My first (and only) experience with D&D Day was when a friend of mine volunteered to run the adventure. I talked him into letting me make up a character (using the point-buy system that all the pre-made characters got) instead of using one of the given ones. I made a warforged ninja.

This stems back from the first time our group tried out the Eberron setting. We were going through the included adventure, and at one point were exploring a building. Well, we were going down this 5x5 stairwell (basically one square on the map), and in the middle of it (as in, half our party on one side, half on the other) we were attacked by a warforged. That just seemed to magically appear in the stairwell. The game broke down at that point, and we started making jokes about warforged ninjas hiding in people's closets and pantries and what-not.

So I make my warforged ninja for this game. Prioritized Dex and Int (for the skill points). Ended up having like a 7 Wisdom. So right off the bat, the NPC tells us, "There's this nearby cave that's lousy with drow. We need you to go check it out." I respond with, "What, are you crazy? I don't want to die."

GM: "Make a Wisdom check."
Me, botching: "Sounds like a great idea! Let's go!"

The two funny moments, though: first, early in the module, we run into a bunch of skeletons and I end up getting surrounded. GM laughs, "What will you do now? Ha ha ha!" I look over my character sheet, and look at my skills and feats, and look back at the GM, "I hide." And I actually pull off a hide roll so well that I hide in plain sight of all the skeletons surrounding me. Warforged ninja, vanish! One of the skels finds me eventually, but only because it tries to move through the square that suddenly became empty to it trying to get at one of the other PCs. :D

The other moment was later on in the module, where I and another PC are scouting down a hallway, and we run into an ogre barbarian. We roll initiative, and I go just before the ogre, who the GM says is setting to charge me.

Me: "I hide."

And again, I pull off such a good hide roll that even the ogre, who is sitting there eyeing me with intent, assumes I vanished into thin air. And proceeded to charge the other PC. ^_^; But then I got to attack it from behind and all that other ninja-y goodness, so it all worked out. :)

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Now, see, it's stories like this that make me want to join up and see what shenanigans my characters can get up to before they inevitably get killed in hopefully entertaining fashion.

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This is part of the fun that happens when you are playing a throw-away character. You try silly things like hiding in a group of skeletons. :)

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I tried to make my existing character ideas as expendable as possible, thereby lessening the pain of loss when their colorful demises come, but the trouble with that is that the longer they stay with you, the more you become attached to them. I tried figuring some alternative character lines to follow from each of them come their loss (say, a devoted friend for my Fighter, a smarter sister for my Warlord), and it was actually almost depressingly easy.

What I really need to do is to make a character I can expressly hate, and therefore get him (or her) into situations I would otherwise not expose any self-respecting creation of mine; not really making him suicidal, but exploring options and avenues of thought that I'd otherwise not take if I cared about the character at all. XD

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If I recall correctly, the Warforged is supposed to be hiding in a little recessed alcove off the stairwell.

Warforged are pretty damn good at standing in one place and not moving.

Though I did play through it once and we spotted him, and it didn't react to us at all, standing there gawking at him in the shadows for some reason.

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Warforged will probably be the butt of many an old golem joke, what with their one weakness being pigeon poop and the such.

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I was linked to an image on 4chan a few days back, and I really regret not saving it. Basically it was a stickman comparison of Pixar and Dreamworks' filmmaking styles, and in the Pixar window, the execs were all starry eyed and "There's a maintenance robot who falls in love at the end of the world after all the humans have left! :O" and "The monsters in our closets actually have a society that runs off of childrens' screams! :O" etc.

And then below it is two Dreamworks guys, and one says "So there's like... a bunch of animals, and they do things that animals don't usually do." "And they all make this face."

Yeah I can't do the actual cartoon justice but it is basically truth incarnate. Seriously, what is up with that face?

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That face is a phenomenon I like to call 'photo op face', where programmers are set to the unenviable task of translating a well-known celebrity's for-magazine-front-page-smiling likeness into the face of a cutesy, caricaturized CGI character for a children's comedy. Or something like that. It may also be what I like to think of as 'sardonia', that smug, contemptuous flavor of comedy that runs off a condendescending amusement at the antics of the 'common folks'.

The trouble with many-- perhaps all-- of Dreamworks' previous offerings in the CGI-movie-for-children arena is their sheer transparency as nothing more than pure vehicles for profit. Aside from the brute-force tactic of taking as many well known names as they can in their employ, Dreamworks has the regrettable tendency to have stories and characters that are only 'for children' in as far as they patronize everyone who watches them, both young and old.

Kung Fu Panda dodges many of these problems admirably, but is not immune; for example, I enjoy pondering how much these people had to have paid personalities like Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan just to have them read out the two to five lines of spoken dialogue they had throughout the entire film.

The art, planning, programming, directing, and editing departments (among others I cannot name out of ignorance of how exactly a studio like theirs works) all seemed to work appreciably hard to bring to life a pseudomystical, recognizably Chinese setting, though populated by animals, only to have it ruined every time Jack Black opens his mouth. Don't get me wrong-- I have nothing against Jack Black. He's a good actor, and he has a wonderful singing voice, but seriously? I know the whole movie was pretty much built around him, but this was one case where they could have served themselves better by removing him and... and...

Holy crap, I just realized that Kung Fu Panda is actually yet another movie about an American who loves/needs kung fu, and is magically transported to the past/magic kingdom where he can actually learn kung fu and save the day. Except in this movie, he just starts out already in that world, and everybody ignores the fact that he is American. OH, DREAMWORKS, YOU SLY DOG, YOU. YOU KNEW I NEVER WATCH MOVIES LIKE THAT, AND HERE YOU TRICKED ME RIGHT INTO ONE. DA-YUM.

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Speaking on this "photo op face" phenomena, I recall the interview I saw with Hugh Laurie Monday night with David Letterman. He plays Dr. Cockroach in Dreamworks' film that's opening this Friday, Aliens vs. Monsters.

He basically said that he doesn't know if they had a cockroach, and when trying to decide who was really cockroach-y, thought, "Hugh Laurie!"; or if they wanted Hugh Laurie in the film, and thought, "What critter is Hugh Laurie really like? Cockroach!" He decided that either way they came about the pairing, it wasn't very flattering.

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P.S.

Look what I found!

Also, I heard you have a Facebook account. You need to be on my friends list.

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I went along and played and had an awesome time running a gnome bard.

D&D is an awful lot of fun if you've got creative players with a sense of misadventure.

I don't really have any personal stories that can match up to the meat mountain anecdote I once heard though.

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There was an urban legend also you might have heard of about the paladin fellow who managed to show up an entire orc army by himself despite his low level. I tried Googling it, but 'King of something' is so vague that the hits were less than helpful.

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May be another epic tale.

And of course you know the tale of the Dread Gazebo?

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Somewhat of it. Refresh my memory, babe.

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