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... 

Four F#*$^ng Weeks in a Dungeon

"Text Me if We Die."

This guy is really pissing me off.

A few observations a month into our adventure.

• To quote our Senior Director, who finally joined us a couple of weeks ago: "Oh my god, will somebody finally make a decision already?" It turns out that roleplaying by committee--or, more accurately, by a committee of committees--is exactly as excruciating as that sounds. We took fully 20 minutes four weeks ago to decide our approach to the mouth of the dungeon we've been stuck in. Do we go in all together, directly? Send a scout? How deep does the scout go? Just a little way? As far as he can before it gets too dark to see? Wait, what do we do with our paload? And the two prisoners? Do we let them go? Take them with us? Tie them up? Kill them and impale their heads on sticks and lead with those and What in the hell is wrong with you and this torture thing you've got going on, Rob?
• It's fairly terrifying to have your party rather badly beaten up by four critters in the very first encounter, and then to find themselves facing ~16 more, plus 4 other critters that are bigger and meaner, plus that beast up top, over the span of four weeks--or 90 minutes in game time. 
• No matter how much pizza you're stuffing into your face, when the whole party probably has fewer hit points than that guy, it's never fun to roll the D20, have it bounce of a copy of the PHB and come up 2 on a roll-to-hit. Or, as happened twice last week, to have the wizard hit with Ray of Frost, then roll...2 points damage. "The bugbear laughs." Gah.
• At least we avoided a trap that would have almost assuredly killed us. Barely. Only by means of another 10-minute, 8-person, 3-team negotiation. "I think we should go under the..." "Why would we do that? We're carrying this unconscious person and that seems dubious..." "But if we go the other way..." "What if we tie the unconscious person to our back..." (As it turns out, had we done that, the unconscious person and possibly a few others in the party would have been goners.)
• As of the end of last week, the elf wizard is unconscious at 0 HP, the human fighter is dying at -4, the dragonborn paladin is down to 3, and Roscoe the Legendary Halfling Rogue is the only character keeping the party alive. Roscoe is a killin' fool. Every party needs a Roscoe. Every office needs a Roscoe. I need a Roscoe in meetings with me. Armed with a shortbow. Just because.

Assuming the bugbear doesn't take down the remaining three party members this Friday and the human fighter doesn't actually die (good luck on the saving throws, team!), I am assured by the DM that we'll level up and find ourselves in our first non-dungeon destination this Friday. 

Which would be nice, because we are most assuredly sick of things trying to kill us right about now and could darned well use some rest, healing, food, and practice at non-combat roleplaying.

Meanwhile, my Director tells us he played D&D with his kids for the very first time last weekend. OK, modified. OK, they fought with some imaginary monsters and rolled some dice for damage and death.

It's a fantastic start!

:-)

P.S. The title of this blog is brought to you by the colleague who could not be with us last week because she was househunting, but knew we were potentially heading into a slaughter.

Chaos. Pure Chaos, Man.

This guy should work at Guantanamo.

Well. At least now we all know which one of our directors will, faced with a relatively straightforward decision to politely question two tied up prisoners or, you know, head directly to TORTURE, will bust out his inner Dick Cheney and go for broke...

Then again, dragonborn paladin is chaotic neutral.

So, um. Well played?

Except the character is also bleeding out of several places and is down to three hit points, having taken the vicious brunt of our first encounter with... wait, I am not going to tell you what we were attacked by, just in case somebody reading this blog would like to play the Starter Set. Which should make it very interesting trying to blog the adventure...

Suffice it to say if I were a wounded dragonborn paladin, my first order of business might have been to ask the dwarf cleric (who is also suffering from a few slashes and hacks herself, as she was too close to the front of the fracas) for a round of healing before I went diving for implements with which to start yanking on fingernails.

You know.

Just in case a few more of those devils were to emerge from our surroundings and come at us.

It's not out of the question. It's not like we're in a safe place.

And the prisoners we're interrogating (my team's wizard hit them with a Sleep spell, yay! successfully! and got them tied up, thus ending the battle before anything fatal happened) has more or less told us there are more of them out there.

Lots and lots more.

The campaign begins

I will say this; I'm glad the 5th edition rules are lean and mean. Because Lord of Rings, this was a room full of noisy, confused pizza-eaters!

