Swords & Wizardry: A Swarm of Rats

For my latest Swords & Wizardry game, I used a series of randomized dice rolls to create a dungeon and I used Table 41: Generating Encounters from the Core Rules to populate it. Some of the encounters had me scratching my head. 15 giant rats, for instance (3d8 CL A creatures). But I thought, okay, I'm going to just try doing this dungeon straight from the book and see what happens.

My players, a party of 4 + 2 hirelings, made their way into the dungeon and began listening at doors and creeping down halls and such. At one such door, the thief, Schulla (who was played with a hilarious Russian accent), heard the sounds of scrabbling and squeaking beyond. The party opened the door to find a long chamber, in the centre of which was a dried up bathing pool with steps leading into it. One of the fighters (in a foolish moment of judgement) strode over to the pool and looked in. There seethed a swarm of 15 giant rats. Now, at this point, the players' fates were in their own hands, and had they been smarter, things might have gone differently. Alas, they (some of them having never played an old school game before) started attacking the swarm, assuming, "Eh, they're just rats." The man-at-arms went down first. The players kept attacking. Two of the party members were eaten alive. The survivors kept attacking. The thief finally got the idea to run, and slipped through a door before the rats got to him. Everyone else met a nasty end.

The players could have been more strategic, played more carefully, etc. Evidently, all they did was stand and attack, over and over. They managed to kill a little over half of the giant rats. They put up a decent fight, but 15 rats was just too many to handle. I wonder if Table 41 is a little ridiculous and I should have placed far fewer rats in this encounter, or if it was supposed to represent a moment in old school gaming that seems to be missing from modern gaming: Run!

Either way, the idea to run didn't even cross the collective mind of the party until characters were already dying. This was a beautiful moment to me, when they all realized "Oh, what? We can't defeat 15 rats without a scratch? We aren't nigh-godlike super-humans?" I'll leave you with a quote from that moment that really solidifies the mentality of modern role players versus old schoolers:

"Wait, you die when you reach 0 hp?"