Dungeon Master Tools – Character Creation

Know What Books You Are Going to Use

Firstly, know what books you are going to use. If you are a new Dungeon Master, I think I would go with the Players Handbook and the Revised Ranger which you can find online. I wouldn’t add in anything else, because that is going to mean a few things. Firstly that you or someone owns those other books. And if you don’t own them, you need to know what’s in them pretty well. The other reason is that it keeps what you need to know focused and the character races and classes easier to keep track of.

As you play more and feel more comfortable, I think it’s totally valid to add in more books. In fact, I expect that most Dungeon Masters are going to add in more books over time. Though, if you are playing the revised 5E with the new books, you get to keep it limited, for now.

Is Anything Banned?

Next, know if you don’t want anything in your campaign. Is your setting one where all magic comes from the divine or demonic sources, maybe you don’t go with all the casting classes. Or if magic is banned or doesn’t exist for some reason, that’s good to know. Another example would be creatures with flying speeds that the PC’s (player characters) can play. Do you want to deal with a 3D battle scenario or not?

I think that banning is a last resort. In fact, I recommend that Dungeon Masters don’t do it. But there are thematic reasons why you may ban some class or class feature so be aware of that. Especially if this is your first campaign, and you want to run something that is maybe easier to understand, don’t ban anything, go with a setting that more closely resembles Faerun as it’s going to make your life easier as you and your players don’t need to remember anything.

How Do You Get Stats?

One of the final things here is how you get the stats. And I want to talk about a number of ways that you can get them. Because there are a lot of fun ways. But know how you want to do it. Why, because a player might like one better than another, so they can min/max or manipulate things more. So know which way you want to go so there isn’t a discussion. You run this game as the Dungeon Master, listen to reasons, but at the end, everyone does it the same way, however you land.

Point Buy

Firstly there is point buy system. In this players get a certain number of points, and all stats start at 8. Then you spend points to increase those stats. Before the bonus you get from being an elf or half-orc, whatever it might be, you can go as high as fifteen. Each number increase costs a point and you start with 27 total points. This is going to give the players complete control over how they handout their stats.

Rolling

Rolling For Stats is another way that you can go, and this can be done in a few different ways. The most common way is roll 4D6 (four six sided dice) and drop the lowest of the dice. For example, if you roll a six, two, five, and two, you drop one of the twos, and get a 13. Now, you complete that six times, one for each stat, and players assign them in the direction that they want. That is going to let some numbers possible be higher, but there isn’t a floor like you get with the point buy system.

You can also just go with rolling 3D6 and keeping that, it’s going to create a wider range of what you can roll, though. So it is possible that a player is going to roll very low. A three in a stat is too low to really even play with, and while it’s possible in the previous version, it’s less possible.

Finally, you can use either method and do a down the line approach to the stats. What I mean by that is you start with strength and go down. So if I decide I’m a wizard, I hope I roll well on roll four for intelligence. This is going to create a greater level of variance in characters and how good they are and it can be fun. Just let your players know ahead of time.

Standard Array

The final way is the simplest. This is the standard array. The standard array is 15, 14, 13, 12, 10 and 8 for your stats. Every player is going to start out basically the same. Now that order is going to change, but no one is going to have a very high stat by magically rolling three sixes. And no player is going to have a low stat. This is good, I think for a starting campaign. The more new people you have, the easier this is to use. Mainly, because, you don’t want someone to be in a position to dominate everything because of good rolls.

Is Anything Custom Allowed?

This is the final thing and generally my answer is going to be no for this. Again, if you feel comfortable with it, sure. But know that what is custom might not be balanced. And this could be from a custom class that a player found on the internet that they want to try. Or it might be customizing a spell so it does a different type of damage. Generally I saw go with rules as written. Unless you want that extra challenge in something, keep it simple. And if this is your first game or early on in your dungeon mastering career, definitely don’t do it.

