OH MY GOD I crossed the streams...

Knitting and D&D?!? Together? In the same post?
What has the world come to?

Just a housekeeping note... I've decided to review some of the beverages served on game night, and all posts labeled "review" will have this sort of content. I happen to live in an area of the United States that has access to a blooming craft beer and craft cider industry. (I'd call it a "craft beer renaissance" except the word renaissance means rebirth, and let's face it, for most of our history, Amercians have produced voluminous quantities of crap beer.) I admit to finding delight in serving up the occasional offbeat libation to close friends, and ha! [insert diabolical cackle and rubbing of hands here] at game night I have a captive audience! So on our first night together I sprung a salted cucumber cider (I shit you not) on the unsuspecting adults. I saw this cider in the grocery the other day, and figured it would either be good or good for a laugh. Stay tuned to find out which. I'll review the cider at the end of the post.

And now, on to the game.

And it most certainly is time to introduce our game! I am the DM. There are four adventurers: my husband, my teenage son, his closest friend, and his friend’s dad. Of the five participants, only two of us have any D&D experience, mine being the most substantial. My son’s friend’s dad played 1st edition back in the late 80s very briefly. I’m outlining my experience in this blog, interspersed with actual play tidbits (look for the 'well played' tag to find entries that relate what has happened in game). Suffice it to say, I have no experience in 5e, I haven’t played in 15 years, and I haven’t DMed since high school. But what the hell.

We’ll be playing the Lost Mines of Phandelver (henceforth known as LMoP). This module is the one that ships with the starter set, which I bought for the purpose. The starter set comes with an abbreviated rulebook, dice, five prefabricated characters and the campaign module itself, which is pretty linear as campaign settings go, if the reviews are accurate. I have to say, it was a hoot to have a boxed starter set in my hands again after all these years. 

Because I know that ruleset won’t suffice with this crowd, I picked up the ‘real’ starter set - the core rulebooks gift set that comes with the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Monster Manual and a nifty DM screen. My son and his friend quickly vetoed the pre-fab character set, so we got together for a pre-season game of just rolling up new ones. If I were playing with more reticent players, I would have insisted on using pre-fab characters. I heard that mutter. Pre-fab characters? How boring. How uninspired. Yep. Can't argue. But also? How useful for a first-time player. 

I'm going to make a knitting analogy, because there are some surprisingly helpful commonalities. At its core, knitting is just sticks and string, and it takes the knowledge and inspiration of the knitter to turn that string into something of value. People learn from people - whether it's in a class, watching a Youtube video or reading a book. In the beginning, most people work from a pattern in order to learn the mechanics - how to increase stitches, how to do cables, how to make lace. Occasionally you run into someone who is preternaturally gifted and can generate knitted works of great beauty from the very beginning without learning from patterns, but for the most part, the people I've known who have those abilities came by them from years of exposure to the craft. All the parallels with D&D can be drawn - as with knitting the premise of D&D is quite simple and the possibilities are endless, people learn from people, most people need time and exposure to learn, etc. And D&D and knitting have another thing in common: setup is harder than the main activity.  In knitting, it is easier to learn to knit than to cast on stitches. A knit stitch is just a knit stitch (and yeah, of course it can get more complicated), but there are a zillion ways to cast on, each with different properties that affect the overall outcome. With D&D, game play isn't that hard to learn (and yeah, of course it can get more complicated), but understanding the nuances of building a character from the ground up can be daunting when you know nothing of the game. (Add in a discomfort with role playing a character of your own creation in a group setting and you have a real barrier to entry.) Handing someone a pre-fabricated character eliminates that initial hurdle, much like handing someone a swatch already on the needles helps a wanna-be knitter learn the craft.

Character creation took awhile. Based on the prefab characters included with LMoP, I strongly encouraged some class diversity with “classic” characters. My natural style is pretty hands off, and I’m not a big fan of railroading, but (and you knew there was going to be a ‘but’ in there) seeing as we’re a bunch of newbs I explained that it would give them the greatest understanding of the game and allow the greatest chance at character continuity if we played this module ‘straight’ (i.e. keeping things class type-y so that people can see different mechanics in action, and generally following the module book). If we get to the end of this module and people want to keep playing and change it up, I’m good with that. By then we’ll all have some experience under our belts and have a better feel for how the game works/5e works. 

It became quite clear that we’re not going to lack for divergent thinking. Due to our lack of familiarity. it took hours to sort out character roll-ups according to 5e rules, but it got done. We have an elven cleric who will be misquoting his sacred texts at every opportunity, convinced that his deeds are on par with that of a hero of yore, we have a gnome wizard of deeply impoverished charisma who also happens to be a charlatan, we have a superstitious and egocentric half-elf arcane trickster who is the bastard child of an elven aristocrat and a building contractor, making him the family embarrassment, and we have a half-orc barbarian with atopic dermatitis and a penchant for playing piccolo in the woods.

Verdict on the salted cucumber cider: If what you wanted was cider, I suppose you might be disappointed. Perhaps even severely disappointed. But if you are just trying this for the hell of it, it’s not bad, actually. It smells more like cucumber rather than tastes like it. Don’t dismiss the importance of this... smell accounts for a large percentage of how things taste. But another fun fact - once you smell the same thing for awhile, you begin to lose your awareness of it. So basically if you sip this episodically it will definitely taste like cucumber. But if you sip this continuously the cucumber element fades. It’s quite dry and the salt is present without being overwhelming... more like an aftertaste or a note rather than a major flavor. So if you’re holding this up to your face for awhile, it winds up tasting a little bit like a very dry sparkling cider, or dare I say it? Wine. Yes, it’s all a little bit weird. Yet it’s weird in an inoffensive way. It’s as if some imaginary culture had a cuisine that you were being introduced to, and this is their alcoholic beverage of choice. It seems plausible, if not quite like anything you’ve had before. If that’s your gig, you’ll like it. If you’re someone who likes your beer to be beer, your wine to be wine and your cider to be cider, you should probably pass.

All in all, there are worse things that have happened to a cucumber wrapped in aluminum.