Another D&D Game, Another D&D Post

This week's Tuesday game was D&D. In this game I'm playing a dwarven cleric and I am less than enthralled with the character.

In this week's game we had to deal with a giant tree-thing that used to be an Orcus cultist, but gave herself over to Orcus so she could "live forever." A side-effect of her little ceremony was to animate a bunch of the undead in the graveyard.

The DM (John) came up with a cool random-effect generator -- a stack of cards that he flipped over each round -- so that more zombies would spew out at random or a flaming pit would appear or treasure would erupt out of graves, etc. It was very cool.

The wizard Taeryn (played by Kristian) and the ranger Balasaar (Mike) had good success targetting the zombies from range and taking out scads of them, although Balasaar ran into some trouble when he ran into the mausoleum to deal with the tree-thing and had to flee.

The rest of us (my cleric, Seth's warlord, and Wil's fighter) dealth with things as they burst out of the ground nearby and tried to make our way to the mausoleum. This is where my problems started.

The cleric isn't meant to run around solo. Sure, he can deal damage like anyone, but he doesn't have any good area attacks that help him to power through a handful of lame-o zombie minions. So when a crew of four zombies pop up nearby Rufus (my cleric) has to spend 4+ rounds killing them before he can move on unless someone else lends a hand, which happened a bit. And the whole time I was examining the character trying to figure out why he wasn't fun for me and I came up with two things:

1) he needs to be part of a group for his powers to have their desired effect and we were very spread out in this game, and

2) the cleric's buffing effects don't seem either extreme or interesting enough to really carry the class. Or maybe it's that I don't find the powers to be extreme or interesting enough.

Thankfully at the end of the night we'd gained enough experience to gain a level so I gained a 3rd level attack power and swapped out a lower level power for one I hope will be a bit more interesting.

The DM has offered to let me swap out my character, but I think I want to experiment with what's available to me before I give up on him.

As I said in my last post; magic is really what I groove on in fantasy games and I guess I was hoping the cleric's effects might be cool enough to keep my interest. So far they're not, but maybe I'll find a combination of powers that work for me.

Monster Makeover

Xbox is producing Web-based episodes of a program featuring aspiring make-up artists working their craft. The monsters they're making are all based on popular or soon-to-be-released-and-most-likely-popular video games, so it should be pretty cool to watch.

It's produced in the style of a competitive reality TV program, but the make-up is pretty cool. Plus, if you care to, you can register to win an Xbox Elite, some games, a Zune, and maybe one or two other things.

Zombie's ahoy!