Shadowdark Finally Played Shadowdark

[NN]

Meh, give it a rest, shadowdark will survive without them.

Its the deluge of 3rd party slop you should be concerned about.

 

[Retreater]

I can't say how you personally used to play TSR D&D. But OSE (Basic) for example is literally a cleaned up port of D&D B/X. So when you say things like this, it demonstrates a rather substantial disconnect on your part...

Right, I found that OSE didn't match my expectations of old school play, but I was hopeful that another branch of the OSR might.

Maybe (if anyone cares) I can explain what my nostalgia was, and maybe that will inform the disconnect I have with Shadowdark and other games. If nothing else, it can show people coming here for a player's review of the system that I am an outlier, apparently.

I got into AD&D in the late 80s, post Hickman Revolution. I never played Basic/BX/AD&D1. Gygax was out of TSR. My experience was shaped by Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, and Dark Sun.

We didn't have large dungeons, ever. Most would fit the design of today's 5 Room Dungeons. XP was rewarded, not for finding gold, but from using your character's abilities to solve problems. Thieves were awarded for using their skills, clerics and wizards for casting their spells, fighters for fighting enemies, etc.

Our sessions were spent uncovering political intrigues, solving urban mysteries, surviving harsh environments. Rarely did we face hordes of goblins. We would do something like go into a crypt, lure out the zombie minions, then sneak past them and take out the necromancer controlling them.

If we played wrong, it's because we were an isolated group in a small town in the South during the Satanic Panic. We did play a number of the adventures during that era, but they weren't like the modern OSR.

Even looking at an older adventure like The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, you can see how that is more investigative and concerned with thematic pacing than something like Keep on the Borderlands. I think that demonstrates the difference between how I played and how the OSR has developed.

 

[Mannahnin]

Maybe (if anyone cares) I can explain what my nostalgia was, and maybe that will inform the disconnect I have with Shadowdark and other games. If nothing else, it can show people coming here for a player's review of the system that I am an outlier, apparently.

I got into AD&D in the late 80s, post Hickman Revolution. I never played Basic/BX/AD&D1. Gygax was out of TSR. My experience was shaped by Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, and Dark Sun.

We didn't have large dungeons, ever. Most would fit the design of today's 5 Room Dungeons. XP was rewarded, not for finding gold, but from using your character's abilities to solve problems. Thieves were awarded for using their skills, clerics and wizards for casting their spells, fighters for fighting enemies, etc.

Our sessions were spent uncovering political intrigues, solving urban mysteries, surviving harsh environments. Rarely did we face hordes of goblins. We would do something like go into a crypt, lure out the zombie minions, then sneak past them and take out the necromancer controlling them.

If we played wrong, it's because we were an isolated group in a small town in the South during the Satanic Panic. We did play a number of the adventures during that era, but they weren't like the modern OSR.

Even looking at an older adventure like The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, you can see how that is more investigative and concerned with thematic pacing than something like Keep on the Borderlands. I think that demonstrates the difference between how I played and how the OSR has developed.

I don't think you played "wrong". I think NN identified correctly that you played AD&D in more Trad style, as opposed to most OSR being focused on Classic or a somewhat revisionist "new" OSR style of its own.

Six Cultures of Play

A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.

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Shadowdark does have a strong focus on dungeon play at base, especially stuff like the light rules. I think it more naturally lends itself to Classic play than to Trad, as with most OSR systems.

That's not to say that's the ONLY thing it can do. The new Kickstarter is a big overland hex crawl setting, after all. It does also have more forgiving rules for going to 0HP and surviving than any TSR edition.

Though in my experience in the 80s-90s period we're talking about, many Trad tables used a simple "death at -10HP, bleed at 1HP per round" house rule*, which tends to make it very unlikely for a character to die from simple damage until higher levels, because low level monsters are mostly incapable of doing 11+ points in a single round. Combine that with not targeting downed PCs, and a little fudging behind the screen to help ensure that you don't drop the whole party at once... And you get a recipe for PC death being relatively rare despite how the RAW TSR D&D rules make it really easy. If you were to return to 2E AD&D, I think you'll probably want to use some kind of death mitigation mechanic like this house rule.

