::A Geek in Korea::

The adventures of my Orc Paladin and demented Human Invoker have continued despite not updating this blog about it for some time. Having found a strong “voice” for a character with elaborate back story and a culture involved in the rituals of their particular religious beliefs, I’ve really gotten into writing both of those characters. The DM for the play by post game I am in has put the party in a few interesting situations recently that has let me get my writing and character firmly established.

The first incident was when we ran to a fort that was about to be overrun by a bunch of undead creatures. This battle was a long time coming, as the party split into two groups and I was role playing how my characters were going to outrace and slow down the approaching army. We had to warn the fort to the danger of the oncoming army before we were eaten, while the rest of the party picked off the creatures before they approached. This was a long, slow process that got delayed because of a vacation or two, and some scheduling problems. Once we got going again, it was clear that the DM’s ambitions for the battle to take place at the fort had outstripped our willingness to control dozens of characters and have lots of battles going at once.

A clever solution was provided when the DM ran the entire battle as a giant skill challenge. He gave us bonuses whenever we rolled skills we had, but we had to justify why those skills were being used in battle with lots of undead monsters. We couldn’t just roll the best skills repeatedly. We had to use different skills, or use them in new ways, and role play how it was supposed to affect the battle. The DM had worked out different skill check numbers we had to roll to beat with the different skills. “How can I justify a History roll where I have a huge bonus in the middle of a battle while having it make sense?”

If we rolled successfully, the fort’s soldier’s succeeded using our leadership from the rolls and we had a stronger force fighting for us for the rest of the battle. If we failed, some of the soldiers would fall. If all the soldiers fell, we lost and were eaten. We could use specific skills with harder difficulty levels to raise soldiers that had fallen in the previous round, but it took multiple successes at harder rates to bring them back to battle. It was a mini-strategy game inside the battle to see who was going to be best at raising and fighting, who could keep the soldiers alive, and who could come up with different ways to use their skills to keep getting bonuses.

After that unique large scale battle, the players in the game celebrated while the DM added two more players to the party. Now there is actually a large enough party we can play table D&D again, but logistically that’d never work out anyway. My Orc character is used to getting his way in the party. He’s schizophrenic to a delightful degree, but I don’t think it discourages anyone’s play at all. The DM loves the way I’ve been using his strange cultural and religious ideas to relate to the other party members. As this character has leveled, I’ve deliberately stacked his powers and abilities to be more sacrificial and risky. He will often do damage to himself to do even larger damage to someone that stands in his way. I’m continuing to build on that theme as he gets more and more powerful, but more and more suicidal. Usually the Paladin in the party is someone that can heal and help out raising someone in a pinch. Not the way my Paladin plays. He has a voice and a logic all his own, and I love playing him for that reason.

One of the  new players told me that he was more disturbed by my Human Invoker character that has fallen in line with the demented Orc’s religious beliefs. I hadn’t thought about the image of a human eating rotting meat or ranting about how righteous a Cruel Orc God is in my mind. It seems along the way the “sidekick” character I had used as a convenient way to round out the party has grown into something worth developing too. I’m glad I’m not just building a bunch of boring stock characters in my free time.

The most recent story arc involving the Invoker was after the large battle with the undead. During the battle he had used his high Arcana skill to search for magic around that might have been influencing the battle. There was a gigantic funeral pyre erected in the fort to dispose of the undead after the battle. As a throwaway idea, I mentioned that the character was going to sit in front of the fire and watch it while he pondered the information from the battle. He also had some other related skills that let him know something funny was going on with these particular undead attacks. As he sat down to watch this fire, he had a vision. I got a personal message from the DM who wanted to share the story with only me. This isn’t unusual. The personal message is how all messages from my Orc God are delivered. It’s up to me to share the information I want to divulge to the rest of the party.

This time was different. Instead of the normal visions my character has after performing an elaborate ritual I worked out from scratch, he saw something through the flames of the fire. He was contacted by a hostile, evil God who offered him a Faustian bargain. This particular God is Orcus, The Prince of the Undead, had already made a brief appearance earlier in the campaign. He’s a real jerk. Anyway, the offer I got from Orcus was insufficiently tempting for me to take, so the Invoker just taunted him and really put Orcus in his place. It was all righteous and character driven smack talk that worked from the story’s perspective, but will probably have huge consequences for him later on. I decided to take the risk and not just reply, but make a statement as well. This is the same God that tried to have undead monster eat this character. No way he is going to hold his tongue. I can’t imagine that going out of your way to piss off the God that has a death cult and lots of influence in the world is going to bode well for this character’s long term survival strategies, but for role playing opportunities? It’s a gold mine.

