So we actually played a week early, so you get a bonus episode of I’m Not in There. Except it’s not really a bonus, because next week you won’t get one at all. Such is life.

This may well have been in every previous edition of D&D, but I didn’t notice it until 4E: almost every caster has one or more “word” spells that do something. Clerics have Healing Word, for example. And this is fine—that’s a great name for a spell—but the designers and writers did not see fit to actually say what those words are, which is practically begging us to come up with them ourselves. Thus it came to pass that, in honor of Kylie Silverbright the perpetually cheerful cleric, we have decided that the healing word is “Funshine.” I heartily recommend that all of you adopt this idea into your campaigns immediately, because it improves the play experience by an empirically-provable 73%. To illustrate, consider the following two scenarios:

1. You find a miner in the back of a dragon cave, wounded and near death. Your cleric says, “I cast Healing Word.”
2. You find a miner in the back of a dragon cave, wounded and near death. Your cleric says, “Yay! I love to Funshine miners!”

I think the evidence speaks for itself. This has proven to be so awesome, in fact, that we have further decided that the Warlock spell Dreadful Word is “Moist.” The flavor text for the spell says that the warlock whispers the word in the target’s ear, and “his mind reels in terror;” I know that if someone walked up to me and whispered “moist” in my ear, I would definitely take 2d8 damage. My Warlock isn’t even built to take ideal advantage of Dreadful Word—it’s the wrong pact—but I’m tempted to respec into it anyway purely for the shenanigans.

In this particular instance we actually did find a miner in the back of a cave, and we did indeed Funshine him, and in return he hired us for a job, got stinking drunk, and told a bar full of wererats that we were on our way to fortune and glory. Ahhhh…it’s so nice to finally be in a real Micah adventure instead of that silly DMG thing. Though as much as we like moving on to a real campaign, the DMG adventure was still valuable because it taught us things about 4E that we didn’t know. For example, you can now fight a dragon at first level. This is awesome, because the game is called “Dungeons & Dragons,” but in past editions it’s usually been “Dungeons & Maybe Some Dragons Later On, Like Around Level 14, But You’ll Probably Just Give Up And Roll New Characters at Level 12.” The boss fight with the dragon was actually pretty awesome, in part because we’d already burned all our daily powers, but mostly because the Dragon is actually designed, from the ground up, to be an interesting challenge to a full party of characters. He had extra action points, he had huge area effect things, he had triggered abilities that went off in the middle of combat—it was like fighting a whole swarm of little things, but in a big dragon-shaped package. I was well-pleased. The only downside was that my Warlock has come to specialize in teleporting all over the field and taking out stragglers, and there just wasn’t a lot of that going on in a fight with a single dragon. But the dragon thing was still fun, so I can live without my precious Misty Step for one fight.

The other thing the DMG adventure taught us is that fights need obstacles now. Every room in that dungeon had some kind of terrain feature we needed to work around: a pit, or a ledge, or a frozen pool, and so on. These made the environment more dynamic, they made battlefield positioning matter, and they actually gave us something cool to do with our plethora of positional powers—the fighter could knock people into pits, the rogue could flip off of walls, the cleric could push people in front of rolling boulders, and so on. Our first Micah fight had terrain, but most of it was on the edges, and it didn’t have a big effect on the battle. My Warlock has a daily spell that slides people 3 squares, anywhere I want, and there was just never a good opportunity to use it. Positioning was still important, and there was a lot of tactical maneuvering, but those specifically positional abilities never got used.

That fight did, however, finally illustrate just how good the new fighters are. If you get close to a fighter you need to either commit to it whole-heartedly or run for your life, because that fighter will mark you and then you will be his forever: if you try to move away he gets a free hit on you; if you try to attack someone else he gets a free hit on you. He can move you around for free, but if you try to move yourself around he gets a free hit on you. It’s great to finally have tanks that can tank.

At the end of the session we hit level 2, and began eagerly to level up. Even levels are cool because all your skills and saves go up, but I’m even more excited about level 3 because Kylie Silverbright will have access to a spell called Command. The flavor text says: “You utter a single word to your foe, a word that demands obedience.” What could such a word be? The mind reels in terror.