Final Thoughts

This, I think, is a good bonus topic to add into the mix. I don’t think it’s as much of a tool that I would recommend specifically to make your life easier. It is just some good things to think of before you session zero. Especially when it comes to how you want to get your stats and anything custom. That way you know what you are comfortable with.

For me, personally, I like the roll 4D6 and drop the lowest. Though, with that, it is not too hard for a player to get some really good stats. So even with my preferred system, I generally look through and make sure everyone is balanced. If someone rolls everything over 12, for example, I change one. I want you always to have a bad stat, and some good stats, no Batmans (someone who is good at everything) on the team. Use your discretion with that and keep it fair.

So what is coming up next?

• Session 1
• Story Arcs
• World Building
• Combat
• Exploration
• NPCs/Social Interactions
• Meta Game and Players at the Table

And let me know if there are other things to cover as well that you want to know more about, or help with. I think that there are a ton of different things that new Dungeon Masters are curious about or that feel intimidating. So I hope that I can help make them clearer and simpler for you. And this one is really that first step that you can take before you even start to think about the other elements.

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People do those five things in different orders, but I tend to like them in the order listed above. Some people pick class before race, but for me, the race plays a more important part in who your character is. Everything I want to lay out should enhance both your roll playing and your role playing.

Race

So why is race the first thing? Why not class? I think that race will give you a better idea of your character for both roll and role play. And elf might not be as likely to be a barbarian but if they are, you now have a story surrounding that. But for first time players, race can be easier to pick than a class. Picking that you want to be an elf then leads you in certain directions for your class choices. Granted, picking human leaves everything open.

So from the roll play side, like I said, picking your race helps you nail down your class. And I think that the class for a lot of players is a little bit more flexible and most races can play most classes well. Going back to the elf example, you can pick to be an elf and be a fighter, a ranger, a rogue, a druid, or a wizard very easily. And I think that a number of the other classes work as well. Picking your race will give you a narrower target for classes, but a wider target than picking a class and then going back to race.

From the role play side, you now get to create a character with more of the flavor that you might want. When you look at the classes, you have a variety open to you still, both fighters and casters. The race give you a better picture for role playing than class does. How do you want them to interact, do you want a haughty or nature focused character, an elf, a gruff drinking and brawling character, why not a dwarf. The race helps set more of that personality than anything else would.

Class

Class helps focus the character. This really covers both roll and role play again as you can use the class to focus more of the story. But you also get a lot of mechanics out of this. You are going to get your first skills, if you pick a spell casting class your first spells, and you really get to see where you are going to be rolling the dice. Take this time to when looking at the class to find those skills that are going to be your characters standard. What attack is your signature, so when it comes time to combat you are ready to go.

But there is also role play elements to think about. When you pick your class you start to add in other questions. If you are a wizard, what wizarding school did you go to. What connections do you still maintain there? If you are a fighter, where did you learn to fight? Who is your mentor or trainer, and are they still a friend or a foe? Were you in the military or town guard or why did you pick up the skills?

Stats

Now we move into an area that seems more like it is roll playing and role playing. But in reality, it is both. The roll playing part is obvious. You roll your dice and you use the stats to modify them. So with your race and class, you now know what stats you need to be good at. If you are a wizard, intelligence, a fighter, strength, that sort of thing.

But putting down your stats also gives you a ton of opportunity to create more role playing as well. It is tempting to try and be at least okay at everything. Using a standard array for numbers, it is going to give you one thing you are below average at. And that is where you get your role playing. What does it look like to be worse than average at intelligence or to be missing subtly because of lacking common sense from wisdom? What is it like to be a character who isn’t strong? There is a lot of story that starts to develop from your weaknesses, as well as your strengths.

Background

This is the last part of what you need to be thinking about from the book. The background helps flesh out your characters backstory and who you were at some point in time in your life before you decided to go adventuring. This one is much more focused on the role playing side of things, versus the roll playing. In fact, you are unlikely to get any dice improvements out of this beside getting some more skills and maybe some tools to help improve your modifiers.

