Scribe
Legend
The Wavestone Monolith | tenfootpole.org
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Shadowdark Finally Played Shadowdark
- Thread starter Retreater
- Start date
tenfootpole.org
I agree with all your points, but in the best tradition of the Internet, I have a small nitpick. MM does 1d6+1 in Basic. As a nerd, I automatically fail my saves vs useless pedantry.,
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Edited to fix! I bow to your recollection! I was evidently confusing it with AD&D at that moment.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Doctor Futurity
Hero
Just a quick comment that I ran a campaign of Shadowdark earlier this year and had a monumentally different experience than the OP. The stories I am hearing about its lethality are jarringly at odds with my own experience, I am beginning to wonder if the GMs running the game are missing the rules on encounter design in the core rules or something. I know of another local group that was experiencing high lethality, and when I mentioned the encounter design rules and where to identify monster levels in their stat blocks the GM was completely shocked to realize this was a thing. (EDIT: I actually suspect the base familiarity of the rules, mixed with their extreme brevity, trips up a lot of people who overlook things, leading to some false assumptions from how other D&D-likes run, and missing some important but very simplistically spelled out underlying design decisions in the Shadowdark core).
As for the rest of the OP, I ran the game by the book (except for running the game in a more traditional format in terms of turns and pacing) and it ran quite smoothly. We started at level 1, no one had any unplayable characters or even difficulty getting at least an average stat range, and it went quite well. I have my issues with Shadowdark, but its playability isn't one of them.
As for the rest of the OP, I ran the game by the book (except for running the game in a more traditional format in terms of turns and pacing) and it ran quite smoothly. We started at level 1, no one had any unplayable characters or even difficulty getting at least an average stat range, and it went quite well. I have my issues with Shadowdark, but its playability isn't one of them.
Doctor Futurity
Hero
Crud double post!
I'll comment on the three games I played.
Con Game 1: was designed and run through Lurking Fears. I think they're something of the official organized play because they work directly with Arcane Library. It wasn't a "bad"session. Just a mediocre dungeon hack with lots of monsters to fight. I played a thief, so I didn't interact with the magic system.
Con Game 2: also run by Lurking Fears. I played the awful pregen wizard with one attack spell, basically no bonus to casting aside from Intelligence. It was run by someone who had never read the adventure or GMed Shadowdark. We were given no clues to what was ahead (probably because the GM was running it as she read it for the first time). Got overwhelmed, no details, mindless "you swing, miss, you swing, miss" for two hours.
Home Game: my friend ran us through a "converted on the fly" mega session of the Lost City. We had 4 TPKs. He used no morale, reaction rolls, foreshadowing, factions, luck tokens.
The awful thing is that Con Game 2 included my wife, who never wants to try an OSR game again. The Home Game included a player who excitedly bought Shadow Dark beforehand and now says "it's just going to gather dust on my shelf - I'll never want to play that again."
Scribe
Legend
A shame you have not corrected their misconceptions based on plainly horrible DMs who didnt have a clue.
I will say however based on your various post campaign threads, any OSR game is a bad match for your wife.
Doctor Futurity
Hero
Yeah I can see how the two con games were epic fails. The home game sounds like it could have benefitted from some scrutiny on the choice of module....I've run the Lost City as well, though I did it long ago as a PF1E hack.
The main difference (and it probably matters) is I did my own series of modules for a short campaign that went for about five levels. I built them from the ground up according to the suggested design rules, and leaned on the reaction tables for guidance on whether an encounter was going to turn south or not. I was (probably being an old, kind GM) liberal in providing the players with an escape opportunity if they realized they were in over their heads (and they had at least two encounters where that became clear....in fact a single encounter with a troll was a near TPK averted through som judicious dice rolling). None of the spell casters ever seemed to fail their checks (to which I raised an eyebrow on that, but sometimes luck does win out); to contrast, the other group I know of seemed to have atrocious luck, with the spellcasters usually failing on their very first roll. So this element.....the potential severe swinginess in the magic system, is an example of where I feel the system can lead to a bad experience. I was entertaining some homebrew ideas on how to fix that, but then in actual play it didn't ever impact my group (though it definitely made me question their unusual die rolling luck).
