Saturday Temple and I started generating some characters. It’s a basic set. Well first let me backup a bit. We went to the local comic book aka geek central to look around. Actually I forced him to go since he was riding with me and I wanted to stop by. I picked up Munchkin Cthuluhu and then found an ‘Irregular’ battlemat with square grids on one side and hexes on the other. I also perused their mini’s looking for what I might find.
We picked up 5 mini’s, a half orc, a male caster, a dwarf hammer toter, and a roguish type and one guy straight out of Arabian Nights just because he had a cool looking scimitar.
Anyway after we got back to my place and grilled some burgers and the kids drove everyone crazy I printed out the character sheet PDF that was over at WoTC in quadruplicate and we sat down at my new gaming table, which I should post a picture of here I suppose, and did some rolling.
I’m not a fan of point buy being old school as I am, I won’t try to one up anyone with some dumbass comment about what color box of DnD I started with or maybe to beat that I could go well “I started with Chainmail” and then if someone tops that, I’m too old for that crap at this point. If you need to feel superior that you were geek earlier than me, by all means go ahead.
Anyway before I got off on my side rant, I’m not a fan of point buy I like the randomness of rolling. Of course each time I do this I forget about Temple’s mad skillz with dice. Let’s just say that two of the four characters are GA and the other two ain’t too shabby either. His half-orc barbarian for example started with a 19 str and has 52 hit points at level 4.
I started them all at level 4 since my plan was to use the Return To The Temple Of Elemental Evil to do any gaming. My time’s just too tied up to be able to spend the hours a week it takes to do decent production values on a campaign. Sure I can wing an adventure with nothing more than some blank paper and an Idea or two but in those cases production values do tend to drop off since there are no hand outs, mapping is done on the fly etc.
So we generated a sorcerer, rogue, cleric, barbarian, your stereotypical Adventuring Group. Oh the sorcerer is the other example of Temple’s gods given ability to roll uber characters and has 25 hitpionts at level 4. 25?! hit points for a level 4 sorcerer. Without any re-rolling 1′s or anything. Yes the character has a big strength.
My method was roll 4 dice, drop the lowest and generate them in order. You can then have two numbers switch places to help push the stats toward where you wanted the character to be.
We really only got the half orc done, Gnatsum, is his name, can you guess what kind of car Temple just bought?
So just to get back into the swing of things I took three orcs, gave two of them 3 levels of warrior and the other 3 levels of cleric (shaman) and had them meet by surprise on the road. Gnatsum was hurrying on foot up a caravan trail between Freobar and Hommlet at the summons of a past acquaintance of his (the sorcerer in this case) and came across the three orcs who were heading in the other direction. The orcs were… well never mind as that’s probably not something that should be explained as of yet.
So initiative is rolled and Gnatsum wins of course as he has the Improved Initiative feat and Temple’s rolling to go with it not to mention like a 16 dexterity.
Gnatsum reserves his move to see what the orcs do which of course is unlimber javelins. Seeing this he charges at them. Of course as it’s been years since we’ve dealt with DnD and very little with 3.0 (yeah I didn’t go out and spend another $100 on the 3.5 books. It’s just bullshit those came out so quickly) so there was a lot of quick looking things up. But eventually we figured out what (although we were wrong as I’ve since gone back and re-read) could happen. As it was Gnatsum ran toward the orcs and they left fly with the javelins. One punched a hole in the burly half orcs shoulder which twisted him around enough that the other missed. He shrugs off the damage and kept charging.
The shaman reaches out and casts a spell on one orc who’s muscles immediately plump up a bit. (bulls strength).
The orcs ready their great axes as Gnatsum gets there and attacks of opportunity abound (which of course didn’t go correctly either as I’ve since re-read).
There’s a brouhaha of course and to make a long post a little shorter, Gnatsum went after the shaman who managed to Shield one orc, get almost dead, drink a potion, Doom Gnatusm, get almost dead, then gets run down as it tries to run away.
As Gnatsum runs back to meet up with the other orcs he cleaves one in half with Lopper, the +1 Greatsword he wields, the other tries to run away, only to be run down as well due to the barbarian’s speed of foot.
Gnatsum cleans his blade and loots the corpses gaining a masterwork greataxe and roughly 400 gold in gold and silver from the bodies.
Now my rolls during this battle sucked. I missed every shot, including several AOO’s as well as the regular attacks except for two.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun ‘dming’ again although it was very little done but just rolling dice and controlling npc’s was fun.
D
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