Triple Click - Triple Quest: Planning and Character Creation

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Maddy, Jason and Kirk sit down with guest game master Matthew Mercer to roll their characters and plan out the coming adventure.Listen to Act Two right now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.SCHEDULE:Triple Quest will be told in three acts, along with a "session zero" planning session. All episodes will be published to the members-only feed first, and will hit the main feed a month later. Part One and the planning session will debut at the end of September. Parts Two and Three will debut at the ends of October and November, respectively. LINKS:Join the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/  Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Hello everyone. Kirk here to share a little something extra with you all in advance of this week's regular episode, which will run on Thursday as always. As I'm sure you're aware, we recorded a special three-part Dungeons and Dragons adventure with a very special guest dungeon master, Critical Role's own Matthew Mercer. It was a ton of fun. We recorded the first two parts in a hotel room in Los Angeles just after doing our live show down there this past summer. and then we recorded Act 3, the grand finale, remotely a little bit after that. Now, what you're about to listen to actually happened ahead of that hotel recording session. We got with Matt on a call and did what's called a Session Zero, where we talked through our three characters, rolled stats, and generally planned things out. So that's what this episode is.

If you want to skip straight to Act 1 and get right into the story, you can totally do that. That episode, Act 1 is also live in the main feed. It's right after this one. This one's fun, but it's just kind of planning and a lot of rolling dice and picking stats. So it's cool if you're into Dungeons and Dragons, but you could skip it and go straight into the story if you want to. Of course, we are only able to dedicate the time and money to making things like this because of the support of our wonderful Maximum Fun members. We've been publishing episodes of Triple Quest a month early in the Maximum Fun feed just for them. So if you want to go and immediately listen to Act 2 after you finish Act 1, and let me tell you, in Act 2, things get...

pretty spicy. Go to maximum fun.org slash join and become a member and act two will be waiting for you. And while it's cool to get things early, really, you'll be supporting the creation of triple click. That's kind of what it's all about. And of course, if you can't become a member, that's no big deal. Episode two will run in the main feed in about a month at the end of November. Last thing, just to say it again, to be sure everyone knows, we will still be doing a regular triple click episode this week. That'll be out as scheduled. No changes. Okay, let's get this thing underway. Let's roll some stats and name our characters.

Thanks as always for listening. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Matthew Mercer, and this is Triple Quest. All right, we are here with the one and only Matthew Mercer. Hello, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Matt. Hey, Matt. Thank you all for having me. I'm excited to throw this together with y'all. Yay. Yeah. This is going to be so much fun. So on this episode, we are going to be doing some prep work.

We are going to be creating our characters, kind of introducing our characters to the world, and talking about how they all know each other. Matt, how should we get started? How should we go about doing this? All righty. So a lot of times the actual creation of your character, like their statistics, their abilities, can inform aspects of their personality and kind of things you want to play with in their story. So let's start with the very barebone basics of character creation for you all.

Let's see. I'm going to take a volunteer. Who wants to go first? I can go first. I'll go first. I was going to nominate Jason if he didn't pick himself. Because Jason, out of the three of us, I think, is the most coherently attached to the character he created. I don't know.

Beautiful. He already gave it a name. Maddie seems to have a strong sense of Jason's character. Jason doesn't seem to have a strong sense. Completely made that out. Whereas I'm the person that's like, I have a few. ideas, but like she could change. I don't know. We're going to see what happens in the next 30 minutes in my life. Okay. Jason, go ahead. To that case, Jason, what race are you thinking for your character?

Okay, my character's, his name is Leon Petalberg. He is a, uh, this is what I'm talking about. Sorry, no, that scratch that. My character's name is Leon Gold Peddle, and he is a high elf, arcane trickster rogue from the city of Waterdeep. Great. Got that. Perfect. All right.

So, to that point, so we have your, you have an elven background, high elf in particular chosen, and we're going to Arcane Trickster. So we're going to rogue. Just so everyone who's listening those two, we're starting these characters

for this one shot at fifth level because that allows everyone to kind of lean into a subclass or even some early stages meaty multi-classing if they're feeling it. as well as getting those nice fifth level beginnings of the real meat and potatoes of most D&D classes. So, hell yeah. As a fifth level rogue, an archa and trickster that gives you some decent low-level magic, as well as some decent buffs to your sneak attack abilities,

as well as a few other fun features and skills that you can focus in. So that's awesome. Given that case now, for the next part of character creation, let's go ahead and jump into getting your attributes figured out now. So for this process, for each of the players, the way I like to do it for my games is have each of you roll a set of six statistics. For each statistic, you will roll 4D6, that's 4,6 set of dice, and then drop the lowest number that you roll, add the rest of them together, and then just make a note of that number. I'll be making note of them here for you, so you don't have to worry about that yourself at first glance. And then you can arrange them however you want between your strength, your dexterity, your constitution, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma.

And we can take it from there. So Jason, since we're doing you first, go ahead and roll your first 4D6 and let me know the numbers that you roll. Yeah, I just have two, so I'm just going to do it twice. That's totally fine. Okay, 5-6-3-5. So drop the 3. So 16. Strong first roll from-dust.

Yeah, that's a great first roll. It's a 16. All right. Fantastic. So we'll note that. Next one. Okay. It's the arcane trickery at work.

3-3. Okay, so 5-3-3-3. So that's an 11. 11. Good. Go for the third one. 4.2. 1.6.

So that is a 12. All righty. 1.4. 2.1. So that's a 7. Heck yeah. I love myself a low stat. There's your strength stat right there.

Okay. Yeah. 2.5. 6.3. So that's a 14. 14. Great. And for the last one. Yep. 3, 4.

4.6. Ooh. So that's a 14. 14. That's a great spread, actually. It's higher than average. And it has my favorite thing, which is a stat lower than 10. So 10s are considered an average standard across the board. So anything below a 10 means it's maybe something you're not the best at, which for me informs a lot of role play choices and gives you a fun aspect of a character weakness to kind of lean into

for the fun of the story. People love rolling high and being successful, but if anyone who's played D&D for a certain amount of time begins to realize sometimes rolling low and doing poorly can be as fun or if not more fun in certain moments than succeeding. For sure. So great.

That's a great spread. So for Leon Goldpedal, where are you thinking about putting that 16? Yeah, the 16, I feel like, should probably be dexterity. That's probably a good call. And then maybe take the 14 and put that in charisma. I think he's a charismatic, quick, nimble, fast-fingered rogue. Pretty slick.

Also considering as a high elf, I'm sorry, an arcane trickster, you do have some intelligence-based spells in your repertoire. That's true. Maybe not put the seven in your intelligence, unless you really want to, which also is pretty funny. I think the seven is in strange. I think we got a super, we got a weak dude. So he, I have a whole backstory for him. I can tell you about that. Oh, please, yeah.

He's definitely, he's weak. He's got the seven in strength. Beautiful. And then, yeah, we can give the intelligence, what was it, a 12? Is that the third highest one? Yeah, you have two 14s. So you have, uh, 214s, so 14 charisma, 14 intelligence. Great.

So 16 decks, 14 charisma, 14 intelligence. And then what are the other two numbers? 12 and 11? Is that it? 12 and 11, yeah. Yeah, so maybe, like, wisdom and, what am I forgetting? Charisma? Did we do that?

