Immersive Ink

Ha! There's the old expression about "giving me just enough rope to hang myself" and the Sleep spell definitely falls into that category.

Well that was exciting...

I believe that was what they call a Pyrric victory. The players won out, but with six of eight losses, it probably would have ended most dungeon expeditions.

The good news is that here in the locker room, Mushgnome's Members are all fully restored to shiny new condition, and good to go for their next test. That's how we roll in Fight Club

How much XP would they 2 survivors have been award for this Pyrric Victory? My first adventure ever saw 1 survivor out of a part of like 12-14, sadly I was not one of them my thief was next to last to go down, so close, but so fun.

OD&D (and hence DD) does not emphasise awards for combat; XP mostly comes from treasure. So... had the hydra been protecting a treasure most of the XP would be in that.

For the combat component, it's 100 XP per HD of the opponent. In this case, the six-headed hydra is *technically* 6 HD, so it would be 600 XP divided between two players, so 300 XP each. The hydra is a bit special because it has a) a full 6 hp per die, and b) the hp are allocated to six individual heads, so there can be "wasted" damage overflow on a per head basis. So... 600 XP is probably a tad mean for this monster, but them's the breaks

Was the hydra guarding any treasure?

Treasure is not really the focus of Fight Club so I hadn't really thought about it. However, just for kicks... 50% of monster rooms are monster+treasure rooms, so we could infer that there is a 50% probability the hydra was guarding treasure.

So... if I dice evens, it had treasure. 1d6=2, so yes it had treasure.

A random DL3 treasure:
1,800 SP, 300 GP, 0 gems, 0 jewelry, 0 magic items.

So... pretty meh. It's a quirk of the dungeon generation tables that although "bigger" monsters can randomly appear on shallower dungeon levels, treasures are always proportional to DL with no variations. Perhaps this is a weakness... or perhaps it is designed that way to encourage players to visit deeper DLs?

Fight on!!