That went...well

SYSTEM: D&D5E

Okay, ran the young'uns through part of the opening bit of Sky King's Thunder—you know, the free part. I made a couple of changes to the setup (I put the temple farther away so they had more opportunities to fight goblins before the bells were quieted). We didn't do nearly as much as I had expected, mostly because I had forgotten just how fragile first level characters are in D&D: I didn't fudge any die rolls but characters were dying left and right, due to fumbles and such-like. As a result, the goblins got even stupider and the pair of worgs behaved like my dogs: fierce one moment, timid the next.

Now, I intend for this to segue over to Temple of Elemental Evil (sort of; I found someone's conversion notes to fifth edition, and a description of the module elsewhere, and that's pretty much all I need to make stuff up). I'll have to gin up some connection between Nightstone (which now takes the place of Hommlet) and the abandoned moathouse in ToEE, but the presence of a festering ancient evil is all I need to make work most of the other plot threads I dropped in. So that was fine.

But after years of playing and running competent superheroes, I had forgotten that it can be a lot of fun with a group of characters who can't cross a drawbridge stealthily, are unable to hit the goblin up by the top of the windmill, who are >this close< to dying after a single arrow shot.

And it was, frankly, a joy to watch delight in the students' faces when they pulled off the impossible arrow shot to work the drawbridge mechanism at a distance (necessary to keep somebody from dying). I don't think I'd want to listen to somebody tell me about their campaign or character (so I'll shut up after this, unless there's a point to be made), but certainly we can have fun playing our own adventure.

From looking at the conversion notes for ToEE, the author of the conversion (I'll find the name and post it later) talks about some of the differences between D&D then and D&D now, not least of which is that it was originally written for 5-8 adventurers, and this group is four only because I have them an NPC meat shield. (Who I should have made second level, but at first, the barbarian is as bad as the rest of them. Still, in this group the barbarian takes the position of Character Who Will Press The Big Red Button.)

They say they want more, so I'm guessing this will continue for a bit.