OSE: Personal Session 0

The Tomes showed up and I am starting up on trying to grok the rules and all that. While pretty familiar with Traveller and The Fantasy Trip after years of play, and picking up various microlite games as they play mostly along the same fairly simple principles. Old School Essentials is, as it says, old school. Meaning that the rules are based more on classes and races and so each has its own set of ways to change things around. Come to think of it, it is exactly how a lot of games play: you have the core rules that apply, then specific cards or whatever change/bend/break the rules. Thinking of Cosmic Encounter here. I actually have the original game (though missing many of the pieces) with a lot of the expansions, as well as the Fantasy Flight version (no expansions. Yet). Anyway, same sort of thing: classes and races give bonuses (and sometimes detriments) to the way you play.

Anyways...rolling up some characters as I want to run them through a small game to see how to stock the dungeons so it is not instant party kill. Though actually the 1st adventure is the mansion / headquarters from 0-Hr: just replacing the elevators with stairs or ladders, and anything SF can be ignored.

There is also the underground lair, but we'll leave that for the next scenario as I think they may need to level up. The boys said they want to be more of the rogue/thief type and burglarize someplace. So, I have someplace to go where I actually have a poster with the grid. They'll have a rougher copy of this map. I just need to figure out how to stock it to make it challenging but not a 1st level TPK. 

Step 1 is to generate 3 characters as I am hoping we'll have all three. If not, we may have to do 2 characters apiece, or if I can get the dad to allow a non-vaccinated friend to play, I've got an ideal fellow gamer for this group. Hoping for later this year things will loosen up enough for that to happen.

My dice do hate me: I actually re-rolled one whole set of characteristics. The characters are as follows:

Human Male Cleric

STR: 12

INT: 9

WIS: 13 (+1)

DEX: 12

CON: 10

CHA: 7 (-1)

Chain Mail (AC 14), War Hammer (1d6), 5 HP

I chose cleric as that wisdom is the primary stat for a cleric. At level 1, clerics are not all that great: they have no spells, are limited in weapons and armor, and don't have a lot of hit points (5 in this case). He has the standard adventurer things as well as a holy symbols and some vials of holy water. The only real benefit is that he has a chance to turn undead. If one of the group does decide on a cleric, I'll be sure to throw in some undead to let that character shine. The advantage is that clerics level up faster generally. I also rolled on the secondary skills table and got fisher. Before taking to the cloth, he sailed the seas fishing.

Human Magic User

STR: 11

INT: 15

WIS: 12

DEX: 11

CON: 12

CHA 5 

Dagger (1d4), staff (1d4), 4 HP

Spells: Magic Missile (1d6+1)

Speaks Pixie

With the high intelligence, I chose magic user. At level 1 he can use 1 magic spell a day at level 1. I chose an offensive one, the magic missile. Unlike TFT, spells are automatic pretty much and don't cost anything. Other than that limit of spell spots per day basically. The advantage is that it won't miss and will do a minimum of 2 points of damage. At the low-level game we'll be starting with, that is probably enough to take out one enemy. He'll just have to be judicious in when to use it. His secondary skill was a cooper, meaning he knows how to make barrels I think. 

Half-Orc Fighter

I actually rolled well, and chose the half-orc to beef him up even more.

STR: 16

INT: 12

WID: 8

DEX: 13

CON: 13

CHA: 6

Plate (AC 17 with DEX bonus), 2 handed sword (slow, 1d10), sword (1d8), 9 HP

As noted, I had some really good rolls and decided to sort of min/max this guy a bit. He'll be at the front most of the time: with an AC of 17 he is hard to hit. His CON gives him a bonus for hit points as well. We have our tank.

What we don't actually have is a thief. I may roll one more up for that. And this is where I may introduce some house rules. While I do like the rolls as straight up, I may allow them to switch stats but cost 1 point in one of the switched stats. There are some optional rules to take 2 points to beef up one so this is along those lines. 

At a guess, we'll have a session 0 where we take a fair amount of time generating characters. As I currently just have the 1 set of books (and the printed out basic rules), there will be a fair amount of time spent going through the options. And we may have a sample combat round to get through the basics of that sort of thing as the mechanics are a bit different. 

I do have dice for everyone thanks to the Mystery Dice Kickstarter I backed. Though honestly, I am not overly thrilled with what I got. While the solar system set was really cool, the other "special" sets were to me, rather lackluster. I got 4 oversized d6s and a bag of tokens. I was hoping for something more along the lines of the solar system set. The other 11 piece die sets were nice but nothing really special. Good thing I really got them to give away: I really don't need more dice. I have sets I've yet to use still.