So I Joined the RPGA

I was unable to sleep after returning from our Game Day event and I stayed up into the wee hours on Saturday night, registering my DCI# so that I could join the RPGA. The WOTC website kept crashing on me, but seemed to calm down as the evening went on.  I even took the open book GM test to become a 4th edition Herald GM. I scored a 95%. I expected to score a 100%, but a vaguely worded stealth question lead to the demise of my perfect score (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). I will take comfort from the words of Cypher in the Matrix "No one makes the jump the first time." Wizards has changed how stealth works in the new Player's Handbook 2, so I will be sure to brush up on that weak spot.

I read as much as I could about the RPGA, it seems fairly structured, but I'll find out for sure when I put it to the test very soon. My two oldest children wanted to become members as well, but it seems like I'll need at least four RGPA sanctioned gamers to make my home events official. My daughter is busy trying to recruit one of her friends from high school, but I may have to draft more members of my family to fill in the extra spots. I also put in an order for more DCI membership cards (it was not a very intuitive process, I hope I did it right!) so that I can expand the geek gaming forces with gamers from the local area, but that is a topic for a future blog post!

I browsed through the huge choice of modules, selecting and downloading two adventures to run my group through and we are in the process of rolling up some RPGA legal characters. I chose the ADAP1-1 Barrow of the Ogre King and CORM1-1 The Black Knight of Arabel modules. I didn't get a chance to read through them yet, but I hope to squeeze some time in tonight! Hopefully, by this coming weekend I will be running my group through the first one!

On a side note, I read an interesting article (Got Wiki?) over at At Will. It was in reference to a Gnome Stew article and looked like a good idea to help any GMs pressed for time. I think I will try and get a wiki set up for the group we create.

We Came, We Saw, We Almost Conquered!

I took my two oldest children to their first ever gaming event! It was the Worldwide D&D Game Day: Player’s Handbook 2 event hosted at The Comic Lair. If you haven't been to the store, you should stop in when you get a chance, Chad(the owner) is a great guy and is very knowledgeable about everything in his store. The place is literally packed wall to wall with geeky gaming  goodness, from comics to action figures to boardgames, he has a little bit of everything!

It was a little under an hour drive for us, but we still arrived early and took advantage of that time to sign up for the RPGA. I wanted to make sure that we all joined so that we could participate in any future WOTC sanctioned events. I even plan on trying to organize some events closer to home.

Turnout was light for the event and some expected gamers didn't show up, so when our GM (Matt) arrived we ended up drafting the proprietor Chad into the group and ran through
One Dark Night in Weeping Briar with just four characters in our party. My son had his heart set on playing the warforged barbarian Squeaks and was immensely pleased when the GM passed the mini and character sheet for the character to him, to start the game. 

I was given the dragonborn paladin Balasar and my daughter chose to play the tiefling invoker Markaria. Chad opted to play the gnome bard Roswyn. With the minis and character sheets handed out, it was time to game!

Matt (our GM) seemed a little nervous at first, but soon warmed up and had us combating the evil creatures assaulting the poor inhabitants of the town of Weeping Briar. The WOTC pre-generated character sheets were very handy, although I wish they would have printed the power stat blocks in color, it made it a little more difficult to quickly select the powers we wanted to use. It was also difficult trying to use some of the abilities of the characters since we were not familiar with most of the powers. I think WOTC should have designed the adventure with lower level heroes, the eleventh level characters had so many options that our combat started to bog down as we scanned the huge amount of choices available to our characters. I imagine it would have been a lot smoother if we had leveled theses characters from first through eleventh ourselves (and thus gained familiarity with the nuances of the different powers), but as it was, I didn't think it was very new gamer friendly.
We ended up gaming for about four hours, but didn't quite make it all the way to the end of the adventure, because plans we had  for later in the evening required us to leave. Still we all had a good time, Chad & Matt were great and my kids got their first taste of 4th Edition gaming! I myself had a good time, much better than my own first experience at a gaming event as a teenager.

We were already talking about things we would have done differently with our characters on the drive home and planning for our next event! I've posted some pictures from the event in this article and I will post the remainder up in a gallery!