Ah, but I wouldn't have had the ass stamina to keep me going until 5:30am Sunday morning if it weren't for the intensive training in sitting on my butt that comes from feeding the OSR blogosphere!
I wish I'd known that Swordsman Joe the Phraint was the blogger James Mishler, who I admire. I would have been sure to kill his PC in a gruesome way before he had to leave.
If I a ring of nine wishes, I'd spend one to make people stop communicating in open letters and go back the closed kind you write with a quill pen and get collected in a big volume of your correspondence after you die, like H.P. Lovecraft and his buddies did back in the good old days when my lawn grass was carnivorous.
That late night/Early morning game you ran was a blast. I wound up in a Sunday midday BX game run by James Mishler, too. Much fun.
For those who do not game with Tavis, he addds to (O)D&D an unusual system for HP. The first third being mental points, the second third spiritual, and the final third physical. No rolling them until you were actually being hit and then only as needed (roll the first die and if it becomes exhausted through damage move on to the second, etc.). As they get used they are also recorded on the character as his HP for future use as well. Who among us knows how he will fare until he be tested?
It was fun of Tavis to also allow us to have free rein with making our characters and equipping them under certain loose guidelines. I came up with the following . . .
Tiptoe Tagends was a 5th level Hobbit Burgling Expert with a Ring of Ignorability, a NonchaLance, a Cloak O'Smoke, a Pouch of Endless Copper, and a curse upon him. The ring worked mainly like a
Sanctuary spell. The weapon did no actual damage but rather tapped an opponent of someone else on the shoulder in combat and distracted them for 1d4 rounds. The cloak billowed a 20' radius cloud of vision-obscuring smoke three times per day. The pouch allowed one to reach in and find 2d4 coppers each time but if you did not return one right away it ceased functioning for 24 hours. The curse was worded as, "Cursed to always be perceived as part of a group of fourteen. Anyone counting any group of which I am a part, will count me last, ending with fourteen, no matter if I am trying to get lodgings with one other person (thus needing to pay for an extra dozen) or as part of an army (thereby frightening no opposing army)." That did seem to come up a lot more than originally anticipated.