Regardless, my DM sent me a follow up personal message that gave me the thumbs up for my bold response. I even got a bonus Action Point for my role playing. Heh.

I’ve taken this twist (which has yet to be revealed to anyone in the party) and added to how I want the character to act. This Invoker is going to be more bold and reckless when confronting enemies now that he believes that he’s angered a God and needs to speak for his own God all the more strongly. His first combat after the vision he dropped a huge Daily Power on some goblins, while hostile, might or might not have been a threat, simply because he wanted them to burn in a fire and roast painfully. He serves a cruel Orc god (not to be confused with Orcus), so he should start acting the part. The other players thought he was disturbing and a little strange before. He’s got a reason to be a little more weird now.

While I like my big, dumb, slightly insane Orc Paladin alot (easily my favorite character), this new twist on my Invoker is getting me pretty excited too. I enjoy telling a story with my characters a lot, and having a strong voice to bring to the play by post game is really rewarding. It’s not easy. It’s like having a second blog, but when it works I think the time is worth the effort.

I thought I was a geek, liking computers and D&D. Then I found this page about Origami art based on D&D miniatures and art and now I have been put to shame. I’m just one guy, and I haven’t master the folding of paper to the skill required to make a fucking Mindflayer. If I did, I’d have one on my office desk, on my lapel, and I’d probably staple one to my forehead too. It’s that awesome.

Anyway, I’ve been geeking out recently with the release and subsequent reviews of Primal Power, as well as the updated DDI character builder with lots of new errata. If I actually had time to play D&D this month I’d be rolling up new characters and playing like crazy, but I’ve got things like work and “real life” taking up all my free time. Damn it.

(More Via Wondermark.)

I’m arguably the geekiest English teacher at the University. There are a few other geeks in the office, but we are a small minority lost in the shuffle. There are a few bloggers, a few web designers, and perhaps even a few gamers, but I’m the only person with a d20 in their desk, that’s for sure. I’ve only been there a few weeks, but my geek credibility is already firmly established.

I was rather disappointed that I had to explain a Cthulhu mask I made in my elementary school supplemental class for Halloween to someone. How can I be productive in an office environment if people don’t know what “Cthulhu fhtagn” means? H.P. Lovecraft? Nothing? No one?

Could you imagine if I went out of my way to start working in fictional collective nouns for D&D monsters into conversation casually? Collective nouns are inherently nerdy. Special names for groups of nouns? Why bother learning them unless you are just trying to impress someone with some trivia?

Sometimes they are so good they are worth memorizing. My favorite collective noun is, “A murder of crows”. How often does that come up in conversation exactly that I get to share it? Not enough, and that’s a damn shame. There needs to be more opportunities to use these kinds of words.

This is just perfectly extra nerdy for an English teacher that plays the occasionally game of D&D. I could be sitting at my desk and someone happens to ask, “What do you call a collective group of rampaging orcs spreading chaos? I need a collective noun for orcs. Anyone?”

I’d casually answer, “The preferred term is ‘A rage of orcs’.”

Tell me that wouldn’t impress you. This just will not happen at my university job, and it saddens me.

One of the best things to get to learn how to play a roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons is listening to other people play it. I learned a lot from the first series of official D&D podcasts done with the guys from Penny Arcade when the 4e system was brand new. Listening to a bunch of guys roll some d20s might seem boring, but with good editing and some funny people it’s just like a story as long as you’ve got some familiarity with the system. I had listened to the latest series to completion, and wanted some more adventure gaming podcasts to listen to.

The Tome Show is good for reviews of classes and new book materials, but I was looking for someone that talks about and plays through a campaign. I hadn’t found anything that was up my alley until I discovered Return to Northmoor. This podcast is exactly what I am looking for that it’s almost like I willed it into existence with my mind unconsciously.

The first thing I like about the show is that it’s well put together. It’s got tight editing and doesn’t waste time. I do not have time to listen to 7 dudes roll dice for 200 minutes a week. The two hosts have a laser focus on exactly the show they want to make. In their first episode they explain that they are busy professionals that only game biweekly. They have mentally taxing jobs, families, and not a lot of free time. (Wow! Sounds familiar!) They have been playing D&D since the age of the Red Box and know a lot, but don’t come off like a bunch of grognards. Their goal is to help a busy person set up a campaign as easily as possible, even if they are busy adults with children and not a lot of free time.

