Whoops! In 2 above please insert one before encounter.
Steelerphan, I haven’t played D&D in years, and I don’t have a set of rules handy (although I do have a copy of GURPS). If you don’t mind the lack of practice, count me in. Also, any links to good on-line resources would be appreciated.
CJ
-
Cheetos and Mountain Dew do not a meal make, regardless of what everyone tells you.
-
Do not cry if your first character dies on the first night. It happens. This happened to a friend of mine some years ago the first time she played and she has not lived it down yet.
-
Tasha’s Uncontrollable Laughter can help you kill a dragon (just ask me how!).
-
Always carry a couple of flasks of oil. This is second only to rope, as noted by The Peyote Coyote.
-
Do not be a rules lawyer. That isn’t any fun for anyone.
I hear you and we were playing, just playing in a goofy way. IMHO, if there are four players in jokey moods and you, as DM, are in a serious mood… maybe the game should be called off.
It’s always fun to play someone who’s monumentally stupid. I played an asskicking barbarian who was dumber thana bag of hammers back in the day and we went up against a dragon. We were fairly high level but a couple of characters died and I did fairly well.
One of the items we found was a gem that had two wishes. I found this out when I found it and wished I had something to eat. Bingo! Food. Then I said “Fight dragon was good. Wish fight dragon again”
Wishes do come true.
To make up for my hijack, I’ll add some bits of wisdom…
In game stuff:
Make sure you take a grappling hook with your rope. It comes in handy when climbing walls.
Get continual light cast on a small gem; keep it inside a scroll case or small box. You have an emergency light. Cast it on an arrow, and keep it wrapped up until needed. Fire in the direction of the enemy in darkness, it light them up for you. Works for bolts, darts, and stones.
Make sure that you and your party have a safe place to rest. Bribed ostlers and stableboys, traps on doors and windows, someone always on guard. Pets are helpful here. Trained dogs can keep an enemy busy until you can react.
Pick a useful non-weapon proficiency, and buy necessary tools to do it. Making arrows is useful, being able to ride a horse helps, use this to give some dimension to your character.
To be a better player:
Be there to have a good time. Listen to the DM and keep aware of your surroundings, especially if you don’t use miniatures.Stay in character when conversing with the PCs and NPCs. Don’t be late or stand up your group- call if you can’t make it, they will understand. HELP YOUR HOST CLEAN UP- or at least offer.
There has been some good advice given in this thread. I think you’ll do fine.
3rd edition doesn’t have continual light. It’s continual flame. One of the best magic items to get is a torch of continual flame (90gp).
Or…
Have another game system on hand, for nights when no one feels like taking the game seriously. There are several decent “goofy” role playing games out there, where busting up the rest of the gang is more the idea of the game than actual dice rollin’ and monster slayin’.
I’ve no clue if this is out of print now or not, but track down a game called Tales From The Floating Vagabond, if you’re of a mind to try this. Every character is given a hook upon creation, most of them intended for yucks.
Off the top o’ my head…
There’s the Bottomless Pockets schtick, where your character has a chance of producing damn near anything from an oversized trenchcoat, duffel bag, or whatever. Taking one of these characters through, say, a customs search can bring the entire game to a screeching halt, however.
The Sidekick schtick means your character has an annoying teen-aged sidekick, whose only real use is as a plot point, for the bad guys to kidnap, or getting himself lost, forcing you to chase him down all over the GM’s creation.
The Escher Effect schtick allows your character to completely defy the laws of physics, thermodynamics, and the game itself, at whim (and the GM’s discretion, of course.) The character becomes a real live Bugs Bunny. so to speak.
Just reading the rule book aloud can be a hoot, on those nights where no one wants to take much of anything seriously.
[sub]Okay, I wanna shoot the guard on the watchtower before he spots us.
You can’t, for two reasons. One, he’s at “See That Dot?” range from you, and two, three guards just walked out of the woods behind you, two armed with spears, and the third armed with an assault rifle.
Oh hell. Awright, I’ll whip out my Acme Switchblade BattleAxe, and move to engage. Jim?
I’m gonna stick my finger in the third guy’s rifle barrel, and dare him to shoot me.
Avoid bridges. There is always something nasty living under it that will attack you, probably with tentacles. The ensuing fight will make the bridge collapse.
Avoid boats. Boats are inevitably ravaged by storms and attacked by sea serpents. The ensuing fight will make the boat sink.
You can get away with almost anything if it’s cool enough.*
Beware of harmless little old men.
*(True Example: “You know how my favorite character was killed crossing the desert last week? Well, his body was found by an ancient Indian shaman who used a powerful ritual to bring me back to life, only now I’m half-crazy and talk to spirits and fight with a spear instead of a plasma rifle. Can I play him tonight?” “All right, he’s back in.”)
There’s been a lot of good advice given in this thread, but I’ll second that one. When I lived in Hawaii, I was in a particularly good group of gamers. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the name of the main game we played (Everquest?), but we also played quite a bit of Cthulu and Paranoia.
