Ho boy, my first character. I wanted to play a bard! Because, you know, singing! And inspiration! Yeaah!
That wasn't the problem. The problem was the party's general make-up. Here's a list.
- One paladin
- One ranger
- Two bards
- Two monks
- Two rogues
Now, the ranger used Con as his dump stat and took a fox as his animal companion. Meaning that the only person who could actually do well at all in melee range was the paladin...who was also the only person with access to much healing magic. Yeah.
So, what happened to me?
After hitting level five, it became clear that the party didn't have a few important roles filled. By which I mean, the paladin had to start dedicating his progression to healing, while one of the rogues--the more competent one, I might add--started retraining levels in wizard.
Me? I started taking levels in dragon disciple...because we needed another tank. The DM of this campaign had learned to play the game with a fairly optimization-happy group, so she threw pretty challenging stuff at us without really thinking about it.
So, I'm a bard 5/dragon disciple 2 when someone finally introduces me to
Tome of Battle. Thank god, really.
At the end of the campaign, my timid, sixteen-year-old human bard had undergone some...rather serious changes. He was now a dragonborn bard 5/dragon disciple 2/crusader 3 with dragonfire inspiration, improved toughness, and law devotion. Yeah, the bard ended up lawful--fortunately, you don't lose your class abilities for that.
It was an...eclectic character sheet, to say the least.
The next semester, I ended up DMing--the DM of that previous campaign was about to graduate, and she wanted the chance to play in one more campaign before doing so. I decided to run something not terribly complicated--an alternate universe version of the Third Crusade, in which convicted criminals--including witches--were offered absolution if they fought for the Church. That last bit there was added for the former DM, who really wanted to play an outcast-type character. My players were:
- The paladin from the previous campaign, now playing a swordsage.
- The rogue from the previous campaign who had ended up retraining into a wizard, now playing a spirit shaman.
- The ranger from the previous campaign, now playing a rogue.
- A new player, playing a binder.
- The DM from the previous campaign, now playing a druid.
The swordsage was a Spanish inquisitor whose main shtick was his initiative modifier--absolutely nothing expected him. The binder and druid were both witches, though only the druid made her witchiness visible. The entire time, the inquisitor thought the binder was just some petty crook.
Now, remember how that DM had learned to play in an optimization-heavy group? Imagine my surprise as a fledgling DM--having only ever played in one campaign and now running my first--when she cast the spell
blinding spittle on the saint that I had prepared for one of the combats. More or less negated any threat he posed immediately, forcing me to drag in a three-headed leskylor to at least make combat something other than a laughingstock.
Now, imagine my surprise the first time that she cast
vortex of teeth, when I had carefully statted out a sorcerer/binder/anima mage and a cleric/solar channeler for them to fight...indoors. Yeah, those guys got ripped to shreds.
Let's not even talk about the one time she cast
venomfire.
While part of the problem was druid and part of the problem was the fact that she was doing this unconsciously--she was just so used to a certain power level of play that it just happened--a lot of it had to do with the fact that I thought that two 12th-level characters would pose a serious threat to five 8th-level players, one of whom was a druid. As their only encounter for that entire day. I also thought that a single monster on the field was enough to take on a party--hence the
blinding spittle incident. I really had no clue what I was doing, and it showed.
See, these days, I've learned. If I'm going to throw only a single creature at a party, it's going to have so many goddamn templates on it that you have to dig through layers and layers of .rtf files to establish what the original creature was.
