5e Game - Part 9

I have not posted in a while, due to a combination of us not playing every weekend but mostly due to not many mistakes made by the players or me, the DM. Mistakes are where we learn how to do things better, and so without many mistakes, not a lot to learn from. Oh, the players made small mistakes, though I have to admit they are staying very true to their characters, and I am very proud of them.

I made a big mistake in yesterday's game, which I hope to warn you away from doing yourself - I squashed the adventurous ideas of one of my players. A baddie was standing above the rest of the party on a staircase, and he (the player) wanted his PC to grappling hook said baddie off the staircase and do nasty things to him. I admit, I am an old, curmudgeonly grognard of a DM/player, and this immediately struck me as just outright silly. You have a bow, shoot him with the bow!

{sigh} Yet here I sit the day after, and I feel bad about it, because D&D at heart is that Errol Flynn swashbuckling type of adventure. D&D is Conan creeping into the lair of the bad guy with no armor other then a loincloth and some charcoal smudged about his person, bearing his bastard sword proudly before him. It does not have to make sense if it is FUN! Did I have to say he automatically succeeded due to the "Rule of Cool"? No, but should I have let him make the attempt? Yes! Especially as said old player I am remembering back to when I was playing AD&D as a youngster and I snagged a bad guy with a grappling hook to drag him back to the party's "gentle ministrations".

Ah well, I will talk to said player and apologize for my transgressions, and hopefully he will find another situation to use his grappling hook on a baddie. Or one of my other players will get to use the 1,000 ball bearings he has been DYING to use for the past two months and land everyone in the party on their collective buttocks. Note, I have not denied that player his wish, it is the rest of the party looking at him in horror every time he mentions the ball bearings that keeps him from throwing them about, willy nilly.

The picture below I took of my gaming table to show that even if you want to play with minis in a tactical representation of the game, you don't need much fanciness or spend much money. The board you see is a hunk of plexiglass with a couple of pieces of posterboard behind it, and an inch square grid drawn on the posterboard. Dry/wet erase markers are used on the pleixglass, and the standoff of the plexi over the posterboard makes the marker marks very visible. Plus, multi-color marker packs are available, and make it easy to liven up the board (here's water, these brown things are tables, etc). The miniatures are from a variety of sources, but I've really come to love the Reaper Bones and the WizKids Deep Cuts as they're both really good sculpts and very affordable. The monsters are all represented on my table by Rich Burlew's A Monster for Every Season printable card monsters.

The Chimera is dead and the Tieflings are next.

I have started up 3d printing and am working to print out many dungeon tiles from the OpenLock line and many monsters from Miguel Zavala's excellent designs, plus many others out there. I won't go into details on 3d printing, that's better discussed elsewhere (like the G+ community "3d Printing for Games") , but let me reassure you that 3d printing today is more affordable for the quality you now get than what you might have seen in the past.

Enjoy folks, and happy adventuring!