Chris's Invincible Dungeon-Crawl: Week 1

As you may have guessed from my resounding endorsement of The Order of the Stick a few weeks back, my litany of socially unacceptable hobbies doesn't stop at comics.

Heck, now that I think of it, the thousands of comics taking up space in my bedroom are probably the least geeky thing I'm into, which should come as no surprise considering that you're reading this on my comics-themed website where I often talk about the Sexy Girls of Public Radio.

Being into comics just isn't so bad these days. There's all those good Marvel movies out there, and that guy on the OC who's into the Legion. Even the love interest in Coyote Ugly--a bottomlessly wretched movie that I've seen three times for reasons I don't want to get into here--was a comics fan, and he even shared my love of the Punisher. I'd go so far as to say there's a certain charm about it.

Unless, of course, you're Scott, in which case having the exact issues of Team America you need to finish your run stored in your PDA is slightly alarming.

My deep and abiding passion for Dungeons and Dragons, however... That's a monolithic reason why I may never know the touch of a woman again. But hey, it's fun, and what the hell else am I going to do with all these dice?

I've been playing for about five years now, and while I run a semi-regular Eberron game, I haven't actually played as a character in a couple years. Which is why when Ben--the shop's manager who describes himself as a former avid reader of Black Belt magazine--told me he had an opening in his campaign, I jumped at the chance to get back in and do some playing.

There was, however, a problem.

Usually, I play a monk--the Shaolin kind, not the Benedictine, although I have been known to throw out a badass illuminated manuscript when the need arises. My reasons for this choice are fairly obvious: Monks do badass kung fu, and I think we can all agree that badass kung fu is high on my list of "likes." They're a pretty straightforward class to play. You pretty much just run around the battlefield kicking people in the face with Bruce Lee-esque howls and occasionally blocking the flow of their Chi to kill them.

It's awesome.

Every now and then I'll switch things up with a Fighter (who hits things) or a Rogue (who hits things while being sneaky), but it's pretty much the Path of the 18 Iron Hand Styles for me.

However, it was gently suggested to me that I play a Cleric, since that's what the guys in the group were lacking a the moment. Clerics aren't bad at hitting things, but really, their deal is that they cast spells--mostly to heal the people who are out there doing the real hitting. The problem, then, is this: I've never played a spellcaster before, and it's a bit more complicated than throwing my unstoppable dragon punch.

So I created the Cleric. I named him Liam, after The Jesus's bowling partner in The Big Lebowski, and he worships this guy:

That guy is awesome and that's a fact. Look at him. Not only does he look like medieval Sam Elliot, he holds his mace sideways--gangsta style. He's a total BAMF. And he is a god of vengeance and action.

Which is why my guy Liam has a lot of spells with names like "Disintegrate." Now if he could ever pull them off...

Tonight was the first session, and I was pretty ineffectual. The rest of the crew had been fighting a massive evil dragon, chasing it around on their own dragon with one of the characters standing on its back wailing on it. I managed to cast two spells at it, one of which pretty much fizzled out. And the guy riding its back? Yeah, he was a monk. And he killed it with an uppercut so hard it rocked like the biggest guitar ever made.

See what I mean?