The set up of the show is brilliant for teaching new DMs how to start. One episode is dedicated to outlining a scenario for the DM. The next episode is that very same scenario being played by their group. This is a practical guide to what can go right and wrong during an encounter. They limit the gaming to the highlights of the campaign, and don’t bother to tell what every die roll might be. A well edited gaming episodic D&D podcast with a focus on game building, playing, custom worlds and designed for busy adults? YES! THANK YOU!

What I really like about the show is that there is a plan and reason to their content. I’ve listened to the first three episodes and learned a lot about how to DM and play. They’ve set their goals in a reasonable fashion. They let the listeners know how they made their custom campaign setting, and offered tips for people looking to set up their own custom world. Not only that, but they provide the materials they discuss in their podcast in addition to their audio, so you not only get a campaign being read to you, but the materials to run it as well! Knowing how the game might turn out before you even run the campaign saves tons of time and lets you balance the encounters in ways you wouldn’t have thought of without a prior experience with the materials.

I’d recommend starting at the beginning as they are attempting to go 1 through 30 levels in their campaign, which is an epic accomplishment if they manage it. I only get to game Play by Post style these days online, when I can squeeze in some time in front of a computer without the baby demanding attention. (Amount of times I was stopped by Glow needing attention for this post? Approximately 20 times.) If I can get a little more gaming in while on the bus going to work, I’m all for it.

I hope the quality of this show continues and improves as I listen. Even in the first three episodes there was a lot to like about their approach to both D&D and podcast gaming in general. I’ve got a few more of their shows in queue and can’t wait to give them a listen and catch up on this show.

My Orc Paladin character in D&D had been sent out on a vision quest of sorts and told to steal a book from the benefactor that had been paying for the party’s haul of art materials from an abandoned crypt. The vision was from my homebrew god that I created for my character to worship. The DM told me to find this particular book, then burn it in a fire with a hero’s ashes. Seems easy enough, as long as someone in the party died along the way.

It turns out though that the big battle I unintentionally broke rules in left the evil book as loot, but no hero’s body to burn. The Warlord that  had been following the party to help with healing sacrificed himself to seal a portal shut, likely dying in the process. He didn’t leave a body behind! After lots of role playing, and some Orcish poetry of mourning, we went on back to the evil baron and tried to pawn off our art haul. My character can’t lie or steal to save his life in most social situations. He has the big and tough thing covered, but lying and being tricky? He’s an ORC. That’s not what they do.

I actually role play my dice affecting his thoughts when I fail to get a good result on checks outside of combat, so I just chaulked that up to his paladin morals. He felt guilty stealing something, even if his god told him to do it. He lost a battle of wills and acted brashly so that everyone saw what he was up to. Luckily the rogue of the party is quick witted and saved him. We got through the encounter without the Baron suspecting we were hiding anything.

All was going well, and the Orc and a secondary character I rolled up as an Invoker set off after another vision quest. The party has split up after my character got his vision telling him where to go to dispose of the book. The rogue has been trapped by the baron and is forced to tell the truth through some sort of magical means by some people trying to hunt us down. He’s doing more role playing at the moment on his own, while I went into a combat scenario not long after the stories diverged.

My Paladin got a badass Obsidian Horse as a wondrous magical item when I failed a critical roll during the ceremony. My homebrew god enjoyed his failure and rewarded him with a stony ride that snorts flames. I had the chance to pick any item I want, but I decided to forgo combat badassery and simply go with what was cool thematically at that level. I’ve started developing the horse now as a cool addition to enhance my character’s presence and style, and I really like the flavor a giant stone horse come to life brings. The image of a giant orc in plate mail with a huge axe riding an obsidian horse  is really what I want the character to be about visually. If that doesn’t scare you, nothing but death is going to change your mind.

Eventually the characters I control make it to a tomb that they were reluctantly going to disturb to fulfill their god’s edict. It turns out it was already raided by some evil Drow Necromancer. He was using dark magic to try to raise the very person we were sent to burn in a funeral pyre. Now we had the hero and all we had to do was defeat the Necromancer and the minions and burn them to make the prophecy become true! The battle took 5 rounds, and ended when the Necromancer fell for a trap I had set for him at the entrance of the tomb. He was crushed to death by a giant flaming wagon we had brought for the funeral pyre. Spectacular!

