Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

CokeRewards progress - 377/850 - I stole points from Darrell and was given points by Joe, but I still drank a lot of Diet Coke, some of it with lime.

Saturday night was game night, which featured the triumphant return of Joe who missed the whole rest of the Werewolf campaign due to work or having a life or some junk. Anyway, the game was one big showdown at the cathedral downtown.
My character's attempt to "take the fight to the bad guys" (by attempting to leap from the third floor of a parking garage to the roof of building across the street) ended in a three story fall into the midst of about 20 enemy werewolves and government agents.
At least they couldn't shoot with my character right in the middle.
What they could do was spend the next many, many rounds beating my character in to much deserved unconsciousness.
Since the game was essentially one big combat for multiple real-time hours (it is hard to accurately judge how much was game time and how much was hang out time), the challenge for the storyteller was keeping it interesting. While it sounds like something so action-packed would naturally be exciting, the dice-heavy nature of table top RPG combat can actually kill momentum faster than just about anything.
The problem gets worse as the characters grow in power, too, since more dice and more combat choices start to develop.
Last night great big handfuls of dice thundered across the wooden tabletop long into the night and I don't think anyone was ever bored. Even with my character unconscious I found it interesting.
At the end of the fight, our group was victorious but our goals were still incomplete.
Our next goals are to investigate the (possibly really evil) first born of Mother Luna and rescue a packmate from an evil modern mage.
I think the decision was made to start over the Eberron Dungeons and Dragons campaign when we switch game systems next.
Since everyone needs to start over at first level, there was some discussion (around the leaping flames of a quickly blackening fire pit in the back yard) about dual-weapon wielding character progression.
Here goes:
By starting with Ranger, you maximize first level skill points, so take that for two levels (to get the two-weapon fighting bonus feat and favored enemy).
A level of Swashbuckler at third level nets you decent skills and your Intelligence modifier to damage (with light weapons - it all hinges on light weapons).
Follow that with two levels of Fighter (never, ever take more than two fighter levels. Ok. Maybe four.) for bonus feats and good hit points.
After that, Dervish levels for all ten levels of the prestige class. That's almost cheesy enough by itself, but you still have room for five levels of Tempest somewhere in there before epic levels which totally eliminates dual weapon penalties and all but guarantees anime-level damage against everything.
For flavor purposes, in Eberron this character would be either a Valenar Elf or a Talenta Halfling, which opens your character for Dragonmark feats if you are into that, though the two-weapon fighting chain uses a lot feats.
Whoa. That last bit was geeky even for me.