Staying On Topic Part 1 (Dungeons and Dragons)

Welcome to Staying on Topic. This is a new idea I'm going to try for my blog posts, where I attempt to talk about the same topic throughout the entire post. It's actually quite hard for me, so we'll see how I do and I'll try to have a new topic every few days. It may or may not work out...

So, if you've been reading our posts from the beginning, you'll know that we play Dungeons and Dragons. I, of course, take full credit for introducing Cam to the game a couple of years ago, but I've been playing for the better part of a decade now, and I like to think of myself as a 3e/3.5e player, but I have dabbled in 4e as well. I think in those eight years, I have experience playing almost every 3.5e PHB classes, even some from supplements (Gotta love the Dwarven Samurai!).

I listen to Podcasts and watch YouTube videos of people playing DnD, and I spend about an hour every other day trying to write Campaigns, designing characters and sketching villages. I consider DnD to be a brilliant way to spend a day, but I don't know whether 5e will be good or not. Obviously, I want it to be, and just as I gave 4e a chance, I'm sure as hell going to try 5e, because I'm an optimist at heart.

Sadly, I haven't played as much as I'd like recently, but I'm prepared! Like I said, I have started writing, and it's not looking so bad at the moment. My campaign so far involves Pirates and a market town. There are some other elements I'd like to incorporate into the world, but I haven't written any of it yet...

I'll keep this one short, simply because these four paragraphs have taken me a whole day. Staying On Topic is a challenge, but the next one will be much better. It'll be a while before my next On Topic post though.

Feel free to Comment, Follow and Share us with your friends.

Stay tuned for more Off-Topic goodness soon.

Oli

D&D: Don't Hate The Player

So, my friends and I have regular sessions of Dungeons and Dragons, once every Friday, we meet up and talk about our week while we set up the game mat and sort out the dice we'll be needing. Now, what should happen here is a short recap on the previous games events, but recently (mainly because of the release of certain new games), we've become increasingly distracted before playing, now I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but we don't really give the game the attention it deserves.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game, which, when you're paying close attention, can keep you and your friends occupied for hours, and thinking about how to escape that trap you fell into last session, or how you took the advice of a certain wizard, let's call him Randalf, who crit-failed his Intelligence check on the secret Dwarven riddle door, it isn't enough that he found it, but he has to be the one to solve it? Anyway, after hours of Bluffing his way through "Yeah, no, Dude, I got this. This riddle ain't no thing" The halfling walks up to him and rolls a 15, just making the cut, but still slightly worried about talking to the man twice his size who could shine a light at him "Hey, I think it's... um... friend? Take it or leave it, just saying, man" (but if you ever asked Randalf, he let the Hobbit figure out the answer to make him feel part of the group.)

History is written by the Wizard.

What I'm trying to say is that, once you get into a story, it's very hard to break free. I didn't mean to write all that, but I got side-tracked while writing and it kind of just happened.

I got into DnD in my second week of high school, when I had just turned 12, and, for me at least, it was one of the greatest things that could have happened, I was reading those rule books for days on end, and because I was new to the school, the group itself was comprised of people I had never met before, some of whom I'm still friends with almost 8 years later (I know it doesn't seem a long time, but I've lost a lot of friends since then and keeping the DnD group together, after several permutations, has been a great achievement).

Characters come and go but The Group stays together.

I've played many characters over the years, even DM-ed my fair share of games, and it's still not enough to satisfy my Experience point cravings. I have spent more time designing characters for this game than I have most other things in life (I mean, if I had spent that much time on my work in school, I would have had my GCSEs in year 8 just from sheer boredom)

I love playing this game, not just for the fact that you can pretend for hours that you can cast spells like magic missile and acid arrow at random villagers, for the simple reason of "Just 'Cuz." Neutral Evil right? But that's the idea, you can do things that you can't in real life, you could wake up one morning and announce, "Today, I shall fly a Dragon!" and you could, all you have to do is find your personal set of lucky dice and your character sheet.

I want you, Yes You, Reader, to find a DM, make him, don't ask, Make Him, design an adventure for you  and some friends, experience the feeling of that first level up, and the first time you kill those pesky goblin bandits who are raiding the caravan with untold riches.

So, grab your dice, print out a quickie character sheet, design that character, and save those Villagers from that Dragon who lives in that Dungeon.

Oli
10th Level Blog Writer


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