How do you play LL?

[mightyeroc]

Hello!

We just tried LL the other night and had a fun but very challenging evening. The dungeon was the example cave full of morlocks from the LL book, and we had not read the AEC at the time yet.

Questions:
1 -Do you use the Wilderness random encounter table for your lvl 1 characters? On their way to the dungeon hey encountered 20 brigands who robbed them and almost killed one of them the first that happended. Adter that they saw a Giant Rock who didnt notice them (surprise on 1-2) and they hid. On the way home from the dungeon they encountered 2 sable tooth tigers but got good on a reaction roll so they could sneak away, but was only hours from the village attacked by 12 griffons who killed most of them (a few snuck off when the griffons ate the horses). Four rolls for encounters per day in mountan terrain! All of them too much for a lvl 1! Really hard to survive that.

2 -Do you use the random encounter table when in the dungeons for lvl 1:s? On got eaten by the green slime, but otherwise they survived most of the stationary enemies in the dungeon - when they met a random encounter of 9 orcs (I changed to more morlocks) on their way out, two got killed, one captured and two hid in the secret room and snuck out after. Also a bit hard with 2d6 enemies. Or?

3 -When you do reaction rolls, do you let everybodys charisma modifiers count together, or do you just use the best or something? They were quite charismatic so they got +7 together which was a bit much.

4 -do you give xp if they successfully sneak off from these high-level encounters? No fighting, just hiding or stuff like that?

We did like it with really hard encounters though, so next time I think I'll let them start with lvl 3 characters, and have a few less rolls for encounters per day.

1. I do use the wilderness encounter chart as is, but I have substituted a few creatures with some of my own. I also make a day time/night time chart for the wilderness.
2. I usually make my own dungeon random encounter chart, but will use the one from the book on the fly.
3. I use the best Charisma modifier for the group as a whole, unless a particular player does something really good role-play wise. Good banter or a witty remark trumps dice rolling, if you get me laughing or whatever then that is the reaction of the monsters/baddies etc...
4. Yes they get XP for being wise enough to know when something could totally TPK them and they avoid it.

[Gnarri]

Yes, my memories of my first year of gaming are of a succession of 1st level characters for everyone in the group. One of my characters, a thief (I mostly played thieves) was the first to make it to 2nd level but he promptly got knocked down to 1st again by a wight. Nevertheless, it never occurred to us that there was anything wrong, we just kept trying harder and harder to "beat" those difficult encounters and eventually we learned how. The referee never "cheated", he was as new to the game as we were and we all played by-the-book as we understood it. I'm pretty sure we understood it correctly as B/X is still the benchmark for clarity in my book.

Yep after 4 sessions we have a heap of discarded character sheets, 11 PC:s and 5 henchmen. There is one fighter that has survived both dungeons (a history of yielding and good Cha, but now she´s quite badass at lvl 4). Another elf was also a veteran but was turned to stone by a medusa in todays session, most of the others have their fourth characters now.

We sort of wanted the ”vietnam war of fantasy” mentioned in the wikipedia article about LL, and we have succeeded I think. Today, a new M-U found the party in the camp outside the dungeon with 5 corpses under blankets next to the treasure heap. Was a bit of fun roleplaying.

In the last session a form of despair came to one player who´s characters have died all the time so he never reached lvl 2. We decided to use a variation of the rule that the new PC gets half the old ones xp. In this session, half of all xp:s earned by the character belongs to the player, as a permanent minimum of how low he must start with his next character. So that even if his character dies 3 times in a row, he still has not really loosed anything. He also gets xp from the battles he has died in (player gets half). This rule worked out well, no despair around the table but only hysterical laughter when they died.

Also, they figured that they could hire mercenaries to escort them through the wilderness, really cheap (3 gp per guy, for a month!). They got 8. First I was pretty sure I was gonna let the mercs rob them, but they gave fair shares of the treasure so they got quite high morale in the end. However, I let the mercs get a half share of the xp from wilderness-encounters so that its not a completely painfree arrangement.

1. I do use the wilderness encounter chart as is, but I have substituted a few creatures with some of my own. I also make a day time/night time chart for the wilderness.

How did your players survive in the beginning? We started with some homemade hex-crawl rules, so that you roll for every hex you enter and then once for the night. The point with it is to give a bit of consistency, so that they get attacked by the same foes again if they go to the same area, and also that routes with no meetings will be safer and safer the more you walk them (so that new terrain is more intresting than old paths). Any of you having any rules for random hex-crawls?

[jrodman]

B/X fairly typically started off with no wilderness. The Moldvoy basic rules didn't even have any rules for wilderness at all, and most of those wilderness monsters you're rolling up that are deadly to your characters weren't even in the book either. It wasn't until you got the expert set (Marsh/Cook) for levels 4+ that the wilderness and all its dangers were revealed.

