Short-Attention-Span Suicide Hobos 'R' Us

"Goats are Loyal, Man" - Note in bottom right corner

Turns out when you're picking up D&D in your 30s and 40s, instead of at 13 or 14, and you're only playing for an hour a week instead of 4 or 6, you do some stupid things. Especially if you're playing PURE theatre-of-the-mind, and nobody's drawing a decent map or keeping very good notes...

There's a cliche about a style of D&D play called Murder-Hobo, in which the party just basically goes from place to place looking for things to kill. Our party is the opposite. We seem to be looking for ways to die. 

If we were fish, we'd live forever

1. We ignore adventure hooks.Our party's been from one end of the town of Phandalin to the other and talked to every conceivable townsperson, hearing all kinds of interesting rumors about, say, kidnapped townspeople. Or the gang-like Redbrands who run the town. Or hey, who was that Iarno guy, and where did Gundren go, and wait a minute who was he anyway? 

We wander around like a group of dementia patients

2.We forget where in the hell we are--and what we are doing there. Oh, yay, we finally beat the monsters that were about to thump our asses! Hooray! Loot the bodies! Search the cottage! Find loot! Oooh, goody, we can sell this back at the trading post in town! Let's go do that! 

DM: "You arrive in town to find the trading post in smoking ruins." (He did this to keep us from yet another long, drawn-out, pointless conversation with the poor shopkeeper, I'm sure.)

Colleague, in an email sent after the session: Wait, weren't there another four cottages in that little hollow? We kinda forgot about those...

Fuck.

We fear the little stuff and then rush into mortal danger like a bunch of brain-damaged toddlers

3. We have absolutely no sense of proportion. In the aforementioned cluster of cottages, we tiptoed through the first time because of a sign that warned us, Beware: Plants and Zombies. In the very next session, the group very nearly decided, for reasons still unclear to this bewildered blogger, as a bunch of Level 2 babes in the woods, to march right up to the lair of a green dragon.

So basically, Terrified of Shrubbery. Dragons? Not so much.

We have a supremely and hilariously unbalanced party

4. Our wizard is thoroughly inept, and our halfling rogue is a murder machine. Perhaps due to intentional play and perhaps not, Bonnie the Elf Wizard's spells frequently go spectacularly wrong. During a battle against giant spiders, for example, she opted to cast a sculpted Sleep spell, then a Thunderwave. Unfortunately, this put Roscoe, the otherwise most reliably lethal member of the party, into an immediate and sound slumber. The decidedly unaffected giant spider then picked him up and skittered off 50 yards into the brush, and while the subsequent Thunderwave did hurt the spider, it also pushed it--with poor sleeping and now-also-injured Roscoe in its jaws--another 30 feet away. Only quick thinking and ranged attacks by the Dragonborn Paladin saved mighty little Roscoe from being dispatched by the combo of spiderbite and some absolutely lousy wizarding.

Roscoe himself, though, when unencumbered by Bonnie's bumbling, would give any Game of Thrones assassin a run for the money. The players all love Roscoe. If Roscoe ever dies, I think we'll hold a mock funeral for him in the company parking lot, complete with a Viking burning of his character sheet. 

Our pants-less dragonborn paladin provides some powerful comic relief and fighting might. Today, in fact, as we leveled up (Level 3! It seems only yesterday we picked up those dice for the first time! Sniffle...) Morrigan McNoPants read her Sacred Oath aloud--and it turns out the character's voice is a high falsetto. Inspiration Point was awarded for the feat of reading the whole thing without cracking up (which was no small task, as the rest of us were thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close to laughter-induced cerebrovascular hemorrhages).

Our DM is getting creative

I am relatively certain the stock D&D 5e Starter Set does not include a blue and orange magical goat named Mr. Woolseyworth who was used as a projectile weapon, thrown repeatedly at Bonnie the Obnoxious and Inept Wizard by an ogre during our last encounter. But that doesn't matter, because it's hilarious, and Mr. Woolseyworth then licked Roscoe on the head, then walked up to Princess Andromeda the human fighter, pulled a ring out of her 100-pocket vest, chewed on it, and spat it out again, magically enchanted.

Cool.

If only we hadn't run into the damned Necromancer and his dozen zombies on the way back to reunite the goat with his owner...