[Dad_Scaper]

Pasting in my posts from the other thread, in which I was also describing a D&D 5E campaign:

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

I play a weekly D&D game, which isn't exactly a board game, but I'll mention it here anyway. My character is a sorcerer, a "wild mage" whose magic is barely under control. Sometimes when he does stuff he sets off something he didn't intend, and it might be good (turn invisible), there's a good chance it'll just be weird (turn blue), and there's a moderate chance it'll be bad (a fireball detonates, centered on you). The fireball, of course, is extremely unlikely, but last night I triggered it.

My party is only level 4, and we'd already been fighting for a while, so between our existing injuries and a few failed saves, all of us but one were knocked unconscious. And the big bad boss guy was just outside of the blast zone. Also my zombie minion survived. So we scrambled to throw around heals while the zombie minion grappled the boss. Somehow everyone is now barely conscious, dragging each other away from the battle, while the big bad end guy (hopefully) gets distracted by his big evil-magic tree, which is, on account of the fireball, totally engulfed.

Wish us luck for next week. I really like this character, I hope I didn't kill him. Or anyone else in the party.

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

Wild mage is a subclass of sorcerer. Wizards, intelligence-based casters, learn their spells from books and study. Sorcerers, which are (theoretically, and probably actually) rarer, have innate magical powers, and are charisma-based. They don't develop the magical brute force that wizards do.

Sorcerers have two existing subclasses, though reportedly others are on their way: "draconic origins," meaning they have natural magical ability from dragon in their bloodline, and "wild mage," meaning they have some story-based reason for naturally-occurring raw magical power that they have not earned with study or, yet, practice. Wild mages get some extra powers *but* they also, from time to time, trigger a roll on a table that will provide some unexpected side-effect of an attempt to use magic.

Del, my sorcerer, is a half-elf wild mage, and the rest of our party is also a combination of handsome, lightly armored fellows: a ranger, a bard, and a monk. So we are going tank, and heavy-armor, free. A tanky big bag of hit points would have helped when I blew up the fireball last week, but luckily the bard survived, and he resuscitated the ranger, and the two of them had (barely) enough healing to get us all off the ground and mobile.

Tonight is our next chapter, which I will keep to myself. Unless there is any interest, in which case I will move the discussion to another thread. Thanks for your interest, Tornado!

Before tonight, I will add a word about the heroics of my zombie minion last week: First, know that there is utterly nothing special about him, stat-wise. I have a magic item that lets me check once a day to see if I can animate some dead thing, and this day I got lucky so I got to animate a zombie. Second, he was only intended to do stuff like open doors in case they were trapped. Third, in this combat, he managed to successfully grapple a *pair* of very dangerous bad guys, to keep them from getting away and to (somehow) soak their attacks while we could do the real damage.

He rolled very high on various saves and, when necessary, on the d20 to keep from dying, like zombies do. Sadly, after a couple of rounds of grappling the big bad end guy, he finally missed one of those zombie-death saves, and he perished from the face of the earth. He will be remembered fondly as the MVP of the fight, assuming we survive.