Next up, introduce him to Trappers and Lurkers Above.

I saw gas spores are back in the new MM. Those never made sense to me. If your method of reproduction requires physical contact with living creatures, appearing as an apex predator is a horrible way to go about it.

Man, mid-to-high-level Pathfinder/3.x is ridiculous. Just plugged a baddie from the Adventure Path I'm running into Roll20 and his minimum damage on a crit is a 100 points of damage. (Granted, his maximum is only 28 points more.) Double-checked that against the party and the only one in danger of getting killed in a single-blow is the wizard, who should hopefully know better than to get in the face of the big ugly giant with the glowing heavy pick.

So Rex and companions defeated the (wyrmling) dragon Black Fang and returned to his home village victorious, thus completing the (converted to 5E) Pathfinder's Beginner's Box adventure. They ended up missing half the dungeon (and treasure) but they took care of the goblin threat and the dragon they were working for, so mission accomplished.

The original dragon in the BB is a good deal older, but I didn't want Mattias' first D&D experience to be "horrifically murdered by a foe that thoroughly outclassed us." Also, skipping half the dungeon meant they faced the dragon still at level 1 and without the dragonbane sword conveniently hidden elsewhere in the dungeon.

As it was, it was a tough fight, with lots of misses on the part of the heroes and the dragon kept successfully rolling its recharge on the breath weapon. Since we were playing mind's eye, I assumed the party was smart enough to avoid standing in a line, so the dragon only caught one person at a time with it's three breath attacks over the course of the fight. Rex got hit first and took 12 of his 15 HP in damage with a successful save. (Yikes!) In later rounds the ranger and the cleric both ate breath attacks and were dropped despite making their saves. Had any of them but Rex failed, it would have killed them outright. (Which brings back to our earlier discussion of how CR means the entry point in 5th Ed. The CR 2 was downright deadly to 1st level characters.)

The cleric managed to get a Bless off earlier in the fight (after healing Rex) and it helped turn a couple misses and missed saves into hits until she went down and could no longer Concentrate on the spell (though even if she stayed up, I doubt she'd have made her check to keep the spell going anyway.) She also managed a crit with her Shillelagh, which is what turned her into the target for the next stream of acid.

The warlock opened up the fight by trying to hit the dragon with Faerie Fire, but it made the save easily. Advantage would have helped them a lot, I think.

The party lucked out in the only character that got hit with the dragon's bite attack was Rex, and he took half damage since he was raging.

Near the end of the fight, the ranger rolled a natural 20 on his death save, leapt to his feet (at 1 hp) and whacked the dragon a good one, dropping it to 1hp as well. Rex then finished it off with his greatsword on his next attack. After that, Mattias decided they were going to climb out of the cave and head home.

I threw a quick adventure together after he went to bed tonight. Next session, a pixie will arrive in the wood elf village seeking aid from the now 2nd level party. It seems there's an ettercap who has taken over the nearby dryad grove with his giant spider minions. There will be some web-traps to avoid, some fairies to rescue and spiders to squash. Should be fun.

Tried to play Dragon Age: Origins last night and got prompted to login to EA's Origin service to authenticate for some reason. Get my password reset because I never use Origin and couldn't remember it, sign in and it tells me there's a problem with the game and it needs to be reinstalled. Reinstall the game and it still gives me the same error. Reboot. No change. Do a full uninstall, run CCleaner on my registry, reboot, start the reinstall but it's going to take hours because it's 25GB. As it's been almost 2 hours at this point I decide to let it run over night and go to bed.

Check it this morning before work and the game runs, but half my DLC is missing. Grr. No time to monkey with it.

Google says there might be an updater service that's not running. I hope it's as simple as that.

TLDR: Fuck EA and their bullshit malfunctioning DRM schemes.

argh! that sucks.

I think I finally got it working. Had to clean up the registry further and do some stuff via the command line and then repair the installation yet again. (Apparently when you uninstall and reinstall the game, it leaves the updater service entry in Windows. The problem is, the reinstall changed the install location (only EA knows why) and Windows was still pointing at the old location.

I think I got all my mods re-installed, all the DLC is there and I can load up my last save without the game crashing. So that's progress, at least.

woo hoo! How are you liking the game?

I've already played the base game all the way through twice and played all the origins. Played through Awakening a few months ago and then it glitched after I beat the final boss and I put it down for awhile because I was annoyed. Trying to get through the rest of the DLC and then play 2 so I'm ready for Inquisition. I've just run into obnoxious DRM issues every time I try to pick the game back up. (Last time I spent three different nights on hold with EA support before I could get it fixed.)

It makes me feel like I'm being punished for trying to play their game legally.

bah.

Oh hey I just remembered Wildstar sent me a one week pass for myself and a friend. (I played the Beta and it was great fun but not enough to make me want to buy the game) Are you interested in downloading another monster to try it out for a week? I still haven't decided if it's worth diving back in.