After we discussed the evil that had corrupted the hero and I described the made up ritual honoring his death in detail, the DM made a proposition. The city’s hero, who had been raised from the dead by the necromancer, treated us as his savior from a corrupted unlife. He willingly gave us his high level items, gold, and treasure. He wanted to be burned in the fire, and was quite helpful. He wanted us to raid his tomb and use his items, because he thought we were noble and righteous and he had no use for them. He had tons of information about what we needed. We were going to burn him in the funeral pyre to burn the book and he was happy about it and wanted to give us his cool stuff!

I did the unthinkable and TURNED DOWN the magical items he was offering. I let the war hero keep the item in his tomb and performed the ceremony to get rid of the evil book. It was tempting, but I thought better of it.

I did it for two reasons. One, my Orc is sheepish about stealing if the dice are any guide, and didn’t want to go on this tomb raid in the first place. Only the command of his god made him willing to raid the tomb of a hero. Secondly, I thought this was a sort of meta-game test as a player. I thought, and a called the DM out on, the fact that I thought this scenario was a giant trap that was going to get my character lynched when he went back into town. If I showed up wearing a dead hero’s armor after his crypt was recently defiled, I was going to be treated like a ghoul even if I had the now crispy hero’s permission. Instead, I correctly gaged the situation and turned down all but the gold and gems. Those are anonymous and untraceable.

I got a note from my DM, who basically admitted that I had called him out correctly. He thought he’d have gotten me to surrender to my greed in trying to grab better gear for my two characters instead of making the right choice “in character”. The amount of gold I’ll be able to spend will probably be able to pay for the item anyway, so there really wasn’t anything lost. I’m really enjoying this character and game. It keeps building over time. It’s worth the effort it takes to keep up with the story from day to day.

My Play by post group has continued to play through Keep on the Shadowfell on the web. My Orc Paladin, Ganash, is a strictly melee fighter. I’ve been hit by arrows, taunted by demons, and generally harassed throughout the game. The rogue in the party made off with a share of gold because I bestowed protection onto a creature we found, and rather than let him sell it into slavery. There has been lots of fun role playing to be had so far.The combat so far hasn’t been as fulfilling for me as I had hoped.

The first chance I had to act heroic was during a goblin attack. We fought them off, but I only killed one or two. The Warlord NPC turned the tide of the battle, healing us at a critical moment and routing the rest of the fighters before we were defeated. That’s okay, because where Paladins really shine is against the undead. The first scene where we had with some zombies coming towards us I didn’t roll a very high initiative and chose to let the zombies come to me rather than aggressively charge. The Deva Wizard torched nearly all of them before we even got into hand to hand combat. I only put one of the undead down in that combat too. It wasn’t bad tactics on my part, just simple kick ass rolling on the Wizards part.

Anyway, after being knocked around and forced to spend several healing surges, I ended up getting an action point and having a surprise round. An action point is an opportunity to do something bad ass twice per round because you took on a greater challenge without resting. It adds strategy to every move and builds drama during a big fight. A surprise round is basically a free round to do something before the other party moves. Not having the books in front of me for a reference point, I decided to make a mad charge for the undead that were summoning something evil into the world. I took a double move, then spent an action point to cross the board, charged, then took a hostile attack of opportunity to smack down the undead barbarian that was nearby. I was basically Lancelot charging across the entire map to smack down someone. I went ridiculously far (Nearly four or five times my normal movement rate through a combinations of mechanics for running and charging with my racial bonuses for being an aggresive Orc) and ran up and stabbed someone from across the map.

It looked fishy to me that even in perfect conditions I would have been able to cross so many squares that quickly, but I tried to do it with some flair. When I got home and checked the Player’s Handbook, it turns out that neither I, nor the DM had been ruling the surprise round correctly. No one else in the party had any idea of the proper ruling either, so no one was trying to get away with anything. It was just a rule that slipped everyone’s mind while trying to set up a good fight.

We had been playing as if a free round was like any other round of combat but only one side got to move. This allows for ridiculous actions like my charge all the way across the board. Even I could see that this couldn’t have been correct. Instead of a “Free round” of full actions, there was only supposed to be a single action that the opponents couldn’t react to before real combat began. No one knew that. The rules also expressly forbid that I spending an Action Point like I had. The rule is “only ONE action on a surprise round.”