No, I did. Constitution then. And Constitution. So, like, 12, no, 12 wisdom and 11 Constitution is what makes them a sense for Leon. Fantastic. I love it. So, yeah, Leon is an interesting character. So you're weak and squishy. Well, 11 isn't so bad.

Yeah. So Leon is, he's this high elf from Waterdeep. He grew up as part of this super rich noble family and his parents were gone all the time. They were traitors. They were out in the world. They left him to be raised by his maids. And he grew bored and kind of lonely and detached and sad. And he wound up finding that he, the only thing that like got him through life that made him happy was stealing things.

He started off small, like stealing trinkets from stores and like things like things out of his like his classmates' lunches and stuff. And then as he got older, he found that he was actually pretty good at it. And he started getting a little more into it. He got wound up with the Thieves Guild. And of course, he got into some trouble with some unscrupulous thieves along the way, got beaten up a couple of times, wound up leaving water deep, and getting into the criminal underworld elsewhere. And now he's been through a few things.

he's seen some shit. He's gone on some heists, including with these guys, which is how the three of them met. And now for this adventure, of course, the three of us are reuniting for one more adventure, which we'll get into in a bit. But now Leon is this kind of, so he's got this noble background, but he's been kind of operating under the law or away, like outside of the outskirts of the law for quite some time now. Great. I love it. Awesome. So for that, as you are an elf, you do add plus two to your dexterity score.

So that would bump that up to an 18. Nice. Beautiful. Beautiful. Which is great. Fastest shit. Exactly. And as a high elf, you also get to add a plus one to your intelligence score.

So your intelligence gets to bump up to 15. You have some other cool abilities, like elf weapon training, which means you get proficiency with like long sword, short sword, short bow, long bow, depending on what your preference is being a deck space character, I'd recommend a weapon with some versatility for using dexterity. That would be something that is considered a light weapon. So you can use decks for your attack modifier. But as far as your weapon and equipment goes,

we can go ahead and delve into that right now. We're kind of doing this fast and loose. Yeah, Leon likes the dual wheel daggers when he does have to. He doesn't like to get into hand-to-hand combat, but when he does, he has the dual-wielding daggers, and he's got a bow that he uses when necessary as well, which he, I think, prefers over melee combat. Beautiful. It's great.

Dagger being a finesse weapon means that you can add your decks for that. Finesse was the term I was looking for, not light, but light works too. Because I know someone out there listening to this is going to be like, he said light, that's incorrect. It's a lot of things in the system. But yeah, so great as a finesse weapon, you got dual daggers. That means for your action in combat, you can make an attack action, you can attack with your main dagger and as a bonus action attack with your offhand dagger, which means two chances

to sneak attack. So if one misses, you get another shot at it, which is great. As far as equipment goes for your armor, for this being a deck-based character, you probably want armor that's fairly light so it doesn't impede your movement, your stealth. And with a pretty decent Dex mod, I'd recommend something in the light armor category, you Perfectly studded leather armor, which gives you an armor class of 12 plus your decks modifier, which at an 18 would be plus four, which is pretty slick. Sure. Leon's a stud.

He'll take the studded. Hell yeah. The studded armor. Awesome. So with the stud leather armor, that puts him at an AC of 16 base, which is what enemies have to roll equal to or higher to be able to hit you in combat. Wow. But also, not too bad. Not too bad.

He's a quick one. Plus, depending on the spells you pick, which as an arcane trickster, as a rogue, you do get access to some spells to pick. Cool. Hopping over to that here at fifth level, you know four spells from the first level spell list of wizards. So you can choose four spells and three cantrips of the wizard class if you'd like to. You can decide these later if you want to take some time to ruminate on it. Yeah, I'm going to have to pour over the spellbook. I got my players' handbook right here.

Hell yeah. Definitely going to take some magic missile, but other than that, I have to decide. I'll go through, and by the time we start, I'll have my spells picked out. And I think one of those cantrips, if I remember correctly, is mage hand that I get. Or maybe that's an addition to the other. No, no. Let me see here. I want to check here under the Roug here for this one. So, yeah, as an arcane trickster, you know, you learn mage.

lage hand and two other ones. Yeah, so you could choose two other cantrip. Ball. And then you can choose three, sorry, four spells that you know of the wizard's spell list. You can cast three of them per day. You get three spell slots that you can use for those first level spells.

Dope. Yeah, I will get back to you because I have to look at the spell list and make some calls. That's all good. Take your time as a play at a research and go and fill the in later. We don't need that at the moment.

We're just kind of getting the, the broad strokes here for ourselves and for me to ruminate on this to prepare for our sessions to come. All right, so we got dual dagger wielding, stud of the leather, bearing high elf arcane trickster rogue named Leon Goldpedal. Jason, is your character really tall

because he's a high elf? Yes. Wow. He's actually kind of annoyed by that sometimes. Oh. Look at how tall he is. Interesting. Because he actually thinks

he's been looking, he's like looking for ways to make himself smaller if possible. Right, sure. He'd be thrilled if he had like one of those, like some sort of transforming ability or ring or something like that, but has not been able to find one. Cool. Okay. His biggest weakness is being tall. Right. Because it would stick out and he's trying to be sneaky.

Just like Kirk Campbellton. I can't relate to this at all, but sure, why not? Honestly, it's, well, there's a lot of tall privilege in the world, but sometimes he's, wish you were a little less tall. It's true. It's totally... It does have some advantages. Yeah, for example. Yeah. Or, you know, like moving through a doorway anywhere in Europe. Oh, that's just me. I can only imagine. As a very average,

heighted fella, that's a phrase, I have walked through European hallways and stairways and been thankful that I'm just barely clearing it. So I can only imagine the challenge you suffer. It's a tough life. Someone's got a little bit of life again. Fantastic. I think I'm going to end up being the shortest character here. Well, I guess we'll see what happens at the end. Once again, it has its benefits.

It does. It does. We're doing a haste. Somebody's got to be small. Heck yeah. All right. So going over the quick and dirty over the rogue of what you can look forward to. You do have some decent hit points. Your proficient in thieves tools, which you'll start with.

You'll be able to pick locks and disable tricks. traps with fairly decent acumen. You do get to choose two skills that you are proficient with at first level. From a list, acrobatics, athletics, deception, insight, intimidation, investigation, perception, performance, persuasion, side of hand, and stealth. If you look at the character sheet that has a full list of skills that are available to you, do you have any two that stand out to you as ones you'd be really, really good at? Let me go through those again. Yeah, I'll pick those with my spells as well. All right, cool.

I haven't had a chance to review them all just yet. A good thing to note, too, is as a rogue at first level, you get an ability called expertise, which means you get to choose, basically your two skill proficiencies of the ones you have proficient, and you can double that proficiency bonus. So you're even better at those than most people.

Yes, you can hyper-specialize. Exactly. You have a sneak attack, which is a kind of a standard damage-dealing rogue ability where as long as you're attacking somebody with advantage, or you have a friend or ally of yours that's next to the person you're attacking, you can do additional damage to them

if you manage to hit, which at fifth level is an additional 3D6 damage regardless of the weapon, which is freaking awesome. Nice. You also have cunning action, which is an ability, whereas a bonus action on your turn, you can take the dash, disengage, or hide actions.

