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D&D Ideas — Tag

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is tag, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy Live to talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of tag in Shell Game adventurers learn to share the burden and work in tandem — especially when they’re marked by weird energies! An oddball moment occurs when adventurers face a series of puzzling circumstances along with 54 other dynamic scenarios in Out of the Box. Find out more about it here. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

Live chats every Monday evening at 8 p.m. eastern and weekdays at noon eastern at Nerdarchy Live

Nerdy News

Fall into the week that was! Commiserate over tales of lost heroes, make a mini bargain with an Otherworldly Patron, rock the stage and the battlefield and so much more plus new live chats with creative folks and industry pros rounds out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

This week’s newsletter topic is a tough one. Normally we do topics based on the last weekly live chat, which in this case was the D&D Tag questions. It was recently done by Ginny Di and Mark Hulmes. Steven Partridge invited me along with author and Nerdarchy staff writer Robin Miller to take part over on his YouTube Channel here. Of course I was delighted to. They are two of my favorite people. So we tagged Nerdarchist Ted and I asked him the questions on our weekly live chat. It was the expedient way to do it and you can hear Ted’s answers here. 

It was a fun trip down memory lane answering the questions. I was first exposed to the concept of D&D and RPGs going on 40 years ago. Damn, that was a long time ago! It was probably another 5-8 years before I really started playing the game. All this is to say it was a long D&D history to sift through to come up with my answers. The questions are listed below if you want to take them and go harass your D&D group with, because I tag you. 

I’ve also got a bit of Nerdarchy news or housekeeping to share depending on how you want to look at it. Patreon has given us a hard time about having automatic entries for Patreon supporters into our monthly giveaways. Therefore now we’ll be doing it through Nerdarchy the Newsletter. You are now automatically entered in those giveaways! You don’t need to do anything extra.

D&D Tag

1. What was your first D&D character?
2. Which D&D class is your least favorite to play, or do you not want to play?
3. What D&D spell would you most want to have in real life?
4. What’s your favorite D&D monster?
5. What’s your favorite NPC/villain that you’ve encountered/created?
6. Has one of your characters ever died, and what killed them?
7. What’s your best natural 20 story?
8. What’s your best natural 1 story?
9. What’s the highest level you’ve ever played a character to?
10. What’s your favorite magical item?
11. If you had an IRL alignment, what would it be?
12. If you had to date one of your characters, which one would you pick?
13. Is there a character you want to play but haven’t had a chance to play yet?
14. Are you a dice goblin, or a dice minimalist?
15. What rule or mechanic have you never quite wrapped your brain around?

From Ted’s Head

Nerdarchist Ted is taking the week off for this newsletter. He participated in the D&D Tag challenge over at Nerdarchy Live. If you’re curious what Ted’s answers to all the questions were you can check out the video here.

Instead we’ll use Ted’s editorial space to share some awesome news. When our Kickstarter for Out of the Box was live and raising funds much quicker than we expected we came up with quite a few stretch goals. It was an incredibly exciting time! For one of the ideas we wondered if we might collaborate with longtime sponsors D&D Beyond to integrate the encounters with the awesome digital tools there.

D&D Beyond integration of Out of the Box took some doing but the work is complete! The incredible development team lead by our friend Adam Bradford, VP of Tabletop Gaming at Fandom, took the content and created a special portal for people to access all 55 encounters. Each encounter includes a button to load the encounter into the D&D Beyond encounter builder, from where you can copy it to your own collection.

You’ll be able to run encounters through DDB but will have to use assets provided by Out of the Box Encounters like the maps and descriptions. It was the only way to do it without giving away the book for free there. You’ll have to be logged in to access the content, which you can do so through this link.

Enjoy, and stay nerdy!

From the Nerditor’s desk

This week’s newsletter topic is D&D Tag, which comes from a recent video by Ginny Di and Mark Hulmes. Nerdarchist Dave participated in a video along with Robin Miller and Steven Partridge over at the latter’s YouTube channel here. Nerdarchist Ted got in on the action during our own weekly live chat here.

Now it’s my turn to answer these D&D Tag questions so let’s get into it. I’ll do my best to keep the answers brief.

1. What was your first D&D character? My first D&D character was an elf thief named Zorax during the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons era.
2. Which D&D class is your least favorite to play, or do you not want to play? Tough question! I really like and enjoy them all but if I must choose one I like the least I’ll say rogue.
3. What D&D spell would you most want to have in real life? This is super easy! Same as what I consider the best super power without question — teleport.
4. What’s your favorite D&D monster? Gibbering mouther without a doubt.
5. What’s your favorite NPC/villain that you’ve encountered/created? Thessaly Threefaces, a dusk hag who rides a giant four poster bed.
6. Has one of your characters ever died, and what killed them? Of course! A gray ooze destroyed one of my favorite characters in one hit.
7. What’s your best natural 20 story? A player whose warlock character got disintegrated went on an astral journey and discovered a new source of power. Their spirit engaged in a sort of skill challenge and their final roll was a natural 20, which freed the entity. The grateful entity became their new Otherworldy Patron and sent them back.
8. What’s your best natural 1 story? Rolling a natural 1 on two consecutive turns for death saves. Alas, poor adventurer…
9. What’s the highest level you’ve ever played a character to? Realistically it’s 10th level. But back in the day our Basic D&D characters eventually took advantage of the Immortals rules and basically became cosmic deities.
10. What’s your favorite magical item? Cloak of arachnidia. It’s not incredibly powerful or anything but I’ve always thought it was just super cool since I started playing in 1E AD&D.
11. If you had an IRL alignment, what would it be? Lawful good, I think.
12. If you had to date one of your characters, which one would you pick? I’ll say Tabitha Rasa, the character I’m playing in our newest Nerdarchy Live campaign. This is kind of a weird question so I’ll use my answer to plug Dungeons & Delving!
13. Is there a character you want to play but haven’t had a chance to play yet? I mean, yeah of course! There’s many characters I’d love to play and never enough opportunities to play RPGs in general.
14. Are you a dice goblin, or a dice minimalist? I don’t collect them or anything but I do have several sets of dice. I get new dice for new campaigns sometimes but for the most part I have a small collection of a few sets simply because I like the way they look.
15. What rule or mechanic have you never quite wrapped your brain around? Nothing comes to mind. Part of my job requires close scrutiny of rules and mechanics so when something I don’t grasp right away comes up I spend some time figuring it out.