Had I know that, I would have been much farther away and would need to spend another round reaching melee range. I could have made it where I was in another round, but not the surprise round, which changes things tactically. Once we were in proper combat I could spend the Action Point and move twice, but the Undead creatures would have had a round to fire arrows or blast me first. Basically everyone’s action during the entire round of combat was against the rules, and I only discovered it when I went to look it up for this post.

Does it matter if everyone was still having fun? The DM has yet to rule, but I posted the appropriate page now that I discovered my error. It’s up to him to make the call, as the DM’s word is law.

The best part of D&D in a friendly setting like this is that we can all just decide if we want to enforce the rule and start over the combat, or just fudge the round and give some sort of reason why this could happen. It was an honest mistake, but since the players are also the arbiters of the rules and nothing is competitive, we can just make it up now and see what happens.

Perhaps my character’s god gave him an extra boost to help him across the battlefield? Perhaps the undead were incredibly engrossed in the raising ceremony and just didn’t notice this time, with an understanding that we’d play the combat out following the rules better next time. Personally I would prefer just having fun rather than worrying we got every rule correct as long as no one was trying to exploit anything. It was pretty hilarious to run all the way across the board just to hit someone, either way.

I am entrenched in the geek culture. Even I have my limits.

I was bored waiting for my afternoon podcasts to download. I had somehow burned through all my comedic and informative political stuff early, and I wanted something nerdy to listen to. I decided to check to see if the latest Dungeons and Dragons podcast featuring the guys from Penny Arcade was available. No luck. I was a few hours too early to download it. It’s the only actual “People play a D&D game recorded for a podcast” worth listening to for any amount of time.

Casting about on Twitter, I discovered a few other D&D podcasts. Some of them are reviews of books, or about the hobby of roleplaying themselves. Then I stumbled upon Radio Free Hommlet, which is a dedicated D&D 4e podcast. Since this is the game I play, I decided to give this a listen. Several people on Twitter referred to as “crunchy”, meaning it dealt with the mechanical and game playing parts of the game. I like some crunchy talk about D&D from time to time. The mechanics of running a good encounter, or building a good character can give me ideas for my own games. I thought I’d be able to handle it. I thought it was going to be about how to be a better player through roleplay and character ideas. I was wrong.

This podcast, at least the one I listened to, was astoundingly nerdy. Three people introduced themselves as “DM” followed by their hostname, as if it was a title you earned for completing a few years ad “Dungeon Master University” or something. I’ve never refered to myself as “DM Torgo”, and if I do, it means Mindflayers have eaten my brain and you should run for your lives. I knew I was in trouble right there, but I kept listening because I was washing dishes and didn’t feel like drying my hands and searching for something else to listen to.

The first section of the podcast was dedicated to a review of the characters presented in the Players Handbook 2. I know D&D, and I have access to the power selection through DDI builder (when it works. Current status: BORKED!). I know how to select powers for a build and try to make a kick ass characters. At least I thought I did.

These hosts went through and built a character, talked about the different powers, and got very, very “crunchy” about their different breakdowns of which was a better choice. They had catch phrases and injokes about different powers which just baffled me. It wasn’t funny, just like a catch phrase spewing character on a sitcom isn’t funny. They repeated them. Often. The different DM hosts would argue rule interpretations and talk about how one skill or another was so vital to whatever it was they were doing, or how they thought this power or another was so much better.

They had lots of opinions about very trivial things, which I guess some people might find helpful. If you were trying to decide if you needed to pick up a particular book to add to your collection, I could see how this level by level breakdown could be helpful. For people that have access to the information in the online builder, it seemed redundant. Anyone can read and make up their own opinions about the things they discussed. There is no “right” way to play the game, which is why D&D is great.

Later in the podcast they built offbeat characters for fun and then ran through a build for ten levels. This part I actually liked, except I think they approach the character creation process very differently than I do. They built mechanics first, story second. That’s fine, but I never come out with a coherent character that way. I guess if the end result is something fun to play it’s not bad to approach it that way, but I couldn’t do it when I tried in the past. Whenever I take apart a character and reduce it to a bunch of feats and powers without a story I tend to have a hard time playing it well.I think the episode I listened to, in particular, was a less serious sort of build than they normally attempt.

