Monday, June 15, 2015

Adventures in D&D 5e Part 2: D&D Harder

Alright! Part 2.

It's been a bit more than a week, but that only means that I've had twice (3x, actually) as much D&D since last time to write about! I have decided that I enjoy 5e. I like the warlock class, I like my character, and I like my game. For the most part. But we'll get into that later.

My first actual session started at 5PM. We then actually got around to playing at about 7PM. We are a very chatty group, I've found. Our first game was a tour through the wonders of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, complete with random Bandersnatch encounter. Pretty fun, all things considering. Here's how it went: we got off of our ship, a ship headed from distant lands to the Nine Kingdoms, and find that the coastline has been magically altered by a meteorite that has fallen slightly inland of where we landed, turning the coast into a poem. We head into the jungle, past a library with wards outside that would withstand nukes, to try and catch the baker (not the banker) who ran off into them. We then find the banker (not the baker) getting chased by a bandersnatch. We kill it fairly quickly. I think my favorite part of this was when our fighter got scared into the trees by a portly banker bursting out, but when the giant monster thing popped up, he jumped right in without so much as a whimper. Dice are fun.

Anyway, we then find that the baker (not the banker) has set up shop next to the crash site of the meteorite. He's selling baked goods. Our bard buys a muffin off him before I get a chance to buy any of the wedding cake (it turns out that this was a good thing later, as the snark likes the flavor of that particular muffin), and we get to venture into the hole behind his shop. Inside we find a glass sphere and a cute little creature (the snark) who happily follows our bard back out of the cave (chewing on her bag all the while). With the sphere in hand, we then head back to the library we saw earlier. Upon entering the library, the huge wards explode, dealing quite a bit of damage to a few of our party. The snark has now chewed through our bard's bag and bites the ball, breaking it and dispelling the enchantment on the area. We have a nice little chat with the magic librarian (who sends us on our next quest), get chased out of town (by superstitious townsfolk), and then end for the night.

Fun, fun! I think the only problem with this night was that some of us were not done with our characters in time for the game to start, and so held up the rest of the group getting ready. Whoops. Other than that, it went fairly smoothly and I (having missed the character creation meet), got to learn a lot about my companions.



The second week's game doesn't go quite as well. It turns out that our talkativeness can get in the way of the story quite often. Which is a shame. Anyway, we are sent to go to the other branch of this library to find a meteorite that fell there and is causing issues. Fun. We get there and it's in a volcano. Funner. The volcano is guarded by iron golems. Funnest. Turns out that the golems are friendly and don't hinder us in any way (as they know we were sent here by the other branch), but still. We get inside and find the other sphere thing. Guarded by a few suits of animated armor with two flying swords each. This is where we run into problems. It turns out that at our level (2), this is a deadly encounter for a group of 5 characters. I dunno. We mostly just couldn't hit them, otherwise we were doing quite well and only had one "death" (who was stabilized and recovered afterward). This, however, caused some... issues.

But that's for next time.

As for the game itself, I think it's pretty good so far. I'm looking forward to some of the higher-level spells and stuff I get as a warlock and definitely enjoying being a crazy baker with a pact with an old god. It makes for some interesting misadventures when cookbooks or baking recipes are involved. For instance, I have already procured over 100 pounds of cookbook and have used my charisma and persuasion to get the fighters to carry all of it for me. Tee hee! I did drop most of them off at the baker's guild a week later (in game and in real life it turns out), so no real harm there.

I am enjoying the mechanics of the game. From what I hear, it's a lot simpler than 3.5 or 4th editions, which makes me happy because I am very slow at learning new systems. The dice rolls are fairly straightforward and the leveling up is easy enough. The only complaint I have so far is that there are some tables and sections of the book that are hard to find or in odd places. And at the bottom of the page, it's got the section title, not the chapter title. So you kind of have to flip through the whole thing to find the correct chapters or go to the table of contents. Or just put a ton of bookmarks in, which is what I did (I was going through mail at the time and so now have a bunch of junkmail bookmarks).

Come back later for part three: wrangling a group!

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