So on Tuesday I got to play 5th edition D&D for the
first time, the party consisted of my character (Dragonborn Paladin), a
Dragonborn Barbarian, Half elven warlock, Half elven Bard, Half Elven Rogue,
and a Human fighter. We were playing the
first part of the Tyranny of Dragons scenario and while I’m new to this
particular system, I’m not new to playing, so I wasn’t thinking I was going to
learn anything new in this session.
Interestingly enough, I was very wrong.
I’d read through the character creation rules enough to make a
character, but not enough to minmax it or design other characters that could
work alongside it to make a far more potent combination than one character
alone could do.
For example, do you know that it’s possible for Rogue’s to make sneak
attacks in broad daylight whilst in the middle of a ten man fight as long as
they have a friendly backup within five feet who also is engaged against the
same enemies?
I didn’t...
Or that it’s possible to use the cantrip of Vicious Mockery against a
group of Rats (to quote the player, “It says that they don’t need to be able to
understand me...”)
I didn’t...
Two weapon doesn’t need proficiency any more, you just get the second
weapon and start hitting things, the only penalty is that you don’t get your
bonus to attack on the second hit, no other penalties at all...
I didn’t...
I do now...
My shield’s going in the bin shortly, count on it...
So we started along the way, arriving straight away at the town that
was being attacked by a Blue Dragon, and encountering a variety of Cultists and
Kobolds, most of which were slaughtered out of hand by the Rogue/Bard
combination doing multiple attacks and additional damage on every hit. Meanwhile the rest of us were just racing to
catch up with them and by the time we got a few civilians into the keep, the
dragonborn had both expended their breath weapons and both they and the warlock
needed a short rest (that’d be an hour for those not familiar), and so the
Rogue/Bard combination went rampaging on through the scenario without us, now
admittedly it was only to go down a tunnel and do the inital recon, but five
minutes of recon took up half an hour of actual time and so we were left
waiting for our abilities to come back.
Then the revelation that almost every race in the book has
Darkvision...
Except Dragonborn and Humans...
*sigh*
So, towards the end, the three of us new to the whole thing were having
thoughts about the possibilities that we may have missed by just looking to
make an interesting character rather than looking for combat advantage in
everything. It’s been some time since I played the game and while the other
players were somewhat younger than me (and so therefore probably doing the same
thing I did when I was that age), it did seem like every encounter was Kill,
Shank the captured, loot the dead, move to the next encounter, Kill, Shank,
Loot...
Three such encounters in the first missions, and even with some of us
knowing what we were doing with the game system, we’d killed more than twenty
different creatures, got ourselves a hundred and fifty Xp, and spent two hours literally
rolling from one encounter to the next...
So even by other estimations, there was a lot of combat in the first
part of the scenario, and we didn’t have much else to do, so I’m hoping that
next weeks encounter set will yield something more than Kill, Shank, Loot. I’m not reading ahead in the scenario, even
though I have it here, but I want to see these things through new eyes again. I want to believe that there’s more to these
games than KSL (as it will be henceforth known as), and I’m hoping for a chance
to do something more than hitting things, so it’ll be next Wednesday when I
come back with the next report...
And we’ll see how it goes...
