Back to the dungeon

 

For me, running a role-playing game feels a lot like taking a case to trial: I'm thinking on my feet, remembering obscure rules, and trying to juggle a half-dozen events at the same time.  I enjoy that feeling when all is going well--but when things don't go as planned, I start second-guessing myself; wondering what I could have done better. 

This past weekend, the stars aligned and I had folks over to do some more dungeon crawling, two months after my first attempt at DMing the Holmes basic D&D rules.  I had five players this time: Coach, Rickey, John, and Chris took part in the first session, and Chris brought his friend Jon, who was visiting from out of town.  After taking about 60 seconds to roll up a character for the newcomer (a dwarf called Evard Barrelbrain (favorite song: Barrels of Beer)) to join the rest of the group (Fred the fighter, Colnis the fighter, Acronus the cleric and Evaro IV the elf), the adventurers proceeded back into the dungeon. 

Heading down an unexplored corridor, the adventurers came to a room with nightmarish, Bosch-like murals that caused nearly everyone to flee in fear.  I liked the players' creativity in getting past the terror-inducing illustrations: They extinguished their torches and had the dwarf and elf use their infravision to guide the party through the room with the hellish murals. 

They then went through another corridor to a large room, an evil shrine of some sort.  Lured to the black altar on a dias on one wall, waves of palpable evil caused the elf to run from the room as the dwarf (with a wisdom of 3) decided to examine the non-Euclidan geometry carved into the object.  Touching the altar caused three ghouls to appear.  They quickly shredded the hapless dwarf and began feasting on him as the cleric attempted to turn the undead creatures.  Unfortunately, the roll of 10 was 1 shy of what a first-level acolyte needs to turn ghouls.  The rest of the group moved in and managed to dispatch one of the carrion eaters, but the sharp claws and teeth of the remaining pair of undead ripped the two fighters and the cleric to pieces.  The elf, who came to his senses at the base of the stairs to the surface, hightailed it out of there.

A few minutes and a few dice rolls later, Evaro had recruited a new group to tackle the dungeon: the fighter Fred II played by Coach, Jon's cleric Father Pius, Rickey's thief Alaric, and John's dwarf Derric Elderbeard.  Determined to recover the bodies (and loot) of the slain adventurers, they made their way past the fear-inducing murals and back into the shrine.  The chamber now contained four zombies (one noticeably shorter than the others--these were the bodies of the characters; corpses left in this dungeon tend to get up and walk off).  The group stayed in the doorway and used missile fire and flaming oil to dispose of the undead (and any items their former comrades had left on their bodies).  They wisely decided to avoid the evil altar this time.

Heartened by their success, the group pressed on to explore more of the dungeon.  But they made a couple of mistakes: They didn't bother to listen at a door before trying to open it.  And they didn't get it opened on the first try, alerting the five orcs waiting on the other side.  With surprise and numbers on their side, the orcs quickly dropped the dwarf, as well as the elf (who so far had been the longest-lived character of this campaign, if you can call it that).  The remaining three adventurers fled, with the orcs chasing them (I rolled that they would not even bother to stop and loot the bodies of the elf and dwarf).  Luckily for the fighter, cleric and thief, the orcs stopped at the door to the shrine.  Unfortunately for the survivors, the elf had been carrying scrolls of Sleep and Charm Person that the elf made using the Holmes scroll rules.

So the group returned (with Evaro V and Derric Elderbeard Jr.) and took out the orcs with a memorized Sleep spell.  They even defeated some reinforcements, got a few coins from their vanquished foes, and recovered the spell scrolls.  But instead of sticking around to search for treasure (who knows what they would have found), they retreated to the surface.  It was mainly because the players needed to go, so we ended the session there.  Everyone said they had a good time.  So why am I not satisfied with this session?

I'm bummed that there was the equivalent of a total party kill.  Everyone lost at least one character over the course of the day, and one player lost two.  Seeing the dungeon inhabitants take out the PCs so easily makes me feel bad.  Most everyone has at least a 40 minute drive to get to my place, and one guy drove for way more than an hour.  I don't know how much fun it is to put all that effort to join a game and then have your character killed so easily; and I hope I haven't run anybody off.  I didn't think I was running a killer dungeon, and I hope I didn't come across as too much of a dick with my DMing style.  I want my players to come back.

Maybe I should have rolled for reaction from the orcs, even though I figured that when they heard multiple attempts to bash their door in, they'd fight (and I did have some orcs flee after their fellows were cut down).  If there's a next time, I'll try to do better.  I hope that just like players (or lawyers), DMs can learn from their experiences.