So it was D&D night tonight. This is always good times, but it's especially good times when we're just at the end of a long fight with three high-powered demons and a high-level blackguard. We had, when we left off, just finished the enemies, losing our NPC ranger and putting most of us at 2 or so hp.
So we get the hell out of Dodge, hole up, and are about to sleep and heal when...
"Roll a spot check. Erik."
"Uh, 6."
"You notice the dog-headed demon about the time it slips a dagger into your ribs from behind. Take 13 damage."
"Excellent. I'm at -11. I am dead. Next time, I'm finding a bigger tree to slump against."
Fortunately, Rema let Mel's cleric attempt to heal me from the dead, and it succeeded. So we sort of beat off the 6 or whatever attacking demons, and camped, got some spells, healed. Next plan: Save the hostages.
So, in a brilliant display of woodsmanship, since we lost our ranger, Mel immediately gets us totally lost and we waste a day running around in the pouring rain on this hillside. Finally, we emerge onto a road. This would be about the time a big cloud of demons comes up over the treeline.
"We, uh, hide. This time, I find a big tree to get my back to."
"Ok. Matt, what are you doing?"
"I leap out in the middle of the road, draw my sword, and wait for them."
Oh crap.
The mother of all melees ensues. The 4 of us, half out of heals, versus something like 35 assorted demons. We quickly group up in the middle of the road, and it devolves into:
"I hit! I killed it! I cleave! I hit it! It didn't die! Crap! It hit me! For 4 more damage! I'm losing hp fast! Help!"
etc, etc for a whole long time, until in a scene eerily reminiscent of the last fight scene, everyone's at negligable hp and all the enemies are dead, and we limp off the road into the woods and collapse. I find a big tree. And we heal. Again.
So our mission, originally, was to recon the area, see how many demons there were, rescue the hostages if we could, and that sort of thing. Well... we get back up to the slave pens, and it's empty. So we check out the evil shrine. And find the hostages. Or the bloody remains of the hostages, anyway. Looks like we failed THAT one. But the demons look pretty much gone. We got that much, anyway.
Next up: Whereupon Dwip encounters Homework. And Dwip does battle with Homework, and Overcomes it. And Life is Good.
Posted by Dwip at November 16, 2003 11:43 PMExactly how does this Dungeons and Dragons thing work? How can you simulate being hit by 35 demons?
Posted by: Regina at November 17, 2003 5:37 PMThink of it as playing army-men in the sand box. Except there are a lot more rules to follow.
Posted by: Whir at November 17, 2003 11:17 PMHeh. I've never thought about it quite like that.
Maybe as a game of AoK, where all the demons are, say, militia, and all the players are the equivilent of the Ghengis Khan hero, powerwise. Give the demon side a couple of knights to even things out.
In reality, D&D has a pretty good combat system, which takes your character's and the monster's physical statistics into account, along with weapons and armor and magical abilities and such. You roll dice and modify the number from the roll based on what you're doing. Usually the number you get from that has to be higher than something to be successful - combat works like that for being hit. Once you get hit, you have a certain amount of hit points, which go down depending on big of a weapon you get hit by.
Etc, etc.
Posted by: Dwip at November 18, 2003 12:23 AMyanno, i always thought of ADnD as functioning on rules and raw imagination ;p;p more the latter than the former, of cours ;)
Posted by: Raine at November 18, 2003 6:19 AMMost of it is, but she was asking more specifically about the combat portion, which has been made more like a boardgame in the newest iteration of rules.
Posted by: Whir at November 18, 2003 2:45 PM