Our First D&D Session: Creating Our First Characters

Keep in mind that at this point we still had no clue how this game was played. My tiny shreds of knowledge came only from playing Neverwinter Nights which is a third edition based PC game.

One thing I did know though was that people love clerics, but people didn't necessarily enjoy playing a cleric. I figured I would endear myself to the group by taking on that role and have a nice simple time of casting "Cure Light/Moderate/Critical Wounds" over and over again while learning to play more complicated parts of the game.

My wife decided to go for the barbarian figuring that it would also be simple to be the person in charge of running up and hitting things. The classic barbarian has the lowest Intellect score, so it makes sense that it should be the easiest to play, right?

Loran, my first DM, was a great person to introduce us to the game. He and his wife continued to be part of our D&D adventures in Houston up until we left.

Here's specifically why Loran was a great DM, especially for newbies like us:

He's a friendly person for one. Unfriendly people do not make good DMs. When your job at the game table is to thwart and confound your friends, it helps to be completely unlike the villains you are portraying. Otherwise it becomes far too easy for people to assume you really hate them. For example, DMs should try their best to not cackle maniacally at their players' misfortune. At the end of the day, even after characters have been melted, ignited, perforated, sliced and diced... your DM should still be your friend.

For two, Loran seemed excited to share the hobby with new people, and he had a good sense of humor about it. For some players, character creation is a fine craft that must be approached with the utmost reverence and seriousness. These players should not be the first ones to volunteer to help you make your new character.

I know. I know you can help them make their first character super awesome and amazing and perfect... but, just remember that it's a game and some people - and most first timers I assume - have fun just finding their character in a process of thinking about the person they want to create.

I told Loran that I wanted to play the cleric - obviously assuming that every group still needed one in this edition. I then picked out half-elf for my character's race. The reason I picked half-elf was two-fold. In all previous editions of D&D half-elves were just awful. They pretty much had the weakest bonuses of both humans and elves, so I was excited to see that in 4th they became more of a unique player race.

The second reason I chose half-elf was because I thought charisma was still a handy stat to have as a cleric. In 3rd edition charisma determined everything about the cleric's Turn Undead ability, and I remembered that being a really awesome power in Neverwinter Nights. I remember I actually caused a server to crash because I had gathered up an innumerable amount of skeletons around me before unleashing Turn Undead to destroy them all.

In 4th edition, charisma is still a secondary stat for clerics, but the Turn Undead ability is much less a cornerstone power for them.

At any rate, in those days there were two potential builds for clerics: Devoted, and Battle... or as Loran put the question to me, "Would you rather be a standing in the back guy or more of a battle-pope?" While I found the idea of playing a D&D version of Pope Julius II intriguing and hilarious, I figured that the standing in the back guy was standing back there casting Cure Light Wounds, etc.

I decided to go for the more healing sounding one rather than the self-buffing warrior type. As it turns out, every cleric in 4th edition gets to do other things in addition to healing - that's were the real dichotomy between devoted and battle-popes come in. Iannan would get to heal whether he was in the front lines doing it or in the back. 

I should also mention that I was a cleric of the Raven Queen. I wanted to be a cleric of Ilmater, but this is what a newbie I was: I had no idea that the Forgotten Realms (which Ilmater is from) was a specific setting for D&D. I thought all D&D was set in the Forgotten Realms. This was just as the Forgotten Realms materials were being released so Loran had no sources for clerics of Ilmater.

Cassandra created a rageblood half-orc barbarian. Interestingly enough her newbie assumptions about her class and play style were closer to the truth than mine were. Her build really was a good way to learn the game as it mostly involved running up to things and bisecting them with an axe. It was very direct and she had the luxury of not having to worry about taking care of other people.

In my next post: How My First Character, Iannan the Characterless Cleric of the Raven Queen, Died.

Our First D&D Session: Who Actually Works Here?

This post has taken me a while to write, because of two things: Firstly, the holidays happened, secondly, I really wanted to figure out what exactly the people in our first D&D did so well that we got so hooked on this game.

As I have mentioned before, we set up this first session through Asgard Game's forums. Aside from the treatises that we should play X, Y, Z other game, the initial forum posts we read were very encouraging. First of all, one of the posters stated that she was the girlfriend of the original poster. 

I knew that women played this game. Heck, it was Cassandra's idea that we look into playing in the first place. It was extra reassuring though to know that the people we were meeting were actually able to have and maintain a personal relationship with another person though. It's not that everyone who has a significant other is instantly awesome or has social skills, nor is it that everyone who doesn't have a significant other doesn't have those qualities. It's just that these folks had already shattered the stereotypical basement-dwelling nerd that we have all grown up to know, love, and shun.

It was decided that we would all meet on a Tuesday night at the gaming shop. The shop was fairly deserted when we last visited, so we weren't expecting the festival of nerds we encountered on a weeknight. I feel like there must have been several tournaments of various games going on at once or we just hit one of those moments when everyone decided to show up to the shop and stay.

