::A Geek in Korea::

This weekend was the first chance any of my D&D group had to meet again. The last member of our group to DM had made an entire epic adventure he hadn’t yet used. He told us that instead of running his own character, we should make up our own secondary characters to control to beef up our forces, because otherwise, we wouldn’t survive to tell the tale. Despite the challenge of controlling two characters at once, it was a great success. This is a different style game compared to what I ran last game, and I like the action heavy stuff a lot.

I went through the process of pulling from different sources and putting together a character. In addition to my Shrike like, sword weilding construct badass, I’ve got a new character. This guy is a more “into the fray” charging, running, lycanthropic monk slicing-open-your-face bad ass. It’s a totally different sort of badassery. Really.

We ended up being attacked by air pirates on a ship during the course of the adventure. My new character lept from one of the masts, grappled a falling character mid-air, and slammed him into the other mast of the ship using his momentum. My character then floated down to the ground, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style nearly unharmed, while his victim did a face plant from sixty feet up.

It was the first combat action that the character had made, and it set his tone really well. The only problem is that he’s got so few hit points he spent several rounds escaping harm and trying desperately to heal himself. He’ll improve when he gets one more level. That’s the hook that keeps me playing. Just one more level and I’ll really be awesome. I had a lot of fun making the new character now that I actually know how to tweak some of the statistics to be in my favor. My previous efforts felt a lot more clunky, but I really like how I’ve structured him and got to use this new character to do different things.

My older character got hit several times and even approached single digits in health at a few points. This is the most damage I’ve ever taken in one game, and I had to worry about death. Unlike some of the past adventures, there really was no where to run, and I had to roll well at critical junctures or some shit would have really gone down.

Over dinner, I talked to the current DM. We’ll be continuing the story the next time we play, as we stopped mid-battle. This is the first time we haven’t resolved the story at the end of the session. This means that we’ve got to go back and reach our destination before the next DM can sort of interject a new part to the main character’s story. We played for six hours, and we’ll need to continue just to reach our destination. That’s epic.

He said he wanted to turn up the heat a little bit, and he thought a confined area, lots more attackers, and a “wave” mentality to our opponents would keep us on our toes. It worked. We’ve almost died several times, and this was just trying to get to the place where the really dangerous stuff was. We haven’t even gotten to where the main encounter will occur. If the first few “days” of our journey were that exciting, I can’t wait for the next adventure.

Now that there are at LEAST a month or more of adventures before my next shot at taking the reigns of the story again, I can really shoot for the moon when I think about how I want to change the direction of the tale. Any potential survivors of this tale will be really deadly by the time it’s my turn to run the game. We’re deadly now, and we’ve got twice the characters we had before we started this adventure.

My last story got referenced repeatedly in this session, as our characters bragged about what we did last time around to impress a captain we encountered. One of my ideas for a potential character I wanted to make actually became the standard storm trooper guy we faced this time. My ideas were integrated and brought to life in a sense! I impacted the story! I helped mold the world, and I nearly killed the party with my idea! That was a pretty sweet feeling.

I think the next time I play, I’ll take some tips from our current DM and work on something different, however, I don’t think I’m up for a multiple day campaign at the moment. I’ve got a podcast I’m listening to for inspiration, but I still don’t have my basic plot sorted out yet. I’ll let my ideas perculate for while and see what I end up with. I’m running two characters, but I’m totally digging them both.