"OK, I get that you're telling a story," said one colleague to the DM as he was establishing the scene in which we are hired and sent out on the first leg of the adventure. "But why?"

"It's like choose-your-own-adventure," answered another.

(I beamed inwardly.)

We had ensnared a new player just that morning. So for this week, we were up to 13--but we're losing a player already, to an inter-company transfer to a different department, at the end of next week--thus validating the criticality of team character play.

Our characters had no sooner been assembled, hired for their first gig and left town, it seemed, than they were being attacked. (Swift, nimble play is important when you've got only 55 minutes).

The human fighter, who really should have been out front, had decided to stay behind to stand guard over something, leaving the paladin out ahead of the rest of us dealing with two enemies and the cleric with two others.

The paladin got hit before he got a chance to turn his two antagonists into popcicles with dragon breath. (They both failed their saving throws--whew.)

The cleric technically also should have fallen over into a nice deep slumber when our wizard cast Sleep, but the DM let that slide. Next time, though? Probably not.

Having pried some useful information out of our prisoners even without prying out their fingernails, including that our employers have probably been kidnapped and are being held somewhere other than our original destination, we ended the hour still debating what to do next.

Somebody might have suggested, "Hey, we should split up..."

I might have screamed, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" in actual horror-movie slow-mo voice.

And then, the hour was over.

This could be a long six months.

Rollin', Rollin,' Rollin'...

3...2..1...and the Geekin' hath begun.

Last week's PowerPoint "Basics of DND" presentation went over about as well as could have been expected, with only a few forest-creature-in-the-headlight moments. So today, at noon, in Assembly Room A, (which one of our party had cleverly booked for "Team Lunch" [not, under any circumstances, "D&D", because we aren't idiots and we knew the property management company would have refused that room invitation]), we assembled and awaited the pizza delivery.

For what in the name of Olidammara is a game of Dungeons and Dragons without friggin' pizza?

The hour struck noon. (It didn't, really. But the smoke detector in the hallway is dying, and it chirped at least a hundred times, so call one of those The Chirp of Noon.)

The energy in the room sizzled. (Or maybe that was just the sound of WiFi fritzing, and the one member of our team who was attempting to join us via Google Hangouts cutting in and out. Oh, yeah. That's what it was. After a couple of aborted attempts, I said "Fuck it" and turned on my iPhone's personal hotspot. So if I go way over on my alloted data this month, it's because I love you thiiiis much, work-at-home-on-Fridays new mom!)

• First order of business: Roll for your set of dice. Since this crazy idea was mine, the organization had fallen to me. I splurged for a giant $20 bag o' dice from Amazon. It came with 15 sets of beautiful polyhedrals--See above. Just the thing we needed. But some were prettier than others, and how should we fairly divvy up the loot? With the roll of a d20, of course! Winner takes first choice. And so on. And so on. There are still two full sets left in case somebody else wants to play.
• Second order of business: Order of character selection. We're playing in teams of three. Each team will run one of four prefab characters from the starter box. But which one? Also, one very lucky team would get to build its very own character from scratch. Who would it be? Would it be J___ and M___, both of whom were the most eager newbies, eager to play a particular race and class?

Each team rolled three d20s--one per player. Possible range: 3 to 60.

And behold! J____, the Vegas native, came out on top, with a total of 49! She and M___ took all of 10 seconds to yell "DRAGONBORN PALADIN!"

And we were off.

Who you gonna be?

My team, with a roll of 36 (consisting of Yours Truly plus two of the most introverted women in the office), will be playing a half-elf Wizard. We've got some pretty cool spells in our book already. Go, Ray of Frost! 

The other three teams selected from among a dwarf cleric, human fighter, and halfling rogue. For the next half-hour, mouths stuffed with pizza, with the Hangout team member fading in and out (we'll do better next week, I promise, Telecommuting Mommy!), and the room broke down into small teams as we scrutinized character sheets, getting to know the characters, at lesat on the surface level.

Our wizard? A bit of an arrogant asshole. 

We like that. 

Last week, we'd also each rolled for trinkets--one of the coolest new features in D&D 5th Edition. So our half-elf wizard has a silver bell missing its clapper (from me) and two other trinkets from the other two ladies on the team. As a team of ladies, we've decided to play the wizard as a She. 

