I broke the news to my gaming group last night of my interest in changing characters. I didn't want to; it wasn't my plan. I had intended to wait until we returned to the dwarven stronghold and spring it on them in character. I thought it would be neat that way. Unfortunately, the consensus among the group was that we could do all of our necessary dealings with the dwarves via intermediaries and then go on about our business. So, I had to bring it up.

It's not a bad thing, on the whole. The house rules on rolling stats are vaguely recalled at best, so I wound up getting three points to stick wherever I liked rather than the single point straight swap I was expecting. That let me get my strength into the percentile range (2nd edition D&D) and my dexterity high enough to improve my AC by 1. The bad news is that I'm a point smarter than I wanted to be. The DM might let me sacrifice it.

The only trouble came when I mentioned that I wanted my old character to pass out a few magic items to the others before he left, since he wouldn't be needing them anymore as he is giving up the adventurer's road. The DM balked at first, telling me my magic items had to leave with me, for some cockamamie reason of game balance, which I might have bought into if the items weren't already in the game and having whatever effect they were going to. Once I explained that I was keeping all the weapons and mostly handing out miscellaneous magic, she calmed down.

All of which was entirely for the purpose of getting the belt of storm giant strength onto my new guy. I always thought a cleric walking around with a 24 STR was silly, but we didn't have any straight fighters in the group I could hand it over to. So I made one. I can't help wondering if she'll change her mind once she discovers I'll be able to do 75 points of damage per round by throwing darts. Maybe she'll settle for 60 points with thrown daggers.

I'm sure the five of you who read my blog regularly are fascinated by this anecdote.