Musical Interlude: Red Fang

                                          "Hey Gandalf! Nice dress!"

I was going to try once again to get rolling on my long-postponed home game of ye olde schoole D&D this Thursday (scheduled to coincide with the wife's book club night, middle-agedly enough), but these guys are playing here that night for $10.

As an entertainment choice, I like to think I know when I'm licked. I will join a detachment of the Saturday Players as likely the oldest bastards at the venue, and try to convene the game next week, when my ears stop ringing.

That Old TPK Feeling...

                                          4E Medusa: Now With Stone-Be-Gone TM!

Long time no blog, I know, but that stretch of goose eggs in the comments reduces any guilty feelings that I've been neglecting my rabid fan base. I'll spare you any blogging about how I haven't been blogging, the most pointless subject there is. If I have nothing to say, I just won't say it.

My only regular game these days is a monthly 4th edition D&D game with the Saturday Players. It's been going for three years, so we're evidently having a good time. It ain't the D&D we grew up with, of course. It's no coincidence that Nerf is another of Hasbro's fine products. Encounters are balanced for PC safety and comfort and terrifying perils like poison and energy drain have been downgraded to mere annoyances, generally amounting to "Target is inconvenienced (save ends)."

We have had few bumps in our orderly progression through published modules, rising from 1st-level Badasses to 9th-level Junior Demigods, with regulation treasure packets to show for it. Oh, sure, my rogue got killed once, but a convenient, courteous and affordable Raise Dead was as close as the nearest NPC Cleric.

Last Saturday, though, that comfortable routine of level-appropriate challenge and presumed success vanished, and D&D ripped into us with its long-disused fangs. A few bad rolls was all it took for a typical run-in with a Medusa Archer to turn ugly, as one by one, our party turned to stone. Not until the end of the Medusa's next turn, not until save ends. Fin.

Ironically, the only member of the party not transformed into a lawn ornament was Biff the Bold, our gnome bard. Biff's player was absent and I was covering, badly. In a shocking string of single-digit attack rolls, I had managed to exhaust poor Biff’s entire arsenal of encounters, dailies, weapon dailies, buffs, bennies and bardic bimbammery. He sheltered behind petrified companions flinging his puny At-Wills at the Medusa.

It got tense. I threw some Vicious Mockery at her. "Yeah," prompted one of the other players, still gamely trying to inject a little roleplaying into WOTC's board game, "But what do you say to her?"

"Who gives a fuck?" I replied, perhaps a little more sharply than intended. That old AD&D fear and frustration was back, and it was glorious! Oh, and I bitched and whined round after round. Suffered, really suffered, and loved it. I’m an old-school pervert that way. Pain feels like pleasure, thanks to the cycle of abuse that passed for play in my formative years. 

And lo, on my last handful of hit points and an empty bag of tricks, verily did I whack that Medusa and save the party. Shame everyone was too stoned to applaud my hard-earned victory.*

4E being 4E, however, a solution was near at hand. The Medusa’s blood, smeared on the lips of her victims, now allows them to say goodbye to the heartbreak of petrification. That’s right: The monster now contains its own antidote, no doubt in a refreshing cherry flavour. Nerfed again.

For a few minutes there, though, cursing the dice and mentally rolling up a new character in despair, I had played real D&D as I once knew it. 

*Our DM, a bit of a softy by my lights, later allowed that he had rolled a couple of 20s over the course of the fight and disregarded them because our asses couldn't absorb the additional kicking. As a player, I'm damned glad he was in the DM's chair; I would have let them stand.