They had normal attacks, because advantage cancelled disadvantage.
Yeah, I'm influenced by some things from Malazan, mostly the cosmology for this. A lich they thought they killed that may have actually "ascended"? What does that sound like...
The lethality was obviously mentioned up front for a reason. It's less a traditional D&D game and more like those dungeon crawl adventures they sometimes ran at conventions where it was sort of a competition to see who could get farthest. I try to make it a point that things don't turn dangerous until you kinda turn things up yourself. Of course, when the first thing you have is a durn dwarf screaming, the game reacts appropriately. Same for fidling with traps. Taking things.
Pac man ghost might have been an exception. No wait... who wants anything to do with a creepy smiley face.
I did feel really sad at the first death, as someone was entirely not responsible for their own death. Not even betrayed either!
Caretaker was a crapshoot, it's fairly choreographed and he can be 'beaten' more easily, but I think PbP encourages us to do SOMETHING with our time to keep things moving.
Not a bit of discovery on the parties part about what's going on on the main level. You actually wandered into the archlich side rooms, ignored the weird plant monster observatory, I may have went over overkill intentionally on the magic crap in the lich's room... then we started to go to the demiplane which has the "end game" solution that isn't just sneak out of the castle somehow. The live group I ran for went the other way and found their way to the courtyard where... something happened.
Not a single NPC you could talk to till you ran into the catpack. That's funny to think about.
