I won't be able to make either the Tues/Thurs as the first week of the month is usually bad for me.  I've run through the video and will look at it again tonight.  May just want to look it over once I have it done before we start.

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Thanks to everyone that could make it last night!  We spent a couple hours on character creation and were able to run through an "off the books" combat scenario to get everyone comfortable with movement and fighting in Fantasy Grounds.  To those of you that couldn't make it, no worries - next week is the first formal session and will be designed to ease everyone into both D&D 5E and Fantasy Grounds.

I had originally created the combat scenario as a random encounter for six characters.  Unfortunately, we only had three fully functional characters, one mostly useless bard, and Mike's uncompleted Paladin.  The combat consisted of four gnolls, which had an encounter difficulty of 800XP.  We only had 4 effective characters, meaning a "deadly" encounter (the hardest setting) should have had an encounter difficulty of 400XP.  The party ended up killing two gnolls and heavily wounding a third before they fell in combat.  Even with the total party kill (TPK), that's pretty damn impressive!

• Craig L. rolled Oni Fisticuffs, a piratical monk wielding a nasty two-handed great club.  He had bad luck with attack rolls, but when he connected he did some serious damage.
• Craig P. rolled Hytton Manbearpig, a mace-wielding cleric that was apparently wearing a Teflon suit.  He must have dodged at least 8 attacks before falling to a nasty bite attack from a Gnoll.  By the end, he was surrounded by three gnolls simultaneously and he went down like a champ!
• Meredith created Temmie De Spell, a wizard (because wizards are awesome!) that was kiting like a mofo.  She went toe-to-toe with a gnoll and lasted an impressive 8 rounds before catching an arrow to the face.  She managed to kite her opponent half-way around the map before he finally took her out.
• I rolled Donald Trumpopotamus, the world's worst bard, as a demo character.  Since we only had three functional PCs for combat, I threw him into the mix to try to level the odds.  His attack rolls were god-awful and he didn't manage to hit a single NPC.  He did cast a couple of half-ass healing spells, which weren't enough to keep the party alive.  I might have to introduce him into the campaign as an bad guy just so you guys can put him out of his misery!
• Finally, Mike got started on Theobald, a paladin.  Theobald didn't have a race, class, or any ability scores, so he died a quick but valiant death.  If nothing else, he was an excellent meat shield, absorbing blows that would have fallen on his compatriots in his absence.

...and here's what a TPK looks like:



I hope you all had fun, and I'm looking forward to our first full session next Tuesday!


-b0b
(...YAY!)