*(There is an official Optional Rule called Hovering on Death's Door on page 75 of the 2E DMG which is similar, but I'm talking about a house rule which further softened it. By the book optional rule, if you hit zero or less the shock incapacitates you and automatically wipes all spells from your mind. Magical healing can only bring you to 1HP and conscious but incapable of action and barely able to move or talk, until you get a full day of rest or a Heal spell. But at the more action-focused tables I played at, we normally ignored all those lingering effects, as became standard in subsequent editions).

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

But back in the day, in my TSR memories, we didn't do dungeon crawls. We'd have 1-3 combats a day. My experience with Shadowdark at conventions (official Arcane Library adventures and GMs) were "monster hotels" that couldn't be avoided, negotiated, etc. My experience with it at a home game was an old TSR adventure that quickly overwhelmed us with random encounters. "You come to an intersection in a hallway. There's a hobgoblin squad there ready for ambush - you're all dead."

This sounds miserable regardless of system or edition of the game.

 

[Mannahnin]

My experience with Shadowdark at conventions (official Arcane Library adventures and GMs) were "monster hotels" that couldn't be avoided, negotiated, etc. My experience with it at a home game was an old TSR adventure that quickly overwhelmed us with random encounters. "You come to an intersection in a hallway. There's a hobgoblin squad there ready for ambush - you're all dead."

This sounds miserable regardless of system or edition of the game.

Indeed. The OP did specify that one of those GMs had never played or run the game before, tbf, and the other was a two hour slot described as lackluster rather than awful, but if it was a monster hotel with no negotiation, it wasn't being run by the book either.

The home game also evidently skipped reaction rolls, which are a key element both of Shadowdark and of B/X, which The Lost City was designed for.

 

[Retreater]

This sounds miserable regardless of system or edition of the game.

Yes. And this wasn't one of the convention games. It was being run by a GM who had been a player in my group going back to the AD&D 2E era. He has been running an ongoing Castles & Crusades campaign for about 2.5 years at this point. I don't know why he ran the encounters the way he did - causing us to have 3 TPKs in his single session.
We were talking last night and he said the lethality was because he was running it "by the book."

 

[Retreater]

The home game also evidently skipped reaction rolls, which are a key element both of Shadowdark and of B/X, which The Lost City was designed for.

Also - in the wisdom of that GM - he wanted to "skip to the good parts." This meant avoiding all the faction play on the upper tiers and just putting us in the dungeon, with no support from the factions, no knowledge of what was below, etc.
He's a great friend, but he did a bad job with this one.

 

[TiQuinn]

I really don’t know what we’re doing here any longer. Retreater didn’t like the game.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

I got into AD&D in the late 80s, post Hickman Revolution. I never played Basic/BX/AD&D1. Gygax was out of TSR. My experience was shaped by Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, and Dark Sun.

We didn't have large dungeons, ever. Most would fit the design of today's 5 Room Dungeons. XP was rewarded, not for finding gold, but from using your character's abilities to solve problems. Thieves were awarded for using their skills, clerics and wizards for casting their spells, fighters for fighting enemies, etc.

Our sessions were spent uncovering political intrigues, solving urban mysteries, surviving harsh environments. Rarely did we face hordes of goblins. We would do something like go into a crypt, lure out the zombie minions, then sneak past them and take out the necromancer controlling them.

I think the modern OSR is not built to deliver you this kind of experience. While you certainly CAN do this in OSR games with lots of houserules, its not a good starting spot.

Your best bet would be systems/adventures designed for trad play - either just actually playing 2e AD&D, or trying something like BRP/Runequest Classic, West End Games's D6, FUDGE, Dragonbane, or even Savage Worlds.

You'd be best served by a skills-first game with more of a focus on simulation, and less on empowering GM fiat.