#rpg tabletop

Portrait of our little goblin!

Check out my insta for portraits of the rest of the Mighty Nein! Molly and Cadeceus are next! 

Aight, here we go again, another dnd session with the gays after who knows how long. So, we all started out in a prison cell. DM won't tell us why we're there, so whatever. After taking turns observing the surroundings, I use my earthbending powers to get a feel of the surroundings, so that was useful.

A prisoner in a cell next to us spoke, and said we were next in line for the 'pit'. So obviously we want to get the fuck out of there. I try to break open the bars only to find... They were far enough apart for all of us to fit through. Nice.

We venture out of the cell, and run into a shaman cultist person who was wearing a bird mask. Like one of those cool plague mask things. (NOTE: I thought these people were actually BIRDS the WHOLE TIME because NOBODY TOLD ME THEY WERE ACTUALLY HUMANS. Thanks guys.) So we fight him, and then kill him, nothing really important happened. Until we came across some stairs.

My character is pretty much blind, as she can only see 5-10 feet in front of her, and then her vision gets progressively worse the farther it gets. However, her hearing is enhanced because of that. Which is why I was able to eavesdrop on a conversation between two of the cultists, who were all the way at the top of the stairs, and somehow I was also able to hear that there was a table or something?? Yeah I'm awesome.

So we come up with this plan. Our rogue ( @redyarns ) was going to sneak upstairs and spy on them to get information of where our stuff is. But, of course, she fucking trips and falls down the stairs. So the two cultists hear that and one of them comes rushing down. The three people with the highest charisma (@ghostlydragons @allaroundmaple @myrhas-haven ) went up and tried to... SEDUCE the cultist. Unluckily for us, he was very dumb, and he thought we were going to "treat" the carpets. So he calls up to the other cultists that the carpet cleaners have come, but the other cultist says "We HAVE NO CARPETS!" So the three try again, saying that they were here to "pleasure the guards". The cultists calls up again, and the one upstairs called down "We HAVE NO GUARDS!" The cultist upstairs (who is female) gets suspicious and starts to walk downstairs. Now we get impatient and begin to attack.

The male cultists attacks first, and rolls something high (I forget what it was) and KNOCKS OUT our bard for the whole fight. The other two people who tried to talk begin to attack and hits the female cultist, who is downstairs now. The DM points out that the male is noticeably worried for her.

While this fight is happening, there are still two characters who haven't been spotted. Me and the rogue. So I make a plan. We're going to fight the cultists, while the rogue sneaks past, finds our stuff, and brings it back to us. Seems smart right? Well it would have been perfect if our rogue wasn't THE WORST ROGUE EVER. She managed to trip over a chair, then proceeded to knock over a statue, then finally got tangled up in curtains. So the cultists noticed her. And she got knocked out.

So I take this opportunity to attempt to sneak attack them, and the battle is pretty normal from there. We finally manage to beat them, and we go to loot them, only to find that they were still alive, even though the DM described them as dead. Thanks.

They don't attack us anymore though, so we take this chance to get our stuff, and then escape. Outside, we find 6 more cultists, and we notice that we're on top of a mountain above the clouds. We try to go talk to them, because we apparently forgot that every one of them had attacked us on the spot before. And this wasn't any different.

They were easily defeated, so we steal their clothes as disguises and continue onward. The DM gives us two choices; scale down the mountain or go forward across some pillars. So naturally we choose to go forward. I go first, because the DM tells me that I have the best acrobatics, so making it across the pillars should be easy for me... If I hadn't rolled a 2. So I trip and fall on the first pillar, and I'm not hanging on to the top of it. My asshole teammates jump across it without bothering to help me, except for our sorceress who helps me (Thank you! I'll remember that).

We all have them and we all use them, but how far should we go?

Some folk have no issues about having a completely fleshed our NPC tagging along with the PCs during their quests, I’m one of them. I feel that it can provide some direction and urgency to a questline should some players get distracted or lost. They can add that extra oomph to an encounter should your pcs not be ready or too inexperienced in the game itself. Plus, and this is just me talking here, it allows the DM to get into the game as well, outside of just narration.

I know that I am not alone in some of these thoughts, but there are definitely people on the other side of this debate as well.

I’d like to know your thoughts on NPCs and where they belong, and when we should use them!

Thanks for checking in,