This is about picking a background and getting four areas in this. You get personality traits, bonds, ideals, and flaws. Check out them more in details in my Building a D&D Character 201 article. But these add in story elements naturally to a character by giving them connections and little ticks and more. These are not hard and fast things your character will always adhere to, but they help create touch points when you aren’t sure how you character would react. It also gives them some skills to fall back on.

Backstory

We are finally to backstory. This one is the easiest to talk about. This one is only role playing focused. This is what helps your dungeon master know how to bring your character into the story. It is also the only part not in the book. However, I put it last because if you don’t know what backstory you want, the other things will help. In fact, they can do most of the writing for you.

If you are an elf, you will see things more one way. If you are an elf fighter, it focused more. An elf fighter who is great with a bow because you have high dexterity but bad charisma, more focused. An elf fighter with low charisma and a military background, you now have a lot of your backstory written for you. You just need to flesh out the details.

Now You Have Your Character!

If you go through those steps, you’ll have a character that is ready to be played. Work with your Dungeon Master through this whole process, because you want your character to fit the story being told. As a dungeon master, I recommend a session 0, a chance to sit around, talk about your story idea and setting and then build characters together. That will create a group more cohesive characters for the players and the world being played in.

What type of character do you want to play next?

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The Idea

This is something different, normally I pitch campaigns, this time I want to do something different. This would be three one shots that all come together at the end. I would put together three groups of two players, maybe three players, and take them through the opening part of the race. Let them get to the tower, but when you can see the tower, that is when you end the session. Then you get all three of the groups together and let them fight over and all the way up into the tower.

The trick for running this will be timing. It’s pretty unlikely that all the groups would arrive at the tower at the exact same time. In fact, I think in the one shots you’ll have to be keeping track of timed elements to figure out who makes it to the tower first. Of course, getting up the tower won’t be easy, and you can do things to delay the first group more than the other groups. Then that last session, you have the groups arrive at different times, tell people to start at different times. So if one group was fast, they get there and get an hour to get as far into the tower as they can. Or maybe half an hour, then the other groups show up. Of course, now that the first group has cleared the tower to a point that makes it really fast for the other groups to catch up with them. Now it’s a question of, will any of them survive to the top. Will they work together or will it all fall apart?

So that first session, what would be the plan for that? I think that it should be about finding where the Wizard’s Tower is. create a general map of the lands, and create some points of interest, different ones for each group that they have to get through. One should be focused on combat, give them a number of small missions and then a clue for where the tower is. The next one could be about puzzles and riddles, again getting a clue for where the tower is when they complete it. Another could fall more into skill challenges, and you guessed it another clue. I think that three things would be solid for a one shot, you want them to do enough and lose some hit points, spend some resources, but not have so much to do that you’d need two or three sessions leading into it. The wizard’s tower is magical, so it can get hidden anywhere, so the whole race, I think, makes sense to take place in a day or at most two, so that the players are a bit resource poor leading into the final session.

Then that last session, we’re going to be staggering when people arrive to the table, like I said. The fastest group will do the job of clearing part of the tower. And then it can be a free for all as players and groups try to make it to the top of the tower. I would make this session as crazy as possible. Make nuts puzzles with high checks for things like dexterity and strength. Give really open ended challenges and just see what the players decide to do to solve them. Let PvP happen if the players want it to happen. Or they can work together. Because when they find the top of the tower, there will be a giant monster for them all to fight or get devoured by. I’m thinking like how it’s a monster in the vault in Borderlands that you need to fight. Let them spend resources and just have a blast with it. Who knows, maybe no one will make it to the top.

