Combat Sequence
...
A group of goblins. The fighter and cleric press themselves against the corridor wall as they approach. The magic-user stays 30 ft back as the enemies approach. The goblins notice the torchlight and approach warily, but the party is ready.
Attack!
The party wins the initiative. The Magic-user holds back for now, while the cleric and fighter jump into the fray. The fighter and cleric, seemingly moving as one, both throw themselves at goblin one, with the fighter hitting a lucky swipe. The goblin takes the blow, but gets back up, snarling at the Fighter.
The goblins split and attack the party. The fighter takes a hit to the arm, while the cleric dances through their swings.
The party gets another go, with the goblins falling behind. The magic-user, dropping the torch, readies a magic missile. The fighter and cleric strike out, but score no telling blows. While the magic missile hums through the air and hits Goblin 3 square in the face. Bloody and barely standing, it rushes towards the Magic-user. The cleric and fighter are able to defend the blows, and come rushing to the magic-user's aid.
With all of the goblins still standing, but mostly weakened, each party member takes one. The magic-user slashes goblin 3 with a dagger, dropping it before it can reciprocate. The cleric's mace bashes in another goblin, while the fighter is unable to score a telling blow.
Suddenly, Goblin 1 thrusts its sword in between The fighter's armor, who drops, bleeding on the floor. The cleric whips around, to see the Magic-User meeting the same fate, when all of a sudden, a cloud of dirt is thrown in The Cleric's eyes. When he clears his vision. He finds himself alone in the darkness.
I wanted to try running combat by-the-book for B/X using the rules here. This was done solo about 20 minutes ago, with 3 randomly generated characters forced into being the three classes. Usually, I do the initiative per round thing, and have the players do individual initiative, and I resolve them in order. I was never planning on having it be a post, but in classic OSR fashion, everything went wrong in an entertaining way.
Lessons:
- this is a thoroughly cool system. I like how structured it is, as well as having
- Post-it notes make great on-the-fly character sheets. I usually have a pad in my pocket as en every-day carry, so I could probably slap down some D&D whenever if I carried a small bag of dice.
- Sometimes you don't need all the accoutrement to enjoy D&D solo, just some dice and a good memory of combat sequence. Honestly, it's probably a great test of system knowledge if you can run it as minimally as possible exclusively from memory. In B/X, you really just need to know a character's class, level and AC (having a 5 or 4 isn't too uncommon at first level) to be able to function in combat, which is pretty neat.
- Writing without using pronouns in English is annoying. I hope it gave some mystique to the description, because it was kind of a pain.
- 日本語では、代名詞を使わずに書く方が簡単です。日本語には代名詞がありません。(I don't speak the language well enough to synthesize that. Thanks, Google Translate)