Dungeons and Dragons

Yes, I am a nerd. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons (a tabletop roleplaying game with dice, for those of you who don’t know) for close to five years now, and it’s something I really enjoy. My nerdy uncle first introduced me to the game, then my brother let me join his group… where I was the only girl. But I love the active storytelling involved in the game. You get to play as a character that you create, who can be any race from a human to a half-orc and any class from a wizard to a barbarian. It’s like writing a book, but you do it aloud with several other people, and you’re one of the characters! If you’ve never played it, I suggest you try it out. We have a club here on campus that I’m a part of, the Critical Hit club, and there are some really good DMs here (Dungeon Masters, the “authors” of the book- the people in charge of describing what happens, writing the story, and playing every other character). It’s a really fun club, and an awesome environment to be part of.

This story is from a D&D campaign that I played in last semester. Probably not completely accurate detail-wise, but the general story is the same. It’s just a little snapshot of the kind of chaos that can go on in our party (group of players). Maybe I’ll share other stories later, more epic stuff that shows the awesome story-building that goes into the game, but for now I’ll just write this funny story that happened because of a bad perception roll.

Our party was just settling in for the night, making camp in an abandoned distillery that we’d come across. We were traveling across the isle of Armien, but couldn’t make the entire journey in one day, so we had to stop and rest. The distillery was wooden, a cellar that went down underground. There was a staircase that connected the top and the cellar, where barrels of beer were stored. The party was camping down in the cellar.

When you’re in D&D, a world filled with monsters, sleeping without a sentry is a very bad idea. Zombies could sneak up on you, people could steal your stuff, anything could happen. So we always had someone keep watch. In this case, the first person on watch was a character named Jared- a young necromancer (wizard with a focus on raising the dead). He stood alone in the top room of the distillery, in the dark, looking nervously around to make sure that no monsters were coming in. The DM asked him to make a perception check.

(Quick explanation on how these things work: in D&D, things that you do are determined by rolls of the dice. When your character is going to perform an action, you roll to see how well you do. If the number is high, you do well. If the number is low, you fail. If the number is somewhere in between, then it depends. Different characters have bonuses they can add to things, but a lot of the time it comes down to luck.)

Jared’s player, Maddie, rolled a D20 (20 sided die). I don’t remember the exact number she got, but it was somewhere in the single-digits, which wasn’t great.

DM: “You aren’t sure, but you think you hear the door creak. It’s slightly open.”

None of the rest of us could remember whether the door had been open before. However, none of that mattered, since our characters weren’t awake. What would happen was up to Jared. One of the fun things about D&D is that you play a character, so you react how your character would, according to their personality. Unfortunately for everyone, Jared was a scaredy-cat. He immediately panicked and raced down to the distillery, waking up the first person he encountered: my character, Phoenix, who was a sorcerer with a love for fire spells.

Phoenix (grumpily): “What?”

Jared: “There’s someone up there.“

Phoenix: “What?”

Jared: “I’m on watch. The door opened. There’s someone there. Help.”

Phoenix got up and began to walk up the staircase, Jared behind her.

Again, here’s where the fun comes in: playing characters based on their personality. If I was trying to play a character based on what I, the player, knew was the best thing to do in the moment, then that would take a lot of the fun out of the story. Instead, I took into account how Phoenix was at the moment. It was sometime around the middle of the night, she was groggy and not fully awake, and therefore not thinking straight. These thoughts all factored into the action I decided to take. If I was being smart, Phoenix would have gone carefully to investigate, maybe drawing a weapon or finding a lantern somewhere. She had an ability called “darkvision,” which meant she could see fairly well for short distances even in the dark. However, since she was sleep-deprived and not the smartest to begin with, she did something dumb.

Me (grinning, knowing this is a bad idea): “I cast Burning Hands.”

The DM and the rest of the party, collectively: “Oh no.” (And several variations thereof.)

Burning Hands is a spell that covers the user’s hands in magical flame. It functions like normal fire, except it doesn’t actually hurt your hands when you cast the spell. Phoenix’s thought process was that casting the spell would help her to see, using the fire to illuminate her surroundings and shine some light on whatever intruder was freaking Jared out. However, there are a couple of factors that make this a bad idea:

1. She is in a wooden building.
2. It’s a distillery. Filled with alcohol.
3. Both wood and alcohol are very, very flammable.

So, of course, part of the staircase immediately caught on fire.

Thus, everything descended into chaos. Phoenix stood there, dumbfounded, trying to figure out what to do. Jared ran around like a chicken with his head cut off. A few more members of the party then woke up: Guardian, an armor-wearing paladin (fighter with power from a god), Bertram, a stuck-up cleric (spellcaster with power from a god), and Soos, a druid (spellcaster focused on nature and animals). Guardian added to the chaos by trying to put out the fire by hitting it with his warhammer. (His player was also making bad decisions based on the character’s personality.) Bertram stood back, snidely commenting on how dumb it was to start a fire in a distillery. This led him into an argument with Phoenix, who got offended easily and already wasn’t in the best mood. They never got along, and this was no exception.

So two people were fighting with each other, one person was panicking, and another person was chopping up part of the wall. Fire was still spreading. In the midst of this, the druid Soos spoke up.

Soos: “So, um… Do you guys want me to cast Create Water or something?”

Everyone (in collective exasperation): “YES!”

Create Water is exactly what it sounds like: a spell that creates a quantity of water. Instead of immediately solving the problem, the druid stood there for a while, lost in the chaos, and then asked if casting the spell would be a good idea. I think the collective brain cell count of the party at this time was somewhere around three, but we reached a solution eventually.

Soos cast Create Water, and we all took a deep breath, surrounded by the burnt and now falling-apart staircase. Luckily, the fire hadn’t reached the barrels of alcohol or the rest of the soundly sleeping party. Disaster was averted, for now.

That story lives on as a funny moment, birthed by a dumb decision, influenced by a bad roll of the dice. It was a mess, and I enjoyed every second of it. This is some of the crazy stuff that can happen in D&D. I recommend it wholeheartedly.