Session 16
It's as they say: a weasel in the hand is worth two play reports in the blog, or something.
As you can see, eminently normal session, I only have two considerations. The first is that I don't really get how AD&D expects you to keep magic items secret if you have to give XP for them. I have a small rule that magic items tend to (but don't always) glow faintly so that you can always tell at a glance that something is magical, and that comes about because it seems really silly to me to only reveal that that longsword you picked up on room 35 is magical once you leave the dungeon because you're getting 500 XP for it. Unless it expects the DM to track all of the XP, but I ain't got time for that. It also seems very obvious to me when you get a good item and it gives a fuckton of XP, but you don't know what it does and still have to pay the tax to identify it. I just don't get what the game expects of me there.
The other is wow, running classed NPCs SUCKS. Each Set Deacon has a small handful of magic items, potions, and scrolls, and it took me a good 5 minutes of searching what each of their items did (I vaguely remembered the spells but I wasn't sure of the range and things of that kind) and thinking of how they would react appropriately.
D&D's main form of advancement is numbers increasing, sure, but the actual advancement comes through these "footnotes" your character accumulates, as anyone who's played it knows, and while that's fine for a single character, it gets really difficult to remember everything when the NPCs also follow those rules. At least in something like Mythras the little footnotes come from the system and apply uniformly such that you can get experience by running it and memorising everything, but in D&D you just have to accept that a 6th or 8th level fighting man will have a ton of little bullshit accumulated. And don't even get me started on adventuring parties.
Aside from that, I'm very glad the Weasels finally found out the fate of floor 2, which they utterly fucked by releasing a platoon of ghouls. I actually played through what would happen to a certain point, and I won't reveal much here, but I am very interested to see how the situation will evolve. They have reached the point which, as I told them, advancement isn't clear unless they actively start butting heads with the factions of the dungeon and destabilising the ecosystem for advancement, which can only result in good vibes and happiness I'm sure.
