Dungeon-crawling

Two adventuring lizardmen confront a troll

Yesterday afternoon, I ran a simple dungeon-bash for my kids. My ulterior motive was to test out some of the tweaks I've been toying with for Whitehack (shields, defensive fighting and combat priorities). I also wanted to try something resolutely old-school: multiple PCs per player.

As it turned out, we only had one player, at least to begin with: my son, who took charge of three lizardmen fighters (the strong in Whitehack terms). My daughter soon joined in, though, to play the monsters.

For speed and expediency, I laid out dungeon tiles in advance, the pretext being that the lizardmen had a map of the complex, now occupied by a villainous rakshasa who had stolen treasures from their tribe. So they knew the layout but not what lurked within it. Their aim was to retrieve two treasures, as well as some of the rare fungus that grew in the caves to which the complex was connected.

After an initial skirmish with the rakshasa's pig-faced orcish servants, in which one of the PCs was killed, and narrow avoidance of a basilisk, the surviving lizardmen raised a portcullis to enter a troll's den in search of fungus.

To my daughter's delight and my son's dismay, the troll regenerated in classic Poul Anderson fashion (it also said "Hooo!" a lot). It made short work of one lizardman, while the other grabbed the fungus and retreated. But then my son hit upon a scheme; he lured the troll away from devouring his friend's carcass and dropped the portcullis on it. That allowed him to escape while the impaled troll set about dismembering and reconfiguring itself to squirm out from under the spikes.

By the time the surviving lizardman was rescuing the first stolen treasure from a brace of gnolls, the troll was on his trail. But he was able to manoeuvre the gnolls into its path, and then skirted round a table to investigate the rakshasa's throne room. The rakshasa - I used an old Grenadier elephant version - attacked, but was then confronted by the troll. I wasn't using the Monster Manual profile for the rakshasa; he was merely an exotic-looking bad guy; and the troll eventually destroyed him (the children battled it out as the monsters while the lizardman looked on). All that remained was for the lizardman to provoke the troll with a pit (the monsters' latrine) at his back, then sidestep at the last moment - thus plunging the troll, after a failed DEX check, into the murky depths.

It was a blast - D&D stripped back to its basics. It confirmed something I've often thought: that the  quest for a perfect"dungeon-crawler" boardgame is a bit of a wild-goose chase, because a boardgame just can't measure up to the flexibility of an RPG and the resourcefulness of the players.

Having one player run three PCs worked fine too - though it helped that all three had the same goals and motivation. I think that's probably the best way to proceed: each set of PCs should be thematically linked: a wizard and his sworn bodyguards; three nest-brothers of Black Swamp tribe; a burglar and his apprentices.