along time ago (almost a over a year!) now I ran a open table game of Martin O's gold soul mine it was my first proper dungeon crawl id ran and it was very successful for the standard of my games my players drew maps some of them quite good imo:
other players took really good notes! both behaviors I wanted to encourage in this style of game
over all I found it extremely fun and one of the most engaging games Ive ran! unfortunately I encountered flaws the two big ones being:
the dungeon was too small to continue and I dint feel like just moving the group on to a new one since they had been building up infrastructure to make getting to the dungeon easier and I am quite picky when it comes to what dungeons I like
the second being the rules system I use while very good lacked much of what I came to want from a system for this style of play (5 torches deep which I used mainly because it would be fa miler to pretty much everyone who sat down as I assumed they would all be ex 5e players. )
- it was not easy to pick up as I would have liked
- because of the vestigial 5e elements many rules are not explained and had to be hand waved or home ruled in a way that wasn't just "ruling not rules" but "I don't understand how my charter works its unclear"
- finally many ability just where massively under or over powered due to the limited style of game (dungeon delving)
so to rectify these issues I have began a task many others have attempt before me
I will build a system I like (with elements stolen from all over the place). with rules that are fun and lead to interesting decisions. and a few mega-dungeon levels + local area to actual play in (which will probably contain more original content than the system)
