D&D last night

[cellio]

Last night's D&D game was nifty. Ralph was able to show, not tell, us some important things about the problem our party faces, and my character got an interesting development. (It is still to be determined how this development relates to the surprise my character got last session.) One other character got something interesting too, but it's my journal and I'm going to talk about me. :-)

We had ended the last session with our arrival at the home of the elves. This session Ralph said "I'm going to start in the middle" and told us we were walking down a corridor. Fortunately, none of the players objected to this; while we did say things like "I wonder how we got here", no one challenged the method of storytelling. The result was this sort of surreal "is this real or are we collectively dreaming?" feeling, which got stronger as more and weirder monsters came at us (and stronger still when the passage by which we entered disappeared, leaving no escape).

As we entered the large cavern where most of the evening's activities took place, my familiar took off excitedly. Now, Ralph has never taken over the play of my familiar to such an extent before, so clearly something important was up. Meta-game, I as a player knew that something was up (more on this later), but I did my best to play it all in character. Fortunately, Larissa in character is pretty concerned about Hrolf (the familiar), so while we fought she also kept looking for him and calling out to him.

I concluded early that we needed to treat the real (immediate) problem (the source of the monsters), not the symptoms. (Ok, the real problem was that we were here with no way out and no context, but that was beyond our characters to solve.) We could keep fighting monsters, but that wasn't getting us anywhere. We needed to keep that flow in check while also figuring out how to make them stop. So my character started paying more attention to the source, trying various things to make it stop, all somewhat ineffective (but very informative for later). This meant that my firepower wasn't being spent directly on the monsters, though, which resulted in the non-flying party members getting swarmed. Oops. And things were way too close for fireballs by then.

For my character, the highlight of the fight was the sword. Now, just in case it's not obvious to anyone still reading this entry, my character is a sorceress. When she finally caught up with Hrolf, it was high up on a wall, where the handle to a sword was sticking out. So she grabbed it. It came out effortlessly, and she found that it was mostly made of (sun)light. My character is a follower of Pelor, the sun god.

This is the point where I made a mistake as a player. By "mistake" I mean something that diminished the storytelling. What I wanted to do was to take that sword in hand, swoop into the fight on the ground from above, and smack something. (I don't know if the neural processors were going quickly enough for me to target one of the undead creatures, who tend to have trouble with light. I did figure that out before Ralph mentioned it at the end of the game, but I don't know if I figured it out then.) That's what the character would have done, I'm pretty sure. But as a player I thought and self-moderated too much. I said "Hey, you're currently polymorphed as a gargoyle. These hands are good enough for spell-casting, but you've never held a weapon in them. And you're not even proficient in swords. Land and drop the spell and then charge in; it'll work better." I should have gone with my instincts and let the rules side sort itself out; the story demanded flash, not accuracy, and it's the GM's job to moderate such things on behalf of the players. I think I disappointed Ralph with that, along with myself. Oops. (So I landed and shifted back, and was immediately engaged by something, and did not get to make my heroic charge.)

Eventually the monsters overwhelmed us, everyone died, and we woke up. But Larissa still had the sword, which she knows how to use due to the level of paladin she just acquired.

I think Ralph did a great job of storytelling with this session. It was unconventional, informative, and just plain nifty.

Comments

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you liked it. Your eager enthusiasm is helping me overcome my own perfectionist self-criticism.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

On third read, I find myself just a little surprised that you didn't mention the dragon. :)

[cellio]

The dragon will get copious treatment in Larissa's journal. :-)

The dragon is so tied up in the whole "metaphysics of the world" thing that, each time I started to write about it, I found myself having to explain lots of backstory so it would make sense. I guess I should have kept the "eek! and there was a huge dragon blasting fire at us!" part though, as that stands on its own. :-)