What's Subtlety? Can You Eat It? (Part 1)

We had another D&D adventure last weekend, and while it wasn't quite so nutty as our characters' first venture out, there were some notable moments. And by notable, I mean "quickly becoming increasingly obvious that our strengths lie in slaughtering goblins, and not being subtle in any way, shape, or form."

For instance, our first task of the adventure was to get a drawing of a magical hat in a wizard's keep, so it could be swapped out with a Helm o' Opposite Alignment. The wizard's lab was on the 4th floor of the keep, and none of us had the drawing skill, so we brought along a barmaid provided by our employer who did. We spent some time deciding how we'd get up into the lab, and who would go, and so on.

Now would probably be a good time to mention that our characters all lean towards the Evil end of the Good, Neutral, Evil spectrum.

Now would also be a good time to mention that I am utterly shitty at playing a character with an Int score of only 11. But I am good at playing a Lawful Evil character, so ultimately while I'm really good at throwing out ideas that my character wouldn't actually have, I'm also really good at following whatever plan we end up deciding on, even if it might involve shooting a halfling boy in the face with a crossbow. Or hauling his and his nosy mother's corpses to a nearby set of ruins for a quick and easy burial.

In the end, we decided that it would be a good idea to send our thief up into the keep with the barmaid, because he could climb walls and stuff. Except he failed his roll to climb walls, and had to be levitated up. But the two of them got up into the lab, found the magic hat, got the drawing, and then... heard meowing.

Meanwhile, the rest of our team is at the base of the keep, invisible, and praying that our thief doesn't decide to steal anything. Because that would be Bad for this particular adventure.

Anyway, it turns out that the barmaid is also a bit of a wizard, and she points out to our thief that the meowing is probably from a familiar, who then walks into the room and starts sniffing around.

I probably should also have mentioned - our thief is definitely Chaotic Evil. And very, very good at playing that role.

He decides to crossbow-up the familiar and lands a good hit on it, but doesn't actually kill the thing. The barmaid freaks out on him, shoves him out the window, and we all basically have to beat a fast retreat before the wizard actually returns and catches us. Because catching us would be Bad.

Our next task seems easy, by comparison. We just need to "take care of" a certain local character who owns a bar. We're told we can do it any way we like, "just don't burn down the place." He's got two body guards, but we're not too concerned, because we just took out a whole cave of goblins and bugbears. We got this.

Heh.

We ambush the guy outside his bar and our thief gets a good hit on him before the bodyguards shove him behind them and start trying to be menacing. Luckily, we have a priestess with us who maxes out her Hold Person spell, so the bodyguards don't last too long - they get frozen, they get their throats cut, we turn to the target... who's vanished. He's fucked right off. What a dick.

So this means that we have to go racing through the streets, over rooftops, following a diminishing trail of blood, and finally we track him to an alley, where our DM suddenly says, "Everybody roll a save versus Breath Weapon!"

By this point, I really hate this bastard, and so I did my best to kill him as quickly as possible. He goes down, we strip him and then spend about a half hour debating where to leave a cloak pin that will frame a local thieve's guild for the murder.

More to follow. This has been enough lunacy for one day.