Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition Playtest

For the rest of the month, Joe Hardin/Biggus Geekus, has disabled all commissions on Big Geek Emporium, meaning that creators publishing there keep all of the money they make. He also reduced the commission rate to 10% across the board awhile back, whether or not you decide to publish exclusively on BGE (not that there is an exclusivity contract).

Something for content creators to consider.

We managed to get in a playtesting session a few nights ago. The dungeon layout and its denizens were largely randomized: this would reduce bias on my part and make things more unpredictable in terms of encounter lethality. The party consisted of a trio of nameless humans: a barbarian, cleric, and nomad, each tweaked in some fashion in accordance with the new 2nd Edition rules.

PLAY REPORT

Going down the first passage, the barbarian triggered a spiked pit trap. She succeeded on her Dexterity save to avoid it, but due to her revised Hawk Totem Talent wouldn't have suffered any damage, anyway.

The first room contained a well-hidden darkmantle. It didn't make its presence known until the party was in the room, after which it descended upon the barbarian since she was closest and making the most noise. This sparked a somewhat hilarious fight (for me, anyway), as the players rolled horribly and kept accidentally striking the barbarian.

It took their combined effort to rip the darkmantle off the barbarian's head, and it was finally slain while attempting to escape. The only reason the barbarian survived was due to her Thick-Skinned class feature, which let her shave 2 points of damage off of every attack regardless of the attack roll: any other character would have certainly died.

This is a shame, because we've only used the Dead Man Walking rules in another game once.

The party eventually came across a room filled with bat shit. One of them threw a torch inside to see what else was there, which ignited the pile and incinerated all of the bats as they panicked and tried to escape. So, not really a fight, but they earned some XP for inadvertently killing what would have been a hostile bat swarm.

The last fight of the night was against a trio of giant, man-sized centipedes. The players were once again plagued with bad luck, and the barbarian almost died again when the centipedes ganged up on her. This time her DR wasn't enough to stave off attacks from three enemies at once (a few bites were completely soaked, however), and the cleric had to start laying on the heals. She also had to use Cleansing Touch at the end of combat to get rid of the centipede venom.

The cleric's Favor nearly depleted, the party barricaded a door and used wood from another one to keep a fire going while they rested. The healing rules haven't changed much, so the cleric used a healer's kit on the barbarian to stave off infection and up her Wound Recovery by 1; in the end everyone recovered only 1 or 2 points for resting in a dungeon environment.

For their efforts, so far they've each got around 60 or so XP, and are now lugging around bags brimming with various monster organs, venom sacs, and chitinous plates. If they can get back to town before they spoil, they'll be worth something (note to self, create an alchemical substance that preserves monster parts for prolonged storage and travel).

DESIGNER'S NOTE

There was effectively no "plot" as this was intended to be a rules playtest, to see if the kids could remember things and determine whether the new/modified rules were too complex, especially the Defense/DR/Armor Class mechanics.

Unfortunately, the only one that got attacked was the barbarian, and since she has built-in DR that can't be bypassed by rolling really high, we didn't get to test that out at all. They're only about a third of the way through the dungeon, so there's still time to beat up someone else. And if not we'll just swap that character out.

Ganging Up is unchanged and was incredibly useful in helping a few characters land hits. It was also useful for the centipedes as they swarmed the barbarian.

"Overhitting" is where you deal +1 damage for every 5 points you exceed a creature's Defense. Useful, but due to bad rolls I think it only happened one time, for like +1 damage.

The darkmantle and centipedes had body-wide DR, meaning that exceedingly high hits wouldn't overcome their DR. The DR wasn't terribly high (only 1-3 points), so it was largely mitigated by Armor Penetrating weapons and "overhitting". 

The nomad used no psionics the entire time, purely because of the powers chosen (Burst and Wormhole). I'm fine with this, as he was still able to contribute with a heavy crossbow and sword, anyway. They came across a portcullis that they couldn't figure out to open, and I should remind the player that he has a very short range Teleport that works so long as he has at least 1 Power Point available (Wormhole would also work, and let everyone through).