A year ago, I left my increasingly-unreliable tabletop games group to join a local Dungeons and Dragons group. It was a big move since the group had been going for over 10 years but regular games were becoming rare and I’d had the itch to get back into D&D for some time.

Here’s a look at some of the highs, lows and other strange goings-on over a year back in RPGs.

The Good

The die that rolled one too many ones

We’ve all had that run of bad luck. After a particularly woeful evening of dice, a player in my group decided to make an example of the offending D20. Scooping up the rest of his dice, he threw the D20 in the lake outside while the other dice looked on in horror. His luck improved.

Did you hear about the time we captured the dragon?

It was this big! No, really, it was so impressive a whole tribe* worshipped it as a god**.

It’s something of an initiation for new players to the group to be regaled with the tale of the time we not only wrestled a dragon to the ground, but captured it and returned it to its rightful worshippers. So famous has this exploit become, that bards sing of it in other campaign settings. Technically, I think we were supposed to fight and kill the dragon as part of the adventure but the tribe who asked us to find it seemed so sad without their god.

Oh, and people

It’s served as a reminder how much I’ve missed the game and why it’s always been my favourite. Playing as part of a larger club has its advantages too. I got to make a bunch of new friends with at least one similar interest (D&D), and games still go ahead when a couple of players are missing. There’s always been someone willing to jump in and fill any empty seats at the table. The first few sessions had some awkward moments but everyone relaxed as we got to know one another.

The Bad

Stairs

My Eldritch Knight cannot deal with stairs. He’ll happily vault over large, watery traps while wearing plate armour and being attacked by merfolk, but give him an ordinary flight of stairs and he will fall down them. Repeatedly.

Choosing our fights

Walking into one of the highest level areas of the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign at level 4 was perhaps not our smartest move. If we’d just walked into it, that would have been one thing, but we decided the most stealthy entrance would be to bobsled down a mile-long passage, over a chasm, and into the heavily-guarded city below. Naturally, the DM’s hints that we were out of our league fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, the person in charge down there let us go with our bruised pride.

Monks

How exactly do you keep them alive for more than one round of combat?

The Ugly

Epic loot!

Being hired to retrieve some legendary weapons gave the party a moral dilemma when it actually came to handing them in for a reward worth only a fraction of their actual value. And they say power corrupts.

Dice

I still can’t roll them but it doesn’t matter since a critical fail is usually more amusing than a critical hit.

 

*May have been kobolds.

**They may have been stupid.