ITT DJP plays Dungeons and Dragons for the first time EVER

That is a lovely story

Jeez that's a great story

I had to miss last week's session due to vacation logistics so I am excited to see what happened while I was away.

lol the invite for this week's session (which will be on Thursday) is "The Return of the Grinz"

RECAP:

When I was last with the group, we were about to climb some stairs to the second floor. The next thing I knew, everything went greyish and indistinct for an unspecified period of time and, when they came back into focus, the party was in a kitchen, the dragonborn bard had vanished, and there was an aasimar with the group who I'd never met before. Apparently I blipped out of existence when we went up the stairs; this is something the house does to people and what we are trying to stop (also it's a genius move on the DM's part to deal with weirdo scheduling issues for a group of 8-9 people with incompatible schedules that will cause them to drop in and out of game sessions). There was a lot of faffing around in the kitchen; we discovered a magic door that would only open for "those who serve" which led to a cupboard full of servants' livery (hmm I wonder how this door works) and also discovered the butler, a woman named M'Lair, out on a patio. The rest of the group seemed to want to lumber around breaking into things and bashing stuff (there was a hilariously failed attempt to kick in a glass door that was unlocked) so, despite my weary disdain, I ended taking point on talking to her to get information. She dropped the name of the wizard's assistant, Kalem, and said if anyone could help us figure out what was going wrong in the house and why it was popping people in and out of existence and attracting weird dancing ghosts, it would be him. She then blinked out of existence.

The party had been regaling me with stories about Branson, the awesome dragonborn cook we had spoken to on the "phone" before I vanished. I got the chance to meet him and he was super energetic, friendly, engaged, and incredibly talkative. Grinz was so relieved when the motormouth blipped back out of existence.

Meanwhile, our gnome rogue Malm idly pulled a card out of a magic deck that she had acquired while I was in The Grey (nb, I coined this term when the DM described what my non-existence was like and everyone immediately glommed onto it) which that did something to her; she immediately hid and ran away from us all, avoiding mirrors and windows. We still have no idea what happened to her.

We eventually ran into Kalem, who was a guitar-playing dragonborn who dresses like Prince. His memories were broken up by decades of blipping in and out of The Grey (M'Lair, who looked to be in her mid-30s, told us that she first began working at the manor over 60 years ago) but he thought he could remember some crucial information that would help us crack the mystery of the house. He then blipped out of existence mid-sentence.

Malm, in her quest to run away and hide, blundered into a room full of imps. We happened to be nearby and heard the commotion and rushed to investigate. The session ended right before combat began.

This is so much fun.

(I left out some details, like the magic portal that led back to the labyrinth they explored while I was gone and the revelation that our barbarian was a runaway noble who had gone to barbarian school in defiance of his parents out on his first post-graduation mission)

barbarian school?

Yeah I don't know, I just rolled with it. It's a ridiculous character anyway (he looks and sounds like a buff Ray Romano)

I love the concept of barbarian school, where first week orientation involves learning to eat with your hands and pound the table properly

yeah that's a great twist

Yes, Barbarian school is wonderful. Great update DJP! Sounds like a really fun group. Of course, you’re going to have to circle back to that glass door because there’s definitely treasure hidden behind it

We got through the glass door! Basically, our two heavies bounced off of it and it slowly opened, because it was unlocked. It led out to a patio where M'Lair was all "wtf are you manics doing here" and why I took over talking to the NPCs even though all I really wanted to do was contemplate a dead plant on a table in the corner

Apparently I blipped out of existence when we went up the stairs; this is something the house does to people and what we are trying to stop (also it's a genius move on the DM's part to deal with weirdo scheduling issues for a group of 8-9 people with incompatible schedules that will cause them to drop in and out of game sessions)

This is a very good tactic, well done your DM.

wait you have a gnome rogue named after IKEA’s most successful line of bedroom furniture?

haha yes we do

That player names all of her characters after Ikea furniture

lol

genius

I forgot to update this!

The party, while looking for our missing rogue, wandered into an attack of imps as well as a weird birdman monk named Blane who seems to think he's some type of magician (this was a new character joining the campaign). We beat up the imps and discovered our rogue, after pulling a card from her Deck of Certain Things, had been cursed so that she no longer could wear clothes. Oops.