What I didn’t like was building a character that was mechanically sound, but had no background. It was just a bunch of numbers, but no story. Picking the bests feats and powers is only half the game, and it’s not the important half in my opinion either. I just don’t get the idea of being intensely “competitive” about D&D. It’s a communal storytelling game. If rolling high numbers on a d20 makes you happy, you don’t need a story to do that.

Either way, they leave their sample characters available for download, which is good. It lets others see how to make a well built character and the thought processes that formed it’s creation. It might not be a character you wanted to play, but at least you know what goes into making it after listening. While I didn’t like the rest of the podcast, this open creation process could be really helpful if I ever get in a building slump. People that take their hobby seriously are fine, but perhaps I had over estimated my love for “crunch” in a podcast.

My D&D gaming has turned digital. While I’d love to have time to meet with the guys, roll some d20’s and hang out, the best we can do at the moment is play through Maptools online Play-by-post style. We pass around the maps, take our turn, and the send it to the next person, all while posting to a board for role play moments. It’s working pretty well. We’ve already reached level 2! My Orc Paladin is about to fight some undead for the first time. I loathe the Undead.

While it’s fine between levels to work with a computer to play, when I needed to level up my character and send it to the DM, I had a hard time because the Dungeons and Dragons Character Builder program has stopped working on my machine at home. I keep a spare Windows virtual machine installed to run that program, and a few others, that simply will not be ported over to Linux any time soon. When I go to install the monthly updates, there is a 50% chance the program will crash and be irrepairably broken. Uninstalling, upgrading, doing a dance to damn Windows, the entire “Why I hate Windows” routine continues on because of this damn program.

When it works, the Character Builder is an AMAZING program. That alone prompted me to buy a subscription to play Dungeons and Dragons for a year. It saves that much time, and makes the game that much more fun! You simply check off boxes, choose your idea of a character and all the mechanical grunt work is calculated automatically for you. It makes the detailed mechanical character creation of tabulating bonuses and sorting through materials bearable.

Sadly, the installer’s problems have left me unable to use it this month. You don’t “own” the content despite having a subscription, so you are limited to 5 installations of the Character Builder per month. I tried, and failed, to install the program successfully on my machine five times this month. Whoops! No September update for you! The demo didn’t even work reliably, which means I have no means of updating or leveling my characters digitally for my campaign! I’ve had to pencil in things on their original character sheets and track it all offline (deep shame!).

I’m waiting for the customer service people to extend my installations so that maybe, possibly, the next five times I try to install it there MIGHT be a chance I can use the program with the content I paid for through the next year. Otherwise I get to wait for another month to update my characters. Each month I get to hope it will upgrade successfully. It’s infuriating that their model of lock down prevents me from using material I should have access to if it wasn’t for THEIR program crashing. I can still use their books thought, and do it the old fashioned way.

Anyway, I’ve had to work on my characters offline, without up to date materials, trying to find where particular bonuses might appy, or where a feat or ability might improve my character or prove redundant. It’s very slow and annoying, and it can’t be shared with my DM, making it useless since we don’t play at the table any more. We’re going to add “second string” characters to the campaign eventually, but I’ll have to be content polishing up my back story and character motivations a bit longer before I can post the mechanical “meat” of the character sheet. This has helped me refine my ideas a little, and slowed down my desire to push on to a new character after working so hard to make my Orc Paladin interesting, but it’s frustrating to know that I’ve paid for something I can’t use for no good reason and it’s holding back sharing my creative ideas.

The old D&D group hasn’t been able to get together for a while now, so we’ve shifted to playing online. They’ve set up a dedicated online forum for the game, and the DM has set up an entire Homebrew world with a back story, maps, and history. I got invited to join them as they start a new adventure in this world. A coworker of the DM who is new to D&D 4E is also going to start playing with us to help round out the party. As a result, I got to make an entirely new character.

Since my last game of D&D was several months ago, I haven’t been keeping up with the most elite builds, highest damage per round outputs, or the newest feats to take. Instead of thinking of my character as a justification for the abilities and weapons I’d use to kill monsters, I went about creating him as a character, then tried to wrap suitable mechanics about it.

