The Arden Vul Weasels - Session 5
I love the Arden Vul sub-levels lmao
As WW said. they got out of the dungeon after trudging through an extremely perilous series of tunnels which are as dangerous as they are maze-like. I didn't even have to tell them this, they just sorta knew. It was incredibly funny to see them getting progressively more unhinged as it dawned on them that Yeah, Arden Vul Keeps Going.
I am glad though, I was a bit anxious that we would have a TPK this session. There are so many encounters which are either unintelligent or attack ON THE SPOT, but they managed to avoid them through a world of luck, since they couldn't really make informed decisions due to the limitation of their light.
At the end of the session we got to OSRIC's 1500 gp per level up and it had me wondering if Richard Barton used silver standard or something, because I just can't see his players levelling up with traditional AD&D costs and XP division with the ratio of treasure he's put in the dungeon.
Having already decided to not divide XP - as I am a believer that the XP values given in those old books assume gamers who play way more often than I do and I do intend to see high-level play eventually - I also decided to chop a 0 from that cost and say it's actually 150 gp per level you have. I initially said it was 75 but thought better of it once I started making the math. Most of the group now has enough XP to get to level 5, but not the money or trainers to do so.
Next session they'll be exploring Gosterwick, so I'm excited for that. A town session, less adventure intensive, to give them some time to breathe and recover, and potentially even timeskipping as they'll need to take some time to train.
I expect XP acquisition will severely slow down, since a big part of why they got so much XP was because of my using the OD&D rule of adjusting XP based on party level, except I also adjust upwards, so they got 3x the amount of XP for deceiving the large albino baboons. This will go down as they level up (in fact, the baboons are 3 HD, they'll get less XP for them than usual) so I imagine things will likely plateau at level 5 as gains will become incremental, and paying for training will become a bigger investment.
Players suffered a lot. Huge success.