Tiny Dungeon 2e

The boys and I played a couple hours worth of Tiny Dungeon 2e this afternoon and it went pretty well. I chose to start us out with the pre-made Quest for Dragonspire adventure and I was happy to have a straightforward adventure to run during our first playthrough. There was plenty of npc flavor information included and even some good example characters, although my sons created their own characters.

Combat was the biggest question mark I had going in. It's a fairly simple mechanic and there's a lot of leeway on how the Game Master can conduct monsters, but I was hoping for a little more guidance going in. Unfortunately I couldn't find any documented example combat write-ups anywhere beforehand and I had a few questions. In particular I wasn't sure if enemies should have two actions per combat round like the player characters or not. Part way through the initial encounter with a pack of six wolves I realized that no, a big group of low level enemies should not have multiple actions or they will quickly overwhelm the heroes.

I really like the Combat Zones sheet for keeping track of combat, but one addition that I came up with that I was quite pleased about was using our supply of extra dice to represent enemies during combat. Since most of the enemies the boys were facing only had a couple hit points I was able to use several extra dice to represent the current hit points and general combat zone location of several enemies at once. The boys actually did the same thing for their characters using two dice since they both had hit points in the 6-10 range and it made for a very elegant way to quickly track everything.

Besides typical combats we had a few more scenes that required skill tests and general role playing. I think the boys are still getting comfortable with the idea of acting out their characters and role playing. I'm trying to provide a good example as GM of providing a little character voice and acting variation, but I can continue to be better. On a related note we ended today's session at the lair of a Red Dragon who is essentially the final boss, but probably too powerful to fight for heroes. As we ended I tried to make it pretty clear that they should try to come up with an alternative roleplaying solution rather than directly attacking the Dragon, but I don't think they've worked out such a scheme yet. Looking forward to seeing how it shakes out tomorrow.