DnD Update –or– The Right to Bear Arms

My current gang of DnDers is in quite a tizzy these days. The group is made up of:

• Dracustous – A male half-dragon sorcerer. He is obsessed with becoming a dragon. He is currently embroiled in a legal battle over an inheritance.
• Elani – A female elvish arch-mage. She is going through a harsh divorce. She has a particular hatred of lawyers.
• Ioctl – A male dungeon delver/rogue. He is the superintendent of a set of condos that was made out of an old dungeon. He has to make some fixes to the property for his clients, which requires the help of extra-planar beings.
• Jerpy – A male half-orc ranger that is becoming a burgeoning demigod and is running as vice-mayor of the Sprawl.
• Nate – A male half-orc cleric that is by far the most powerful character I have ever seen. Using all sorts of buffs and other stuffs, he can easily dole out 250hp of damage/round. He is the sheriff of a small town.

So anyway, the current wing of this campaign has had the party defeat the bastard offspring of Hermes, wrestle Ogremoch, the Prince of Evil Earth Elementals into submission, and make an all-out assault on FedXorn, the package delivery service.

While playing, it is apparent that most of the players are fairly overpowered in the game, but none so much as Nate. He is easily twice as powerful as the next player. So I decided that I would “fix” him.

Last Wednesday night I had the party ambushed by some Kuo Toa Monks of the Left Arm (the same monks that attacked the Pornhas group and disfigured Rollo). Now when they hauled off with the fallen body of Nate, everyone knew that the Monks of the Left Arm are known for amputating PC’s left arms, so Nate’s player realized his character would soon be without a quarter of his appendages.

So I had Nate’s arm removed from his person and then the Monk’s of the Left Arm ritual actually removed Nate’s left arm essence from him – preventing it from being polymorphed back or even from being regenerated.

Anyway, this whole thing didn’t go over very well with Chris, Nate’s player. I mean, I didn’t expect Chris to be happy about it, but he was very, very discouraged.

There is some kind of character study somewhere in this, but I’m not sure what it is. Some DnD players don’t seem to mind if you muck with their character. Others take it as a personal attack. I would say that half our DnD group falls on each side of this delineation. Typically, the power-gamer types hate it when I mess with their characters. The role-players don’t seem to mind it at all. The problem with this is that power-gamers give me more fits than the role-players, so I am more tempted to muck with them. It’s a catch-23.

(A catch-23 is a catch-22 that I could do something about – but for some reason I don’t.)

Next week the group will attempt to rescue Nate from the clutches of the Monks of the Left Arm. They may be able to retrieve the arm before the Kuo Toa’s make it into a belt.