Epic Fail and Psychopaths
On Sunday we engaged in our Epic battle against the Blue dragon. Our cleric didn’t think to prepare any dispel fears, so everyone except him and our wizard we’re running around panicking for most of the game. Some bad decisions got the mage killed, but some miracles later and he was up and spell-flinging again. My ranger did ridiculous amounts of damage, enough to kill the beast in 2 rounds. The rogue/shadow-dancer got some hurtin’ in and that was about it.
Basically, it turned out rather badly. Due to some confusion on certain rules, some bad decisions and bad planning and the GM forgetting to do some awesome and ruthless tactics (as a Blue dragon should!) we killed it rather quickly once we stopped panicking. When you let a ranger use Rapid Shot and then use Many Shot for every attack that round things get stupid. First round I attacked and did 250-odd damage, next round I did 400. Now really, that shouldn’t have been possible, and if we had got our rules straight I would have been doing (on average) about 64 points a round rather then 200 to 300. Also, the GM had a contingency spell on, but thought he could have 2 with meant when I did my 400 damage the dragon should have been in a different area (he had thought he could do mirror image and teleport) but instead just the mirror image was in effect, not the teleport so my arrows did hit (since the dragon and it’s mirror image were super-imposed at this point). Also, our cleric wouldn’t have been able to do as many miracles as he had done, since that would have knocked his XP down a level.
Oh well. It was a learning exercise and in the future I hope we do another game, but with no hold barred. Ridiculous amounts of summon monster, nice combos of creating water and lightning breath to do massive, wide area damage.
In other news, I watched Dexter on the recommendation of a colleague at work and I enjoyed it immensely, enough to watch the whole first season last weekend. I have a bit of a thing for psychopaths and often enjoy stories that involve them, even if they can be somewhat stereotyping and melodramatic at times. I also really enjoy it’s soundtrack. Mmmmmm, creepy! Dru and I find the intro sequence very clever and it’s one of the few intro sequences for a show that we don’t just skip when watching an episode. I might get the books the series is based on, which reminds me I want the books for Fight Club and American Psycho.
I’ve also passed by RPGA GM herald test, finally. Woohoo!