Normally a person that's a full action maneuver, so that means you're much quicker on the battlefield, or you can get out of trouble without being attacked as an attack of opportunity, or you can just hide and try not to be seen, which is fun. It's incredible how useful Baldur's Gate 3 was at... I know.

I know, right? Teaching all this stuff. Because hiding and then being open for a sneak attack next time around. Oh, yeah? Way to use that bonus. I love it. Because you are a fourth level,

you also get to choose an ability score, improvement, which means you could either add plus two to one of your attributes, plus one to two of them, or you can take a feat if you're feeling it. So I can make my decks 20. Yes, you can. I will most likely do that. Okay, cool. Yeah, you have time to think on it.

You can look through the different feats that are available to you as well if you prefer to go that route. But you do have an option to either make your decks 20, make a couple of the stats one higher, or choose a feat. So we'll zero into that before the actual play the first session. Cool. The last cool thing I'll mention is you have the ability Uncanny Dodge, which means if someone is attacking you

with an attack, an attack meaning anything that requires an attack role, so a spell that they have to roll to hit you or a weapon that's trying to strike you, you can use your reaction to make the damage halved. But you can only do that once per round, since it uses your reaction, so you kind of want to make sure you're doing it on

something that's meaty or scary. Cool. Nice. Last thing to consider is your background, like major things to consider. So based on what you were talking about, there are many different backgrounds. Even in the base book, we'll jump off of things like entertainer or criminal or charlatan. These to kind of inform who you were in the past. It could be something that's what you're still currently doing as a vocation,

or something that you were long ago, but you moved on from it, but it informed some of the skills you picked up along the way. Other ones include folk hero or... or guild artisan. Are we all criminals? We might be. There's a noble one, right? Yeah, I was going to say it's a noble.

Good for nothing, noble. Yeah. Yeah, you want to go with the noble background? Yes. Let's do it. Makes sense. As a rogue, you're already pretty criminally steeped, but the noble then gives you a little bit of that flavor

that fits outside of that realm. Yeah. He's still, yeah, there's only so much you can do to break away from his noble pass. Perfect. And sometimes it comes in handy, I'm sure, knowing who to talk to how to get into. Which fork to eat with, etc.

Which palms to grease. Which forks to? Yes, he knows the difference between a A caviar fork and a regular old appetizer fork. Take on rich people and what they know is forks. That's all I got. I got the movie Titanic. That's as far as I got with it. That taught us everything we needed to know.

I think so. The feature, eat yourself then, I guess. It's great. As part of the noble, you automatically get proficient in the skills, history and persuasion. So you get those out of the gate. And you're proficient in one type of gaming set.

So you're good at cards, dice, any sort of gaming set you want to pick. You can decide that later if you like, but you have that option. Can it be Xbox? Yes, indeed. And here in the realm of the other God realms, there is indeed a dark box

that gets past at certain events that you place your hands in. Yeah, well, I'll, I'll develop what the Xbox is if you want to put that as the gaming section. No, not actually. Leon is good at dice. He's a dice player. Hell yeah.

Nice. And then you get to choose a language if you want, and you get some fine clothes. You get a signet ring. You can start with a little extra gold. You came from a life of luxury. You were kind of a slight nepo baby. And so you get some of those type. Leon is a big-time nepo baby.

One of the major abilities you get from this is called position. of privilege in which you, because you're a little more welcomed into high society, there may be moments where you can find accommodation for you and your friends,

you can kind of, you know, slightly tamp down heightened emotions from people of an upper class background. So you just get to keep in mind that because you have a noble background, you know how these places work

and you know how to deal with the 1%, if you will. This has served Leon well, along with these two, on various heists and missions and thefts that he and the three of us have gone on. Beautiful. So Leon has the eloquence at his disposal when he needs it.

Exactly. Great. I think that feels pretty solid to build off of and leave the rest of your court to decide for our session. You feeling comfy, Jason? That gives me some ideas. Yeah, this is good. This is good. Yeah, yeah.

Leon is called back into action and he just can't help. himself. At this point in his life, Leon, again, we're level five. We've been doing this for a while. Maybe, maybe a little bit on the older side, all three of us, I think. And Leon doesn't need the money from any of these kind of criminal exploits. He never did. But even now, especially, he's made enough off of his crime and thieving and heist. But he's just addicted to the adrenaline. Yeah, he's in it. He's in it for the rush. He's in it for the rush. He just loves it. He just can't get enough he'll never stop. Hell yeah. As much as he pretends, he might

not be interested in this reluctant last heist. Nice. Perfect. That's good. I like that. Fantastic. Well, great. We'll leave Leon Goldpedal to simmer behind the scenes for the time being. Kirk or Maddie, which of you would like to make your character next?

I think I want to. I think I can go. All right, go for it. I think I have a few ways that my character could play off of Leon. Hell yeah. So my character is a T-Fling Barbarian. named Bing. And that's his only name.

His name is just B. Like Cher. And he is a very tall, deep red-skinned teafling with beautiful, flowing, purple hair that he wears in a kind of a large knot at the end of his hair

for reasons that relate to his backstory. Very cool. I dig that. Awesome. Fun. All right. So, yeah, what do we do first? I have more backstory, can get into that. You roll nice, right?

Roll stats. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go ahead and get stats figured out. We'll make some class choices. And then when we get to your background at the end, we can kind of let more of the backstory begin to flow from that since that informs elements of it too. Beautiful.

So yeah. Okay, cool. So I'm rolling 46. 4D6. And subtracting the lowest one. You got it. Let's go, Kirk. All right.

Kirk is going to be like Bing. Actually, that was an 18. That's somebody will have to explain to Matt why Bing is an inside joke. Okay. So I love, this is, we're getting rid of the one. So this is a 14. A 14. Good, first roll out of the gate.

Fantastic. Let's go for your second. These down as I go. You're supposed to get a low number, Kirk. Come on. Oh, I'm sure I will. Let's see. This is not, this is 11.

11, good, a little above average. Great. It's kind of a medium roll. Let's see here. Get rid of the two. So this is a 13. 13. I haven't had a little roll yet.

Oh, yeah. All right, well, a nine. A nine. All right, great. We have our first below average roll. We got one slightly low. So that's four. How many am I doing again? Two more. Two more. Let's see. We got rid of that two. We got another 11. A 10.

A 10. Okay. So here's a... Very middle of the road, I'd say. It varies. So here's what I usually do for my campaigns. Is if the character stats spreads below a certain threshold, I can allow a re-roll unless you want to build from here. So you have a decently middle of the ground, or middle-the-road stat spread. If you prefer to start from the beginning and do one more kind of full pass on it, we can.

I cannot guarantee it'll be better or worse, but the choice is yours. Right. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm not totally sure. Because I know there's some stat bonuses, right, for a barbarian and for a T-fling. So we could wind up, because, you know,

obviously I think I'd want strength in constitution to be pretty good. And I've really only got that 14, and then I guess a 13. it's not the hugest deal if they're lower and being middle of the road is okay but yeah I guess I was kind of envisioning a very strong and not very bright character

so I don't know do people really want to listen to me roll dice yeah you can cut it let's just do it we can edit this second roll we're gonna go again I think turn the dice up when you're editing okay I'll move my foley mic over here add some echo in all right we're going again

let's go Okay, 16. 16, all right. First out of the gate, slick. 14. 14. These are just good dye. Yeah, the numbers are too high because the dice are too good.

