Re: Orphanage OOC
My first dwarf cleric was also my first cleric, period. And it was a disaster. I refrained from entering combat with a bunch of troglodytes, because I was afraid of their stench, and in the battle cast a shout spell that caught my allies in it. After the battle, I realized that he had a terrific Fortitude save, and the battle would have gone a lot better if he had joined in.
A little while later, we got in a fight with a minotaur, and I used earth shape to raise a wall of earth three feet high, which was useless, and then I used sanctuary to get within the minotaur's reach and attacked, and immediately afterward the minotaur nearly cut my sister (playing a halfling rogue) in two. When I tried to cure her, I got cut down by the AoO, and my other sister, a human monk, was left all alone to finish off the minotaur, which she valiantly stayed and did, instead of fleeing as would be sensible. And THEN I told her OOC to try untrained Heal checks on me first, so that I would be able to heal the rogue, forgetting that I would only be stabilised, not regain conciousness.
The whole adventure got scrapped because of the mistakes I made in that minotaur battle, as we brought the rogue back to the surface to be reincarnated (into a lizardfolk.) I'm sure you can do it better, though; that was my first spellcasting character ever. I'm better now. Unless you count that time my low-Wisdom wizard mistook the word "griffon" to mean the dog.