After working on my 1:1 time-focused VTT application hand-coded in C with only Raylib as a dependency for the last 4 months, I was finally ready to do a live test with real players and get a campaign started.
The software immediately failed to start a new session (for the purpose of tracking time+location) properly, and was reduced to being a fancy map and notes app for myself… Of course.
The actual game was quite fun. Literally no-one in the group had played AD&D 1e before. (I have “played” as a faction player in UMBROS only). But I gave my players good instructions, and I had prepped a number of locations they might want to visit, and things actually seemed to kind of work.
(Obvious) your players will immediately go somewhere you haven’t really prepped, even if they initially try to pursue some thread you had prepped.
Theatre of the mind >>> roll20 battle map grid bullshit
If you’re gonna make them travel through the wilderness… make sure you have the encounter checks and wilderness tables ready to go
The players went for the #rumor that directly promised G.P. to do a task. So yeah, obviously I should have prepped for that rumor better since low-level PCs only want cash.
Forcing them to elect a “caller” worked well.
I’m gonna need to make sure they are doing encumbrance right.
My software’s 216-36-6-1 mile hex nesting is off… The 1 mile hexes are too small for typical wilderness exploration. Occasionally you might want to “zoom in” to that small (or even smaller) of a field of view in order to craw the hexes explicitly, but the features for doing that should just be a new feature that is opted into on a hex-by-hex basis. The “smallest” default hex should just be 6mile, I think.
We played a short session from 8pm to 10pm. Barely enough time to do anything, so I encouraged them to decide what they wanted to do before play started, like Gary suggests, and they did, and it definitely helped. We had 3 PCs initially: Fighter, Thief, Assassin, all level 1.
They talked to Lord Guthrie, aging Fighter acting as ruling local noble over the town of Fornost, about helping find the missing merchant caravan he was expecting. They spent a day in town hiring a hunter to show them around the local forest and reduce their chance of getting lost. They declined to hire any other mercs which I thought was a mistake, but seemed to work out for them in the end.
They left town the morning of Aug 10, and wandered through the woods for most of a day without encountering anything. Dice were being nice I guess. Finally they got lost a little bit as they left the edge of the forest that the hunter could guide them through, and they ran right into the site of a few days-old battle, with some wrecked and burned wagons. There was not a lot of corpses, and they found some tracks leading away, which they followed. The tracks went back sort of the way they came until they were in an area that the hired-hunter recognized. They camped for the night, set watches, and… 4 encounter checks later, nothing happened.
They followed the trail the next morning to the large lake south of town, and the trail scooted along the edge of the lake before once again going into the woods. They eventually come upon the hill holding the ruins of a crumbling monastery where the merchant caravan is holed up! They introduce themselves, and promise to lead the caravan back to town in the morning. At this point, the 4th player wanders in, a Cleric who was searching for the local religious sites (this is the most hand-wavy thing I did, but it at least thematically made sense).
They hear about a Stuck Door in the monastery ruins, and the 18/50 Strength Fighter busts it open, revealing a partially caved-in wine cellar with 3 big barrels of drinkable wine! The men move the barrels, revealing a trapdoor. The adventurers go into the door.
It’s a dungeon I haven’t prepped at all, so I quickly try to generate something. They pass through a few basically empty rooms, and manage to disarm a wicked Pendulum trap which would have dealt 5d6 damage and killed one of them for sure. Probably too mean of a trap, but it was avoided through careful play.
They then immediately proceeded to un-carefully force open a Stuck Door and attract the attention of some Wandering Kobolds. Quick thinking had them close the door behind them and lay a bear trap in preparation. The Kobolds found them, and were surprised by the bear trap, and Combat began. It took a little while for us to figure out the groove, with the Cleric setting off a bless on people who were already in melee combat (doesn’t take effect) but eventually enough Kobolds were killed that a morale check was called for. Kobolds failed the check and surrendered, giving some cp as tribute.
PCs quickly backtracked a bit and somewhat luckily found the staircase leading out into the woods a little ways off the side of the hill the monastery was on. The next day they lead the merchant caravan back home, with (yet again) no encounters. Lucky!