Josh Smith

From Loranon

On 12 June 2007, Josh Smith quit the campaign (taking Nick Morris with him). He provided the following note:

Friday night was an interesting experience indeed. The map tool, once I finally got connected, is amazing. It truly sped up several processes which normally slow the average party down. The macro system is astonishing, and I can only imagine how quickly map movement and combat scenarios can become once the tool is entirely configured. Also, having half of a party running from someone in Cauldron, creates some interesting circumstances. That being said, I do hope that the rest of what I have to say does not offend anyone.

Most of you know the campaign style which I come from. A campaign style which I have yet to experience in Oxford, even when running a custom written campaign of my own. I come from a group of role-players who were, at times, much more than eager to gimp themselves in the form of dice rolls and combat tools, in order to appropriately build the character which they wished to play. Games in which the players and DMs both truly had no idea what could possibly happen next, be it a ninja who chops someone's fingers off so that they cannot continue to wield their sword, someone cauterizing a friends wound with a hot frying pan, or a DM using months of setup, secretly toying with and criticizing his friends via a secret AIM account, only to then seek to destroy them from within a campaign.

Even in World of Warcraft I originally turned to the role-playing community, and fear not my friends, even the millions of inhabitants of these servers failed to live up to my expectations. At a table where the dice are rolled to see who will win this round, player or DM, and not to see if a player can indeed declare an attack on his opponents fingers (damn you Palladium!) is not a table at which I belong.

There were some very good laughs, like the realization that most of the party was running from Cauldron, Pete's epic dump, and the realization that there was indeed a key on the underside of the sarcophagus lid. However, for me, these time between these fun moments were taken up my frustration and contempt, aimed both at player and DM, in an almost musical rotation. I realize that, in this particular player driven campaign, far more of you would prefer to grind on Kobolds, hack and slash through dungeons, maximizing the accruing of gold and experience. Perhaps if i could let go of of this "role-playing" mentally I cling to when playing role-playing games, things could be different, and we could all roll barbarian-clerics and hack and slash our way to fortune. However that is not something which I believe will be happening at this point. A hack and slash, playing D&D for the sake of playing D&D simply is not the experience that I am looking for.

I wish you all the best of luck in this xp-lite, twelve month dungeon crawl. You will have to make due without a monk that can merely hope to do shadow damage to creatures with 5/DR - being unable to inflict any physical damage on said creatures. May you all find the riches you are looking for, and not be slain by my character when he reappears in a matter of months as a grossly overpowered NPC monk who despises you all for getting him killed.

I leave you with a final thought, taken from the wiki for this campaign:

Killer DM

Today, I was told that I had a reputation as a killer-DM.

I would like to take this moment to speak out against this un-earned reputation. Examples of events that have happened in my games where a PC died or was turned into an NPC:

• A character took off all his armor and wielded level-inappropriate weapons to fight a fully-armed and armored fighter of equal level in solo combat. Even when the character saw that he couldn't win, he didn't run away (which he could have done successfully with the fighter only able to move 20' versus his 30').
• A character, after witnessing a lich being bathed in a largeshadow-flame from which it was difficultly coaxed out of decided toreach into the vortex of pure negative evil and was struck dead from 20d6 negative energy damage.
• A character cast a fireball at Death, who was very peaceful and on vacation. 'Nuff said.
• A group of adventurers, after having defeated the main boss of a dungeon and completing their objective decided to explore the rest of the dungeon while low on health and out of spells. They stumbled into a pair of ogre zombies and were executed.
• A character, drunk on the possibility of power, formed an agreement with a vampire to slay priests of a local temple. He employed a local stable boy to deliver a note with Explosive Runes cast on it to the temple. A priest opened the note on the spot, killing both the priest and the stable boy. Unfortunately for the character, temples usually have access to http://chroniclesofmezra.org/dndspells/getspell.php?spellid=587

I don't kill PCs; foolish players kill PCs.

-Beck

Be sure to add to this list, the PC's went to the town they were instructed to have their characters arrive in at the beginning of the campaign. They were all killed by a horde of high level orcs.

Reputation earned.

That is all.

~macjosh}}