11. 11. Using my special die. 12. 12. Cheat. 18. I just rolled 3, 6th us, and a 5.

Fantastic. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you. Well, whatever. Yeah, one more. Let's see what we got. One more.

Maybe it'll be terrible. Nope, it is not terrible. It's, well, it's a 15. 15. Oh, my God. Bing is blessed. Okay, so Bing is rated everything. Bing was able to go back in time.

Bing was more of a scholar than I had planned. That's okay. Maybe he just has high emotional intelligence. Like, he's not very well read, but he can read a situation really well. Yeah, he's straight. It's smart. Okay, so, all right, so there we go. Fantastic.

So that's a pretty decent test spread. How do you want to distribute that for amongst Bing's different ability scores? So let's see here. So I guess I'm looking in D&D beyond. Can I actually just do this in the app to assign them? Yeah, you should be able to. Yeah, I mean, I'm either. Yeah, you can do manual in the little drop-down here if you see that.

Yeah, yeah. All right. So, oh, I see. It kind of already rolled them. I'll just, I don't want to, sometimes D&D beyond drives me nuts where it like does things for me and then I don't know how to undo them. Right. I'm just going to assign these in this, in my little note document. Okay, so let's say 18 strength.

That seems good for a barbarian. Right. I will say 16 is going to be Constitution. Perfect. We'll take that 11 and put that on intelligence. All righty. And 12 on wisdom. I think, yeah.

We'll say 15 decks. Great. And 14 charisma. That's a pretty great spread. Fantastic. All right. So with those stats chosen, this is a pretty decent spread for a barbarian, which is right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of unexpectedly well-rounded barbarian. Hey? That's great. But I mean, it's because you've been hanging out with Leon for so long. Right, yeah. Obviously.

It actually is. They go back, but we'll get, we'll get into that. Perfect. So given that case, as a Tiefling Barbarian, you do get some stat bonuses for being a Tiefling. That begins with, you get to increase your intelligence by one and your charisma score by two. Now, in D&DBion, if you've already chosen Tiefling is your race, it adds those automatically, I believe. But you chose the old. originability increase, which means you can choose that.

You've chosen Constitution and strength for those. You can change those if you'd like, or you can keep them as they are. I think that makes sense. So those stat bonuses go to Constitution and Strength instead of charisma and intelligence? Correct. Okay. Yeah, that makes more sense, I think, for this character class. Sounds good. All right. So you have Dark Vision as a Teethling, which is great.

You also have resistance to fire damage, having that kind of, you know, somewhat fiendish history to your bloodline as well as the thomatergic cantrip and a couple of few handful of spells like hellish rebuke and darkness that you can use once per day which is fun as far as the barbarian goes you get some fun abilities for those aren't too familiar barbarians they're meat they're the real bread and butter the meat of the class is the rage ability yes so at fifth level you can rage three times per day and the rage lasts until you either take around without doing damage and taking no damage or you decide to end it prematurely. The moment you can kind of clear your head.

Or when I log out of Twitter and go for a while. Right, yeah. Too real. Very hard to do, though. Yeah, that's true. Some skill checks there. Indeed. That makes sense.

So as a barbarian, you also, while raging, you do an additional plus two to any damage that you deal at fifth level. You also get an extra attack, which means when you use your attack action on your combat round, do you get two attacks? instead of one, which is awesome. That's while raging, right? A second attack. No, the second attack you get any time. That's just like a level five bonus?

A level five bonus of being a martial class, baby. The rage just means they do more damage when you do hit. Nice. You also have reckless attack, which means when you are attacking someone, you can decide, I don't care about myself, and just give yourself advantage on all of your attacks, which is awesome. Right, right. Downside is all enemies have advantage on attacks against you.

So you're a bigger target. But the other cool thing about raging is while you're raging, any sort of standard bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage you take is halved. So you just take half damage from most weapons, most physical attacks. You're just, you're a resilient motherfucker. Nice. But if somebody wants to hit me with a magical attack or a spell, I could be in trouble. Yeah.

Well, depending on the path you take, which being the fact that you are a fifth level, barbarian, at third level, you get to choose a primal path, much like how there was an arcane trickster rogue when Jason was making his character, you get to choose one of the primal paths for your barbarian. Do you know what kind of direction you want to take? I'm not totally sure. What are the, what's the gist? Some of the options include path of the battle rager. That's more of a dwarven style. There's path of the berserker, which means while you're raging, you are even more intense. And you can get a third attack as a bonus action while you're frenzied. Essentially you're frenzied while you're in the middle of your barbarian rage. So you're a dangerous front line fighter who's just in a full on

feral rage as you go, which is pretty great. The problem is when you're no longer raging, it makes you exhausted, which is not that great. You can have Path of the Totem warrior where you choose an animal totem that represents like a spiritual guide or someone that's a spiritual print on you. And when you rage, you get a benefit based on what sort of animal is your totem. There's Path of the zealot, where you are a very, I'll say pious, but you have a very strong belief of faith in some sort of entity or deity. And when you rage, that zealotry makes you more of a dangerous holy warrior. Okay. Okay. There's also wild magic. I like the idea of having an animal. I like the idea of a berserker.

So I think I'll go with one of those two and maybe make my mind up before we start. Sounds good. You got time to think on it. You also have an ability score improvement that you can consider, much like Jason was sitting for Leon. You can choose to increase one of your statistics by two, two of them by one, or you can choose a feat. So it's another thing for you to think on before we start the next session. Right. My skills are already pretty good, so I might want to look at feeds. That's true. Okay. Let's keep going.

I think it says you're needing to be on that you had chosen animal handling and athletics as your two proficiencies. You can change that if you want before we start. Yeah, I might. I think that D&DB. John chose that for me. So it's very presumptuous of it. But I mean, those don't sound bad. I like the idea of being kind of pro-animal character in general.

So you can think about that until we start. And you also have a cool ability called Danger Sense, which is you have an advantage on dexterity saving throws against effects that you can see. So when someone casts a spell on you, you see them casting it at you and it requires a dexterity saving throw, you automatically have advantage on that saving throw. and he traps those kind of things. You just are really, really good at spider sensing, if you will, before it goes off, and it gives you a little bit of a better chance to avoid it.

Got it. Sounds pretty fun. As far as your equipment goes, if we're considering your T-Fling barbarian that you've created, what sort of weapon are you considering utilizing? I guess something big, right? Seems like it should be something big. Maybe a great sword or a hammer.

Hammers are kind of huge, I suppose, and we're doing a little bit more delicate work these days. Yes, there's an axe, I suppose. I think maybe a great sword. It seems like easier to put that underneath something or stow it away when I need to. I love it. I love it. Big old, her, Tifling, barbarian with a great sword, massive blade at your side. How did a barbarian, how did Bing get into heists?

