#counter monkey

♪ In my thoughts and in my dreams They're always in my mind These songs of hobbits, dwarves and men And elves Come close your eyes You can see them too ♫

I wanted to draw something for Spoony’s “Counter Monkey” Dungeons & Dragons vlogs, aside from the banners that I illustrated ages ago (which you can still see on the channel itself). Today was finally the day. :P

So I decided to rewatch Noah "The Spoony One" Antweiler's TTRPG vlog series Counter Monkey again and I just finished the video titled "Leaping Wizards". In that video Noah recounts an attempt to DM with the RPGA (the precursor to the Adventurer's League) back in the 90s, playing AD&D 2e. He describes an encounter he ran, modified from the module he had been given by the RPGA, where six PCs (all 1st level) encountered three 1st-level wizards, each of whom were supposed to have a single Magic Missile prepared. Spoony, seeing this easy encounter, changed the spell selections to Sleep, Charm Person, and a third spell that wasn't even used. The two enemy wizards, through good rolls, kill two of the PCs, and the players were so unhappy that they complained and Noah got barred from DMing for the RPGA in the future.

The core conceit of the RPGA, at the time, was to provide players with an avenue to continually play characters they liked. RPGA modules were designed to be very unlikely to kill PCs, even at the time.

And I've seen people in the past few years claim that World of Warcraft popularized the notion that D&D characters shouldn't die (permanently), that WoW's success and reduction of frustration about "unfair" DMs led to this (concurrently with the trend of CRPGs and JRPGs to develop more complex narratives), and here's this kinda-grognard over a decade ago recounting something that predates 3e that mirrors the same sentiment.