OD&D Solo Game with my wife - small games

One of the challenges for my solo game with my wife is time. Now that might seem funny, considering that I meet approximately every two weeks with my Dark Ages group, but it's true. My wife and I also have a houseful of kids and grandkids, a dog, volunteer organizations that we do work with and the struggle to also have those wonderful moments alone called "OMG Adult Night No Kids Go Away Wee!"

You would think that we could game in the evenings, but nine times out of ten, we're exhausted and more wanting to go to bed at 10pm than stay up and play D&D. I know, shocking, but very true. So we're trying something a bit different. Normally, I do not end adventures in the middle of a scene, or in the middle of a dungeon delve, but we're going to do exactly that. We'll play maybe an hour when we can, in the weekday evenings, and see how it goes. Last night, we held our first "mini session" and we had a blast!

Ever since my wife was confronted by an interesting tactical situation, she's been chewing on it. You see, there's a 20 foot long bridge over a deep deadly chasm. It's a one-person-wide bridge, with 4 skeletons with spears on the other side. The other side is a 10x10 area with a door. The skeletons have shown that they'll go into a spear/shield wall if someone stands on the bridge. 4 to 1 odds and my wife doesn't like it.

With the hiring of Brother Atu, the steel flower cleric, she has an option to turn the skeletons, but not guaranteed, so she's trying to come up with new ways to defeat them. Her plan? Create the equivalent of a human-powered catapult. She has a leather worker creating a slingshot type of harness out of leather, which can hold a boulder about the size of a head. She and another strong hireling will each hold the straps on either side of the "cup" and attempt to toss/snap the harness like a combo between a slingshot and a sling to rain stony doom on the skeletons.

I can't even tell you how many multiples of awesome that plan is. Wil it work? Who knows? Right now, based on the gold she's spent on what is essentially a one time weapon, I give it good odds that it'll work. I figure a boulder flung 20 ft hitting a walking set of bones is worth 2d6 damage, which should be a one shot kill on a 1d8 skeleton. I can't wait to see the dice rolls on this sucker though. She's spent some serious time thinking about this and that just tickles me in the happy place.

She is also quite the carouser! She's in what is essentially a quiet farm trade hub. She rolls on in, takes care of a ghoul problem and then celebrates with the equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner for her 7 companions (hirelings, henchmen and NPC) and buys beer for 30 odd people who happened to be in the Inn at the time. I only wish I had remembered Rient's Carousing tables were in Fight On #4, because this situation called for some possible building burning or gambling debts. The town is not soon going to forget when Aeli, Heroine of Valetown, held a victory party. Hopefully it's not too soon, like what happened in Dragonslayer when they thought Vermithrax was dead...



Anyway, we'll probably squeeze in another hour tonight to see how far she gets with the rock throwing and the preparations for clearing the bridge. I wonder what's on the other side... hmmm...