I am, as has been noted before, something of a Dungeons & Dragons nerd despite not having the opportunity to play as much D&D as I might like. I’m a fan of the weird and sometimes goofy monsters, the heroic deeds of derring-do, and the pulp fantasy silliness of it all. And that’s the good sort of silliness.
Anyway, last Saturday I attended Worldwide D&D Game Day over at Eclectic Games, my FLGS, and had a jolly good time. I got to play in a couple of games of D&D, one with WotC‘s R&D Lead Developer Stephen Schubert at the helm. I’m still getting my head around the new edition, but I’ve already found it a lot quicker to pick up than previous versions of the game. Mostly.
The Game Day module, Journey Through the Silver Caves, was a fun romp even though it took me until near the final encounter to work out why my character seemed kind of, uh, ineffectual. I’m not really one of those people who can look at a ruleset and intuitively grasp how to use it most effectively, so I tend to flail around a little and pursue non-optimal tactics until I am corrected. As such, after some advice from a couple of the more experienced players it turned out that Rogues work best when they’re helping someone else gang up on the bad guys. I changed my approach, and my character suddenly became useful in combat! Huzzah!
All in all it was an enjoyable dungeon-bash with Orcs and Rust Monsters (<3) and a Kobold and some ghosts, and I managed to get through it without coming too close to a horrible death so I’ll count that as a win. The atmosphere was great, and the Eclectic Games crew were (and are) very hospitable indeed – drop by if you’re ever in the area.