Challenges

Now, I think this could be a good game to run. However, this is a very challenging game to run. You need more buy in from the people playing in the game. In a normal campaign, you can pivot a little as you realize what the players are really looking for in the game. But with this, it’s going to be harder, the game is almost on rails, though stuff like picking which spot to checkout first is going to be up to the players. If they fight the other groups, that’s going to be up to the players. But this would be more coordinating. How I’d probably do it is that I’d run the first session on the way to the tower over a single week and then that weekend, Saturday afternoon, I’d plan to meet up at a local FLGS that has food and drinks and make an afternoon and into an evening out of it.

Timing everything up as well is going to be interesting as well. I think that getting 30 minutes off of another groups time makes sense, so if one group is really late, they start an hour later than the others in terms of making it to the tower. Now, you could have everyone arrive at the same time, but it’d be kind of fun to have the groups show up to that last session at a staggered times to kind of create more of the feel of what happened in the game. Again, that makes it a bit trickier as you are trying to coordinate times.

Would You Run This Game?

Even for me, this game is a hard sell to run or play in. I like the concept a lot, but of all the people I have ran D&D for locally, I don’t know that I have enough to pull off a game like this. I’d really like to do it with nine people, three groups of three, and I could maybe make that work, but getting schedules to work together, that’d just be tricky. Even for six players, three groups of two, that is tricky. And I thought about this maybe at a con setting, but to commit to two sessions of a single game is a lot for a lot of players who really want to just get to trying as many things as possible.

How about you, would you run a game like this? Would you play in a game like this?

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Silver Dagger

If the name sounds familiar, that’s because I have Silver Amulet, Coin, and Bullet as well. This is a game that uses a bit of memory and a bit of push your luck and bluffing as you try and build up your lowest scoring village possible. To do this can be a bit tricky though, because you have five cards in front of you and they are all face down. At the start of the game you can look at two of them, so you know a little bit, but not that much. Each card has a number and an ability. The number is how many points they’ll be worth in your village. The abilities can be one time use when you draw it, or it can be an ability that works if the villager is face up in your village. So already having three of them, why would I need another game that does the same thing? Simply for the variety. You can mix the cards from Silver Amulet, Coin, Bullet, and Dagger together, you just need one group of cards from 0 to 13. Needless to say, I’ll have more combinations than I’ll ever be able to play, but it’ll be fun as I can make it more “take that” if I want, or more focused on your own cards.

Roll Player

I could have just done a whole order of Roll Player with the Fiends and Familiars expansion and the Monsters and Minions expansions, and eventually I’m sure that I’ll get them. But I thought, let’s just start with the base game. Here’s a little secret, I’ve played this game only once with a physical copy of the game. Now I’ve played it more than that this year because of Tabletop Simulator. But only once with a physical copy. I like this dice drafting game a lot, I think that there are cool things about it and I love that you’re rolling up a D&D character, basically, and seeing how good you can make them. The game play is pretty straight forward and I love the variety of strategy that you can have based off of your background, class, and race, that’ll make you want to target different cards. Plus the traits that you can get can massively change how you’re going to score at the end of the game as well. This game has a good amount of replayability, and while I do want to get Monsters and Minions, because the game does seem like it ends before it could, and I think that getting to use your character will get me to get the expansions, and eventually Roll Player Adventure and being able to take my character through a whole campaign. But even without that, the game is a lot of fun, and hence why it’s in my Top 100 so it is one that I have felt like I’ve wanted to own for a while, and now was the time.

Shadowrun: Crossfire (Prime Runner Edition)

Another one in my top 100 that I want to play more. It’s a deck building game, but I like the setting that it is in so much. Shadowrun is a cyber punk world, mainly known for an RPG, where you are going on runs, hacking into big corporations, trying to keep from being found out. This makes it into a card game where you are taking on missions, defeating bad guys, and it’s interesting, because you are playing cards to deal with your own bad guys but also others. You also, slowly, level up your character as you play through what is basically a campaign. The setting is what drew me in and I have Shadowrun: Sprawl Ops to play as well in the same world, but I’m excited a lot for this one, because I’ve played it before. It’s one that I think has been a hit or miss for some people, or because of the original having a fairly poor rule book might have just flown under the radar. I think this one might take more time to get to the table, but I know I’ll be glad to have it.

