Being a Player

Hot damn, I was able to actually play DnD for the first time in forever these last couple of weeks.
And it's really fucking different.

First off, since I'm usually the DM, I had insights into the whole dungeon mastering shebang that nobody else really had.
Second off, the DM I was playing under kept looking at me to make sure he was doing good.
Third off, my game is the only game he's played in so he came pre-indoctrinated into the OSR cult. Plus I gave him the LotFP referee book and thus am I able to play in the sort of game I like to run.The perfect ploy.

It's been a pretty great couple of weeks all round, compounded by the fact that I overheard one of my players selling some random guy on my game at a party.

But anyway, after months and years of holding all the cards, it's super weird to be a player. But also super fun!


A play by play -

First session I lose 3 characters in +James Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer, which I had purposefully avoided reading, before surviving and hightailing with much loot with a fourth. I died a lot because I know Raggi's stuff pretty well at this point and knew that Fun-With-An-Ominous-Capital-F would ensue if I messed with all of the things.

Deaths included:

• Trapped inside one of five magic mirrors, mimed bringing the mirror that previously made an evil mirror-clone come out of it and place it in front of my own, hoping to step out into the real world. Instead, cause infinite clones come out of infinite mirrors and shattered all of them... and myself.
• Licked salt from the magic circle which kept an insane wizard from escaping.
• Did all the steps to utilise a super space telescope and got beamed across space and eaten by the doopy dancing slime-natives of the planet I arrived on. I don't know what I was expecting to happen, but it wasn't this!

So anyway, kind of a character funnel in it's own way. I had a blast!
The guy who escaped with treasure was a throwaway halfling with middling stats known as Wuggles Bungo.

Next session it's just me and another guy who show up. We're in Generic Not Even Named Fantasy Medieval Township and so Wuggles Bungo, halfling party master, decides to spend the shit out of his loot and make a name for himself with his arms crossed in a douchey manner the entire time.
His motto: "The party don't start til I walk in"
Something I learnt - dicking around in town spending all your money and being a top bloke is actually a lot of fun. No longer will I be worried about people's enjoyment when my players are on one of their frequent shopping trips!

So shopping trip over, plate armour on and my two new intensely loyal men-at-arms in tow, we decide to look for some adventure! Conveniently placed guards tell us there's a place called Goblin Gully just across the way.

I've seen this one page dungeon before, but I don't let on due to my newly discovered drive to be a filthy metagamer.
Things I could remember included a tree with goblins in it, a bridge, a ceiling with a hole for goblins to chill in, and an evil slime in the depths.

Half the dungeon and several goblin corpses later I send my injured henchmen home with a hefty cash bonus since I am a good guy hobbit and I know a funeral isn't much of a party.
We cross a fairly rickety bridge, meet a goblin, and I bluff hard by saying I'm an albino goblin and a friend. We murder him. His friend calls out to him from above, we wave his arm out into his vision like Woody with Buzz's arm in Toy Story. I climb the rope, the goblin boss sees through my "amazing" disguise, and after running deeper into the dungeon we end up trapped in the lowest level of the dungeon ever-so-close to a giant slime.

"Shit, well, I've got ten days of rations, I'm sure our henchmen will be back to find us when we don't return in a few days."
"Why would they come back?"
"Uh we worked out some protocols with them in the bar before we left, this is Omega Protocol B5 - if we are missing come find us or we won't be able to pay your wages."
"... fine"

Credit where it really is due, newbie DM did a bang up job of letting us play as my henchmen in their thrilling rescue mission. They distracted the goblins, while our "real" characters used barely plausible thief kit instruments to knock the bar off the door and barge it down.
Of course, we broke the door off the hinges, leading to a dead sprint out of Goblin Gully with an enormous, potentially town-destroying slime on our tail.

All in all, it went pretty well!