About ten years ago, I started running an RPG group at the school where I teach. It was a natural offshoot of the sci-fi and fantasy club I was running at the time and, eventually, came to outgrow, overshadow and finally replace its parent club. In the six or seven years I ran it, there were probably about twenty-five kids involved to a greater or lesser extent and about half that number involved pretty intensely.
It is one of the oft-ignored realities of teaching that relationships you have in the classroom sometimes carry on once your students leave school, go into university and mature as young adults. This has certainly been the case with the former members of the RPG club, most of whom I’ve stayed in touch with via social media etc. I was honoured to be invited to join three of them (all in their early to mid-twenties now) for as many sessions of 5th edition D&D as we could fit in during the summer holidays and we had our second session yesterday.
And it was a blast.
This post is an attempt to capture some of the excitement and fun of that session. It assumes that you already know a bit about tabletop rpgs and D&D in general and is brought to you by the word… critical.
Let’s briefly introduce the PCs:
Kharrz is a half-orc barbarian, played by a complete newbie to tabletop rpgs (one of the greatest things about the two sessions we played was seeing him grow in confidence in terms of game mechanics and becoming genuinely enthralled with the whole experience of role-playing). 5th edition D&D places an emphasis on character motivation and traits during character creation as well as stats and class features etc. While stats-wise Kharrz is a fairly typical barbarian (high STR and DEX, reasonably high CON, low CHA), his actual character is… well, pretty, unique. Based on the dice rolls, he is… short. (Shorter than my human cleric and the elven wizard who is the other PC.) And wide. And a lover of fine fashion. And something of a pervert, apparently. Okay, then.
Mylia is a female elven wizard who, apparently, was raised by wolves. Our DM pointed out that it takes elves about 100 years to reach maturity. That’s… a lot of time spent in the wilderness. Okay, then.
Gaston Emberspire is a human cleric of Ilmater who is a terrible (in both senses of the word) flirt and has a low DEX score. His background is more ‘vanilla’ than both Kharrz and Mylia, but that is perfectly fine with me.
The first session was a lot of fun and relatively straightforward. We did the sort of things that you expect a party of first-level characters to do. We were cautious and thoughtful, trying to co-operate with one another and augment each other’s strengths in an attempt to mitigate our weaknesses. We negotiated a couple of encounters reasonably easily, although we did seem to have a worrying propensity for triggering traps we’d already spotted. J
Yesterday’s session was. Insane.
We were exploring a cave system and entered a side cave which, our olfactory senses had warned us, contained some kind of animal. As we inched forward, we became aware that we were sharing the cave with two mangy wolves who had been chained to stalactites on either side of the chamber. There was a safe way through the middle of the cave to a cliff at the back which was climbable and the top of which flickered with some kind of light. There were a variety of options open to us at this point. The DM told us that the chains were reasonably secure, but that one of the wolves had turned towards us and noticed us, starting to growl. The half-orc decided to spear it with his javelin quickly to avoid it making too much noise. (We knew that there was no one else in the cave with us, but had no idea if we could be heard from other chambers that we hadn’t even seen yet.) He threw and did 11 points of damage – not (quite) enough to kill it. He took a second javelin from his pack and prepared to throw it too.
And then all hell broke loose.
What follows is a classic example of why I love D&D so much, of how a situation that you think is under control suddenly turns out not to be, of why low-level D&D is among the most terrifying, white-knuckle experiences you can have without forking out megabucks for a theme park ticket. The DM rolled; he paused. “Erm… the wolf gets free.”
“What?”
“Maddened by the javelin sticking out of its flank, it tugs at the chain and the pin holding it to the stalactite pops out.”
He didn’t have to, but he raised the DM screen to show us the natural 20 he’d rolled.
Okay, then. There were three of us and only one of it. It was pretty close to death, surely, and the other one was safely chained to the…
Another roll.
“Erm…” Another raising of the DM screen. “The other wolf is free too.”
We looked at each other.
Battle was joined.
My character received a critical bite attack for 17 points of damage – more than twice my maximum hp total. Instant death.
