Dungeons & Dragons Is About Trial And Error As Much As Being Clever

I’m awful at puzzles, murder mysteries, escape rooms, or anything else that requires a bit of forward-thinking. Part of it is that I lose focus too quickly and can’t stay on track, so I miss key details and spend most of the time stumbling to catch up. I&rsq♎uo;m also just a bit thick.

We’re playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons at TheGamer, DM’d by our Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley, who I’m learning is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:an incredibly patient woman. Our current chapter is dedicated to solving the murder of a king, asking an island of pirates questions as we investigate different scenes toꦰ see if we caﷺn find clues. Herein lies the ‘thick’ part.

In the king’s bedroom - where he was found dead - we stumbled on a knife hilt with brown fur attached and proceeded to hunt down every single shred of brown fur we co🙈uld find in the hopes of it giving us an answer. Not realising that in the fantasy setting of D&D, there aren’t DNA tests. The best we could do is hold the fur up to other examples and say, ‘Yeah, looks like brown fur’. Probably should’ve anticipated that, but did it deter us? No.

At the end of our last session, we found a carpet which looked suspiciously like the brown fur we found on the hilt. Clearly, it was being used to frame our prime suspect, a loxodon who looks like a woolly mammoth. They had a clear motive, were last seen fighting the king, and had brown fur - Stacey would never make it so obvious. Rega🌠rdless, we chased the lead to the ends of the 16 Planes and uncovered a key part of the plot.

That determined trial and error is as much a part of playing Dungeons & Dragons as using your brain. Just repeating an act enough until it bears fruit is even a mechanic in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3, as you are c⭕onstantly rolling passive checks in the background as you enter rooms to look for traps or hidden doorways, something that’s all too easy to forget about in D&D despit🎐e being such a pivotal part of the game.

In every room, I rolled to check for loose floorboards or hidden compartments, desperately hoping someone had left a hidden note revealing all. It’d give me all the answers in a neatly wrapped package without having to use my brain, brilliant. I’m 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:less Sherlock Holmes and more Inspector Clouseau. But as I said, Stacey wo🤪uldn’t make i𝕴t that easy.

jesper ejsing loxodon — Loxodon, by Jesper Ejsing

Instead, my rolls led me to some underwear shoved under a mattress (which I naturally pocketed) and, more importantly, a vial of poison hidden in a ship. The king has no stab wounds; when we used Speak With Dead, he mentioned burning up inside as he died; and he drank an awful lot of r🐈um. We’d found the smoking gun, and💮 we did it by constantly rolling to painstakingly investigate our surroundings.

You can be incredibly inventive in D&D, since it’s a game limited only by your imagination and the DM&🔴rsquo;s forgiveness; whether that means summoning an illusory wall in a cave to protect you while you rest or crushing a giant with the weight of an enlarged dinosaur. But like any game, the mundane is as important as the standout moments, and we’ve stumbled through countless sessions forgetting to loot dead bodies and roll basic🐟 Investigation checks. It took a murder mystery to shed light on how important it truly is, so for once, being thick is okay.