Those are the new games that I’ve ordered. I’m definitely excited for all of them, and I really think that there are some interesting games in there. One thing I forgot to mention with Silver Dagger, since each game is a standalone, I’ll be able to play it with a larger group, have a few groups playing the game at once, maybe do a mini tournament, something like that.

Which of these games seems most interesting to you?

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• Players take the test of the tower to become adventurers
• Players enroll in Strawgoh, a school of dark arts and assassination
• They find out that there are spies in their midst
• They run into issues with one of their classmates who was supposed to be part of their group
• Player start their mid term going through the first real floor of the tower competing against the other squads

So that catches us up quickly to where we our. The player characters, Barrai, Bokken, and Thrain, along with the fourth member of their group, Parrag, have burst through the tree line and see the island, covered in moss with three of the professors standing on it. About 60 feet away from them, Castillia, Narius, Addrus, and Cordin have also burst through the tree line. Thrain fires off an eldritch blast at them, but misses, and Castillia draws her bow on him.

The Bokken decides that while a fight on the shore could be fun, it might be smarter to try and get to the island first, since that is the objective of the test. Glancing at the water he notices that there are some monsters moving around in it but he takes off towards the shoreline anyways. The other group decides that is a better plan and Addrus gets to the water first and dives in and he is immediately grabbed and batted at by some giant purple tentacles.

Barrai, the next up, decides to take a little bit of time to figure out what is going on and sees that the island is not actually an island. Instead it’s a giant monster that has moss growing on the top of it that is sticking out above the water.

Things go sideways when Bokken decides to take a running jump onto one of the tentacles and is hanging off of there. Barrai seeing that decides to try something fancy of his own and uses a great acrobatics check and his whip swings most of the way to the water. Unfortunately Barrai is not good at swimming and starts to sink towards the bottom. Meanwhile Bokken, seeing how that has worked, tosses a rope to first Thrain and then Parrag and tries to whip them across some of the water with varying degrees of success, but eventually the whole party is in the water, some of them having been grappled by tentacles.

During this time, Narius has been taking pot shots at the party from the shore while Castillia, Cordin, and Addrus are dealing with tentacle issues in the water. Thrain getting fed up with that fires off an Eldritch Blast at Narius and drops him in one hit and Narius starts making saving throws to avoid death. Thrain gets dragged under water by a tentacle and being annoyed he can’t cast Eldritch Blast on the tentacle underwater, when he surfaces shoots the downed Narius again and takes him out. When they all finally reach the head of the monster they are able to get up without issue and are the first group from their class to get there as Castillia’s group was still in the water and Dorin and Domon’s group had just come out of the forest.

The teachers commend the group on doing a good job and they level up to level 2, which gives them some new fun toys to play around with, including Barrai getting Dissonant Whispers. After they level up a teach suggests that they could have tried animal handling on the squid which Bokken never would have thought of. They also go to poor Narius who has been lying there and a teach casts reincarnation on him, causing him to come back as a Hill Dwarf and we ended the session there with them going back to school.

So behind the DM’s screen:

This was an odd session to run because I was controlling eight tentacles and four NPC’s throughout the fight. In the future, I should have written up a basic HP, AC, Attacks for the four NPC’s and handed them off to the players, but I was able to keep it moving quickly. It just would have been less downtime.

With the eight tentacles, at least the player playing Bokken assumed you couldn’t destroy them, because it was a giant monster, which is a fine assumption, they couldn’t have taken down the monster proper had they tried. But each tentacle had an armor class of 14, 16 HP, and +6 to strengh. But they didn’t do a ton of damage. The monsters attack plan was always to drag someone under water and drown them, which wouldn’t have worked on Bokken, but knowing the monsters plan made it easy and fast for me to run eight tentacles.