During the course of a difficult combat, Kharrz received enough damage to fell him and failed his second stabilization roll with a natural 1, using up not only his second chance at avoiding death but his third and final chance too. Another one down.
By this point, Mylia was on 1 hit point and there was only one wolf left. She ended up shocking it to death with a couple of Shocking Grasp cantrips.
She looked around her. There was a lot of blood on that cave floor and two very dead adventurers.
I looked at the DM and wondered what he would do. This was his first adventure and two of his players were dead. That’s not his fault necessarily. This is a game in which character death is always a possibility and we had made some crucial tactical errors as well as being desperately unlucky. There are plenty of DMs who would have asked for character re-rolls at that point and ad-libbed some way of introducing the two new characters into the adventure to help Mylia.
“I’m going to pray,” said Mylia’s character. “To his” (nodding at me) “god.”
The DM thought about it. “Okay.”
What followed was a fudge, but I can’t really say I blame him. I would have fudged too; but I would probably have done it earlier, perhaps with the crit roll that downed my character. The truth is that character death can be wonderful and dramatic but it can also be a pain in the backside when time is limited and it’s taken you three weeks to arrange a meet. Sometimes it’s better for pragmatism to win out over rigid adherence to the rules. Or the rolls.
There was a prayer and an offering. A desperate heart-felt pleading. A tentative, uncertain ritual, fire and blood and tears in the dark.
We were raised from the dead.
Not that our PCs actually knew anything about it. Neither my character nor the half-orc knew that they’d died, just assuming that they’d been knocked unconscious. And the elf wasn’t going to say anything. Now that’s interesting, because it has potential character consequences for later on.
After trying our best to absorb the lessons of this encounter, we went into the next one with considerably more thought. We went down a tunnel towards another cave, this one occupied by six goblin guards drinking around a fire. We thought things through. We watched them carefully for twenty minutes, noting that one of them seemed more inebriated than the others, seemed more prone to getting… excited. The wizard crept forward and cast minor illusion at a point just next to the drunken goblin, creating an extra goblin voice to the conversation, a goblin voice with a less than respectful attitude towards the drunken goblin’s mother. An argument broke out between the drunken goblin and the one sitting next to him.
We waited, hoping that the two goblins would provoke a fight and do our job for us. They didn’t. Not quite, although they were distracted. The wizard’s spell was limited in both duration and flexibility. We would have to take matters into our own hands. Still hidden by the shadows, the wizard let fly with her bow and the arrow embedded itself into one goblin’s chest and he slumped forward, dead. One of the half-orc’s javelins slashed into another goblin’s neck killing it outright. The goblin next to him saw the javelin hit, got up and opened his mouth to warn the others. And my character’s crossbow quarrel buried itself into his larynx. Suddenly, we felt good again. Suddenly, we felt like we knew what we were doing. Flushed with victory (and spurred on by the knowledge that there was at least one other creature nearby who didn’t take kindly to us attacking ‘his’ goblins), we charged forward.
To be fair, that wasn’t a bad plan, per se. It was just that the good rolls we’d been experiencing up to that point kind of dried up on us. (If it’s one thing that playing RPGs should teach you it’s that the dice are never your friends.) I got taken out early on in the fight and started bleeding out on the floor. While Kharrz took care of the remaining goblins, Mylia knelt by me trying to stabilize me. She failed. I was down to my second self-stabilization roll and, if I failed this, I had only one more chance to survive before I died. Again. (And presented the DM with a real headache.)
The DM let me roll with advantage (a system whereby you can roll twice and take the higher of the two rolls) because Mylia was aiding me. I rolled the two dice together and this happened…
This, to be honest, was the punch-the-air, scream-at-the-top-of-your-voice moment for me. The relief was… indescribable. Whatever else I was going to do today, I was not going to get killed twice in one D&D session! We got through the rest of that section of the adventure relatively unscathed and, after some rest time, we’re ready for round 3. I don’t know when that’ll be, but it promises to be a lot of fun.
Which is what D&D is all about. For years I’d been on the other side of the screen, but actually playing was fantastic. And nerve-wracking. And terrifying. And slightly embarrassing…