We're going to get into that. Don't work. Good. Which actually, to that point, what would you consider as being? Bing's background before he got into this criminal circle, or has he always been one? Your choice? So Bing was working as a mercenary with his sister, and they had been kind of estranged from their family, and were just picking up jobs wherever they could around Waterdeep, and then were hired as muscle by various thieves, and eventually fell in with the Thieves Guild of Waterdeep,

and a job went sideways, and Bing's sister was captured by the authorities, and Bing barely made it out and carries quite a bit of guilt over that. And the authority of Waterdeep executed Bing's sister, or at least that's what Bing understands happened. So this was a really tragic turn of events, but that enraged Bing and has turned him against authority figures in general, and especially those in charge of Waterdeep. And over the course of that job, Bing and Bing and Leon Goldpedal worked together for the first time actually on that job. And Leon was the reason that Bing got out of the job alive. So Leon, Leon got Bing out alive and Bing kind of owed Leon one.

And they began to work together more closely after that. And eventually when Leon sort of peeled off from the Thieves Guild and set on his own, Bing and Leon teamed up and had been working together ever since for quite some time now. They're, I would say, pretty good friends as long as Jason, you think that that back story works. Sure, yeah. I'm curious to see how Maddie's character plays into this. Yes. Yeah, I'm going to have to fade that out.

We can talk through the relationships a little bit more once all of our characters. Exist. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'm right. And definitely all of these ideas are just me throwing things out there. We can adjust the event and tweak. I love your backstory, though. I like that you threw in that as far as he knows.

Yeah. Yes. That's just a little piece for Matt to consider. Yeah, exactly. You know, who knows. It's a lot of us. Yeah. All fun things to play on.

We didn't see a body, let's say. That's true. Last thing to go over to, you do have the abilities of barbarian called unarmored defense, which means if you're wearing no armor, your AC, your armor class is 10 plus your decks mod and your constitution mod. That being the case, as you have pretty decent decks and com modifier, two decks and three constitution, which could even be adjusted based on that ability score increase you mentioned earlier. That puts you to 15 AC, possibly 16, if you were to buff up your dexterity. You could go with that, or you could choose to be a barbarian who wears armor,

which is also totally viable up to you. What are you feeling? Do you think you're more like bare chest than it in combat, or are you going to be wearing some heavy equipment to keep you safe? I think actually, given the kind of work that we do, that not wearing armor is probably a little bit more flexible. So I think people see Bing and don't think warrior immediately, and then maybe underestimate him as a result. So, yeah, I think I'll probably go with unarmored as a result of that and probably then wind up buffing up my decks, yeah.

Great. That sounds fantastic. I think that's the strong threads for Bing that we can go ahead and be forward on and fine-tuned between here in the first session. Anything else you want to throw on before we move on to Maddie? Can you explain to Matt what Bing? No, no. Bing is just a sound that I make when I'm editing our show.

I say, Bing, before I come in and make a correction or an edit. And so it's kind of become a little bit of an inside joke among our listeners. So Bing wants to go back in time and save his sister with a Bing. Bing should constantly be correcting us. And maybe Bing will bang his way into reality and change the past. I love that. That is what Bing means. All right, cool.

I appreciate the context. All righty. And so, last but not at least, Maddie, have you figured out what kind of character do you want to make? More or less, but I think I have a couple more moving parts than Jason and Kirk do. So I know her name, and I know she's going to be a magic user. So I'm going to name her key Sandrine, and I'm going to put it in the chat so people know how to spell that.

And I'm going to say that's not her real name, but is a name she came up with because she thought it was cool. It is cool, so props to her. But I'll explain more about that later when we get to the backstory part. So Matt, this is more of a question for you. So when I sort of came up with what I wanted her character to be like in my head and then I was reading the character classes and I was like, oh, a sorcerer would be really cool because that's like the sort of wild magic manifestation.

Like I was kind of thinking of hers almost like a carry type where like magic comes into her life suddenly. But then I was reading about how sorcerers actually work in the game and it seems really, really hard. So then I was like, what if she's a warlock? Because that seems a lot easier. But I'm open to feedback on this because I know Warlock has its own kind of additional parameters where at that point she needs to be sort of in a partnership with some other being in order to have her magic. Correct. Yeah. So sorcerers, yeah, because magic is innate, it's inherent. And especially in the case of what you're creating for key, it is something that perhaps you weren't expecting and

are still trying to wrestle with this innate power that might apparate in unexpected ways. I would say it's no more complicated than a warlock. It's just a different kind of complication. Okay. The fun thing about it is you have the ability to use sorcery points. So outside of like your spell slots you used to cast spells, you have at fifth level actually, it's a fifth level Sorcer. This is what I was starting to read about and I was like, this seems like a lot of math, but go on. It just means you have five points that you can spend. Like I'll say likely the one shot will be maybe one, maybe two days at most. So you don't have to worry about like having to constantly give up with it. But you have like five extra points that you can spend that can buff up your spells or rejuvenate them. So the complication here with sorcerers, you have less spells to choose from than a wizard. But you you are good at casting the ones that you have and manipulating them slightly through your

sorcery points. So you can either spend sorcery points to recover expended spell slots. So you can spend two sorcery points to recover a first level spell slot. Three to recover a second. There's a neat little table there in the character sheet that we can kind of like tack on to your character for easy access if you ever want to look that way. But also at third level, you get what's called metamagic. And you can choose two of these different abilities. You don't get all of them, so you don't have to worry about the full spectrum of them. You just get two of them that you pick that can you can kind of tweak and manipulate the basics of spellcraft by spending sorcery points. You have cool abilities like a distant spell where a spell has double the range.

You can hit something that's farther away. You have empowered spell where you can spend a point to re-roll some of the damage dice to make sure that it hits harder. So nothing sucks more than rolling a fireball or lightning bolt and getting a bunch of ones. There's extended spell where things can last twice as long, which is fun. Or like a quicken spell where you can cast, you still can't cast more than one main spell per turn, but you can cast a big spell and Quicken spell to cast a cantrip in the same turn. Got it. Yeah. It's a pretty decent throwing it all out of one round if you want to.

There's twin spell where if a spell you cast as a single target, you can spend sorcery points to target a second creature in the same casting, which is pretty useful. That's pretty cool. Maddie, I played a sorcerer in Baldur's Gate and it was awesome and not too complicated. Yeah, you two are kind of talking me into it. I mean, I did read enough about it to kind of even understand some of what you were saying, where I was like, oh, the twin meta-magics sounds really cool. Like, then I could just like add on another thing and the extended one sounded neat because

then I was like, oh, okay, so let's say we're doing a heist, we got to break into a castle or something. What if there's a guy that's really far away that I need to hit? That could be really useful. So I was kind of like thinking ahead about like, what are some situations that we might be in? And where would I, where would my bad to be useful? Or, yeah, I don't know if it works that way. Like if I'm, if I'm invisible, I don't know if that's even an ability I'm going to end up having or something like that. And I extend it, then it's like, oh, I could maybe go further or whatever.

I don't know. No, those are all exactly viable perspectives on this. And a fun way to consider creating this character. So, yeah, the Sorcero does have a lot of options, which can seem like a lot up front. Yes, it did. But once you kind of choose the things you have, once you have your choices made, it pairs down that scope much smaller. And it's not quite as overwhelming. And then I just have to get to know what I have.

And then I only need to be an expert in a couple of things. And I don't need to add. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that is a tactic. What could possibly go wrong? I'm not saying I'm going to do that over and over. There's just a small fireball.

