What We Have Been Doing

Sorry for the long delay in between posts.
I’ve been extremely busy.
I got a new job that requires 10 extra hours of my time a week. But the pay is nice, and I’m doing interesting things, so I’m okay with it.

As for us and gaming, we have been gaming for sure.

We’ve been low on numbers, and due to the way we run our group, it’s not likely to change.

Finding people that fit in your group is a pain.
Our problem is that we have a few too many requirements:
1) You have to be 18. Hell, 18 may be too young.
2) You have to have your own transportation, or reliable transportation. We’ve lost two potential new people in the last year on this one alone. Which makes me wonder about people in their 20’s not having a car. (One actually said that he couldn’t get his father-in-law to drive him. That guy sounds like a winner.)
3) You have to be sane for a gamer. It’s disturbing how tough this one can be.
4) You have to be of at average intelligence or better.
#1 has never been an issue. The other three can lead you down scary paths when you find those that qualify for all three. –shudder–

We had another player for a few months, but he had to drop out recently.

We have been playing 5E pretty consistently, not counting the holiday interruptions.
Aaron is running The Hoard of the Dragon Queen module, and we just hit level 5.
We’re enjoying it. But I suspect we’re moving along slower than most groups, and missing some obvious hints and clues.

I pretty much agree with what most people have said about 5E; it has many of the goods of most editions combined into it.
It has the simplicity of BECMI.
It has the character option potential that 3E had (after all the books were out).
It has a general feel of 1E & 2E.
And it doesn’t have a god damn thing from 4E. That’s probably not true, but 4E sucked, and as far as I can tell, WotC seems to have distanced itself from that failure of an edition.

Now if they could never print another book about Eberron, that’d be great.

Dale and I will probably run 2 PCs a piece again.
We did for the first few weeks of the campaign, so it won’t be hard to just start that up again.

We won’t have a healer though, which will probably bite us at some point. But it’s all good, it makes you think more than just charge in.

My main is Grugach, half-orc frenzy barbarian.
My backup is Maleena, half-elf dragon sorcerer.
Dale’s main Brom is , tiefling sorcerer.
Dale’s backup is Yrrch (pronounced Yerch), assassin rogue.

We’re learning a few things here and there.

One thing that stands out is that barbarians, when raging, make an excellent front line. The half damage from standard melee attacks works wonders.
I put Grugach on a bridge and while the casters blasted from a distance and he took a beating. Granted without a cleric there to heal him every now and then, he’d not have done so well.

Another thing is attack bonuses and armor class bonuses feel almost like they’re double the effectiveness as they were in 3E. Mainly it’s because they both were scaled down to make higher level opponents not immune to the lower level ones.
The effect is that every single attack bonus is gold, and every single armor class point matters.

Combat speed is definitely much faster, though slower when we use a battlemat.

We did have one combat last, in my opinion, too long.
I think it was designed to be a chapter ending kind of battle. A kind of battle to be remembered, but it turned into a slug fest of attack, miss, attack, hit, attack, heal, etc.

Our next session we’re going to try to use Roll20.
Roll20 is meant mostly for online play when you can’t go to a group.
It has video and voice communication, a battlemat type interface, and dice rolling on the screen.

We will only be using the battle mat on the screen. Aaron will be connecting his laptop to his TV and that will be our battlemat. Additionally I can use my iPad to move PCs around.

The advantage is we won’t be required to use a physical battlemat, thus we can be even lazier when it comes to viewing a combat. Also there won’t be any goofs on the table to knock things over.

The downside is that I’ve got hundreds of unpainted minis, and at least a hundred painted ones. Plus the group itself owns hundreds of D&D minis.

I guess another downside would be that the DM would have to spend a fair amount of time preparing the maps. But there may be some shortcuts (like using satellite imaging of real places).