Overheard at Dungeons and Dragons at my House

Sorry to be tardy posting this weekend.  I’ve had a lot on my plate (including a delightful Twelfth Night party, in which this chocolate bourbon cake was my answer to Sir Toby Belch’s question “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”).

You may remember that I have a group of friends who sometimes have me NPC (play an antagonist or ally) in their Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.  They last appeared on the blog, when they used an exuberantly strawmanned version of my beliefs as the foundation for a theology that had driven one of the characters mad.

In between some fighting and some villainous monologuing for me, we did manage to have some of the following adventures:

“Do you own the land?”
“No, my dragon does”
“Wait, can dragons own land?”
(The 1L in the room): “I think we covered something relevant to this in property law!”

During negotiations to set up a coup, the players ended up getting distracted from closing the deal by wanting to lay out the foundations of the new regime, until someone finally asked, “When did this turn into Dungeons and Constitutional Conventions?”

Player: “I do a listen check at the door”
DM: “You hear a stentorian female voice pronouncing harsh sentences on prisoners”
Me: “That’s my cue!”

And, in my favorite phase of the adventure… the technically-good-aligned band was trying to track down a villain who was kidnapping children, and got into a lengthy debate over whether they ought use an actual child as bait.  After running through a couple different options (one of them pretending to be a child, hiring a dwarf, etc), they settled on polymorphing a badger into a child.

Problem solved.

Until I came back in from setting the oven timer and asked, “So, if you turn a badger into a child, does it have the same capacity for suffering and moral worth as a child?  What does it mean to create a soul and/or sentience purely instrumentally”

I’m not sure whether the metaphysical debate or the cake was done first.  But both were quite enjoyable.