D&D commercial, accurate depiction of actual play! (except for the lightining bolt part)

So the Champions of Cauldron defeated a pyroclastic dragon. Not surprising, considering they have also killed a lich, a draco lich, a room full of mustache twirling villians, and eradicated an entire thieves guild. How they bested it was the shocker for me.

Going into this fight, I was pretty sure this bad mamba jamba was gonna kill one if not all of them. They decided to chat with it first, which was a good thing. Slight chance they might be able to achieve their goal by cleverly lying to him. Seemed possible, they did roll enough to change his attitude from hostile to friendly. The lying part though... well he had a sense motive of +31. Not so easy to fool. Especially when you come in telling him you are gonna kill his employers.

The fighting starts, and the party wizard tries yet again to disintegrate. On paper, disintegrate seems like whoop ass in a can. Never seems to work though, after the ranged touch attack roll, overcoming spell resistance and save, the baddies get at least one lucky roll. I roll a two on the save, which is still enough. Now my stomach drops, because I can tell I'm gonna have to kill characters now. Lots of them, unless the Champions get really really lucky. This thing has like 312 hp, and breathes superheated ash for 14d6. Its favorite tactic is to bull rush people into the lava, then grapple to keep them cooking. Painful, very very painful.

They try to banish it. Banish is turning out to be a super useful little spell, considering everything seems to be extra planar at high levels. Knowing that only a botched save on baddies part is gonna save them, I roll it right out in the open. I roll a one. It was kinda weird, it was like everyone was really too shocked to react. Plus it was like the first round of combat. I'm thinking if this had happened a little deeper into the combat, when like two or three cohorts had been toasted, there would have been whooping and cheering like in the commercial. It was more like "huh, wow, umm.. no fricken way... huh" Awesome, utterly awesome. I'm glad after like twenty years, the game can still surprise me.

Also, that's Jami Gertz and Cameron from Ferris Buehler in this commercial rocking it with the polyhedrals. I guess it originally aired only a couple of times, once of which was during Saturday Night Live. That table looks pretty damn uncluttered for a gaming session.

Don't even remember this being on TV

Here's a show I'll probably never get to see. Pretty sure thats a good thing, cuz this show looks like one hell of a stinker. It's unattainable status is just about it's only appeal for me. That and it's 80's fantasy capitalizing on the popularity of D&D.

Moltenwing

This bad boy right over here is a pyroclastic dragon. Or as I like to call it, dismiss him with a spell real quick before he breathes whoop ass all over you!

Hook horror!

I bought a couple of boxes of Dungeons of Dread, the new DnD mini set. Lucky me! I scored a hook horror, not accurately represented on the left. No, that over there is one of the damn coolest toys ever. Meaning I never owned it, other wise it wouldn't be so cool. This is one I desired greatly, but never acquired.

The hook horror seemed to be one of the most important DnD monsters to me as a kid, for three reasons. It had a toy, a whole bunch of them were featured in the cartoon, and I had the stats in the only monster book I owned, the fiend folio. Having only the fiend folio and the players hand book (both scored in a bargain rack at Kaybee toys) gave me a strange, skewed vision of how to play DnD. I had to cobble together the rules from those two books, maybe one of the books from the basic set, and an adventure written for the expert rules (Quagmire!). Occasionally I would check out the dungeon masters guide from the library, but that tended to muddle and confuse more than help. When I finally started earning enough allowance to start to buy the needed books, seemed like all of the ones I needed were never in stock. Probably because they were out of print. Second edition was soon to be released!

Not funny haha, funny AWESOME!

The April fool's page on WOTC? Right up my alley! Autognomes, evil squirrels as players, all kindsa Erol Otis art. That's what the site should be all year long. Lurkers above and below 24/7. Grumble grumble, wish those links were real though.