Huh. I've been looking through my various character notes for previous editions. In 4e I had apparently planned at one point to create a minotaur warlord/barbarian called the Kowgan.

Interesting. I was thinking the bastard sword was also called the hand-and-a-half. I googled that term and all the top results were for longsword. Can you tell I have wielded a lot of bastard swords? It's like my world has turned upside down!

The fun thing with medieval weaponry is the people actually using the weapons didn't really differentiate in exacting detail between them. They generally used basic terms like "sword" or "mace" or darkly humerous slang like "holy water sprinkler". Modern scholars have to make up their own terms so they can communicate with each other. (Such as the Oakeshott Sword Types).

Actual two-handed swords meant for battle (rather than parades) are also a lot smaller than one would think based on fantasy artwork.

Granted, I didn't really know much about any of this stuff until I took a class on Medieval Italian Longsword fighting from a local historical fencing society years ago and started looking into the sources they referenced.

So I ended up converting Kelric to 5E. Rogue 11/Fighter 2/Sorcerer 1/"Paladin" 1 with the Spring Attack chain and a homebrew Luck feat became Human Noble Rogue(Thief) 11/Fighter(Eldritch Knight)4 with the Mobile, Lucky and Skilled feats.

Eldritch Knight was a little kludgey, because none of Kelric's meager magical powers were blasty in nature, but I stuck with Abjuration spells and took Detect Magic as my one free choice. (I don't understand why this isn't a cantrip in 5E. It worked fine as such in 3.x and Pathfinder, even with the latter's infinite cantrips per day.)

On a related note (though I didn't use it for Kelric) somebody put together a web-based 5E character generator. [link] It's a little clunky, but it works.

Had a game night with strangers, a Meetup event. We played Cards Against Humanity. We had a 5 way tie going into the last card. Miracle of Miracles, my remaining card worked wonderfully with the black card, and I won the night.

I haven't played Cards Against Humanity but it sounds like a blast.

It's better with folks you know. Last night was fun, but not knowing how these people think, it was a lot harder to pick cards. And it's a game where you need to know things. Lots of random things. One of the players won with the 3/5ths provision, and didn't know what it was. So a few of us pointed out some of our sadder constitutional history.

Someone has some GotG-inspired fun with the new game Destiny: [link]

Finally ran some 5th Ed for my son. He made a wood elf former-criminal Barbarian named Rex. (Originally he suggested "Stealth", as in Stealth Elf from Skylanders. When I told him "no" he suggested "Tree Rex". We compromised with "Rex".)

I threw together a wood elf Cleric of Nature named Amerielle to accompany him, who was a childhood friend of Rex's. The pair encountered a group of goblins in the woods near their village and decided to try to drive them off.

I discovered that 4 goblins is a bit too much for two first level characters. If I hadn't played them like Pathfinder goblins they would have easily killed both of them. As it was they dropped Amerielle and Rex only had 2 hit points left even with his rage halving the damage he was taking before he managed to kill two of them, causing the other two to flee.

Rex then carried the unconscious Amerielle back to village where the village healer was able to tend to her wounds. We left off with the village elder calling for volunteers to find out why goblins are so close to the village.

The mechanics were smooth and easy to deal with. I just need to get a better grip on appropriate challenges.

Yeah, the CR thing takes some getting used to. I ran a pickup game at a local gamer Meetup a while back, and ran into the same thing; two adventurers, 4 goblins = TPK. 3 rounds! Ouch.

Apparently what it is now is: CR equivalent to level of party of four characters means that they MIGHT not die. But it'll be a challenge. Before, CR equivalent to party level meant that the encounter would probably consume about a quarter of the party's resources (HP, spells, etc.), so you'd be able to work through about 4 CR equivalent encounters before you're done for the day. Now, you're gonna wanna take a long nap after one, and you might hafta replace a couple of dudes the next day.