Shadowdark Shadowdark General Thread [+]

[Bill Zebub]

I've been listening to the mastering dungeons podcast and they mentioned that in the old school days (specifically around Village of Homlet time) people wouldn't just have one character, but two characters. Has anyone tried this for the lower level side of Shadowdark? I think if I remember right it's mentioned doing this in Gauntlets, but I'm thinking of into the early levels.

Frequently when playing with my two sons (including earlier today) they run two characters each.

 

[Emerikol]

In the old days 9 characters was commonplace in the literature. I rarely had that many. We have on occasion played multiple characters per player. Probably not best though for new players. I think many games assume more characters than people actually have and thus the TPKs.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Unlike TSR dnd, kelsey specifically designed Shadowdark to work better for smaller parties. Notably - the game lacks rules for hirelings/retainers, overland mercenaries, and lacks the extremely high "number appearing" stat on its monsters.

You shouldn't need more than 1 pc per player unless you only have 1 or 2 players.

 

[numtini]

We regularly play 2 characters in one of the DCC games I'm in and I'm not a big fan of it long term. It tends to reduce identification with the character and turns it more into a war game sort of feeling. I find that I tend to identify with one character and it feels more or less like I'm playing one character and running the other one--if that distinction makes any sense.

 

[Bill Zebub]

We regularly play 2 characters in one of the DCC games I'm in and I'm not a big fan of it long term. It tends to reduce identification with the character and turns it more into a war game sort of feeling. I find that I tend to identify with one character and it feels more or less like I'm playing one character and running the other one--if that distinction makes any sense.

Yeah, that too. We run two characters out of a sense of necessity, but players don't identify in the same way. They don't 'inhabit' a single character.

Slightly off topic, but I want to point out that running small parties is hard because the swinginess of combat RNG increases with fewer participants and fewer dice rolls. Even if you reduce the challenge by cutting the opponents in half, there is a much greater chance of a TPK, or of boring/trivialized victory, because one side or the other gets lucky.