Friday, August 22, 2014

D&D - 5th Edition Reboot part 1

As part of my vacation I visited my sister in Ottawa to see what our nation's capital had to offer.  A strange coincidence was that Wizard's Tower also happened to be in Ottawa (which I totally did not know despite having subscribed to their email mailing list for a few months).  I found a way to get myself there and to my surprise they had the D&D Next Player's Handbook available (it wasn't supposed to be until a week or so later) so I picked it up.  I spent a few evenings reading over the rules and the new character options and was quite impressed.  It was the first D&D book I had purchased since I think 2nd edition AD&D.

With the Player's Handbook in hand I proceeded to round up the group and decided to roll up new characters for a new adventure.  So far the party has a Tiefling Warlock and a Dragonborn Paladin and both players sort of half-rolled half-picked their background which I'll describe a little later.  One of my favourite features of the new handbook are the pre-built backgrounds which really helped my players generate a background for their characters.  That's one aspect of RPG games that we often overlook as a group and with a bunch of them already presented it's not hard to find one that you like and roll or pick the details from the tables provided.  Absolutely great in my opinion.

Now on to the two characters so far! (no names yet though)

Our Tiefling warlock rolled pretty not so great for his stats so after modifiers had 10s and 11s for most stats with an 8 in strength and a 17 in charisma.  Being a chaotic neutral character he is all about himself.  Totally selfish but understands he needs friends because he is physically weak.  His lack of physical strength drives him to attain power in other ways and we figured it's why he became a warlock (warlock powers are gained through a pact with a more powerful being)
His incredibly high charisma makes him a natural charlatan.  That coincidentally brought us two really cool details about the character.  One, his bond is that he swindled someone really powerful and two, he has a penchant for swindling the rich and powerful.  We figured that his hate on for the rich and powerful was born out of a life of being looked down upon for being a Tiefling as well as being unable to physically do anything about it.
This character's main ideal is to attain power and eventually rule part of the world with that power (if not the whole world).  But he realizes he needs powerful allies that can compensate for his lack of physical strength.

The second character we rolled up was a Dragonborn paladin.  His stats were quite stellar getting 16 in strength, 14 in charisma and at least a 12 or 13 in all other stats except intelligence which was 11.  His back story was that he was a blacksmith who turned into a folk hero after the dragon god Bahamut gave him divine powers.  We tied this in to another detail in that he was beaten severely by some noble.
How the noble managed to beat him we still haven't figured out considering this is one rather strong Dragonborn for one person to fight single-handed.  However it happened it must have attracted the dragon god as we used that moment to be the one when he got his paladin powers.  He know uses his powers as a paladin to smite down all who would pick on those weaker or different than themselves.  This also leads into his one flaw in that because he believes in his righteous cause so much he is blind to any chance of failure.  The power of his righteous dragon god will carry him through any ordeal.

A good pair so far and can't wait to see what my other players roll up and how we can fit them in.

2 comments:

  1. I miss playing pen and paper RPG's, I'm hoping to form a gaming group here in Halifax that will play a large variety of games...at some point!

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    1. The new edition of D&D is a great starting point. Rules are easy to understand and the number of modifiers is kept to a minimum to keep things more narrative. Back to the foundation of good story telling and role playing.

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