Well, I gave solo-gaming a try. I decided to let The Amazing Sigbald have a short dungeon-jaunt. The parameters were that I would use the standard campaign rules for hirelings, and the DMG random dungeon rules, which were made for solo play.
I couldn't catch a break on hiring NPC's. The squad of bandits I really wanted, and the wizard and the fighter-mu, who would have done, all refused to join up. I had a +1 charisma bonus, so I only needed to roll a 6 or better on a d20 for each one, but no, the only guy who joined up with me was Old Witherspoon the Alchemist. Witherspoon had nothing going for him except a fairly large store of hit points (4d4, and I somehow rolled maximum).
The first random dungeon we went into was all weird and full of dead ends. We could have climbed down a "Chimney 2 levels down" but that seemed like complete suicide. So, we had to leave.
The second dungeon was a little better at first, but then we hit a "trap" which was a wall sliding to cut us off from behind. We were then trapped in the dungeon and had to keep going forward until we found a way out. We entered a chamber and were attacked by piercers. Here our terrible magic-user attack rolls, and the piercers' high AC (3) really punished us. WItherspoon notched his dagger, I dropped mine. My summoned Guardian did alright, killing the weaker one, and taking a few blows, but we eventually were all killed. I thought about running, but we were trapped, and there was nowhere to run.
I was a little surprised, I actually had been afraid that Sigbald was going to be more useless than he was. A little bit of luck going my way, might have pulled the thing out.
As the man said, blank character sheets, like life, are cheap.
That sounds a lot like the 'background' one of the guys in KODT rolled up for their character in 'Dawg: The Role-Playing Game'. Literally they rolled that the dog got euthanized before the game started.
ReplyDeleteI loot the body!