D&D this summer

WoW was extraordinarily boring tonight. I missed the guild raid by 15 minutes and so was stuck waiting to be an alternate. By the time I realized that I had no chance at getting into the raid, it was too late to bother trying to get into a pug (pick-up group, or ad hoc group, for those who don't know). On the up side I was questing and found a quest in Icecrown where, through flashback narrative, I got to be Arthas. That was fairly awesome, if a bit morally troubling.


Recently my guild moved all of its best geared characters to another guild so as to get raid experience. I moved too because, A) I'm fairly well geared and B) it was pretty lonely in the old guild with all the best players elsewhere. Anyway, this new guild is looking to give raid spots to people who will constantly raid with them. Fair enough. I don't want to be a hardcore raider, but I could maybe do 2 a week. But they also schedule their raids between 7 and 7:30, just when I've been making dinner or hanging out with MV. So, because I am not there for raids to start I'm not necessarily "reliable" enough to be included in raids. Most vexing. We shall hope that this changes.

In less annoying news, plans move forward apace for our D&D adventure. It cannot be worse than my first D&D experience. I shall narrate this briefly, just to give a little background. I had no idea about D&D. I was invited to play with a group of people I knew from community college. Players: 2 spinsters in their late-30's, early-40's; 1 lonely female wiccan with designs; 1 overly-idealistic male with romantic and chivalric notions (read me). DM: younger brother of spinster 1, bassist in metal band, and generally cool, if non overly refined, dude.

So both spinsters decided to play misanthropic cutthroats of borderline, if not, evil alignment (can't remember precisely). Both were that annoying stereotype who would rather glare evilly at you than respond to you. They were your typical I'm a member of the party, but I'll kill you if I decide I want to. This is, of course, a great morale booster. It is particularly useful when you meet a camp of men who know about the way ahead and who seem to be important to the plot (why would the DM have put them there if they were of no value?), and these characters decide they are too suspicious of the men to even investigate. Yet it turned out that I offended these damosels for taking the initiative to talk to NPCs rather than scornfully storm away from them. They decided that I had elected myself leader of the party. If by leader they meant the only person in the group who used polysyllabic vocabulary and who thought NPCs were useful vectors of information, then I suppose I did. Silly me.

The wiccan played a bard. Her high charisma scores, though, I fear were forged, as I saw no evidence of charisma in her character. Again, when faced with a camp of men who seemed to be useful, I did all the talking, and not by way of taking advantage. Me talking was better, in my mind, than awkward silences punctuated by desperate hooks tossed out by the DM to no avail. She was the quietest, meekest, and most awkward high-charisma bard who ever laid plectrum to gut.

I was playing a Ranger and had been asked in to be the one who takes the damage, in a party otherwise fairly low on HP and AC. I was also supposed to be the one to heal. In other words, looking back with the eye of a stalwart WoW campaigner, I was supposed to be the tank and the healer. ummmmm..... What was the DM thinking here? He should have made me be a Fighter or Pally. Or he should have made me a Cleric. One role or the other, not both. If he wanted me to do both he should have made me be a Pally, even though that would have been compromising on heals. A part cannot co forward w/o dedicated heals. Anyway, this meant that I, a ranger, and essentially, in WoW lingo, ranged DPS (I took alot of ranged feats), was in the front line taking most of the damage, and at the same time needed to heal myself. Classic. Physician heal thyself syndrome. It was ridiculous.

Horror stories:

• As we were leaving town to go and find the tower of the powerful wizard who had summoned us together, we noted a large mercenary army gathering outside. Being wary of them, as one should be, we wanted to keep an eye on them and make sure they didn't follow us. Being a Ranger, I had an animal companion. I decided that, since we didn't want to split up the party to have someone keep watch, I'd summon a badger to stay behind and watch. This provoked a controversy of at least 15 minutes. The spinsters were collectively (they acted collectively often) worried that the mercenaries would see the badger and be suspicious. I suppose they were playing their paranoid characters to the full. I offered to not cast the badger, but then they worried that we'd have no way of knowing whether the mercs were following us. Upshot? 15-30 minute argument about whether a band of profesional mercenary soldiers would find a badger suspicious and what they would do to it either way.
• One of the spinsters, a Rogue, if I am not much mistaken, got fed up with trying to carefully ascertain what was on the other side of a door and so kicked it in herself and leapt into the room. um.... ok. She's a Rogue. She's a misanthrope. She's Drow. She should like to stay in the shadows, hidden away until she can do the most damage posible and avoiding contact with the lower races as much as possible. Quite apart from this being radically outside of character, she totally flew in the face of her class role. She's supposed to scout, not get tired of scouting and bash doors in. That's the fighter's role, dammit. So after this ridiculous move, I leapt in after her to try and take any damage (my role in the party, mind you) and I took a crossbow bolt. This, I thought was in line with my character and with my class role. Suddenly and without warning she remebered to play her character and was taciturnly disapproving of me for being paternalistic and chauvanistic. She was fairly frustrated that I had presumed to take the damage for her, little remebering that one of the explicit reasons for asking me to play was that the party needed someone to soak up damage.
  
• I dated the bard... but that's not a story for this blog...
  

For my part, I fear that I did not properly play my character. I had an elaborate backstory, which I definitely played to, but I didn't really understand the concept of ability scores as defining character motivations, actions, and outcomes. I think that I played a far more charismatic character than was reflected in my scores. But, by heck, I wanted to interact in the world that was being created. The RP, imho, is less in the battles and fights and more in the interactions and the exploration. The fights are necessary filler in between more meaningful story driven encounters. That's what I feel, and I'm carefully designing my character with this in mind.

More on character building and party formation of the current party later. For now, I look to pout myself a whiskey, descend into the embrace of a well-worn leather armchair, and ruminate on battles past, won and lost, and the lessons to be learned by them. Why, when I was in India, during the Rebellion...