Saturday Night Spare Time Dungeon Crawling

Saturday night, I had some time to spend gaming and I set about testing an idea I had for a new random dungeon generator. You know, because there aren't enough of them already available on-line. 

This was my third test, and the first in which I tried to generate something larger than a handful of rooms. I was rather happy with the results - I generated two levels of a dungeon with multiple entrances/exits, and a variety of points up and down. In fact, of the two levels I generated, both have unconnected areas that can only be accessed by passing through the other level. 

I hope to finish the write-up and post it later this week.

I also managed to squeeze in a USR dungeon crawl to clarify for myself the pros and cons my approaches to magic with that system. Scott at The Trollish Devler, and author of USR, posted his thoughts on a magic system the other day - worth a look if you enjoy the game!

With regards to the dungeon crawl, I rolled up 3 characters (fighter, halfling and a magic user) and a hireling (using "shifted dice": a d6, d4, d3 rather than a d10, d8, d6) to enter the dungeon using USR and my b/x conversion. 

Rather than generating a map or using tiles or even using the method I posted last week, I closed my eyes and pulled a Rory's Story Cube from its bag, rolled it and then made up an encounter based on the image. Each encounter used a new cube. If I got through all nine, I'd have found the steps down.  

If I ran into any issues where I wasn't sure of something, I used the ever reliable 1d6 "yes and" method:

1 "Yes and" [fill in the blank]

2-3 "Yes, but" [fill in the blank]

4-5 "No, but" [fill in the blank]

6 - "No and" [fill in the blank]

I got through 6 encounters(to be fair, one of them was a totally peaceful encounter with some helpful treants) before I needed to pull the party out back to the base town. What loot they had gained was spent resurrecting the fighter (he was struck down by a stone golem) and healing. The party's halfling was the hero of the hour - deadly accurate with his bow -  while the magic-user was just about useless unless he was throwing his daggers (and he only had two of those!). 

The last point illustrated very clearly the potential problem with one of my approaches to magic!