The fight was taking place next to a pit. Every time something fell into the pit, the imps suddenly took a bunch of damage. The rogue tried to throw another card into the pit but it vanished and instead a giant Winnie the Pooh-analogue appeared in the corner mid-fight offering to sell us potions. We decided we'd get back to him after killing the imps, which took a bit of time but we successfully completed.

Our barbarian, meanwhile, had been possessed by the same type of lethargic ghost that had possessed my cleric earlier and decided to peace out on the fight. As he was going down the stairs, he made a saving throw and shook off the possession, right around the time we finished the fight and were ready to buy some potions. He came charging back up the stairs, saw a giant golden bear in front of him, and chopped the fuck out of him. We did not buy any potions.

The next room we explored had several mirrors on the walls and a painting that obviously had held the imps we just fought. There was also a small cupboard with buzzing noises coming out of it. When the rogue stood in front of one of the mirrors, it began to glow. We started arranging ourselves in front of the others and they started lighting up, but the buzzing was distracting so we decided to check it out.

It turned out to be a floating droid that communicated by repurposing the words you said to it as a cryptic answer. Through several attempts of trial and error, we closed the shutters on the windows and then arranged ourselves in front of all the mirrors. Nothing happened. Grinz decided maybe we needed to break one, so he headed over to the one empty mirror to smash it. This triggered teleportation magic that threw us all into different rooms with suits of armor in them that moved when we turned away from them.

And the adventure stopped there. Until next time...

this sounds like a completely wild campaign

also hueg lol:

He came charging back up the stairs, saw a giant golden bear in front of him, and chopped the fuck out of him. We did not buy any potions.

I forgot to mention that the poor bear's last words were "my life has been a meaningless sham" before he poofed out of existence in a cloud of honey and was replaced by an angry bee, that promptly stung the barbarian in the face.

That’s one of the first things they teach you about in Barbarian school, they should have blocked that

Last night's session was an epic battle against the suits of armor, who all had a ridiculous AC because, well, they're armor. I was the only person in a room that didn't have a suit of armor in it initially; I did find a large terrarium with a mirror floating in it that I wanted to investigate over the crashing and banging I heard in the rooms around me. The other interesting thing is that all of the suits of armor were linked to each other; when one party member damaged the suit they were fighting, the damage was reflected on the others, plus all of their movements mirrored each other. Meanwhile, various employees of the house (Branson the cook, Kalem the assistant mage, M'Lair the butler) kept popping in and out of existence mid-fight. I did learn from M'Lair that the mirror I found was a gateway to the main mage's study; it was currently closed and she didn't know how to open it. There was also a rug missing from in front of it.

We also had a new party member join; a female dwarf warrior named Miranda who kept missing all of her attack rolls and covered her obviously whiffed swings by pretending to fix the furniture the rampaging suits of armor were breaking in her room. She came through in the end though and crushed the armor menacing her and the warlock, which made the other suits of armor vanish. I joined up with the warlock and fighter; the gnome rogue and our barbarian scholar were in another room down the hall and we hadn't brought the entire party back together yet.

Grinz did get in some good one-liners in the character interactions with the warlock; the best was when the warlock asked "Have you seen Malm (our gnome rogue who is still suffering from a curse that makes clothing disappear off of her body)?" and Grinz replied, "I think we've seen a little too much of Malm."

Time for the next campaign update:

After the armor fight, everyone collapsed in exhaustion in their rooms. Two previous campaigners popped back into existence from The Grey; the dragonborn bard from the original party and the birdman monk we met in one of our fights. The DM gave them the option to level up to 3 with the rest of us in exchange for taking on a curse; the bard declined and the monk accepted. This formed the backbone of how hilarious this session ended up being.

The monk introduced himself to the bard as Steven (note: his name is actually Blane) and he said he'd been in the house for months and was its original architect (uh... waht). As the rest of us began to wake up, we welcomed back our long-lost bard and then got extremely confused when he said "I met Steven" and the monk said "no, my name is David". It quickly became obvious that the monk couldn't tell the truth anymore, and he knew he couldn't tell the truth, which led to him frustratedly saying opposite of whatever he meant in an attempt to communicate.

