Dungeons & Dragons and Dinner

Last Sunday my sister called me excited to buy her own set of polyhedral dice. For those of you that don't know, polyhedral means "many-sided" or multiple sides, in other words, all manner of sizes of dice from four-sided to twenty-sided, including the traditional six-sided dice, to be used for the game Dungeons & Dragons (and other similar games. Hey Pathfinder!) I apologized for my influence on subjecting her to very geeky things that she probably wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise.

For several Sundays in a row now my sister and I together with her husband and my fiancee get together to play a little bit of D&D. It started at my house, but since has moved to their place since they have a kid they have to take care of, which is just easier at their house. My nephew, Oliver, is two, and we tried playing a game once with him at the table. But he wanted to keep picking the dice up, and I got a little nervous each time that he would fling it somewhere or stick it in his mouth when we weren't looking. My sister swallowed a penny when she was two and damn near died, so I think we're all a little sensitive to the choking issue. For that reason, we've started playing when he's asleep, either when he's napping or while he is down for the night. But I digress.

In our last session, I brought cheese enchiladas that I made along with sides of refried beans and corn. I am the Dungeon Master. My sister, Amanda, is a level 2 Wizard named Lanin that doesn't like to use magic, preferring to stab things with her dagger instead of casting spells. I can't stop her. Her husband, Mikey, plays a Fighter named Regdar that deals and absorbs most of the damage. My fiancee, Randi, plays Carn the Rogue, which is like a sneaky-thief type character that can pick locks and disable traps.

In this encounter, the players were going after Tusenmaug, a blue dragon that can breathe deadly electricity. After slaying a Gargoyle and some goblins the adventurers were quite beat up. By the time they got to the dragon, things weren't looking too good. The fight with the dragon is meant to be the penultimate battle in the box set we are using, (there's an additional encounter in his treasure room after he is defeated) but ultimately my players were too wounded to continue, and so I had Tusenmaug take flight, living to return and fight another day. A more cruel DM than myself would have had those adventurers incinerated and told them tough luck and to re-roll new characters. Therein lies the beauty of D&D. The rules exist more as guidelines than for the end-all be-all say on how something should go down. I meant to take pictures, but the batteries in my camera were dead. Next time.