Light thoughts on Tonight's Game

Ran a game tonight. Just two players, but I'm hoping for two more next week. We'll see what happens.

An idea that I got during the game from the chatter of my players: a pool that can imbue mundane items with magic. Like, say, you dip your crowbar in the pool and now it's a Crowbar of Returning. You can throw it in combat and it'll come back to you. (Also, roll under your Dex or it'll hit you in the face.) Or choose some other magic effect, make sure it isn't too useful, or that it can have drawbacks so the PCs won't dip absolutely everything in it, and put it in a lower level of your dungeon: instant fun thing for your players to mess with.

One of my player's magic-user elf character died tonight in a fight with giant centipedes. They only had 1-2 hit points and had poison that (if a save at +4 was failed) crippled for 1d4 rounds, but there were eight centipedes to two PCs. A fighter, with the ability to make another attack whenever an enemy with less than a full hit die is killed, would have been really helpful for them to have. Using flaming oil earlier would have helped too. The nice thing is that she's still interested in using a magic user, something that is new to my players, who haven't been interested in them until very lately. Magic users are probably my favorite class to play, so it's nice to see them played by my players, especially since it means that I get to see some of the thought I've put into magic users actually used in my games.

So far that means that I gave my player her choice of having her magic user be a member of the Order of the Green Hand, have gone to a magic academy or be apprenticed to a higher-level magic user. She chose to have her PC apprenticed, so I'm going to have to roll up a master for her her character. Cool.

I'm going to have to do some more mapping this next week, as my players have almost reached the end of my mapped territory. Having dungeon dressing, the results of just a few random rolls per room, really, really slows them down. Perhaps wandering monsters will teach them to speed up, but none of my rolls this session brought any wandering monsters there way. Oh well, there's always next time. If they'd gone any faster, they would have hit the end of what I've got mapped, so it all worked out for the best.

But, yeah, dungeon dressing is definitely a must for a megadungeon. It slows the party down and also gives them lots of things to use in the dungeon as tools. For example, the main entrance of the dungeon is guarded by a bunch of kobolds that charge a toll of any who enter and one PC tried to get on their good side by giving them some mice that he found in the dungeon. The PCs are also deathly afraid of a mirror I left out in the middle of one of the rooms. It's mundane and harmless, but they're so afraid of cursed items (after one character went for maybe a month with Buck's Hat of Misery on her head last year) that, though they added it to their inventory, both of them took pains not to look in the mirror. Lots of fun.

And that's what roleplaying's about: fun with friends.