First fatality in the new (Jeff and Andy) campaign: Jeff’s character Thrunk Shillelagh got pinned in a corner by a trio of skeletons and hacked to bits. Andy’s character Link was running pellmell for the exit of the dungeon, and so wasn’t in any position to try first aid or to recover the body. Remember kids: In D&D always bring a Cleric!
Russell sez
Buried in a comment that nobody but me will read, so I’ve copied here:
It looks like I’ll be running a few Sunday D&D games while I’m on the East Coast. Sunday night players might want to browse the game web-page at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/russell/DND to get a sense of the world and to start designing characters. I tend to make a lot of world information available, so much that it intimidates some. Most of the information is just for my own benefit, although there’s nothing most PC’s wouldn’t know. So don’t be put off by the bulk, and just skim the parts you need for your character or that you find interesting.
Corrupting the Youth of Athens
We introduced Jeff’s nine-year old son Andy to the joys of D&D over the weekend, and I have to say that it went remarkably well. He caught on very quickly, no doubt because of Andy’s vast exposure to computer games, including some RPG-ish games (such as Kingdom Hearts). Granted, it wasn’t a real role-playing challenge, just a dungeon crawl, but you have to start somewhere, and there is a lot to be said for a linear structure and concrete objectives.
Alas, poor Nolan
we hardly knew ye.
My good friend Russell, who’s been playing RPGs with me for a little over twenty years now was with us last Sunday, and the group promptly abandoned his character Nolan to his doom. This was the first time Russell has lost a PC in one of my campaigns, which are notoriously hard to die in, in years and years and it shocked him a little. I mostly blame Rachel. <wink> Sure, the monsters they were fighting were probably too tough (even though I was confused about the rules, not having internalized D&D 3.5 yet , and made them much wimpier than their official stats would indicate), and I neglected to have the inexperienced young NPC who was tagging along play optimally which probably would have saved him, but it was Rachel’s character Pedro who first cut and ran, leaving the dying Nolan to get crunched. It’s entirely possible that Pedro couldn’t have helped, but what surprised Rusell was that he didn’t even attempt it. Of course, it was perfectly in character for Pedro; don’t let Rachel tell you that she never plays evil characters. Hint: if she’s playing a Rogue, that Rogue will be evil, no matter what the official alignment is. Stealing from party members, betraying their secrets to local criminal families, it’s all part of the job to her. Russell, however, was foolishly assuming an implicit “Band of Brothers” contract among the party members because that’s what he’s used to. This was foolish, because I’ve told him enough stories about this group of players that he should have known better; he’s even read this blog.
The game goes on: Russell’s already made up another character for next time we play, one that’s much more survival oriented. I kind of wonder whether a sniper with a cloak of invisibility isn’t too much of a reaction, though….
Not the Sunday Group Game
but because it should be recorded for posterity, Scott recently broke his personal best record for shortest lived character when (in our friend Mac’s D&D game on Saturday) his character was PK-ed before the adventure even began. For some reason shortly after Scott’s character introduced himself Walter became suspicious of him and cast Know Alignment; upon finding out that Scott’s character was evil–I almost said Scott was evil, but that goes without saying–Walter and Mike refused to go adventuring with him. After a bunch of pointless argument, Scott’s character drew his dagger and had at Walter’s character, and a couple melee rounds later Scott’s character’s head was rolling around on the tavern floor.
Scott was understandably a bit miffed at this, and I have to confess that I was a bit puzzled, since I had thought that there was an unwritten group rule to the effect that players weren’t allowed to refuse to go adventuring with other players’s characters over something as trivial as alignment. I had certainly felt compelled by Mac and the group to continue to adventure with Rachel’s character Polly when she was obviously ripping off the party in her dealing with her criminal family (and my character was easily smart enough to figure it out)–granted when Polly died nobody expressed any great remorse or suggested that we try to figure out a way to raise her, but that seemed to be the extent of the reaction against her character’s actual transgressions. Why Scott’s new character’s alignment was such a sticking point I really don’t know; in fact, now that I think about it the same group had been happy enough to adventure with my previous (now deceased) character, who was also evil. Maybe the only difference was that they didn’t realize that my character was supposed to be evil, since he didn’t live long enough to do anything bad.
Of course, at that point, neither had Scott’s character. Interestingly enough, though Scott insists that he wasn’t playing the character as obviously evil and halfway suspected Walter of using Out-Of-Character knowledge in deciding to cast the Know Alignment spell, my character simply presumed that Scott’s character was evil but just didn’t care. I’m not actually sure why I supposed that, since I know that I didn’t have any OOC knowledge; either it was something about Scott’s manner, or maybe it was just that he got along with Rachel’s character….
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 