Dungeons and Dragons.

[Yoto32]

You BETTER be talking about Dungeons and Dragons...which edition?

I am indeed talking about dungeons and dragons And of course it's fifth edition.

Every other Saturday I play a monk named Thelonious who is attempting to invent his own monk path based off the concept of Infinity. I've reflavored the save or die technique of Quivering Palm as his end goal, a punch involving all infinite dimensions of Theloniouses. Unfortunately this has lead to our current big bad, an evil Thelonious who is using the infinity techniques I (we) developed to steal artifacts. We're level 18 and I still haven't used that ability.

On Thursdays I run a group at my friends board game store with pretty much the same people as the Saturday group. We're going through the Tales of the Yawning Portal, a series of unrelated campaigns that are known for being deadly. I've already killed a character going through the Forge of Fury. who as a half elf let some orcs escort him away from the party. Since the stories are unrelated, I decided to make the stories be layered under each other underground, a la Dungeoneering, with Acererak taking the role of Bilrach.

Who else plays Dnd?

[Murdoc]

One of the guys bought a DnD set and we spent an entire evening, going well into the early hours of the morning actually, creating our characters.

I am proud to announce that I am a gnome wizard by the name of Muhammad. A fanatical religious zealot who lives alone in the woods, I am grossly intolerant of other races and beliefs. I'm sure you can see where this is going - being a brown guy in real life. Anyway I have a terrible secret that, if revealed, would throw the world into chaos. In keeping with my character I decided that this would be my discovery of gender indeed being a spectrum. The most haram concept I could think of on the spot. But anyway the DM agreed to incorporate this into our adventure, haha.

Unfortunately for all involved - that friend group has (for various reasons) broken up. Well, in the sense that the DM and I no longer hang out with the others. Oh well!...

If I ever see those people again I'll give you a breakdown of my character stats and share the full bio. I really wish we at least started a game...

[Yoto32]

Well the thing about DnD is that it's a social game, so everybody kinda needs to be on the same page. My group gets really attached to their characters, so when we started the Yawning Portal I had to sit them down and let them know I'm not going to pull any punches and their characters will die.

[Teddy]

Ah, excellent! I knew you too were a man of culture, Yoto ;-)

I played Dungeons and Dragons a lot in high school, primarily Advanced 1st Edition. My initial and favorite character was a lawful neutral monk who was actually named Zybez. Our DM was a stickler for the experience and AD&D 1E was much more dangerous and slower-going than later editions, so I never really got past the 5th level after about a year of playing. But it was a lot of fun, and we had a very large group (7 or so the first game, eventually grew up to 10 on later games that we played over the years, but that grew to be too unmanageable and now we prefer to play smaller groups of about 4-5). I've also played other tabletops like Vampire: The Masquerade, and while we took a lot of liberties with the rules after a certain point, the game was just so well formed that we end up going with a lot of the rules that are prescribed.

It's funny, the game gets laughed at a lot for being nerdy, but I'd say the game helped take a lot of my friendships to the next level. And even a lot of "normal" people ended up playing the game with us and really loved it. It's harder to play online with friends that are across the country now, but I'm hoping VR and more free time can help make the experience just as engaging as it was before.

Going to have to keep an eye on this thread.

-Teddy