An alternate joke I wanted to use here was that the other players were not afraid of the\u00a0monster\u00a0per se, but afraid of getting involved in a battle which would require knowledge of the grapple system as well as the byzantine system of\u00a0attacks of opportunity, and they were terrified of trying to wrap their heads around all of this while fighting a many-tentacled creature.<\/p>\n
The gist was that they were fearful of spending the next four hours leafing through the rulebook trying to figure out how to wrestle with this thing. There is some truth (and thus humor) in this idea, but I couldn\u2019t figure out how to deliver the comedic payload.<\/p>\n
So instead you got this.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u00a0 Shamus, Wednesday Oct 11, 2006<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
Interestingly, missing that punchline has made the comic age ‘better’. Not that having a joke about an old system would have been actually bad, there’s pros and cons to both, but as it is I understand it far better than I might have (as a younger D&D player) if it had been a joke about a system I never used.<\/p>\n
Well…almost<\/em> never used.<\/p>\n
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It might look like a stormtrooper and a child in a bike helmet are playing some sort of war game here, but in reality those toys are marking out towns on a map in the first game I ever DMed. I’m the kid in the stormtrooper helmet, Peter’s bike helmet kid, and Issac is presumably under the table (There is a spot for him at the table, I can see that. Maybe he got bored?). I have no idea what those markings I’ve got in front of me are, maybe some attempt to show initiative and whose turn it is? And why are the only dice I can see six-sided? The world will never know.<\/p>\n
I did read the handbook, I remember that, but I’m sure every single thing we did in that campaign was laughably wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to this special edition of DM of the Rings with special behind-the-scenes director\u2019s commentary\u2026 An alternate joke I wanted to use here was that the other players were not afraid of the\u00a0monster\u00a0per se, but afraid of getting involved in a battle which would require knowledge of the grapple system as well as the byzantine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[631],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dm-of-the-rings-remaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55454"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55466,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55454\/revisions\/55466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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