D&Dice Fails

Music is a magical medium. It can invoke emotions such as sadness or elation. Music can speak volumes when words alone fail to capture the essence of something.

It is to music that I turn to describe Saturday night's Dungeons and Dragons session. Enjoy.

Saturday night will go down in history as the Night of the Crits, and what a night it was.

With most of the party MIA Mat, newcomer Tyler and I were reunited and free to complete a dungeon crawl sans morons (*cough* Kampo and Rafiki *COUGH*). This somehow went worse than if the morons had been present.

See, in D&D players roll a 20 sided dice to determine the outcome of certain actions, like attacking or attempting to stay on the back of a bucking displacer beast. But the 20 sided dice is a fickle creature, and can sometimes land in one of two critical positions: a critical miss, or a '1', or a critical hit, or a '20' on the dice.

"1's" are bad. Like bad-bad.

Criticals of either variety are uncommon at best, with one or the other popping up in a game maybe 2-3 times, max.

Saturday night, between only three players and the Dungeon Master, we had eighteen goddamned criticals. Eight-%#@*ing-teen. That's eight critical hits, mostly for Aaron, and ten critical misses, mostly between Tyler and myself.

It was bullhonky. Buuuuullllllllllhooooooooooonkyyyyyyy.

Let's take a look at a couple of highlights:

Miss: I take a swing at a giant scorpion, face-planting and flinging my maul in the process.
Hit: Said scorpion crit to buck me off.
Miss: A scorpion missed Mat, only to clamp down on his compatriot.
Hit: Tyler smashed a motion-sensing gem into oblivion.
Miss: I took a mighty swing at a Fell Taint, felling a stone pillar instead.
Hit: Tyler perceived ALL of the Fell Taints.
Miss: Upon inspection, Mat determined that a door was in fact a horse. Maybe.

And that was but a taste, people. A painful, stupid taste.