delving

as those of you who keep up with the way-too-complicated network of blogs from my polyfam know, we've been playing a d&d knockoff lately. it's called "old school essentials," and it's very old-school ... basically the rules from the old basic/expert editions of d&d.

that means if you get into a fight that's any kind of dangerous at all, it's going to tear your characters up pretty bad. this is super-different from the other games we've played, even dungeon crawl classics, which starts of deliberately killing off the majority of your 0-level party in a "funnel" dungeon. once you hit first level, playing it safe in dcc can keep your characters alive a pretty long time unless you just get unlucky.

this game, though ... we had a couple of characters who started off with 2 hit points each, and the "tanks" of the party had maybe 5 or 6. there is no healing available to 1st level characters, either. that means if you get hit once and you're not outright dead, you're pretty close to it. one or two battles go down, and the party's going to have to leave the dungeon and get back to a safe town to heal up.

"seriously, claire," some of you are now thinking, "why do you think normal people would want to hear about your weird nerd games?"

well, here's the thing. we all delve into something. sometimes it's something positive, sometimes it's something negative, sometimes it's in the middle.

but if there's something you delve into that beats you up, you need to step back out into the sunshine and  treat yourself right, or you're going to have a problem. whether it's a positive thing that beats you up because it takes a lot of energy, or a negative thing that beats you up because it's stressful, you've got to come up for some air and sunlight now and then.

maybe not my most brilliant metaphor, but blogging it did take me away from the gaming table for a bit!