Gaming Session #1: Five Strangers Meet in a Tavern…
A friend, hereafter named Red-Headed GM, offered to start up a D&D game with myself, the druid and the two other roommates the gamer and the geek, and a mutual friend who arrived with the GM. So last week, we spent the evening doing character creation. We got cola and a whole bunch of chocolate and salty munchies, we each had our own set of die, and after five hours of light-hearted giggling and goofing around, we filled out our character sheets.
I had picked the gamer’s brain regarding various D&D things, I’ve played a few MMOs and knew the right questions to ask regarding different classes, my gaming style and how I can adapt that to a D&D game, different races, and so on. I chose to play a human cleric of 15 years of age, a little Asian kid who is not worldly nor very imaginative, who is aligned Lawful Good, as I have found myself to glean that result no matter how many times I take the D&D alignment quizzes available online. The lot of us were to start out at level 3, with the exception of the geek who started at lvl 2 due to her choice of race and pecularities of the diety her cleric chose.
The DM has some areas, races, dieties, and other components that are original to “her” world. Based on the races we chose, she decided our originating area. The DM’s friend asked for and was granted the requested race of Kender. As my character’s race was human, and the DM had chosen that humans and kender live relatively close in region, the kender and I would hail from the same region. My cleric could learn one language besides the Common. I chose that of the Kender, which amused her no end. The druid chose a druid, of course, of a monkey race I do not recall just now. The gamer chose a barbarian elf, and the geek chose a cleric of a race I do not recall.
Anyway, we chose all that stuff and got stats and stuff the previous week. My beginning stats were (at lvl 3): STR 10 (+0), DEX 9 (-1), CON 15 (+2), INT 13 (+1), WIS 18 (+4), and CHA 15 (+2). I was given 2800 gold to distribute however I chose, in choice of armor (heavy), goods (hooks, rope, rations) and other niceties (cart & pony). I actually have enough gold left for a bag of holding. Mwaha.
Tonight’s first session was chaotic, with the GM talking with each player individually, guiding everyone through seven simulated weeks of encounters and other such things, eventually steering us to the same city, where she encouraged us to meet in the same tavern. While she was gaming with us individually, the other players were wandering around, smoking, making caustic and silly comments about the session in progress, talking about off-topic things and trying to draw the players-in-progress into conversation. It was confusing and I couldn’t hear a lot of what my character was supposed to be doing. As I’d never gamed before in a tabletop game like this, I’m not sure I have all the information I was supposed to get, but ah well, I’ll learn as I go, playing my character as naïvely as I am.
The kender character and my cleric teenager of doom journeyed together for a time, me on a mission to deliver a package, and the kender trying and at one point succeeding in viewing the package.
The five of us were guided through “recent past” events, ending up in a present situation in which all five of us happened upon a tavern in the middle of an average, large human town. The barbarian elf was wondering what a child was doing with a mug of beer, while the kender was overly amused by the barbarian’s facial tattoos. The simian druid was trying to get the barmaid to make mead with the four pounds of honey he’d found on his journeys, the slutty cleric was eating daintily in her finery watching the barbarian’s companion gnome babble about stories, and I was quietly perched upon the bar (as it was higher than the bar stool and the entire tavern was captivated by the gnome’s storytelling), quietly watching and watching bemusedly as the kender situated herself upon the barbarian’s lap to see better, quietly braiding his hair while he was watching the gnome, not aware of the kender’s actions. Oh yeah, the kender decorated my simple cart with chalk drawings.
That was as far as we got, but whee, what a ride.