Finally, when Narius was shot down by Thrain, I wasn’t sure if I’d bring him back or not. But since the class size is fairly small decided it’d probably be worth it to do. I was going to cast something like resurrect or revivify, but I stumbled across reincarnate first. And I thought that would be more entertaining. And I like that the school would use that as almost a punishment if someone dies in a test or during a class.

So thoughts on the session, it was a good time, lots of things going on, would you want to play in a session like this? How do you handle a lot of bad guys in a battle?

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In our case we have our city of “paradise”, Zenefil, and there’s a deity in the world who has created this for the adventurers to find. Now, that sounds great for our adventuring party, but the world otherwise really sucks. There are powerful chromatic dragons that are ruling the lands with fear.

So this is clearly going to basically be the whole thing getting to the paradise of Zenefil, but generally if something sounds too good to be true, it probably will be. And the deity should definitely have put a limit on how many people can actually get in. So while I said adventurers, everyone and their mother is going to consider themselves adventurers and probably be willing to kill to try and get there. Plus, then you’d have the dragons who would be trying to stop the people from leaving because they need subjects to torture or it’s just dull.

Beyond the dangers of the other people going and the dragons, I’d make it sort of a puzzle/mystery sort of thing where players need to figure out clues and decipher things that the deity is giving them in order to eventually make their way to Zenefil. This will do two things, it’ll weed out some of the weaker NPC’s that they might run into for a while so it becomes less chaotic, it also kind of gives you points of timing for other NPC’s. Beyond that, it allows you, the further they get away from the dragon kingdoms towards Zenefil, they should start seeing more monsters and natural things like that.

You can also add in less natural things as well, depending on what you want to do with Zenefil. Do you want it to be an amazing sanctuary and refuge against the dragons, or do you want it to be a equally as bad, if not worse place. Now, you can have the players need to fight at this point and try and defeat the deity or the deities monsters/henchmen.

This is going to be more exploration focused in some ways as your clues can lead them to various landmarks along the way and put them into unique situations. Also it’ll be an exploration into what the player characters are deciding to do with the other NPC’s that are running about as well. I think that there’s going to be a lot of interesting stories to tell with that, will the PC’s help some less fortunate NPC’s, will they leave an NPC that is injured out there who can be brought back as a nemesis? Is there another group that is their arch rivals? Play around with those emotions and groups of people, heck, even family members.

So, would you run a game like this? Would this be something that you’d do for a whole campaign? For me, this is a higher level campaign, or the second arc of a campaign. If you can set-up the dragons as rulers in the first one somehow, then you could create the paradise/Zenefil part as the second arc at a higher level. It would give the players less competition and more reason to not just worry about their own survival.

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But first, let’s meet the characters, we have Barrai a Tiefling, Thrain a Hill Dwarf, and Bokken a War Forged. You’ll notice that there are no classes tied to them, that’s because I decided, we’re starting at level 0. They are all just average characters to slightly above average with 10’s across the board for their stats, plus racial bonuses, that’s because of the Tower of the Gods.

So, what is a Tower of The Gods? It was a magical tower that appeared about 200 years ago. Bigger than a city block and going up into the clouds, no one knows how tall it is. Monsters spilled out of it devastating the lands around it. The nations put up a quick defense after the initial shock and devastation. But the number of monsters seemed unlimited, eventually, as morale was getting low, a group of soldiers at one of the Towers took the fight to the Tower itself and found an entrance. When they came out, they had stemmed some of the flow of the monsters but also came out stronger with new abilities (aka D&D Classes). Once the news spread of this more people went into all the Towers and while most perished, those who came out came out stronger and had slowed the flow of the monsters.

Now, the monsters still show up, but there are guards at every tower to deal with the small monster incursions. But, of course, a tower that is powerful enough to give people new skills, that’s something that every nation wants and they want several of them if they can. So the nations fought over the tower until a shaky truce was made. Now, there are schools that not only train you to be ready for the Towers but instruct you in the new skills you have when you leave. It’s a honor to be sent into the Towers and not an honor that every can afford or could survive.