There was a puzzle around the mirror we found and a missing rug that was the key to unlocking it. Malm, our IKEA rogue, could have found the rug, but she instead found a music-playing crystal and decided to ignore everyone and have a dance party. Bransen blinked back into existence, to the extreme delight of our novice barbarian Bloodrage, who also had gained an animal affinity that gave him the additional strength, language, and characteristics of... a badger. We futzed around with the rug until we realized that the cutoff reflection in the mirror spelled "I AM CLOSED" (or "I AM A LOSER", I don't remember which we settled on. Regardless, the portal opened and we all went through it into a completely empty study. (Bransen also blipped back out of existence while this was happening.)

We noticed that the furniture had all been moved to another room with a blocked door, so we broke it down to investigate. Kalem appeared and asked us what we were doing; we repeated that we were trying to clear the magic so the husband of the house's former master could retire there and Kalem responded with "Why would you do that? This magic is amazing." This led to a conversation about how the master and Kalem created a new school of stasis magic that tries to leave things as unchanged as possible, which is why the food was neverending and why people were getting swapped into a different dimension periodically (it was the house attempting to reset its baseline). We also discovered Kalem is a giant dick who put a couple of our party members to sleep and attacked the rest of us when we tried to open another door out of the study. This led to a great scenario where our monk decided to wake up one of the stricken party members by whipping him and then flying away. Meanwhile, Kalem kept throwing spells at Grinz, who shrugged them all off because really who has time for all that, then charmed our barbarian and had him steamroll through a couple of people. Our new dwarf fighter friend stepped up to Kalem and just pancaked him, reducing him to a purple smear. (Oh btw, Kalem didn't bleed but appeared to be a solid block of sentient purple material shaped like a Prince cosplayer.) We began to celebrate and turned to open the last remaining locked door but the purple smear suddenly moved to the center of the room and turned into a portal, out of which came... a Beholder.

Kalem is a fucking Beholder. He manipulated the master into turning the house into this weird magical prison and now he is trying to stop us from reversing the effects riddling the house. We are 100% fucked.

Also because I'm tired, I keep typing "Beyonder" and then saying "fuck" and editing

i think i have a crush on your DM

We all do, she rules.

I wish you were filming these sessions

This sounds like the most fun

i will suggest this sounds like a good netflix series but you need a wacky neighbor to play

Could totally stream on Twitch

yeah, live DnD is some of the best twitch to be found

obv it sounds like DJP has a fantastic group to play with, but this might be a useful reference for others:

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-kick-someone-out-of-your-d-d-group-1838880820

If you keep it discreet, you can sidestep a lot of hurt feelings by “disbanding” the group and “forming” a new one with all but one player. (I should make clear, this is my suggestion, not Hunter’s.) Instead of changing the group, claim you have a schedule conflict, and that the group needs to “take a break.” (As in so many awkward social situations, blaming some outside force takes a lot of social pressure off, and saves face for everyone.) Then quietly reconvene the group without certain players.

omg, i gotta stop linking to things before i read them in full. this sounds like something i would try to do, which is to say it sounds like AWFUL advice

There’s also the risk that the group will dissolve. If you’re in a group of adults who already have a hard time meeting regularly, even a fake disband gives other players a chance to admit they wanted to quit anyway. The stress of the whole situation might feel like too much to them. Be ready to accept this gracefully. That’s the point: You can’t force people to play games with you.

yeah, not with that attitude you can't. ok, please mentally delete this post and the last couple, thanks

If you keep it discreet, you can sidestep a lot of hurt feelings by “disbanding” the group and “forming” a new one with all but one player.

this is how Lou Barlow originally got kicked out of Dinosaur iirc

All of us in my gaming group in high school were terrible but we put up with it and stuck together, because we were OUR assholes. If you couldn’t deal with it you could just stop coming every Friday.

I forgot to tell everyone that we successfully repelled the beholder without anyone dying. We also found the original owner of the house encased in an elaborate machine that was sucking the magical energy out of him and powering the stasis field that enveloped the manor. Good times!

We had so much fun that we decided to do a small bridge campaign based on Monster of the Week while our DM builds an adventure that can tie into our characters' backstories and relationships. I chose The Expert archetype and created a street tough-turned-monster hunter named Paco Bel-Canon.

Some of us started to make playlists for our characters; this is mine: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4S6XeuylBhjoEl1w2Oen2q?si=ckODDpY4RYWk8-HGSw3cpw

I forgot to tell everyone that we successfully repelled the beholder without anyone dying.

