I cold not limit myself to a single D, topic. I had three I had ideas to comment about, and didn’t want to wait for next year.

Dwarves are my favorite race. I don’t often play them. I read a fantasy novel in the 80’s. I won’t name the novel to avoid spoilers for those who might not have read it. I REALLY hate spoilers. One of the major characters was a dwarf. I identified with this dwarf and the author killed him off. The author did a good job of making me care for this dwarf, and I was mad that he had killed off my favorite character.

That experience may be part of it, but another part is that dwarves are limited and can’t be magic users or other kinds of characters I like to run. I am trying to think back and I don’t recall any characters I played that were dwarves. I have had characters that were human, elves, half-elves, and halflings. Of the old character sheets I have from back in the day, I am not finding any dwarves. I will play a dwarf for the next character I have.

I also want to play a paladin. In the rules they are only human, but why can’t other races have holy warriors? I know in my brother, Robert’s game, one of his wife’s characters is a halfling paladin. In my campaign I will allow paladins of any character race. I’m not sure I want to play a dwarven paladin, I was thinking more of a human for that. I suppose I’ll make a decision when next I get to roll up a new character.

Dungeons. I like maps of them. I played in a lot of them in the early days. Not so much from college on. Lots of underground, mostly caverns. A few passages under the castle, etc. I have never played in a mega dungeon. I am thinking of making a mega dungeon. I don’t want to put too much time into it, in case my eventual players don’t want to explore that much into it.

Dragons. As a player, I have rarely encountered dragons in the game. Large enough dragons are so deadly that only the most powerful characters can even stand and fight them. I have seen and heard of DM’s playing dragons like they are stupid. They are described as intelligent and some of them can cast spells. That does not mean that they can’t be vain, or manipulated if one knows the right buttons to push, but they are not stupid. I also prefer images of dragons that are more powerful looking, not the long, skinny oriental image of dragons. I am not persistent enough as an artist to develop the skills to draw them the way my brother, Robert does. Those pictures and many from Dragon magazine and the Holmes Blue Box cover art are my idea of what a dragon is “supposed” to look like.