Thrain, Bokken, and Barrai are three of a new group of trainees going into the Towers who have come to them through different paths.

This is where the game basically kicked off, with those three waiting their turn to go into the tower to see if they’d survive and come out the other side with new found skills. When they went in, they were given a riddle and a chance to equip themselves, grabbing a few weapons, they ventured further into the magical tower which took them to many different areas.

There was a jungle room where the floor was poisonous and they had to swing from branch to branch on vines towards one of the exits, but if they fell, it might mean their death.

There was a room with a moat, all they had to do was get across it and they’d be able to go through one of two doors. But there was a sea serpent swimming in the moat, and it wasn’t something they could jump across. Using some quick thinking, they grabbed vines from the other room and were able, using their fourth test taker, a jacked halfling named Steve (the players named him not me), and the War Forged tossed Steve up to the ceiling where he was able to grab onto a hook and tie a vine to it. They had some troubles swinging across, but eventually did, but Steve notices there was a trapdoor, a third door, at the bottom of the moat.

That led them to a room with a bunch of floating tiles. They quickly discerned that they could move them around and use them to get to another door way. Unfortunately, having a jacked halfling and a dwarf trying to get past each other on a 3×3 foot tile didn’t work and Steve fell to his death.

This led them into a room that was basically pitch black. When they stepped into the room, shadow creatures started attacking them. They made a break for it but both Bokken and Barrai were knocked down by the creatures. Thrain had to drag them into the next room where they were revived.

In this room, it was something pretty different. There was just an old lady drinking tea and she offered them some tea. Bokken, rolling low, sniffed the tea, thought it smelled good, so he drank some of it as did the other two. This opened their eyes and they saw that the old lady was a monster in disguise, but the monster didn’t make a move to attack them. Finding out that the next room was the last room, they bid the lady/monster farewell and continued on their way.

In the final room they were given 6 different goblets that they could drink from. Once the drank from them it allowed them to see an exit from the tower. However, the old lady had told them that which one they drank from could make a difference on how they walked out of the tower. They each picked and drank and walked out of the doors that appeared to them as:

Thrain the Hill Dwarf Warlock
Barrai the Tiefling Bard
Bokken the War Forged Fighter

And that’s where the first session ended. We’ll probably be adding a fourth player at some point in time, so we’ll have to see who is added to the party.

What do you think of the game thus far?

Just some DM notes on this. I set it up so that the doors were different colors, I didn’t delve into it too deeply if it was tied to the elements or what, but that’s what the players took away from it.

All the rooms were generally planned, but how many they had to go through and what order they went through them in was kind of up to how the game went. I just picked two rooms, one for each door and then repeated the process for each room after that. They were moving through them pretty fast, so we ended going through more than I’d thought so we could go for a little, plus I needed a way to kill of Steve.

So, that lends itself to another question, why Steve? Again, I didn’t name him, but I always wanted someone with them in the tower for at least a little bit of it. That would allow me to show them bits of the tower if they missed it. But it would also give me someone who I could kill, show off some of the deadliness of the tower, and also that if you die in the tower, you’ll be forgotten in the real world.

What will come next for them? Probably getting them recruited into a school and let them play around with their powers.

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I’m back with some more Drinking in D&D. Tonight I brought up two Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA, but I only drank one of them. It’s one of my favorite beers, a good IPA.

The topic for Drinking in D&D was looking at the Character Sheet and what sections on the character sheet are. There’s a lot to keep track of it and it’s the basis for how you roll your dice and what your character can do, particularly in combat.

There are a number different areas that I looked at on the board, hit points, speed, initiative, proficiency, armor class (AC), ability scores, and skills. I’m going to go back and do the second half of the main sheet and hopefully the other two sheets in my next stream, which might be happening on Friday, tbd.

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Bottoms up!