The result is that most basic adventures had travel off-camera, or the dungeon was very close to their starter town/etc. As for how campaigns played it, I think back then the idea of campaigns were very hazy, where continuity often did not exist.

As for how to play the wilderness in your campaign for low level players. You could let them travel as part of armed caravans from town to town, perhaps earning some money in the process, but having the safety of many other additional guards to survive encounters. Maybe encounters on the road are far fewer. Or you could rule that whatever guide they hire to get to the dungeon/etc knows the lay of the land and can reduce the chance of dangerous encounters. Or you could play it the way you have been so far.

Of course even starter dungeons are plenty deadly if you have 2 hitpoints.

If your party is getting to be around average level 4, then the rolled encounters in woods and such are probably frequently manageable, though oceangoing ones or swamp ones may still be over their heads.

[jrodman]

To address your starter hex crawl -- I would suggest you create your own tables that match your vague ideas of what's going on in those parts of the world. Don't be afraid to update them based your updating ideas as the story progresses or as the players express their expectations.

If you're doing the sandbox inside-out style where you start with just one town and let the world unfold as people visit it, then the advice I've encountered is to build out one playsession ahead of the party, and no more, and let the play guide what else exists. If you're doing a prebuilt world or world area, then I'd plop down a bunch of factions on a map both friendly and hostile to the player races and quickly expose them to several major things going on.. The giants are taking land, the Northern Empire has a civil war going on, the southern peninsula is sinking, and the King's son has been abducted. Or whatever, and create tables for all the regions that are within a few day's travel or that the players might be likely to go towards based on the things they've picked up in their starting point.

[Gnarri]

B/X fairly typically started off with no wilderness. The Moldvoy basic rules didn't even have any rules for wilderness at all, and most of those wilderness monsters you're rolling up that are deadly to your characters weren't even in the book either. It wasn't until you got the expert set (Marsh/Cook) for levels 4+ that the wilderness and all its dangers were revealed.

The result is that most basic adventures had travel off-camera, or the dungeon was very close to their starter town/etc. As for how campaigns played it, I think back then the idea of campaigns were very hazy, where continuity often did not exist.

As for how to play the wilderness in your campaign for low level players. You could let them travel as part of armed caravans from town to town, perhaps earning some money in the process, but having the safety of many other additional guards to survive encounters. Maybe encounters on the road are far fewer. Or you could rule that whatever guide they hire to get to the dungeon/etc knows the lay of the land and can reduce the chance of dangerous encounters. Or you could play it the way you have been so far.

Of course even starter dungeons are plenty deadly if you have 2 hitpoints.

If your party is getting to be around average level 4, then the rolled encounters in woods and such are probably frequently manageable, though oceangoing ones or swamp ones may still be over their heads.

That history-lesson explains a lot! Basically, the ones buying the expert set would already have high level characters, so the tables were never meant to be used for lvl 1 characters? I thought that it perhaps had something to do with the connection to the Chainmail mass battle system, that PC:s were supposed to have vast numbers of men-at-arms escorting them through the wilderness, so that meeting 1d100+200 brigands is completely reasonable. What do you think about that?

The tables do play out better now when they have a couple of mercs with them and are lvl 2-4.

To address your starter hex crawl -- I would suggest you create your own tables that match your vague ideas of what's going on in those parts of the world. Don't be afraid to update them based your updating ideas as the story progresses or as the players express their expectations.

If you're doing the sandbox inside-out style where you start with just one town and let the world unfold as people visit it, then the advice I've encountered is to build out one playsession ahead of the party, and no more, and let the play guide what else exists. If you're doing a prebuilt world or world area, then I'd plop down a bunch of factions on a map both friendly and hostile to the player races and quickly expose them to several major things going on.. The giants are taking land, the Northern Empire has a civil war going on, the southern peninsula is sinking, and the King's son has been abducted. Or whatever, and create tables for all the regions that are within a few day's travel or that the players might be likely to go towards based on the things they've picked up in their starting point.

Yes it's the expanding version, a village with securered hexes around (as in the stronghold rules), and a big city a couple of days away. The first two dungeons was in hills to the north, but we placed Caverns of Thracia in a forest area a couple of days south. In the campaign, the dungeons are deep in the dangerous wild areas were no-one venture, sort of to explain why they are not pacified by civilization already, and why there's crazy tables for wandering monsters around them.

How would you do with petrified characters? There is some spell to return-to-flesh right? How much would they have to pay a M-U (or Cleric?) in the city to cast it? And at what level would you start to consider Raise Dead to be an option? What would they have to pay if they could not cast it themselves?