D&D

My first foray into role playing games was Fighting Fantasy Role-play. Naturally with Steve Jackson as the author it is a beautifully solid and entertaining book that is the perfect intro into the RPG world for young minds.

From here I moved into Advanced Fighting Fantasy and then finally graduated into the grim and perilous world of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 1st Edition (WFRP).

WFRP became our go-to RPG. Myself and my friends played it diligently for years. I still love this game and it has never lost that nostalgic draw for me. The artwork, the setting, the careers system. It has its flaws, but it is a superb game and one I will revisit in the future. It is currently in its 4th edition and Cubicle 7 seem to be doing a good job with it.

So bearing all of the above in mind I never managed to play Dungeons & Dragons (or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). It was on our radar, but the rules were a bit tricky and the world was too rich for my taste. I prefer low fantasy and D&D had too many races and too many planes of existence etc. for my liking. WFRP was basically medieval Europe with elves, dwarves, halflings, a bit of magic and a bunch of monsters. No real need to get into the lore.

Thus D&D became a game I never had any interest in playing. Until recently. One of my board gaming friends was looking for a small group of RPGers to run a D&D campaign. So I bit the bullet and decided to go all in and give it a shot.

We had our Session 0 and my character is a (puny) level 1 human wizard desperate for power. In an unlikely turn of events he is adventuring with a thief (human) and an ex-military sergeant (human). None of us have played for years, so we got off to a bumpy start, but it was really enjoyable. My wizard had to flee from our first fight, our thief was critically wounded and our soldier saved the day!

My first impressions of D&D are decent. There is a bit of a learning curve in character creation and not knowing what number you are rolling to hit in combat kind of dulls the drama a bit. But it is early days and we’re still getting too grips with it all.

I hope to post updates on the campaign as we go, let’s see what happens…

02 Jan 2020