So Monday is rapidly approaching. That's our games night round here. Attracts all sorts, mostly tabletop war-games and MtG games, but every other week we hold our DnD campaign.
It's grown and shrunk as people move away or new people start playing. There's currently 6 of us plus the DM, usual bunch of characters, but with a slight twist. It's an evil campaign. That is, rather than play the heroes we are playing as the bad guys. A wizard, cleric, war forged fighter, ninga theify dude, a dwarf and the sarge. Part of a typically evil army subjugating masses ect ect. 3.5 rulebook, because. Just because ok?
Anyway, we are supposed to be an elite "chosen man" kind of special ops deal. But I maintain we are the reprobates none else wanted.
Playing an evil campaign makes for an unusual party dynamic, due to the lack of healing. Now a good aligned cleric can swop any of his prepared spells for a similar level heal spell. Great, since he can take all the lovely useful spells and swop out if things get tricky.
Not so the evil cleric. Being able to swop for inflict harm is situationally awesome. But it means you have to waste valuable spell slots to take heal.
This can be a massive problem if you don't just want to sit there spamming cure.
There are ways round it.
Load up on heals if your party's short. Obviously
Not that you have to use all of them, even as a level 5 character, I'm managing to keep everyone alive while still rocking animate dead and various summon spells.
Playing a priest of death in an evil campaign makes sense, since raising undead is only a little different to turning them. It took a little while to find my feet with him. He's solid as a rock, AC 23 is amazing for a level 5. But his damage output is small. Only d8+1 per hit. It took a few sessions to work out how to play him. In the end it was an aquatic attack by mind controlling squid that really got the rest of the party sit up, take notice and stop viewing me as a portable med bay.
Basically the DM was being a little evil and picked the war forged and the sarge as his targets. So they both turned on the party. Not such a problem for me, since I can sit there with the war forged for a fair few rounds without issues. But the sarge is a tough nut, with a pair of ranged touch attacks a turn each dealing out 2d6 damage. He turned them on the wizard. Things went downhill quickly. The ninja lacks any kind of non lethal, well anything, he's a ninja! And the dwarf is more than a little banged up from the last encounter.
Thankfully for the continuation of the party. A rather amusing idea came to me. I summoned 2 undead squid. Nothing particularly amazing about them, except their ability to grapple. Sending one against the war forged and one against the sarge they were both quickly tied up and unable to harm the party.
Genius, if I do say say so myself. sadly at the end of the encounter the ungrateful bloody wizard threw a fireball at my lovely friends and exclaimed loudly "mmm calamari" sigh. Evil bastard.
If you have the ability to summon things, always think about what you want to summon. Not everything has to be all hack and slash.
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