Hullo, my dork-nerd friends! I thought I’d give you an update on my Dungeons & Dragons adventures. My friends and I are still slogging our way through dungeons and killing many things. Yay.

When we first started our tabletop role-playing adventure seven years ago, we played the Reign Of Winter adventure path in Pathfinder, which is sort of a D&D clone game (but better in my opinion). While our Game Master was really good at his job, he was also a tremendous flake to the point where we’d go months without playing. Eventually, he said he just couldn’t do it anymore.

A member of my party, the cleric, stepped up to run the game, but since we lost our cleric and main healer in the process, we decided to make new characters and switch back to Dungeons & Dragons proper from Pathfinder. We’re playing a different campaign too; this one’s set in the Osirian desert.

In Pathfinder, I was a Mad Dog Barbarian with a bear animal companion. When we switched to Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, my new character was a Monk. His archetype was Way Of The Open Hand. He didn’t use weapons sort of like One-Punch Man. Since we started at the first level, I found that he just didn’t do much damage. In half a dozen sessions, he never managed even one outright kill. He would have been a monster eventually, but at the beginning, he was rather anemic damage-wise. Plus I found the character boring to play since he was very rigid and uptight; he didn’t drink, eat meat, or do anything remotely unlawful. He was kind of like Spock in monk form.

We had a very annoying Gunslinger in our party who always stole my thunder intentionally, because his character was an intentional asshole. The person playing him was also an asshole and I’m happy to say that he is now my best friend’s ex-boyfriend. When they broke up, the Gunslinger left our group. He wasn’t much fun to play with, and had he not left, I might have.

Before the Gunslinger left though, I decided to switch classes in an effort to increase my damage and play a more interesting character. I switched from Monk back to Barbarian without my bear animal companion. I am now a level 12 Totem Warrior Half-Orc Barbarian. I chose Totem Warrior so my bear could be with me in spirit. Below is my online character sheet. We left off in the middle of a battle, which is why I’m down hit points. And I’m currently raging so my stats are buffed.

Barbarian fits my style of play very well. Even when I play video games, I don’t take cover and snipe; I run right into the fray and blam enemies in the face. I like being a Barbarian except when we’re in towns, because it’s all blabbety blah blah, negotiate with this person and persuade this person, none of which I’m good at as a Barbarian. There is very little killing in towns. I like killing things.

I am the main tank for our party. I don’t mind taking damage, since every hit I take means one less that the fragile members of my party have to take. Most of my party members don’t even have 100 hit points while I have 158. Plus I have damage resistance when raging so I take half damage on most attacks anyway. I’ve maxed out my strength and my character is not very smart at all, so killing things and soaking up damage are really all I’m good at doing.

I’ve decided that the next time I roll a character though, I’m not going to be a straight up Barbarian. I’m thinking I’d like to be a Moon Druid or a Moon Druid/Barbarian instead so I can have some long range magic attacks and Druid wildshape, where you can turn into an animal and rage.

We used to get together in person and play, but since Covid, we’ve been playing on Zoom. It has worked out well since my best friend moved to Seattle and our other friends in Seattle, Oakland, and Portland can join too. Only half of us are still located in Los Angeles. We have 8 regular party members and we play roughly every two weeks as long as 6 can attend. While not ideal, playing on Zoom is better than not playing at all. Plus it helps me feel connected to people who don’t live nearby anymore. During quarantine, D&D over Zoom was my main source of social interaction.

Seven years later, we never did manage to vanquish Baba Yaga in the frozen north before that campaign went kablooey and now we’re trudging through the desert wastelands of Osiria trying to kill off all the bad guys. I’ve still yet to encounter a dragon, though one of my party is dragonborn, so there’s that.

Are you in a campaign? What do you play?