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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 9732775" data-attributes="member: 10738">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.</blockquote>