My hair is at the annoying length on a Wreck-Free Sunday

In case you didn’t know, I let my hair and beard grow during the winter to keep my head and face warm, and the hair bit has reached that awkward length that is long enough to get in my face but too short to tie back and keep it out of my face. In this picture you can see a stray hair that just refuses to stay brushed back and out of my face.

The RPG group met again yesterday and we played another session of D&D5. After leveling my warlock I had a selection of 5 cantrips or “at-will minor spells”: eldritch blast, prestidigitation, poison spray, save from death, and mending. Of those only eldritch blast and poison spray are combat spells that cause damage, and I finally have a healing spell in the form of save from death. Prestidigitation and mending are utility spells that make living as an adventurer much easier. The first cantrip does things like clean anything or anybody a small (1 sq. ft.) segment at a time, light or extinguish small flames like candles or campfires, and make food and drink hot or cold as appropriate and delicious. Mending repairs broken things as good as new as long as they aren’t too big. The spell list says the mend can’t exceed 1 cubic foot but is not clear if the mended item itself has to meet this requirement. Save from death does just what it says it does, takes a character who is near death and brings them back to 0 hit points so they regain consciousness.

I got a chance to use three of those cantrips during the game session as we journeyed back from an ancient library to research a sigil found on a magical archway excavated during a previous game session. We discovered the sigil is for an ancient mage or arch-mage, who founded a sect that believed that some forms of magic were just too dangerous to be left hanging around where anyone with magical ability could just pick it up and use it willy-nilly so they hid it behind a magical wall under a ditto arch. There were sigils for a deity and this mage on the arch and people praying to the deity pass through the wall and receive knowledge from the deity about the contents of the chamber behind the wall. Our current reports about what is in the chamber are incomplete because the deity kinda rattled the person who stumbled through who was not expecting what happened to her. At this point all we know is there are a number of magical items of some nature, whether these are weapons, or spell books, or something else entirely is not known. Neither is the criteria for what constitutes the situation that will allow these items to be released from the chamber. Anyway, the cantrips I used in the last session were eldritch blast, prestidigitation, and save from death. The save from death we didn’t even use on a party member, we used it on the only member of an ambush team that was sent to kill us on our return from the library that was in any shape to use it on. The rest of the ambush team were sniping from the surrounding trees in the forest and were too messed up to use it on so we had to interrogate the orc and hope that he knew enough about why we were being attacked to be useful. The lawful stupid paladin was back with the party just in time for the assault, so we don’t know if the ambush team was following him from the trade city we were working for, or if they were following us from the elf city where the library was located, but several of the archers had tattoos like the drow slaves we had encountered in previous adventures in this realm.

This was where the session ended as about half the group had previous engagements to attend to. And I have to attend evening services now, so I’ll cut it off at this point.

PSA, Opus the Poet (still an unkillable badass)

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PLaying D&D 5th edition, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

The RPG group has moved into the world of D&D 5th edition from 3.5 (there was no 4th edition, in spite of the books of some other RPG saying they were D&D 4th, and anyone who says otherwise is a tool of the mass misinformation machine). To give the new version the best possible test we all played either the same type of character, or the closest thing to the same kind of character in 5th that we played in 3.5, so I played a warlock, again. We had a druid, a paladin, a barbarian, and my warlock.

Notes on warlock building in 5th. There are 9 variations of the build, with three different sources of power and 3 different paths to that power within the source. There is one source and path that results in a moderately powerful combat magic user, who also has access to healing spells. This seems to be the best-rounded form to kick butt in battle and then fix broken butts after combat has ceased. This is also something I wanted for at least the last couple of years as we have had sessions without a healer, and they don’t end well, so I want to make sure every party I adventure with has a healer of some kind even if I have to be that healer.

All we had with our first session was a first-level party which like any other first-level party was pretty weak. There was some dice karma involved, but basically we liked the play action of 5th edition. Combat was streamlined with the use of “advantage” and “disadvantage” instead of having multiple adjustments to AC based on cover and concealment as in 3.5. So the way that works is when your target is obscured or behind cover you are disadvantaged, and you make two attack rolls with the lowest one counting as your actual attack. If you are working from surprise or a sneak attack then you take the higher of the two attack rolls for your actual attack. Again this works much better than the complicated tables of adjustments to AC for when the person making the attack has advantages over the attacked.

One of the problems we had with our party in yesterday’s session was the person playing our paladin playing “lawful good” as “lawful stupid” and killing the lawful evil NPC who was spying on the target of our mission for several days before we got there and more than happy to show off and tell us everything he had discovered had the paladin not killed him first.

And again tonight I am going to end that public spell to return the intentions of the guy that tried to kill me by focussing a reflection spell with my hat. The guy died back in 2002, so the spell has been just churning out energy to no effect ever since then. I will be starting a new spell by dedicating a new hat to the creation of real, high quality (CROW Manual) bicycle infrastructure here in the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell. Pictures to follow.

We had the hats soaked in lamp oil before placing them on the fire.

A few minutes after placing them on the fire.

After the rest of service was done, energy safely dispersed.

And that’s all I got today.

PSA, Opus the Poet