::A Geek in Korea::

My wife and I were bored after shopping for baby supplies, but didn’t have any plans to go out, or to meet anyone. I didn’t want to go to a movie or leave the house again after carrying everything back from the baby store, so we were going to have to amuse ourselves somehow. I suggested my wife could play an encounters worth of D&D with me. Tempered by my help with the baby supply shopping, she agreed.

I rolled up a quick Cleric character in the D&D character generator, as she said she didn’t only want to be “killing people” a lot. Filling the leader role, aiding others in combat was key, because we were playing with a very small two person party. Since the secondary role of a cleric is as a healer, she’d be still fine in combat, but if we ran into any difficulty that required my theif character to take some punishment, her dishing out some healing wouldn’t be bad. You can’t make a balanced party with two characters, but you can try to cover the gaps as well as possible. We’d need her to heal, and me to do damage if we were going to succeed.

Looking over the options, she said she wanted to be “an elf”, and “protect nature”. Simple enough. After a little customizing in the character generator, she was a Cleric of Melora. This gave me an instant story hook to set up the adventure. We were not going to be “roleplaying” per say, more like learning why we roll the dice we do at the given time, so even this simple background was enough.

I grabbed a “Go” or “Badduk” board. It’s got small squares that almost fit the size we were going to need to lay out the dungeon. I also used dominoes to physically build the walls of the dungeon as we explored. The monsters were glass beads, and our characters were minature Nintendo figurines and cheap Pokemon throwaways I collected over the years. Our two adventurers were exploring the dungeon looking for a cup. The cup was a source of power for some undead creatures that inhabited the dungeon and had started to attack creatures in the forest nearby. The Cleric of Melora, trying to protect nature, had been sent to cleanse the dungeon and recover the cup to stop them from raising more monsters. Nice and simple story. Clear motivations. Now what?

I placed her character and mine at the entrance and tried to set the scene. Due to her being an elf, having ridiculous perception skills, and never rolling under a 15 means she spotted her first zombie minions and got a surprise round on them. We walked through that non-threat right away slaughtering them before they counter-attacked. Then I started throwing in things like trapped doors and requiring other sorts of checks to be safe in the dungeon. She wanted to know why I knew what she did succeeded or failed. If I was just making it up as we went along, why bother rolling? I told her that while I was just making it up, there were general “rules” I was following that determined how well she should be rolling to succeed or fail, but that she was welling so well it only seemed like there was no obstacle in place at the moment. If she had tried to do something impossible, or needed to roll so high she couldn’t succeed, she’d have failed what she would have tried.

Trying to move the game along before she got bored, I decided that after the trapped door at the end of the hallway, we’d face the final encounter of the evening. It was a room with big pillars around an altar. At the altar was a brute skeleton type character who was raising other skeletons with some sort of ritual. The “cup” was his power source, thus my wife the Cleric was all about confronting this monster despite his numerous lackeys in the room. Perhaps her attack on the minions was a little too confidence inspiring! She wanted to charge into battle with the brute, minions, and two archers, not grasping the tactical advantage of stealth or not making yourself a target for every big bad guy in the room.

I rolled for stealth and passed up the chance for attack the first round to slip behind some pillars farther up into the room. I wanted to steal the cup and disrupt the ceremomy. Following my lead, my wife rolled an AMAZING series of stealth rolls despite her poor Dexterity and avoided detection. Then she jumped out from behind the pillar and blasted three of the five minions into dust with a Turn Undead spell. The next turn she was promptly made into a pincushion by the skeleton archers.

A few back and forth rounds later as she battled the brute, she fell to some ongoing damage and needed Melora to send her aid. I fudged the encounter a little bit, giving her an extra roll to avoid the ongoing damage, and healed her up to zero so that she could use a healing surge to stand back up. She freigned death, then when I fell in battle the next round, also to ongoing damage, we got lucky. The skeleton failed his insight roll, didn’t know we were faking, and left us on the floor so that he could take his “cup” to a more secure location somewhere else in the dungeon…or something like that.

It didn’t matter since it wasn’t an ongoing campaign. It was just an excuse for us not to be chopped up into bits on our first delve into a dungeon. The encounter was over, and I had killed the party of two. I was giving us an “out” in case she wanted to play some other time. It doesn’t matter, as it’s all just for fun anyway. Looking over the XP I had spent on the fly, I totally made it a VERY hard encounter. My mistake. I’ve never planned for a two person encounter before. There are usually a few other people playing with the characters to kick some butt! It’s not like I had actually done the calculations for the XP before I had sat down!

I hadn’t prepared any of the story elements, and was mapping the dungeon, explaining the rules, and rolling for monsters and a player character at the same time. All of it was impromptu DM’ing for my wife’s sake. I totally didn’t pull any punches killing the party the first time out. I guess I was overcompensating for both playing a character and DM’ing at the same time. I didn’t want to make it easy for myself.

While the tactics and the proper terminology is beyond my wife’s D&D skills at the moment, she said, “I understand a little more now. You roll the dice to see what you can do, and move around and fight. You are making up the story as you go. I understand what’s going on. I couldn’t build a character and pick my powers, I guess I understand how to play.”

I don’t think she’ll sit down with anybody to play D&D on her own, but if I want to try to explain something to her, she’ll at least have a vague idea of what’s going on now. I think she can see why I enjoy the game, and that I’m happy she’s trying to play, even if she needs my help. I’d gladly DM another session if we get bored on a rainy day. It’s not hard to do together, and we can have fun without needing to go out. Plus, it helps solidify my geek cred having a wife that will occasionally play D&D with me. That makes me a lucky guy.