Misc. D&D adventures

Whenever someone mentions 'role playing', I think of d20's. Not therapy or weird stuff that you make hookers sign non disclosure agreements for. Nope-- maybe that makes me weird, but I'll take that any day. Let me start with the story of the dented mug...

This actually goes back to my first game of dungeons and dragons ever. There's a lot of superstition in the tabletop rpg community and if you try and play against any of that, you will have a miserable time of it. Trust me, and the Bards. I played a bunch of other systems before getting into d&d. Although, if you really want to get technical-- I had actually played through some of the 'Lone Wolf' and 'Dragon Lance' stuff first.
'You decide to visit Limbo. You've heard it's nice this time of year'.  (Anyone? Anyone at all?)

Point is, I had an idea of what I was getting myself into...sort of. I had a very experienced DM and he didn't even see this coming. There was a party of about six of us, a good mixed party. Dwarves, half orcs, gnomes. Bards, fighters,  rogues, rangers, paladins. A good assortment.

I was playing a half elf ranger. Ever since my very first d&d game, I have played this guy. Even if I have to roll up a new character, the stats are nearly identical. It's spooky.

So after a long day of adventuring, our party decides to camp for the night. We were on our way to go take care of some restless undead in a local graveyard. Surprise! The undead are wandering around and we get attacked in the middle of the night by skeletons. This is a particularly bad deal--you don't want to be caught without armor or weapons. Especially as a level one character.

We're getting our asses handed to us-- spells that had been cast earlier hadn't regenerated yet and neither had hp. So I asked the DM if I could try and grab something to hit the skeleton that was attacking me with. DM says sure--roll for it. I successfully grab my pack. The skeleton tries to make an attack and misses.

Back to my turn. I try to grab something out of my pack. DM allows it, I make the check and roll again to grab... a mug. Well, shit. This situation isn't very good and all I can manage to do is grab a fucking mug. I'm the only one not taking damage, and everything is up to me.

I had to go for it, work with what I had. So I roll to try and hit the skeleton...successfully! Nat 20, actually. Nobody can believe this and I ended up with major xp from that. Everything suddenly started going in our favour after that. And to this day, my half elf ranger never goes anywhere without his dented mug.