Conversely to go over the warlock to make sure that you have that perspective as well, whereas like a wizard or a sorcerer at the level you're talking about will say at fifth level has, it knows six spells total, has four first level spell slots, three, two, you know, sorry, it's three second level spell slots and two third level spell slots, as well as five can trips. It's a big spectrum of things to pick from. But, you know, once again, once you pick them,

it's not that massive, but it's still, you know, you can cast all these things essentially once per day until all your slots are spent. Warlocks have a more narrowed spectrum where they, like for instance, the fifth level, you only, you know, six spells, and you can only cast two of them outside of cantrips. But you recover those two spell slots

whenever you take a short rest, which is like an hour most, like sitting and taking a moment to kind of recollect yourself, drink some water, and just kind of concentrate on rejuvenating your magical essence. So you cast, you have less spell slots to spend, but your cantrips can be beefed up pretty slickly to be decent for the ones that you can just cast infinitely through your invocations, which we'll go into here in a second. And whenever you do cast your warlockes, spells, they're maximized to third level, regardless. So you can only cast them twice, but they're third level out of the gate,

and you get them back after a short rest. So the sorcerer has a lot more options. Warlock has less options and less spells, but they recover more often, and they're beefy when you use them. On top of that, Warlocks, they make a pact. So they draw... As we learned from Baldur's Gate. Yep.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So one thing about Baldosgate 3 from a player character is you don't get to dig too much into the packed relationship as a player, though you do get a lot of it through Will tangentially. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, I didn't play one, but Will was the sort of what taught me a lot about that. Yeah, it totally worked out fine. Yes. Just a win-win. Yeah.

So the challenge there, but also the fun aspect of a warlock is you have a relationship with some otherworldly entity that lends you its power to create this magic. So you then have to occasionally, depending on what you're attempting to accomplish or what you're asking of this patron, to have to negotiate and role play that dynamic. Sometimes they're like very cool with you depending on how you build your character in that relationship. Maybe they love what you're doing. Maybe themselves are like cheering you on and they're excited for you to do cool, shadowy,

you know, criminal shit. Maybe they want to keep you. focused on their own personal interests. So the complication in them is that you have now that dynamic to have to contend with. And sometimes if you're taking actions that your patron doesn't agree with, they feel as a distraction, maybe they don't fully lend you all the power you want. It's a nice little complication. Yeah.

And it's like a whole other character to contend with that would be like part of our group in a way. But it's for Matt to contend with it, I suppose. Yeah. But it does change things. No, I know you don't, but I've kind of like, well, Key would probably mind. I feel like character-wise, I don't know. Like, Jason, if you think playing a sorcerer is fun, you're going to inspire me, and I think I can do it. I'm going to tell myself I can do it, because even though it's complicated, I think it fits with who I see her being as a person.

It's not as complicated as you think, because once you winnow it down, you're just like, oh, okay, I can just enhance these spells, and that's all I have to worry about. Mm-hmm. And part of it is that I don't think that she's the kind of person who would be willing to make a deal to get magic. And that instead she's like, I'm going to take what I want in life. And that's part of how she ends up in the life of crime that she's in. It's because she's like, well, I've been fucked over so many times in my life. Because we haven't gotten to her backstory yet. But like I see her as somebody who grew up in sort of like medieval fantasy foster care essentially who was like kind of orphaned and then

traded from home to home. She's, she's a half elf, by the way. She doesn't fit in anywhere. So leading to a life of crime is just kind of like part and parcel with that because she's like, well, this is what I got to do to survive. And I just don't, I think that being a sorcerer fits with that more because she's like, yeah, this is the power I deserve. This is like the one thing that's finally coming up lucky for me is that I'm magical. So that was kind of how I was going with Key's whole character arc. But I guess I should roll. some dice, huh? Yeah, well, also, what race do you

think for Key? Oh, half elf. Half elf. So, so, so, so. So Jason and I are not going to necessarily get along, which I like, or rather Leon and I, because he might be like, oh, well, you're just a half elf. Not like me. Well, and not of

noble birth. And he's of noble birth. So I think it's interesting that we've ended up forming an alliance, and there's like a lot Yeah, I think Leon has spent enough of his life, like, dealing with thieves and unsaving characters. Sure, yeah, that you're willing to respect me, but maybe I'm defensive about it. And, like, I assume some simmering, some simmering racial tension. Yeah, and that I assume people are judging me when they're really not, you know, that kind of thing.

Understood. Yeah, yeah, that's a fun dynamic to explore, definitely. All right, so is it dice rolling time? You tell me. Dice rolling time. Yeah, let's do some. All right, all right. Attribes. Here we go. I'm rolling the story. I'm rolling the, I'm rolling the right into the mic, Kirk. That's what you want, right? Like, just right. Yes, we want it as long as possible. I'm going to add some reverb to it. We're going to really, we're going to really make it pop. One of them literally fell on the ground. I got a little too excited. Where did they go? Oh, no. Hold on. I'm sorry.

You're going to play it as it lies or reroll it? This is, I think all three of our desks are not really set up for dice rolling. I'm like trying to make it fit amid all this kind of. We're going to need when we do our in-person session, we're going to need like a good good setup for you're gonna love this you're gonna love this dice rollers right those little tag you're gonna love this low roll because it's 3 3 3 2 and 4 so that's a 10 yeah 10

right that's not terrible solid start 5 1 2 3 so that's also 10 all righty 6 2 4 12. 12. I'm doing so much public math here.

You guys were so much faster than I was in public math. And like, it's like, how often am I adding up numbers? All right, 6, 651. Ooh, 17. All right, two more. That's pretty good. Six, five, four, one. I feel like I'm reading off like video game codes or something.

Like these are the codes to the safe. Is it one more? Is that what I'm doing? One more, you got it. I wasn't writing any of these down, so I hope you were. I meant, don't worry. 6, 3, 4, 2. Alrighty, already.

That puts us at 313. Great, solid rolls. It's a good spring. All right, now I don't remember what any of those numbers were. So probably the highest one. So I need my magic. So that's got to be in charisma, right? Correct.

So what was my highest one, 18? A 17. Oh, 17. Okay. What's my next highest number? Next highest is 15. All right. Okay.

So like what do we, what do we, I mean, you tell me for a sorcerer. I'm assuming like, is it intelligence or it's intelligence that they need, right? Well, actually, for sorcerer, charisma is the basis of your spellcasting. Right. That's what I thought. So you already have your highest stat in there. The rest of it is up to you to kind of help kind of go over how these things will help you through the role playing experience, you know, Intelligence is your knowledge of the world.

Your ability to recall information to investigate details in a scene. A lot of like history roles and things that'll, you'll recall information about mysteries around you or locations that you encounter or creatures that you see. A lot of that can be intelligence-based. Wisdom is your innate ability, your insight to the world around you. So being able to tell someone's lying or telling the truth, being able to read of something to be finer.

Like street smarts is wisdom is kind of what you're telling me. So we should put my next highest stat into wisdom. Great, 15 wisdom. All right. And then what am I down to a couple of 14s? You got 13 and 12 and then 2 tens. 13 and 12. Let's do 13 dexterity, 12,

12 intelligence, and then I'll put my tens in constitution and strength. I guess I'm a little similar to Jason in that way, but I feel like Bing is going to take care of us. That's great. That's kind of what Bing likes to do. So I think we're going to be okay because we're going to have a couple of like smart Alex, and then we're going to have our big friend. I love it.

