Just because I’m a big bad dungeon master now, this was not always the case. It wasn’t that long ago that I was playing my first real campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. It was during that campaign I made a terrible mistake that I will never live down.
In the story was something about a king and somehow my character ended up with a crown. It magically poisoned you if you put it on (my fellow adventurer found out,) so I never put it on, but my character didn’t realize this crown was actually important. He wanted to a new sword way more than he wanted to keep the crown. So when nobody else was around, he went to shopkeep and tried to sell it.
The shopkeep knew exactly what it was, took the crown, threw a shiny blue sword at me, and immediately left through a trap door never to be seen again. I lost the King’s crown – which was basically the key objective we had – and I got a sword with +1d6 frost damage the glowed a bright blue. I was also dumb enough to think this was awesome.
Now everytime I make a suggestion people say things like, “yeah! That’s cool, like that shiny blue sword!” Last night my best friend was helping me test out a possible bug on Simplenote, and he immediately used as his text “Alex is a stupid person who trades the king’s crown for a shiny blue sword.”
We all make mistakes. With good friends you’ll never forget them either!
Alex Gustafson 