In fact, the party looks to be shaping up as a majority-female party, which should be a) lots of fun, especially in taverns, and b) interesting inasmuch as traditionally, D&D associated penalties with selecting the female gender. Not so in this new, enlightened edition.

Actually, the team with the human fighter is going play the character as "androgynous"--which I think is a really cool choice, although it may inadvertently get the character into some bar fights...

Well, that escalated quickly

The DM was absorbed in helping the Dragonborn Paladin team assign a standard array of ability scores to their character--they also have their hands full working up a background for their character, which those of us playing prefabs don't have to worry about.

Five minutes before we were ready to break, everybody else asked the DM to please take a moment, pretend they knew nothing and explain,in very small words, what the numbers in the lefthand column of the character sheet meant. Which he did, remarkably effectively. (They're ability scores and modifiers.)

And then we broke, everybody laughing conspiratorially about our characters' backstories and what we were going to do to flesh them out before we meet to really start the game next week.

At which point, our other true telecommuter, a German programmer from Chicago, sauntered in from a meeting. "What, it's over?" His team told him what character the team would be playing. I handed him a set of dice. We told him we expected to see his face on a computer screen at 10:00 am Chicago time every Friday.

The DM let it slip that we will begin the adventure in jail.

Let the Game (really, finally) Begin.

You Made a How-Many-Slide PowerPoint About D&D?

So this afternoon was the great orientation and kickoff meeting, which, I gotta say, went better than expected.

Nobody backed slowly out of the room, feigning a suddenly sick aunt in Idaho. Nobody was called into an emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

By the end, everybody seemed engaged in the idea of sitting around a table, making shit up.

A lot of this outcome was probably due to the fact that, even though the PowerPoint was 46 pages long, the DM and I left a LOT OF STUFF OUT.

Like, a whole lot.

Put it this way: The Player's Handbook is 312 pages long for a reason.

But today was just about getting everybody excited about adopting a character (in teams), and understanding their character's race and class, selecting an alignment, and figuring out the art of roleplaying.

And when it was all said and done, the best question of the day, by far: "Why roleplaying? Why not just be yourself?"

Dude. That's, like...that's so deep it's practically...philosophy.

And I am not even joking.

Back to the orientation. We rolled through the slide deck, identified somebody who'd never seen any of the shows or movies we used to illustrate alignment, and ended the meeting with a D100 roll for trinkets that would belong to the player, not the PC.

I got a silver bell missing its clapper. Hmm.

Finally, we determined to up the Geek Factor by another 10 percent by Skyping in one team member who works from home on Fridays...

And we're off!

Hatching a Dragon at the Office

The depths of your dorkness never cease to delight me.

-A friend, upon hearing about this

Identifying the Opportunity

Where I work, the Great Place to Work™ survey is a ginormous, huge deal. Like, a beat-us-over-the-head-with-dozens-of-emails, incent-us-with-Starbucks-cards, exhort-us-with-moving-speeches-from-horseback-before-riding-into-battle big deal*.

That’s because where I work really is a Great Place to Work. Fortune Magazine says so, in great big headlines, every year. And furthermore, my little corner of the workplace is beyond great. It’s AWESOME. We rock! We are the Web Geeks! In fact, the only room for we have left for improvement, out of a buttload** of survey questions, seems to be, “There is a team or family feeling here.”

We chatted about that question recently, in our after-survey meeting, and basically, the problem seems to boil down to the problem I think most multidisciplinary departments have: I work on the consumer/patient/employee side of things. So I see you guys every day, but I don’t know what in the hell you do. And I don’t want to interrupt whatever it is you’re doing to just chit-chat, in case you’re doing something really, really important. Ipso facto, I don’t ever really get a chance to know you, and our office remains, for the most part, a silent little cube dungeon.

Which got a few of us talking one day as we were out at lunch…about Dungeons. 

And Dragons.

What if we dusted off the polyhedral dice that have been gathering dust*** for, oh, say, [mumblety-humph] years since college and went on a year-long monster-slaying, treasure-gathering, spell-casting, butt-kicking campaign?

With our colleagues?

At the office?

At lunchtime?

My god, the notion seemed so outlandish, it just might work!

Laying the Groundwork

I ran the notion past my Director, an open-minded chap,**** who thought it sounded like a great idea, if a bit madcap. We also found one other guy in the office who had substantial RPG (role-playing game) experience, who volunteered to be the DM (Dungeonmaster). (He also had some dusty dice.) 

