NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 6422203" data-attributes="member: 79141">I have always used D&D - even 4th edition - to play story-based campaigns with complex narratives. I decided to take a break from all that and have used 5e to play an old-school megadungeon, where the goal is for the PCs to survive to a point where it is worth actually naming their characters.To make this feasible - as 5e leveling is incredibly fast from 1st to 3rd, I started the players at 0-level with hardly any equipment.  They spend XP in batches to earn their first-level features.  Only the 4 core races and classes are allowed (to begin with), though feats are permitted so we're not totally old school.In their first session the players wet themselves when they encountered a mountain lion.  Unhappy with the danger level they went off and gathered more characters: from 4 to 7 players by session two, with 8 players for the last few sessions.There were no character deaths for three weeks, then two were killed by a giant scorpion (underestimating the danger of its poison).  The following week, around six to eight PCs were slain in a series of pitched battles with a host of humanoids*, with a few days' downtime in between allowing the players to recruit and the humanoids to regroup.  Despite my alarm at the carnage, many of the players declared these sessions to be their best ever and I have a new-found respect for the late lamented Gary Gygax (whose style of play I had until now never fully understood).[*We are using Monte Cook's Dragon's Delve from dungeonaday.  The low-level mooks there are a mix of goblinoids, orcs, kobolds and degenerate humans collectively known as the Bestial Host.]</blockquote>

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