The Last Catching Up

Not so much catching up. This is the last session I participated in.

Much of the first part of the session was spent handling administrative stuff. This is an inevitable part of dealing with organized play.

We gathered, once again missing a primary front line fighter. But we had what this edition calls a long rest. Like in 4th, it's a rest for eight hours that restores almost all expendable resources. Interestingly, it only restores half of your hit dice. So the governor of Greenest, Nighthill, asked us to track the raiders back to their camp. Before we set out, a young monk, Nesim Waladra, asked us to rescue his master, Leosin Erlanthar, from the camp.

We set out in the afternoon, and after traveling for an hour so, we came upon a group of stragglers: four human guards and eight kobolds. They were arguing about the meager food they had collected. We debated how to exploit the situation for a while. Eventually, the kobolds (somehow) managed to win out get the larger share of the rations. This is one of those situations that a wizard with ventriloquism prepared is a boon.

Actually, situations like this, where planning, role-playing, and creativity trump charging in and hitting things with weapons, are fairly common in this adventure (I've read it. Yeah. I spoiled it for myself). This seems to be a shift in design philosophy from 3.5 and 4, both of which seemed to favor kick in the door play style. Hell, in 4th edition kicking in the door was the default. Whether this is good or bad is really a matter of taste, but this is my blog. So my taste is correct. I like it.

Eventually, the halfling rogue, Corrin, and the elf ranger, Sandi, tried to sneak into the camp and steal the humans' weapons. The halfling failed his stealth roll, so initiative was rolled. Fortunately, armed with uniforms taken from the fallen raiders, we managed to role-play the situation to our favor. We told them that halfing had stolen something of value from Langderosa Cyanwrath, and we were returning him to camp for interrogation. I actually managed to use my background as a soldier, flashing my character's sergeant insignia and berating the guards for letting the kobolds getting the better of them. At some point in this scene, though, an in-joke about eating halfling almost got out of hand when the underfed guards considering spitting and roasting Corrin.

Still, we managed to get past the guards without a fight. Of course, the kobolds sneaked away and set an ambush for us later down the road. They managed to swarm the bow fighter, Lokeo, and got him down to 2 or 3 hit points before I came along with a cure wounds spell. We dropped half of the kobold party, including a winged kobold (or urd), and they fled.

Some veterans noted that the spell my cleric used was called cure wounds rather than cure light wounds. Why? This is actually one of the cooler new features of spell casting. Rather than having nine or ten different adjectives to describe scaled spells like that, you just have the spell itself, which you know and/or prepare only once. Then, you can use higher level spell slots to cast it. When you do, depending on the spell and the level of the slot over the base level, you'll get an additional benefit. For cure wounds it's additional dice of healing. For magic missile it's extra missiles. For dispel magic it works on higher level effects. For charm person or fear, it affects additional targets. And so on. Definitely a good streamlining and making spellcasting a bit easier to deal with.

When we return, I'll be talking about the most recent session. The best part is, I'll finally level-up!