Back to Basics: The Dungeon Crawl

Well, I have learned a lot about where I am in terms of where do I still "got it" and where do I drastically "need it" in my DM return.

I came straight into "story" adventures because  I wanted to flex the old creative muscles again.  I wrote a couple from scratch, I ran a couple published modules  as-is and I ran a couple published modules heavily modified to fit my liking.

Suffice it to say, my creativeness still works pretty good.  I got high marks from the players in terms of good story telling, especially when they were entirely of my own making.

I needed a lot of help getting back into handling melee combat situations.  More trouble procedurally rather than representing the monsters best interests.  That I always did well on.

So, in order to work on the things I need the most work on,  I now take my players into the dungeon crawl.

By making use of some online random dungeon generators, I am just going to run the group through a number of these non story oriented blitzes where the players just dive into a dungeon and beat the crap out of things.  Really get an idea of how to flex their creative muscles in terms of being their characters and communicating basic interaction with the DM.

For my part,  I get to immerse myself in melee after melee and work out the kinks as a referee and game manager.

I found an online dungeon generator called the DonJon D20 Random Dungeon Generator (thank you, "Bloated Blowfish" from the DragonsFoot forums) which I think is very good.  However, being geared toward the D20 dice system,  I had some trouble making some things translate into 1E.

However, I also found a handy D20 to 1E DC chart that makes those conversions easily.   I added that table to my WikiMage DM Screen to keep it handy.

I'm looking forward to the next few sessions to see how things improve.