Other advice: (Bear with me on the details – some of this stuff happened over 10 years ago.)
If you’re going to get someone to keep watch over you, make sure it’s someone trustworthy. I didn’t follow this rule and, as a result, my PC got raped by a Deep One.
Sometimes the impossible happens. When it does, feel free to laugh at it. One time in the first game I mentioned, one of our party wound up fighting a duel with one of King Arthur’s knights, one whose strength grew greater until noon and then waned until midday (sorry, I can’t remember his name off the top of my head). At midday, our guy scored a critical hit and ended the fight, or so the dice said. Since it was a fair roll, but this was a knight in full armour all we could do is figure our guy must have stabbed him in the armpit! 
Little things mean a lot. My PC in Cthulu always carried a sword cane and would occaisionally stop in a church to get it blessed. Unbeknownst to me (or her!), this led to it gaining a slight advantage against evil creatures. This being Cthulu, there were a lot of them.
Remember what you have with you. In a scenario that was a take-off of the movie The Abyss, my PC wound up waling away at a Deep One with her sword cane until she finally beat it off or killed him. It was only then that the GM pointed out that in her other hand, she’d had a bangstick, basically a long stick with a trigger at one end and a point and a bit of explosive at the other end used by scuba divers. I’d forgotten this small detail in real life. I’m still rather amused by the resulting image.
Don’t annoy the GM. Remember the GM is God and can arrange nasty things, although the good ones won’t. One night, when he’d gotten a little sick of the attack-everything-in-sight school, our GM got particularly evil. He set up a Cthulu scenario where we started out as puppies and worked our way down to baby guppies before our sponsor stepped in. If you can picture a flock of parrots trying desperately to dial a telephone, you get the picture. He was also disappointed with our reaction when we told us baby guppies that Mama guppy appeared. Not one of us swam to her for help. Even the dumbest of us knew that mama guppies eat their young.
Getting on the GM’s good side only helps to a certain extent. At the time the event with the Deep One and the bang happened, the GM was my closest friend and, he told me later, in love with me. Still, he showed no mercy, nor did he during the rape incident. That is the mark of a good GM with a professional attitude.
A good GM does make the game. I was lucky. I played in a group by a man who was bright, original, and creative, as were most of the players in the group. He made up a lot of the scenarios we ran, including the Abyss take off and the puppies to guppies one and they were all a lot of fun, although memory might have taken the edges off.
Most imporant?
(to quote The Princess Bride (also overheard at Pennsic).
CJ
Aww, I’ll always miss my kazoo-playing halfling bard, “Testecles”…
Never follow someone wearing full plate mail up a flight of stairs, he WILL slip at the top and land on you. Over and over again. All the way back down the stairwell. Ow.
Don’t roll 2d10 at the same time when doing a percentage, you’re not fooling anyone.
When the GM starts to ask you to make a saving throw every round, go ahead and make up a new character.
DON’T bring any Rick Wakeman recordings to the session.
More than one Chaotic Neutral party member is a bad idea.
All of these lessions I learned on the same day.
I got better 
Last night some of my D&D-obsessed friends helped me work out stats and skills and vital info for my character. I managed to roll some pretty good numbers (highest was 18, lowest was 11), and though I’ll be fighting with my fists, my friends helped me pick out the best skills and items. Picture a 3 foot 10 female tackling an orc, knocking him down, then pummeling him. NOW we’re talking! Gosh, this is going to be fun!
Also, while I don’t know the GM very well, he seems very nice (at least socially - I’m aware that even the most sweet and innocent of people can be vicious and cruel… I am proof of this.). I know the other players too, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be the only female in the group. Just to be on the safe side, my character took a vow of celibacy, and she can deal a lot of damage with her bare fists if anyone decides to challenge that.
Bwuhahahaha!!! I’ve managed to corrupt her even further!!!
***Bwuhahahaha!!! ***
Actually, if you want to score more social points with these guys, our mutual friend up in Maine has written and sold modules for some RPG’s, including an old one called Traveller. I’ve actually got a couple he wrote which my brother played.
CJ
Oooh, cool! That would score me major points with the club… Hmmm, I should buy some of them , go to Maine and get them autographed, then flaunt them during one of the meetings until my obsessive friends offer me their mortal souls in exchange for… ahem sorry, I was thinking evil thoughts again. wicked grin
How else do you roll percentile?
I should have been more clear. I meant rolling two identical ten sided dice, marked 1-10, and then picking the more favorable result. “No, that’s not a 19, it’s a 91!”
Not possible if you have one marked by tens.
I think what he means is rolling two d10s and only deciding afterwards which is tens and which is ones.
Argh, 0 through 9, I mean.
Damn, a nice simulpost spoiled by my having to correct myself.
Do they still make d100s? Darn things would NEVER stop rolling.