Big Game Wednesday - DM Turnstile

I'm not feeling well this week, so short entry with no scans.

Being a college gaming club, we faced the problem of turnover--players graduated then moved away. Paul was the first to go. After he left, my friend Homer stepped up to take over the DM duties for our weekly D&D fix, starting an all-new campaign with new characters.

Homer's campaign was fundamentally different from Paul's. We didn't level up as quickly and the emphasis wasn't so much on huge, high-powered combats. I think I was playing either a mage or fighter mage, but I don't remember for sure. Homer liked Moorcock's stuff a lot, so we ended up on this ship, sailing hte seas of fate, drifting through fogbanks and ending up in alternate realities where we might fight giant monsters or just hordes of enemy solders.

The one particular adventure I remember was almost dreamlike, a battle constructed specifically to feel like a video game, We faced an infinite horde of enemies, and were immediately surrounded by zero-level fighters. Once each player had killed 10 zero-level fighters, ten first-level fighters took their places, then 2nd-level and so on. I died pretty quickly, but some of the other guys may have made up to the 3rd-level guys. It's amazing how even low-level fighters can tear you up if they get to roll enough times.

Homer's campaign only lasted one semester, then he left. Another guy named Rick then took over, actually continuing with the characters from Homer's campaign, since we weren't very high-level yet. But Rick wasn't as enamored of the Moorcock concept, so he ended up landing us permanently in a new land, with a map based on England.

It's funny how a campaign in the same game system, with the same characters, could turn out so differently with a different GM. Rick's game had a completely different flavor than Homer's, but I don't remember a single memorable adventure. I do remember sitting down with Rick and coming up with a different rule for determining initiative in combat,and I remember that my character had a brownie familiar who spent one night Dimension-Dooring all over a castle to recon something. I don't remember why we were there or what happened, only that I totally abused the rules, because the brownie was only supposed to be able to cast one Dimension Door a day, and I had him bamfing all the castle like Nightcrawler.

It's strange, because we basically had Saturdays broken down into two halves, morning and evening. And even though the evenings were the serious D&D games with the better gamemasters, I don't remember them nearly as well as the morning round-robin games with rotating gamemasters.

Next week: more superheroes...