10 Monsters I Never Want to See

Several of the DMs out there have posted their top 10 favorite D&D monsters (check out RPGBloggers to read them all).  Here's my list, but slightly twisted.  As a player, here are my top 10 I-Never-Want-to-See Monsters:

1. Doppelgangers - Imagine meeting up with your good friend, whom you haven't seen for a long time.  Then, all of a sudden and with no provocation, your friend tries to kill you.  Yeah, see, that's why no one likes to meet a doppelganger.

2. Owlbears - Not the cute, cuddly creatures their name implies, these vicious killers are annoying.  Mostly, because after the battle, you have to hunt down their nest in order to find any treasure they may have.

3. The Tarrasque - Legendary creatures of all kinds are going to guarantee a moment of panic, but the Tarrasque, well, let's just say if you've never adventured with Batloaf, you can't truly understand the panic I feel meeting this monster.

4. Beholders - I think most players feel the same about this one.  Beholders are just no fun, and it can be summed up with two simple words: eye rays.  Can you think of a more terrifying combination of words in all D&D-dom?

5. Drow - I really, really hate to encounter any Drow.  Ever.  My very first character was an elf, who had the misfortune to encounter Drow.  Let's just say the resulting drama has left me with a crippling fear of dark places and a burning hatred for dark elves.  Also, they worship Lolth.  Ew.

6. Giant Spiders - Webs and Poisons and Lolth (again), oh my.

7. Liches - Creepy guys to begin with, and usually bent not only on ruling the world but also on destroying all adventurers, liches just don't spell "party," no matter where you find them.  They could be wearing silly hats and singing karaoke, and they still wouldn't want to have cake and ice cream with them.  Plus, who really needs a phylactery anyway?

8. Banshees - Anything with a "save vs death" is right out; banshees are just my representative of all things death-ly.

9. Hill Giants - Synonymous with "flying boulders," hill giants encounters are generally painful.  And unless you have a lot of ranged attacks in your group, you're going to be taking a lot of damage before you ever get close enough to inflict some of your own.  Ouch!

10. The Vorpal Rabbit - Perhaps the most terrifying of all woodland creatures, the vorpal bunny, who can take your head right off your shoulders before you can blink, is a blood-thirsty tyrant.  Like its estranged cousin, the Tarrasque, there is, fortunately, only one.  We had the un-pleasure of meeting it along the road once upon a time, and our good friend, Swun, didn't survive the encounter well.  So don't let those floppy ears and innocent eyes fool you... that rabbit is dynamite!

The Intricities of Group Dynamics, or "Wow, there's more girls in here."

As previously mentioned, we have a new D&D group here in colorful Colorado. We have been into our current adventure for two sessions now, and an exceedingly rare circumstance has occurred within our gaming group: the girls outnumber the guys!

A Fortunate Circumstance, to be sure!

I have been Dungeon Mastering for many years now and never had more than two girls in our group at a given time, so this experience is a little new for me.

I have some hard data at my disposal that proves there are many more female gamers in our midst than we originally thought. Stupid Ranger and e from Geek's Dream Girl are currently writing a book on the topic, so I've gotten the chance to read excerpts from real female gamers telling their tales of geeky adventure. There seems to be a lot of correlation between groups of male players and groups of female players as far as group dynamics go.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

I have noted a few interesting points about our specific group of players. Please keep in mind, this is not sweeping generalities based down gender lines, just what I can see from my seat behind the screen.

The lone male player in our group is the more tactical fighter type (well, rogue to be exact) that revels in the crunch of battle and vanquishing the foes. The ladies in the group (including the lovely Stupid Ranger) seem to focus much more on the flavor aspects of their abilities... what the flourish of blades looks like, how precisely the flaming sphere immolates its targets, and so on.

I have also seen similar divisions when the roleplaying aspects of our campaign take priority. Our guy distills things down into facts and specifics, the ladies seem to enjoy engaging me in in-character dialogue, or enjoy interacting with one another in-character.

This is one of my favorite aspects of our campaign thus far, because we have both sides of the coin represented in our group dynamics. You mix in Stupid Ranger's natural propensity to overdocument the details of the sessions and nobody ever forgets what the current goal for the party is!

There's even plenty of room for a proto-Vanir!

Normally, our irreverent "off-the-wall" quotient was filled skillfully by our good buddy Vanir. This was one of the aspects of our gaming group that I was very afraid would be lacking... however imagine my surprise when one of the ladies in the group wondered aloud about the sexuality of her tiefling warlord, and decided there and then that she would be a lesbian tiefling warlord with very small boobs and very large horns.

To make matters even better, members of our group immediately chimed in with "oh yeah, that's a great idea and that'll work with our backstory" and off they went into figuring out the wheres and what-for's of how their characters knew each other in the past. (Possibly in a biblical sense, but I'm sure that will come out in future sessions!)

For the record: I am unsure if anyone can ever fill the giant roleplaying shoes left by Vanir at our gaming table. I'm just saying options seem to be presenting themselves from unlikely sources!

A quick moral

I'm going to go on record and call for Dungeon Masters everywhere not to discount or devalue the presence of female gamers at your gaming table. I have heard some very poor tales in the past of women being undervalued or downright denied access to roleplaying games.

In fact, our very own college group had a "no girlfriends" policy until Stupid Ranger showed up.

This myopic thinking and exclusion can only damage your game and the larger roleplaying society, not to mention your ability to meet women and procreate. That's all I've got for now!

Gaze Upon The Glory That Is My Pimp Hands

Playing WoW last night, I happened to notice my friend Brian's shaman had some cool fist weapons on. When I inspected his character, I recieved a completely awesome surprise.

I regret only that I am too high level to use these now. However, this does not mean that I won't go back to Outlands just to get them. Time to save vs. vanity!

Behind the Screen: The New Batch

The last time I spoke to you all, it was on the eve of the beginning of our new foray into the new version of D&D. This meant new beginnings of almost everything: we were going to start a new campaign with a new group of people, utilizing a dungeon module for the first time.

What is going well

Honestly, just about everything with 4e. The module we're using, Keep on the Shadowfell, is just about everything I could need for this first foray. The encounters are designed to be very episodic in nature and our characters seem to follow the prescribed "hints" to get them going into the further areas of the module without much coaxing.

This easy acquisition time by the group has allowed me some time to design my own hooks for further in the campaign right into the pre-existing setting. I can tell this is going to make the rest of my campaign organically grow out of the module which should be a very good experience for my players.

In addition, the non-player characters that the module provides offer just enough description and tone in the provided snippets of dialogue that it was very easy to "get into their skin" and make them very real, three-dimensional characters.

I wonder if it'd be bad form to hug Bruce Cordell or Mike Mearls should I run into them at GenCon this year...

What isn't going well

It seems to be a lot of "real-world" interference. Our group originally consisted of myself, Stupid Ranger, a coworker of mine and his wife. We got characters rolled during our first session and got underway, everything was going swimmingly. We realized quickly that the module was a little... difficult on the encounter front with only three player characters, so we were very happy when my coworker's wife had an interested friend willing to join us.

The only downside was that a fair portion of the second session was helping her roll her character and get acclaimated to D&D again, since she hadn't played 4e yet either. Add into the mix a small herd of three young children, and distractions mounted pretty quickly for our second session despite best efforts to placate the children with movies and video games.

What's next!

All of these hurdles are either past us or manageable, so I have to say that things are going well at this point! We're looking forward to our next session in two weeks, and I need to extend a big THANK YOU to those of you that recommended that I read the module through and get comfortable with it. That has really helped my comfort level as we've moved into this new experience. Our readers are the greatest!