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Giving your unpainted armies a ray of hope.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Scratching That D&D Itch


I really miss Dungeons & Dragons. Of all my major geeky hobbies I probably have the least experience with it, only playing once a week for about a year and a half, but man is it an amazing game. Being the dungeon master let me craft a world for my friends and wife to be excited about, with events that they shaped and memories that they helped create.

As I said yesterday, my brother-in-law is home on leave and we spent yesterday gaming. When the day began he had offhandedly mentioned that he missed playing D&D. This was slightly humorous to me because on Saturday night I'd asked my wife if she'd be willing to play Wrath of Ashardalon or Castle Ravenloft with me sometime soon. These are two board games that distill the essence of D&D in to a DM-free, cooperative experience. It's limited in its simple scope, but it definitely helps reach that D&D itch.



We all decided to mix things up from how we usually play games. My wife likes to stay at the back and support the group, her brother likes to stay way in the back and shoot things dead, while I usually just play whatever a group needs as long as it's not something whose job is simply to do damage.

Amanda chose a paladin, a front-line character who supports his allies while using heavy armor to survive the opponent's onslaught.

Brian chose a warrior who was built to stand between the squishy damage dealer and all the enemies that wanted to eat him.

I played a wizard with 0 support spells. No walls to summon, no means of lowering attack or sticking foes in place.

It was a weird experience for all of us, but we had a ton of fun just hanging out and playing a game that hearkened back to our glory days of D&D (minus the guy who usually plays a warrior). Seeing the two of them charge enemies and lose health was entertaining, and hearing "Ray, can you kill those two guys?" never stopped feeling strange.



The game has you explore dungeons by starting on a single tile and moving to the edge of it to "discover" more of the dungeon by placing another random tile adjacent. Any time you don't reach the edge of a tile, or if the tile drawn has a special marking, you draw an "encounter card" that never has good things written on it. They may have a portion of ceiling fall on every hero in your square (never enemies, of course!), poison you, spawn more enemies, or in my case curse you.

Toward the end of a quest where we had to kill 12 enemies, I was down to a single hit point. The two of them were charging ahead trying to explore tiles to uncover monsters and (hopefully) avoid having to draw encounter cards for not exploring. I got held up a couple tiles behind them, but it was "no problem" since I could attack at range and had a couple movement shenanigans up my robe.

Now because I was so far back and didn't want to go toe-to-giant-claw with enemies I had to just deal with drawing encounter cards and hoping I could survive them. With only a few points of damage, and a paladin only a couple tiles away, it should have been no problem. I drew a couple bad traps that put me at 1 health, but all I needed to do was spend a couple turns running back to the action - the game has a way of using XP gained from defeating monsters to negate encounter cards.

After killing my last enemy I was 6 tiles away from the paladin, which meant that we just needed to run toward each other for one round and then she could heal me. I drew my encounter card while we had 4 XP in our pool, 1 short of being able to negate an encounter card.

YOU ARE CURSED

What?! is the cry that erupted from the table as I read it aloud. The gist of my curse was that any time I moved in to a new tile, I took 1 damage. Keep in mind that my ability to survive was 6 tiles away, fighting 2 or 3 enemies with the fighter, while I was at 1 hit point. Not only that, but I'd have to keep drawing encounter cards every turn I didn't explore a new tile which would always spawn a monster on it who would get to attack me before I could kill it.

True to D&D form my group did what any other group would do if they were 2 kills away from completing the quest - they left me to rot. I used a one-time spell to teleport to an adjacent tile, using my Warmachine rules-lawyering to insist that the curse said "move" and die, while my spell "placed" me in a tile. However, I was still at the mercy of the encounter deck whose wily traps usually needed to roll a 5 on a d20 to hit me. I threw a hail mary and tried to do the only thing I could do - explore the edge of the tile I'd teleported in.

Naturally the tile had a door on it, meaning I had to interact with it before I could open it. How this works is that when a door tile is laid, a token is put on it. One side shows a closed door, while the other side will read "unlocked" "locked" (requiring a skill check), or "trapped" which automatically deals 1 damage to anyone adjacent to it.

If you look at that blue miniature lying down on the tile to the right, you can guess which result I got when I tried to open the door and try to survive the monster behind it and the encounter card I'd have had to draw anyway because of the black arrow on the tile!



However, the brother/sister duo performed like champs and mopped up the remaining monsters right after my frail wizard crumpled to the floor in a heap of acid-scorched robes, poison dart punctures, an arrow wound, dirty hair from a collapsed ceiling, a dragon's curse, and whatever madness was rigged to the door - my money is on a very tiny fireplace bellows that glue a gust of wind in his face, because "air" is the only element that didn't try to kill him yet. I still didn't find any love for having the responsibility of "kill them before they kill us," especially when killing power comes at the cost of dying really fast.

But hey, what a great way to finally get in some good dungeon crawling. My short stint in the Iron Kingdoms RPG was good, but D&D just drips with old-school fun. And after subscribing to a couple D&D terrain makers on YouTube, who knows how long I'll be able to resist the siren's call that is the upcoming 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons...



See you tomorrow!

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