Lily Silverfern and the Temple of Kelandra

So tonight, Sunny and I played another game on DnD. This was the first game I got her to fly solo (without me playing a character as well as DMing) and it went really well.

I think I’ve finally come up with a way to keep things mostly balanced for a single player. The biggest ‘Ah-Ha’ moment of which was allowing her two ‘Second Winds’ and changing it from a standard to a minor action. That way, she gets a few extra hitpoints, and doesn’t have to sacrifice her attack (and take another round of damage) to use it.

I like to think of it as adding an invisible cleric to the party.

Anyway, today was the session when I realized she finally ‘got’ DnD. I’d spent the past week coming up with the adventure from scratch, and it was still a fairly basic dungeon crawl, but this time around, exploration was a real factor and there were a few skill challenges, obstacles to overcome, puzzles to solve, etc, etc.

In fact, it was quite funny to watch. After she brazenly walked down a corridor, only to have the walls start closing in and just managing to escape in time (It was a skill challenge, 3 successes before 3 failures and she got two failures before her first success), she went from gung-ho to extreme paranoia almost immediately. She treated every room like it was trapped, and stopped kicking doors open and started listening at them and trying to ease them open as stealthily as possible.

But she got through, and like all good DnD players, somehow managed to luck into finding the path of least resistance and managed to completely bypass the section I’d cackled like a madman while creating. (For the curious, it was a corridor with different colored tiles on the floor, where you had to solve a fairly cryptic clue to know which were safe to stand on. Stand on the wrong one and you got magically teleported to a random room in the dungeon…I was really looking forward to her stepping on the wrong one and materializing in a room filled with Kobolds or Giant Rats.)

However, the best part was when she’d cleaved a bad guy and then reminded me when I forgot to count the extra 5 damage on the adjacent bad guy. During the last game she looked at her attacks and powers like they were written in Greek. This time around she’d really gotten the hang of it. She knew what all her powers did and was using them tactically.

In all honesty, though, the best part came when we’d finished the three and a half hour session, and the first thing she said was: “Haven’t you got another one already written for us to play?”

Not only does my missus play and enjoy DnD…she finishes a 3.5 hour dungeon crawl and wants to start another immediately.

My fellow geeks, admit it…you’re jealous.