Time Travel: alas poor Ari...

[jchrisobrien]

Sunday was another day of rest and relaxation, of leisurely doing laundry and moving the gaming table back to the attic. The intent was to visit a friend and drop off some Buffy tapes, maybe watch an episode or two, then head over to my DND game. But alas, time stole away from me. Off to the game then, another session of searching for the missing King's son, which was cut abruptly short by my character's demise.
I haven't had a character killed in a game in ages, and it was a little sad. I've only played Ari for a few games, but I already had the personality down, and foresaw great and interesting things for the character. Now her looted body is zombie food. As per our group's pact, I rolled up a cleric for the party (which we sorely needed) but I have yet to get into the character. I was getting very tired as the game was winding down, but also a little surly. Clerics are, more often than not, not as much a character but a walking source of healing. They don't get to do much else. Perhaps I'll scrap the character, or try to make it a little more interesting. Or start expecting a little more religion from the players if they want to get healed. See the light, heathen!

Comments

BAH!

[mr-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

Clerics rock dude!

There is so much more to them. Just because there God has a certain ethos, don't make them a conformist. Look at all the different ways people woship Allah alone, or Jesus.

And if you pick the right god, you can get away with being a cock to the party. For example, I once had a cleric of a war god that wouldn't heal minor wounds in the party. They were badges of honor for a battle well faught and should heal naturally if they weren't life or limb threatening. He'd launch himself into combats as if he was a fighter and start wailing people with his mace until they were dead or he was dragged back from the front line by the party. And he drank like a fish! Holy crap. I started so many fights in bars with that drunken lout.

Don't let the class define the character, let the character defne the class.

-sarcy

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

J. tends to have the same problem with her cleric in the occasional (practically bimonthly) D&D game I run (you'll perhaps be happy to know that John the Fighter is still around as "that NPC guy that shoots arrows and sometimes hits but otherwise does little"). As a cleric of the halfling god of death (in an appropriately "eat, drink, and be merry" sort of way), though, the ale-swilling little guy has some leverage he could apply if need be. They're crawling through catacombs lousy with the undead (so her character gets a little extra respect for making skeletons cower left and right), and the cleric has so far bit back most criticism of the attendant grave-robbing his pals have been engaging in so long as they get to clear out the unnatural abominations that have cheated death. But he could always hold back a healing spell in exchange for a promise not to disturb the burials of the true dead, I suppose. And it wouldn't be too much of a leap to let a mortally injured character die naturally. (I also doubt that the cleric would cheerfully go along with a Resurrection attempt...)

On the other hand, this is largely straight old-school hack-n-slash dungeon crawling, and by mutual agreement actual character development hasn't entered much into it. We're regressing to middle school.