The thing that replaced D&D as my gaming outlet most days was Dungeon Crawl. The DM also started playing this game, and he and I both shared an interest in making the gods of D&D more like the gods of Dungeon Crawl. In Dungeon Crawl, the gods are are active in the world, calling down wrath on your enemies, punishing you when you violate their precepts, and granting you power when you follow them. I wanted to bring that element with me from Dungeon Crawl into D&D, where the gods always seemed more like window dressing and stat boosting instead of living entities.

One of my favorite builds in Dungeon Crawl is the Orc Priest of Beogh. The Orc Priest is an armed warrior that calls down smite on his enemies, gains Orc followers, and eats rotten meat as if it was candy. They wear heavy armor and carry large weapons to chop up their enemies. They fit the D&D class of “Paladin” in my eyes with a little work. At least a monstrous version of a Paladin. I usually favor monster corruption of fantasy tropes as a rule, so this seemed like the perfect fit. Instead of needing to fight for approval, this idea was green lit by the group immediately.

Orcs in D&D are typically a monster race, and they are usually used as generic warrior types to fill out a dungeon. There is a “Half-Orc” race that have player feats and can fit into several builds well. Mechanically they are just like Orcs, except they have a few better choices when you try to customize them. If the Orc race was fleshed out, with unique feats and perks that would make them more fun, they would have been my default choice, but instead I went with the more playable character first. This is the only real optimization I did for the entire build. I decided that I’d play a Half-Orc that was in denial of his human ancestry, which my DM liked, but I have yet to explore. The issue of his origin will only be delved into if the DM deems it relevant.

He is for all intents and purposes fully an Orc. He speaks Orcish (Giant) to those around him, and Common only hesitantly. He believes himself to be a prophet of an Orc God no one in the world has ever heard of before. He is a prophet of a religion from another game. I’m using the D&D 4e rules to translate how the god plays.

My character communes with this Orc god though fever dreams. He eats rotten meat that he prepares in a certain way, and when his mind drifts away at the height of his fever, he believes receives divine instruction. There is no priestly structure or any kind of lore other than what he discovers in his dreams and when he awakens. There is no one else to consult when he gets a vision. He has to parse out the meanings himself. He writes down mad gibberish in blood while he is in this fever state on old paper. He then goes around the world trying to follow these visions to fruition.

Tell me that isn’t an awesome character hook? Other than gaining piety through sacrifices of meat, there is no conventions in the game of Dungeon Crawl to explain this ritual. I just made it up and ran with it, all because Orcs in Dungeon Crawl can eat rotten meat and not get sick often.

My character claims he receives divine protection, but perhaps he isn’t channeling anything. Perhaps it’s all in his mind, which has been warped by the consuming of rotten meat and whatever odd spices he uses in its creation. Maybe he has a more primal connection to some divine source that grants him access to power out for his sacrifices. It’s ambiguous at the moment.  He’s gotten followers that also believe him to be touched by some sort of divine power and take his word that the communion ritual is real. They claim to have seen his god when they communed togehter. Who knows if it’s all just a huge delusion or not?

Just the DM I suppose.

All this background and ritual make him much more fun to get in character. There is a way a normal character would handle a problem, and then there is how a possibly insane Orc Paladin prophet that likes to trip out on rotten meat to talk to his personal, possibly fictitious, god likes to handle a problem.

I picked encounter powers and feats that compliment his reckless nature. He isn’t a stoic, righteous paladin on a mission. I’ve never had an interest in the class, and if I hadn’t gotten to play a twist on the character archetype I would have explored another kind of character. I’m glad I decided to challenge myself by playing a class I’ve never explored before. The powers seemed fresh for reinterpretation by coming at it without any background or previous min-maxing.

My Orc Paladin is a self-doubting follower of a distant and cruel god that wants answers to why he is being put through such a journey. Why has been given this awesome responsibility to lead the Orcs and Humans into battle against the Undead? Will his god abandon him if he can not gain followers or bring glory to his name? Will his next communion end up in disaster if he eats the wrong meat, or prepares it in a way that displeases his god? What if he is just plain crazy? Does it matter?

D&D can be just about rolling dice and killing monsters, but it can be a lot more than that if you get to explore how your character ticks. The play by post medium is perfect for me, because I am much more capable of playing interesting characters in print than when I try to role play in person. I’m too embarrassed to speak in character and “act” like I would in print. I’ve probably written the second most material on the entire board, second only to the DM because I’ve been inspired by this character. We haven’t even been in combat yet and I’ve already escaped death once or twice. Once the pace really picks up it’s going to be a lot of fun!

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.