All right. So we're going to five levels of. sorcery here. Oh boy. Here we go. Here we go. You do have your ability score improvement, which means you know, you can decide now or later, but you can either increase one of your statistics by two, two of them by one, or choose a feat. As fifth edition D&D goes, your modifier,

the thing that improves all of your spells and your spell class DCs and stuff, improves every even level. So getting like your 17 in charisma to an 18, would be a bump to that modifier, but like an 18 to a 19 wouldn't do much. However, being a half-elf, you do get some racial bonuses to that. Let me pull that up here real fast.

Yeah, I think I get some extra charisma. So yeah, you get plus two to your charisma. So your charisma is already a 19. And you get to choose another ability score to improve by one, if you'd like. I mean, I could just have that 20 charisma. I think it has to be a different one then the first one you chose.

Otherwise, it's crazy. All right. I'll give my wisdom a little bump then. That can be 16. Okay, cool. So just leave them as they are in the beyond. Yeah, yeah, I will. I will.

And then under the race section, you can choose here, ability score for, let's see. Right, like underscore calculations. I'm sorry, I must have that. Two other ability scores increase by one. So you can increase your wisdom and, what's the other one

would you like to increase by one? I guess dexterity. Dexterity, you got it. Okay, both those are in there. You also are proficient in two additional skills. You can decide that later if you like. All those are laid out in D&D beyond for you as well as your class proficiencies.

The fun things to consider now, your sorceress origin. Yeah. So this is kind of the idea of where this innate magic comes from. Where in your bloodline? Where in your history or familial history has this magic come to you? Options include the basics are like draconic bloodline, where there was some sort of draconic blood,

some dragon influence in your family history that is bringing this magic to you. There's shadow magic where something touched yourself or your family line and infused you with kind of shadow-based darker magics. There's storm sorcery where like the elements of the maelstrom, the storm itself is under your control. There's wild magic, which you had mentioned earlier, which is some weird fluke of the way the world's magic functions.

When you do cast magic, there's a chance something weird might happen as well. I like that one. Unfortunately, for my adventuring party, I thought that one sounded great. Fortunately for the story. Yeah, I was like, that sounds like it has a lot of potential for shenanigans. Oh, very much so. Very much so. And fits with the kind of happenstancy nature of Key's life of just being shuffled from home to home and just being like cast over.

And then having wild magic be something that she also can't really fully control and feels like, really? Really? This is funny to me. I love it. Darkly funny. Maybe the trauma of her childhood. Right. Yeah, exactly.

It turned her magic into wild magic. Yeah. I mean, that was kind of what I was picturing. I didn't really have like a good like, you know, awakening origin story, but I was like maybe one of the times that she like runs away from a house that's not working out. She's she, it manifests in some way in that moment because she's like, I'm going to, I'm going to try to force myself to grow up and be on my own. And it manifests as a magic power.

But that doesn't always work in her favor. Oh, sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't, depending. So yeah, for those who aren't from, familiar as a wild magic sorcerer, whenever you cast a spell of first level or higher, I'm gonna have you roll an additional D20. So most often-

Just see what happens. Yeah, see what happens. Most times nothing will happen, but if you manage to roll a one on that D-20, then we get to roll on the wild magic surge table, which has a bunch of weird things that can happen. Some positive, some really not so positive. So it's a fun little bit of chaos that's instilled in

to your magic casting abilities. You also have an ability called Tides of Chaos, which is once per day, you can just choose to gain advantage on an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw. You regain the use of that once it's spended every time you have to roll

in the wild magic table. So it benefits you to want to be a little chaotic. So I got to remember that that's there once a day and be like, I need to remember to use this. In my player brain, I need to remember to use it. I'm sure Key will remember. You'll also get to choose your two meta-magic options what we discussed earlier, the things you can spend sorcery points on. You don't have to decide right now.

You can research them and think on it before we play the next session, but just know you have that at your disposal. Yep, yeah. I will. As well, as your spells and cant trips to choose, you have quite a bit that you can choose from as a sorcerer. You don't have to pick them now again. You want to research, read through, and see what fits to the best of Key's abilities and what excites you in that regard. The main things to know is that at fifth level, you have five cant trips that you know. You can choose from the Sorcerer Spellist, as well as five, sorry, six spells total that you know.

So unlike a wizard, which has a massive book that can grow and they can essentially have an ever-growing selection of spells. They can only just memorize a handful every day. Sorcerers have a much narrower scope of spells that they have access to, but they can cast them off. and manipulate them with your sorcery points. That's kind of the benefit of the sorcerer. So research on your own time before we play our first session and choose what makes sense for Key. If you have any questions, you can let me know

and I can offer that guidance. The last little bit here to play more into the story is what do you see as Key's background? Who was she before this criminal path that brought her into her from Patriots? So I don't know what town she's from, maybe one of y'all she could be from water deep right just because we've kind of been centering around water deep i mean i've kind of been thinking like how would she have met leon or bang i'm i'm not

quite sure about that because initially i was like she seems like a loner and after she gets magic which i see is like kind of almost an ex-menesque storyline of like you know teenage coming of age, running away, getting magic, and then sort of realizing like, hmm, it's kind of hard to find food. Maybe I should go back and like continue to secretly train at my magic and live at these various homes that I hate. And sort of turning to a life of crime because she realizes she's good at it. The Thieves Guild definitely goes to these foster homes to find recruits. So it's possible you ran into us through them plucking you and break. you into the fold. Yeah, I got hired maybe for a one-off. We needed some magical help, and there was

a rumor that, oh, there's this, there's this girl who can do magic and maybe can help you with that, and we met you kind of that way or something like that. Yeah, I mean, I'm down for the Thieves Guild backstory, but then still key, not necessarily being so much of a joiner that she's, like, super into being in it. But maybe she kind of knows Leon from that. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, well, he's rich and kind of stuck up. But actually, he's all right. He's really good at what he does. And then through whatever confluence of events, we end up doing a heist together at some point in the past.

And that's how the three of us came to make. This job that went wrong could wind up being maybe some sort of instigating event for all of us where we had to leave water deep after that maybe. Did it go wrong? We weren't successful. Yeah, the one that Leon got. got us out where my sister got killed. That one, yeah. And that's when the three of us did together with Bing's sister.

And Bing's sister was kind of the fourth member of our party who got... Right, because she and I were a partnership. And so we're all kind of connected to Bing's sister. So we all have that kind of bit of a sorrow. And like since then we had to leave Waterdeep because like the Lords or whatever, like they had, they knew who we were. And it's maybe been years since then. And we've been out of the city working together, you know, and like,

It's not like he like fully joined up. She's always been a little bit reluctant, but we're not like associated with the Water Deep Thieves Guild anymore. That was just kind of what brought us together. Yeah. So maybe the three of us haven't seen each other in a while and something brings us someone who knew us from that heist, like calls us all together, brings us all back. So the three of it's been a while since the three of us. It's been actually since that heist. The three of us haven't seen each other since then.

And now we're kind of where we have to cross paths again in this other, in this new city. That's cool. Okay, cool. I'll think on that. What I might do is then, I might start the next session with you all separate. And do a little like three to five minute vignettes of each of you being called to this meeting. And then you can kind of, we can start the story with you all doing that uncomfortable, you know, hey, it's been a while. And then you come into that beginning of this particular, this calling, this, this, this, this heist that you've been requested to.