I call bullshit

The beholder cursed my intelligence to subverbal levels; I could distinguish friend from foe but that was it. This meant, in practical terms, that I went from being "healing cleric keeping all the other fighters alive" to "incredibly stupid cleric who still has a big fuckoff mace and is a lot stronger than he looks" and I just kept chasing the beholder around and smashing it in the face until it ran away, lol.

tangential
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/books/dungeons-dragons.html

I played D&D for the first time last night! I don't want to step on DJP's thread but despite a rather unwieldy party (we had 6 or 7, I think), I had a lot of fun.

Ooh step away!

i can't remember the d&d thread recently where i got some good advice to try DUNGEON WORLD with my kids.

ftr, i haven't played any role-playing game since i was a teenager. i always loved the idea of them, though. but i never really committed to any of it, i never had a solid crew.

ANYWAY i have been devouring information about dungeon world and it feels like just the right kind of loosey-goosey for me. run and gun. the fiction is paramount. HOWEVER.

i am getting extremely ANXIOUS to GM (DM?) this game with my kids. i have no idea wtf i'm doing. i'm supposed make up villages on the spot and give them tags? if i make up a monster to battle my kids i need to create special moves for them on the fly?? how do i dispense with this anxiety??

https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd

I kinda want to try this if I can get a party together

https://blog.roll20.net/post/621100826549682176/announcing-burn-bryte

Olaxis is the last galaxy in the universe. A bright orange existence-consuming phenomenon, dubbed the Burn, surrounds and slowly closes in on Olaxis, wiping out entire solar systems as it makes its slow, inevitable advance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g5cdpe1it8

but yeah, that looks really cool! i'm in the middle of a cyberpunk campaign now but i'm curious to hear if this is fun or not. the only thing about roll20 is that the video chat, in the experience of all 5 people on my campaign, is catastrophically awful and unreliable. it will make you lose your mind. last time we finally decided to chat on hangouts instead. but other than that it's got kind of a janky interface but in general things work!

some of the core mechanics seem interesting, too. i like this way of determining the success (or failure, actually) of skill rolls:

Each skill has a die size associated with it: d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12. The larger the die size, the better you are with the skill. Burn Bryte assumes characters are competent heroes, so rather than rolling to see if a character succeeds, the game asks you to roll to see if you fail. How does that work?

When you make a skill roll to perform a task, the skill roll has a complexity, which determines how difficult the task is to overcome. The higher a roll’s complexity, the harder it is to perform. The GM determines a roll’s complexity, which can be as low as 2 (easy) or as high as 7 (ridiculous). Outside of combat most skill rolls have a complexity of 2 (easy), 3 (moderate), or 4 (hard). The skill roll’s complexity determines the number of dice you roll.

When you make a skill roll, you roll number of dice of the skill’s die size equal to the roll’s complexity. If you roll the same number twice or more, known as rolling doubles, the skill roll fails.

For example, Luwe the glean (an alien species in Burn Bryte) wants to attempt to leap across a chasm. She tells the GM she wants to use her d8 Athletics to leap across the pit, and the GM tells her that skill roll has a complexity of 3. Luwe rolls 3d8 and rolls a 5, a 3, and a 7, so she succeeds. If Luwe had rolled a 5, a 5, and a 7 or a 6, a 6, and a 6, she would fail the roll because she rolled multiples (or doubles) of the same number.

if i did the probability/spreadsheeting correctly, i think this is the % chance of failure for various combos of dice thrown vs dice size:

https://i.imgur.com/88jooGt.png

as you level up your skills, i'm assuming you'll level up the dice size (d4 to d6, d6 to d8, etc), which would have the effect of making it more difficult to roll doubles/failures

pretty neat

it is a world where you have a 18% chance to successfully do something ridiculous in space

narrator: the probability/spreadsheeting was not correct. sorry.

june 28 is the day of the do-over. i think this is right, now:

https://i.imgur.com/WmlaBJq.png

earlier, i wasn't taking into account that if the goal is to avoid doubles, then the probability of each successive roll needs to take into account the additional, unique number that was rolled just previously.

this makes some skill checks are impossible. for example, a difficulty 5 roll (in combat) with a skill that only has a d4 ability wouldn't be successful, since you're required to roll 5 d4 and not roll doubles.

with that corrected, you have somewhere between a 0% and 50% of doing something ridiculous in space, depending on how much you've leveled up your dice size for that skill