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Wow. I don’t know if I just got stuck with a sadistic DM for my first D&D experience, or if the game is simply just this brutal. Our third foray took us a bit deeper into the world Çoop has created for us. The way this session went, it would appear that Coop’s mind is not unlike the mind of a rabid, frothing wolverine. Let me start with this - about 4 or 5 hours before we were scheduled to play our session, Coop called me to his desk. “Hey, Paul, come here. Want to see something that happened this weekend?” he said, a coy smile forming on the corners of his lips.

I walked over, looked at his monitor, and there was FemJesse’s rendering of a tombstone.

“Totally killed one of my Player’s characters this weekend. On accident.”

The ‘on accident’ felt tacked on. Probably because Coop was giving off a vibe similar to that of a child who had just spent the afternoon blowing toads up with M80’s. Things did not bode well for our troop of noob adventurers. Sitting down for this game, things felt much more structured. One of our members was away for the last session, so this week we had a full crew. Each of us had a much better understanding of what our roles were, how the game worked, and how our DM managed the adventure.

We jumped right back in where we left off last week, with our party entering a goblin-infested structure. Within a few moments we were back in battle. We had already used miniatures the previous week, so scanning the layout of the fight was natural and I think we did a better job of utilizing positioning and our powers correctly. One qualm Coop had was that user powers were located on the second page of your character sheet, and that this caused a lot of flipping back and forth between pieces of paper. This was noticeable in our battle this week, and we are still all trying to get a better grasp on exactly what our powers are and when are the appropriate times to use them. A handful of index cards with your powers would really help to streamline the process (hint hint).

This week did introduce something new, which I alluded to earlier – danger. Shortly after I battle with a few goblins we encountered our next foe…a giant troll wielding an oak club. Suffice to say, we had a fair amount of trouble taking that beast down. It was during this fight that myself (and I’m positive most of my companions) felt legitimate fear of loosing our characters. We haven’t played long enough to grow attached, but D&D does a good job of instilling a genuine fear of having to start over. I mean, you spend time picking out a name, a class, powers, and maybe even a back story – having to do it all over again this soon would be a chore. It was nice at the same time, though. Modern games with constant respawns or frequent save points rarely have that edge of your seat tension that we had on Monday.

Anyways, we really are getting used to the game mechanics. For only playing three sessions (one of which was just character creation and a sample battle) I’d say things are relatively easy to figure out. The biggest bonus is having a DM with experience. Without that, I’d imagine the learning curve would be a bit more steep.

Oh, we also had our first level up. Pretty exciting, but we haven’t gone about actually updating our characters, that will happen next week. It should be nice to get a little stronger…but that also makes the slowly-creeping threat of death all the more palpable.

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