ursula: second-century Roman glass die (icosahedron)
2019-01-29 08:53 pm
Entry tags:

let me tell you about my character...

Here is a D&D story for [personal profile] schneefink, who was wishing for some.

I learned about D&D from the acknowledgments to a Katherine Kerr novel when I was in fourth grade, but I didn't find people willing to play RPGs with me until high school. We mostly played White Wolf, since that was then the fashion; in particular, I GMed a lot of Mage.

My first serious D&D campaign was in college. Third edition was new and shiny! My character was named Angharad. She began the campaign as a very naive Lawful Good rogue; I reasoned that she came from a Thieves' Guild family, and had conformed to the expectation that she'd join the family business. She was moderately smart at the start of the campaign (INT 13 or 14, maybe), and we all started at seventh level. We encountered a strange temple that "balanced" our stats, though, so her intelligence went down and another stat went up, and because Angharad was exceedingly Lawful Good, I picked up a level in paladin. Then, through some rather awful failures in coordination, the entire party was killed by a mindflayer; upon resurrection, Angharad found herself with even less intelligence and missing one of those levels of rogue.

Finally, after maybe a semester of play (we spent a lot of time talking to people, and not very much killing monsters), Angharad earned a second paladin level, and became able to sense evil... at which point she learned that [livejournal.com profile] sildra's eponymous character had been lawful evil the entire time. "Sildra! You're evil?" is one of my favorite moments in excessive commitment to lawful goodness.

Smiting evil with a holy sword while simultaneously doing sneak-attack damage due to flanking is also pretty great, though.
ursula: second-century Roman glass die (icosahedron)
2008-03-11 10:29 pm

gaming!

[livejournal.com profile] aelfgyfu asked for a post about gaming. I'm assuming that, like any right-minded individual, she means tabletop RPGs. At the moment I don't have a game going ([livejournal.com profile] glasseye's campaign seems to have succumbed to the dual pressures of school and players who insist on gallivanting round the world). I keep meaning to run a couple of sessions of GURPS Goblins, but this involves either doing a bunch of arithmetic so my players can make characters without ripping my single set of books apart or feeling their heads explode, or else figuring out how to port the entire setting to a less arithmetically demanding system without losing the basic idea of a character built entirely from disadvantages.

[livejournal.com profile] cattifer and I have talked a little bit about doing a D&D-themed webcomic. I've been thinking a little bit about how one might set up a literal dwarven point of view, with humans disconcerting and monolithic.