Monday, September 9, 2013

D&D 30 Day Challenge - Day 9

[Question] Favorite character I haven't played?

As a DM I've encountered many characters. On rare occasions it happens that a player finds the character for him to play and it's always a treat to see. One of those characters was a halfling thief in HackMaster. This was no Shire Hobbit by a long shot. He was dangerous and the best fighter in the group.

While making the character, Mr. K was not in the mood to invent a name, so he opened a random page in a English Dictionary, dropped a finger on the page and took whatever he had landed on. It was Debris. So unbelievably fitting. With time, the pronunciation would change from English to French (the "s" went silent and he sounded like a cheese). He looked somewhat like this:

Done years ago with the character portrait creator
HeroMachine 2.5.
Stories he'd tell you for a beer (and your purse...)

One time they were exploring a moathouse* they had heard some rumors about. After killing the bandits living there, they went room by room and finally found some stairs ending in a dead end. Debris searched for secret doors and found one in the east wall. They opened it a bit and saw light in the room behind. What followed was, of course, a discussion about how to enter the room. The group could never agree on stuff like that and there was always a point where Mr. K would snap and do something reckless.

This time he just said: "Throw me into the room." The group went silent. "I mean it, just throw me!"

Little did they know that the Ogre living in the room behind the secret door had heard them. While they were discussing strategy, there was more than enough time for the Ogre to position himself behind the door. It was one of the moments where I had a hard time keeping a poker face. He wanted to be thrown into the room, so that's what they did. But before he even hit the floor, the secret door was slammed shut. Problem was, he had been the one finding the mechanism to open the door in the first place. The rest had no clue how to open it, they were locked out.

It was a perfect David vs. Goliath situation. HackMaster 4E can be pretty brutal with it's exploding dice and hit point kickers (creatures and characters have a +20 hp kicker, so, as a matter of fact, there is a lot of hacking). The Ogre certainly was a tough enemy to face alone. But he had no chance. None what-so-ever. Debris used Dirty Fighting, Cricket-in-the-Tea Pod** and every other trick up his sleeves. And he got lucky with the dice. Very lucky. It was almost embarrassing. The Ogre was dead in three rounds. Without even landing a hit.

Took the rest of the group six rounds to open the secret door again. They found the halfling proudly posing on top of the dead Ogre. He'd even left a graffiti on the Wall: "Debri was here". His reward was a small-sized Cloak of Elvenkind from the Ogre's treasure***:

Really one of my "favorite characters I didn't play". Debris and Edal Worfang did actually meet to face the Caverns of Chaos. But that is another story...

A well-used character sheet.

*HackMaster variant of the famous moathouse in Temple of Elemental Evil (in module T1-4 The Temple of Existantial Evil, of course).
** A HackMaster Combat-Skills. One lets a character gain a better to-hit and more damage, if he gives up some defence, the other gives you a better initiative and, if you're faster than your enemy, an attack to the rear...
***I didn't put it there, it was already in the module.

2 comments:

  1. I believe he would have been in very good company with the two half-orcs you were describing in your last two posts, Spinoza and Ugg. It's all about the attitude.

    ReplyDelete

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