--for something niftier than a Dagger +1, you probably had to go to the Big City).
