::A Geek in Korea::

The nerdiness has taken a bizzare twist. Now that one of the members of our D&D group is back in the United States, there is no way for us to effectively play. While he’s back in the States collecting D&D playing accessories and dungeon tiles to really pimp out our gaming experience, we’re back in Korea working on how to make our group extra lethal. I’ve ended up with D&D “homework”, as we work around our player limit testing out how to maximize our strengths in a party by running some test scenarios.

What we discovered switching to D&D 4th edition was that most of the scenarios and encounters that I put the party up against were designed for a part of five adventurers. Scenarios are easily scaled, if we choose, but I ran them for a part of five. I followed the urging of the group to not dumb down or simplify the adventures due to party size. One of the players doubled up and played two characters at the same time, but we were always a adventurer short. It’s like playing a man down in soccer. You are always going to have a whole somewhere in your party, and a group needs to work together to stop from falling behind and being completely exploited by their lack of manpower.

The party was concerned that without tight coordination between players, we would get slaughtered as soon as we started the Living Forgotten Realms campaign. That would be embarrasing.

One of the people in the group wanted some experience in being the Dungeon Master, so he will design some scenarios to test our newly redesigned, ready for Forgotten Realms characters. I’ll also be playing as a character for the first time in 4th edition, handing over all the planning of the monster encounters and everything else to him. I’ve got a Genasi Warlord build that I need to complete before the test scenarios in a few days. Not only do I need to do a single build, I’ve also got multiple levels to plan for, as the test scenarios will be at levels 1, 3, and 5, to see if we are working as a team.

I’ve actually got a really busy weekend, and squeezing in a game, pre-game paperwork, and all the planning and strategy involved in building a character. When did my hobby become work?