And we can take it from there. Nice. I like that. Yeah, that's great. Yes. So we need a new city. decide now or match we leave it to you to kind of decide? Before we finish, for that background then for Key, are we thinking that we have examples

Oh, right. I have to pick, yeah, I have to pick my like name modifier. We have technical backstory. Yes. We have urchin. So what's, give, what, give me an urchin description because that sounds on par. Yeah. So, urchin is somebody that kind of lived in a big urban environment kind of on the streets.

Sure. You know, kind of as an orphan, somebody who didn't have a lot of means and kind of had to scaven. And all over twist type. Yeah. Very much so. There's also, if you wanted to, if the criminal thing is a new and a fresh thing, then Urchin feels a little more comfortable. But if you want to have a little more experience in the criminal world, there is the actual

criminal background where you've now, you've made a career at being a criminal. Maybe I've been part of the guild beforehand and you've begun working in this space as a career. So I guess depends on how deep into this you want to be or how fresh you want to be. Mm-hmm. I think urchin's probably closer because I see her as like fairly experienced at crime because it's how she survives. But it's by necessity rather than for dopamine reasons like Leon. Totally. Or being part of a big organization or something. Yeah.

I think that that's a good character. That's great. Yeah. And like I'd be doing this job because I need to, you know? Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. So because of that, you start with slight of hand and stealth as skill proficiencies you get from the background. So you're automatically just naturally better at those two themes because you've had to be stealthy and had to steal to survive.

You also are proficient with thieves tools and a disguise kit. So if ever the thing arises where those might be helpful, which in a heist, they could be. Oh, yeah. Disguise kit, the best thing in Dungeons and Dragons. Perfect. It's so good. You also have a background feature called City Secrets, where, as it says here, you know the secret patterns and flow to cities and can find passages through the urban sprawl that others miss. When you're not in combat and you lead your companions, you can travel

between locations twice as fast than you normally would. So you know how to get through a city quickly through the back streets, through the alleys, through the sewers. Seems useful. This is useful. Perfect. And very complimentary. We're such a good heist team. We're really doing it. Good little for you here. This is good. This is good. Oh, yeah, cool. Yeah. To that point, if you want to like to build out this next city, since you all, since we've grounded these characters' backgrounds in the forgotten realms. Did you want to create a city that exists here that you're traveling towards, or do you want to be an existing

city in the forgotten realms? What do you think, Matt? Where do you want to write your story? Where do you want to tell us the story? Do you want to make up a city? I mean... He doesn't want to make him a city. I have a question, I guess, that maybe it could be helpful.

So something that I've run into in the past with campaigns that I've done is we are in established cities in Everon. and then I find that I want to extemporaneously, like, I just want to come up with, oh, well, I'm doing this because of this organization or I'm working for these people, these artificers or whatever, and then realize, like, I haven't memorized this massive amount of information that exists. So if we made up a city, would it be easier for us to, like, suggest something that's happening or, like, just improvise something, then could just be, you know, magiced into being by you, basically, because we said it? Or does that not really make a difference? Does that question make sense? No, I see your question. I'm not worried too much.

For the purposes of these episodes of this gaming session that we're doing, sessions, I guess you could say, it's going to be pretty much centered around this heist, like we were discussing. So there may not be a whole lot of opportunities for, like, massive city exploration. And I think as players knowing that, likely not driven to turn this into a three-hour shopping episode necessarily to go find that cool place in Baldur's Gate. Do you remember from the second game? Yeah, right.

order everything off the menu. Exactly. I'm not terribly worried about that. I guess to that point, as I developed the story, I have more information on that end. We can totally start in an established city, and then most of the narrative will be based around a location or locations in that place that I'll develop that may be unique to my creation, may be influenced by existing lore. The fun thing about this is this isn't the standard forgotten realms. This is our forgotten realms for this game. So some things might be familiar. Some things might not.

and we get to kind of roll with that vibe. It doesn't even have to be a city. Maybe it's some like arcane tower in the wilderness that we're heisting. About a say. A lot of things. That's true. Yeah. Sure.

Whoever's bringing you together for this heist doesn't have to be the target of the heist. Even if you meet up in a city, the heist may not be present in that city. Right, right, right, right. So I'll think on that, actually. I'll contemplate. Now, I don't know your characters in your background and generally where we're going with this.

I'll think on the locale and as we kind of flesh out the characters, dynamics, and their story in between the first session, I'll put some thought to what this location is. And I can toss that to you and I can introduce these facets of it as part of the game when we actually play. Does that sound solid? Awesome. Yeah. That sounds great. Okay. So next time we meet, we will be doing our first session and the three of us will have like little separate vignettes talking about.

Maybe we can talk about what we've done since the Water Deep Heist went wrong and then we're. some into adventure and then we go from there. Exactly. It's a fun. The water deep job. The water deep job, yes. The water deep job when awry. We just refer to it that way, all capital letters, because we all know what that means.

So yeah, something I was thinking about, first of all, being sister, I feel like could be a healer because that's the one thing we're missing. I know. Yeah. There's like kind of a vacant, like a big hole here in our group. Also, Bing's sister, like we're all just kind of coping with her loss in our own ways because we were all kind of grotesched her.

Right, we had our own unique relationships. Yeah, maybe key a little bit. I'll flush her out a little bit and then we can figure that out. You can figure out each of your individual relationships. Yeah, she needs a name. Do you have a name for her? Not yet.

I'll come up with that. Yeah, I'll come up with that. And to that point, in between this and the next session, my next really only task I have for the three of you is go ahead and if you have a little time, write down the details of your character's story, your backstory.

It could be just a simple paragraph. It could be a few paragraphs. I'd recommend not a 25-page dissertation. You're talking to three people who might all write massive wiki entries on our character. It's going to be short. We're going to limit ourselves. We'll restrain ourselves.

No, I have some bullet points. Yeah. You can write as much as you want, just for the understanding that with the scope of the time we have for this game, most of it likely won't matter. It won't matter. But if it helps inform you and your character, please be my guest. Uh-huh, uh-huh.

I won't get to read my entire 5,000 word lore entry on my character out loud on the show. It's your podcast, man. Yeah, I mean, how many bonus episodes do we want to release? Because this is to go on and watch. I can see my way in and do that. It's just like a dissertation read by Bing in character as Bing. Yeah, that sounds great. I will restrain myself.

Okay, awesome. Well, I think it's about time to wrap up our prep session. But, Matt, thank you so much for helping us guide through these characters. We're all very excited to get started. Huck! Yeah, this is amazing. Yeah, this will be great. We'll see you all.

We'll see all your listeners next time. See you then, phones. Triple Quest was written by Matthew Mercer with improvisational assistance by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edited and mixed the show and also wrote and performed the music. It was produced by me, Jason, and Maddie, as always. We were only able to afford to hire Matt to run this game

because of the generous support of our maximum fun members, so if that's you, thank you so much. And if you'd like to help make it possible for us to do things like this in the future, consider becoming a member at maximum fun.org slash join. Okay, we've rolled our stats. We've named our characters. The scene is set and it's time to get underway. We'll be back next time with Part 1 of Triple Quest.