And with that, we were off.

The planning has taken roughly a month. We’ll be running the 5^th Edition Starter Set to get everybody up to speed, with significant modifications or else there’s no way this thing will ever work.

• For one thing, you can’t block off four to six hours at a stretch for D&D at the office. Back when I last played, our biggest worry was whether Russia would drop a nuclear bomb on us.***** And a session could stretch on and on and on. In the workplace, we have actual stuff to do, so that's right out of the question. Luckily, our crazy idea hatched at the exact same time that Wizards of the Coast was releasing a brand-spanking-new edition of the 40-year-old game, and it’s a streamlined ruleset that takes a lot of klunkiness away and allows for faster, leaner gameplay. (Had we come up with this idea last year, we’d have had to scrounge around for old copies of AD&D rulebooks from the 80s, because there’s no conceivable way to shoehorn a 4^th edition game, with its battle grids and minis, into 55 minute sessions). Our game’s going to be strictly theater-of-the-mind, and if there are any arguments, about "Yuh-Huh-I-Was-TOO-Close-Enough-To-Hit-That-Orc," DungeonMaster's Ruling Stands.
• For another thing, while we are a lean-and-mighty team, we are still 22 people. Even if a few people—or half the people—decide to opt out, you cannot run an effective adventure with 22 player characters (PCs). You can’t even really run an adventure with more than eight without things getting chaotic. And then there are meetings, vacations, conflicts…not everybody will be able to make it to the game each week. Which would eventually cause problems—some PCs would level up, others wouldn’t, and the lower-level characters would end up massacred in battles with higher-level monsters. To solve this problem, the DM and I worked out a scheme in which we'll run four pre-fab characters from the box set, plus an additional two (races and classes TBD by group vote) as “pool” characters. 
• The team-building part: Teaming up people from different disciplines who don't usually work together, for the purposes of smashing heads and smiting things.The characters will be assigned to cross-discipline teams of two or three people, who will roleplay each character either a) collaboratively or b) by taking turns. (We’re leaving that up to each team, and are looking forward to sitting back and basking in the potential hilarity of having a Risky Rick paired with a Cautious Cathy playing a mighty-smitey Paladin. Heh.) We figure at least one member of each team should be able to show up at lunchtime each Friday, ready to take the character out adventuring, rack up experience points, find treasure, buy better weapons and armor, level up, learn new spells, and, oh, yeah, in the process, actually learn to play the game. 
• Has everything I’ve written so far in this section been all blah-blah-blah Ginger? Then what you (and ~20 of my colleagues) need is a 46-slide introduction to the Basics of Dungeons & Dragons! {coming soon, as soon as I find a way to upload and embed a ginormous PPT! DISCLAIMER: All Images Borrowed From the Generous Donors of the InterWebs, Copyright Assumptions Hefted Back At Original Uploaders, Yadda Yadda Yadda.}

We start next Friday. Wish us luck. And skill. And the common sense not to rush headlong into the battle with the first dragon we meet without stopping to strategize first, or it'll be a TPK (total party kill).

Most of our colleagues are approaching this with bemusement. But one of our newest colleagues, a female heretofore not initiated into the awesomeness of sitting around a table making shit up, has already gotten into the spirit of D&D. 

The box set is designed to take 25-30 hours to complete, which means 6 months of training wheels—and by then, anybody who's really enjoyed it can decide to start over, for realz, with a character they roll up for themselves, in a campaign we start from scratch. Which leads me to quote quite literally the best thing I've heard at the office in more than a year: 

"I can be a fuckin' shark that shoots fire out of my fins!? AWESOME!!!!!"

-She who shall remain nameless until credit is requested

* Well, maybe not yet, but in campaign mode...
** Approximately 80; I didn't feel like looking it up
*** In my case, not dust; fish poo. My dice were at the bottom of a very large vase that a betta fish lived in, happily, for three years. Oddly enough, he died a couple of weeks after this plan occurred to me. Coincidence? Divine intervention by Boccob the Uncaring, God of Magic, the arcane and foresight? You decide.
**** I can call him a chap because he's from England, originally.
***** Don't get any ideas, Mr. "I Love The 80s" Putin.