A Scene of Dungeons and Dragons Fun
Yesterday's Dungeons & Dragons session at the library resulted in numerous silly moments as the party investigated a murder at a logging camp in a forest rumored to be steeped in magic. There were puns galore. The characters were occasionally stumped. Sometimes they barked up the wrong tree. One tree had a bite that was worse than its bark.
I adapted a free one-shot module entitled Death in the Wood to fit in an extra chapter for the short campaign that started with A Chance Encounter. One of the players is a Druid who chose the ability to transform into wild animals. While investigating the scene of a new murder, this druid turned into a weasel in order to better sniff out (literally) any clues at the scene. Upon following a strange series of marks she found in the soil, which still had no scent she could detect, she turned around and ran back to the group.
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The downside of the Wild Shape ability is losing the capacity for speech when in animal form. When she ran back to the party, instead of returning to her normal human druid form, she decided to use hand signals to tell the party to stop and not follow that way yet. The others saw a small weasel run out of the underbrush, stand up on its hind legs, squeak at the party, and hold its little paws up to tell everyone to halt. The thief responded to these upraised paws by kneeling down and giving the small furry animal a double high-five. Needless to say, there was miscommunication, and hilarity ensued.
At the end of the day, the murder was solved, the culprit was apprehended, and the Wild Shape druid had all manner of fun later transforming into a bear in order to tear apart some assailants and then intimidate the culprit into coming along quietly for a proper trial.
Remember, role-playing games are designed to provide a framework for cooperative storytelling, not to perform satanic rituals. Find a local public game and join in if you can, because it's the perfect DIY entertainment blend of structure and improvisation. If you don't like the swords-and-sorcery feel of Dungeons & Dragons, there are many other options. Youngsters might enjoy My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria. If you prefer more of a cyberpunk setting with some fantasy features, check out Shadowrun. I am a fan of the flexible Savage Worlds rules that can be adapted to any setting, whether homebrew or one of their published expansions. A new edition of Savage Worlds is on the way later this year, but you can't beat $10 for a paperback copy of the current core rulebook plus PDF files no matter what!
This post reminded me of the fun I used to have playing tabletop RPGs. Nowadays, I can never find players. So I just play MUDs instead. But it was fun reading this.
Sometimes the best way to get a game is to announce your intent to DM. Players will find you.
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Never played D&D but I like Savage Worlds for its simplicity and interesting settings. I had several sessions of Hellfrost and have now a group where we play Sundered Skies (I just wrote about the char I play there).
There are pros and cons to any game system. I like the skill-based character creation of Savage Worlds, but there are also pros to the class-based D&D characters. The dice-based skill improvement of SW is nice, but d20 with a difficulty rating per roll can be good too. There is a tradeoff in granularity of rules versus fluidity of play, but there are benefits to both.