The reader might be thinking, "Why didn't you ask the clerk at the front for direction?" This would be a great idea. At least a good place to start, right? Maybe the people running D&D had told the clerk to expect some people looking for a D&D game. This would be a great idea except that it was (and probably still is) really difficult to tell who actually works at Asgard Games. Seriously, I felt that perhaps the owner of the store had left the store for a while and just had everyone on the honor code. Maybe there's a sacred rule that nerds are bound to not steal from other nerds upon penalty of having nobody to game with.

Eventually we found a person who at least was standing at a table where everyone else was sitting. People who are standing tend to be charge, right? We asked and eventually found our group.

Next Post: Creating our first characters.

The D&D 4e Starter Kit

Before our first session of playing D&D, my wife and I felt it necessary to read all sorts of books about D&D. No, these weren't D&D handbooks. These were tangential books like the previously mentioned 30 Years of Adventure, the Waterdeep novel series, and D&D for Dummies. We didn't want to be the bozos with no clue about what was going on, right? I mean, heaven save us if we appear foolish in the presence of our nerdly brethren!

After a while we finally made the plunge and got the D&D Starter Set. To us, this was "buying the game." We knew it was a trimmed down version, but we figured that it would give us somewhere to start. This product has since been replaced by the much better "New Red Box," but the original 4th edition starter set prompted from us the same reaction we had been getting all along as we read about his game: This game sounds awesome. I wish I knew what it was about.

I had gotten the starter set, unpacked it, and studied it for an hour or two before picking up Cassandra from work. This is what the subsequent conversation sounded like:

Me: "Hey! So I finally picked up a D&D Starter Set. It's simple and geared towards new players. We can finally give this game a shot."

Cass: "Oh cool! So you have an idea of how to play now?"

Me: "I have no earthly clue how to play, but it looks awesome! It involves these funky dice and everything. Just as the books promised!"

When we got home we stared at the pretty dice and the monster tokens and chits and things... they were colorful and my wife and I enjoy colors.

But teach us to play Dungeons and Dragons? Well... no. I'm not going to fault Wizards of the Coast on this one though. From what I've heard from other folks and Wizard's own D&D Podcast, this reaction is pretty typical.

I'm not going to do too serious of a review of this product, because it has been since replaced by the Red Box. Nevertheless, I'm going to point out that it is probably a great starter set for people starting 4th Edition, but not necessarily starting D&D. I get the feeling that, although Wizards gave us everything we needed, we had no clue on how to absorb this material. Someone who was familiar with tabletop RPGs would probably have an easier time of it. While trying to learn this game on our own, I felt that explanations were either very technical or very fluffy without the in-between that I really wanted. It was the switches between these two extremes that frustrated me.

One moment I would be reading how D&D was a game of adventure and whimsy, and the next I would be told all the technical details of the hunter's quarry feature (when I had no clue what a "class feature" even was.) For me, things only really came together in my head after bumbling through a few sessions with experienced players and after being able to hear/see how the game is played.

If you're a new player, I would very seriously suggest listening to the PvP and Penny Arcade Podcasts to get an idea of what play is like. For me, the ideal starter set would not only include what is included in the Red Box, but also a tiny DVD or a link to a youtube video or podcast of someone actually doing it with you while you followed along.

As for Cass and me, we eventually found some people on the forums of our local game shop. Thus we set up our first gaming session with excitement for the future, and fear of making complete fools of ourselves in front of people who casually discuss their "1000 point space ork armies."

How my wife and I started playing DnD

First, a little on Cass's background and mine. If you had told me five years ago that the woman I had just married would one day insist that we play Dungeons and Dragons, I would have been... well not shocked, but surprised.

We were both fairly geeky already. She was the type of geek who went to Renaissance faires and listened to neo-Celtic songs about rat catchers. I was the type of geek who played video games set in Renaissance fair-like worlds. I would also multi-class into Rat-catcher.

Eventually I did join her in attending ye ren-faire, and she eventually read Lord of the Rings after me coaxing her. Next I got her into the City of Heroes MMORPG - AKA Digital Dolly Dress-up Time with Super-powers. (I don't mean that to be derogatory either. Playing super-hero dress up is awesome in that game.) That game got us into the whole MMO thing. After a while we joined the masses in world's largest MMO, World of Warcraft.

It was shortly after that well... this happened:

We had talked about maybe one day playing D&D just to see what it was like. I always figured we would either continue talking about it, but never doing it, or talk about it until one of our friends overheard us and taught us how to play.

One day out of the blue though I suddenly found myself being driven to Asgard Games in Houston. We ended up not getting player's handbook on that first trip. Instead we ended up buying some a 3rd edition reference book and the 30th Anniversary of D&D book from a Half-Price bookstore down the street.

We didn't really know what we were looking for, but we made our first step. The 30th Anniversary book is actually a pretty good read featuring all sorts of people including Sherman Alexie, Steven Colbert, and Vin Diesel, just to name a few. It definitely kept us thinking about the game. The best thing that came out of this was checking out the Asgard Games forums and finding a group there. I'll continue the story about that first session in another post. The next few posts will be about some newbie tips on joining the hobby.