Overly Cautious D&D Party Still in Starting Tavern After 10 Sessions

MADISON, Wis. — An overly cautious Dungeons & Dragons party is reportedly still lingering in the Purple Pig Tavern, the location where their campaign began 10 weekly sessions ago, a frustrated source confirmed.

“We ruled out the front door by session three. Could a trap be any more obvious than that?” said Mark Nathansen, rolling a persuasion check to determine if the innkeeper would give his character a discount on weekly room rates. “And the back door is almost certainly a portal to the underdark summoned by the main villain this campaign may or may not have. The cook told us he’d pay us to kill the giant rats in the backyard, but nobody insight checked him! How can we be sure he isn’t a red dragon in disguise? Nice try, but I’m not falling for that one.”

After failing the persuasion check, Nathensen began to inquire whether there were any open positions on the tavern waitstaff.

“I’m at my wit’s end with these fuckers,” said Terri Moss, the Dungeon Master for the campaign which began over 2 months ago. “The investigation checks to search for traps under every chair were cute at first, but after three sessions they were still insight checking the bartender to figure out if the ale was poisoned. Why would I try to poison them in the starting area?”

“At one point during the eighth session, I had an NPC literally offer the party a hundred gold each just to go outside and check the weather,” Moss continued. “Boy, was that a mistake. My players spent the next two hours asking me questions about the gold coin exchange rates in the region before their characters would even respond.”

At press time, the players were arguing amongst themselves about the likelihood they had spent the past ten sessions inside a giant, tavern-shaped mimic.

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