#3 - Raiffe - Born 16 December 1999 - 30 days, 12 hours

For my first-ever session of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, sometime on a Sunday afternoon in the early 1980s, I rolled upan elven Ranger and named him Raif. A decade and a half later that character was reborn in EverQuest as a female, half-elven Ranger called Raiffe. 

I think I tried for the original spelling and gender but the name was already taken so I feminized both. Once again, I was naively unaware of the implications.

Ranger was on the list of possible solo classes suggested by the guide I mentioned last time, the rationale being that a Ranger could fear-kite. Let's unpack that a little.

In the early days of EQ, kiting, like just about everything a player could do, was controversial. The game was a positive minefield of social faux pas, some of them so ridiculous it seems hardly possible anyone could have cared. I'm not making it up when I say you could get on the wrong side of someone by casting a beneficial buff on them without asking first. I know because for a while I was one of the people likely to send you a tell complaining about it if you tried.

"Kiting", a term once common across many MMORPGs but which has now somewhat fallen out of fashion, meant tagging a mob and having it chase you while you ran away. Depending on the specific abilities of your class, you might cast damage over time spells on it and let them gradually eat at away at its health or you could nuke it and blast chunks off it a piece at a time. 

If you were a melee class you could theoretically fire arrows at it but archery was in a poor state in the the early years so it wasn't advisable. You could even sing songs at it if you were a bard, the class that claimed to be the Kings and Queens of kiting, much to the annoyance of Wizards, Druids and Necromancers although probably not Rangers, most of whom must have known they wern't even in contention.

To kite effectively, you needed to keep ahead of the creature as it tried to catch you and kill you so you'd either need to be able to make yourself run faster or make the mob run slower or, preferably, both. All of this was considered to be cowardly or antisocial by just about everyone playing a class that couldn't do it. People would report you for it if they could find an excuse. Later, kiting became just one more unremarkable, entirely legitimate tactic but for a while it was deeply unpopular with many. 

Fear-kiting was always slightly more acceptable. Instead of running away like a frightened baby, you scared the mob and it ran away from you. Much more adventurous! Then you ran along behind it, dotting it, basting it, poking it in the backside with a sharp object, slashing at it with a sword or shooting it with arrows as you saw fit.

Occasionally the mob would break whatever spell you'd cast or the timer would run out and it would turn and get a few licks in before you feared it again, which clearly made the whole enterprise much more noble and respectable. Unless you were a Necromancer, naturally. Then it was just no more than anyone would expect.

Rangers could theoretically do this but only to animals. They got a spell called Panic Animal that did exactly what you'd imagine. They also got Snare, a very effective run-speed reducer, and Spirit of the Wolf, a equally effective run-speed enhancer. Altogether it made for an acceptable fear-kiting kit, provided you could find a flat, open area with nothing much other than animals roaming around in it.

It sounded great on paper. The problem was Rangers back then didn't get spells for quite a while. Nothing at all until level 9, then some more at Level 15, 22, 30, 39 and 49. Snare came early at 9 but you had to wait until 22 for Panic Animal, which in any case only lasted a few seconds. SoW didn't kick in until Level 30.

I did eventually do some fear-kiting as a ranger but it wasn't until Stonebrunt Mountains was added to the game a couple of years later. By then Raiffe was probably in her thirties and I remember chasing after tigers and stabbing them in the rump for a few evenings. It got old fast.

I'm not really sure how she got to the dizzy heights of Level 49. I don't have a lot of memories of grinding levels with her. The one thing I can never forget about Raiffe is the day she fell down the hollow tree stump in Blackburrow. 

That was the day I rage-quit EQ for good. I stayed away for two whole days. Might have been as much as three.

Somewhat ridiculously, since Raiffe must have been all of level 7 at the time and had nothing on her that  couldn't have been replaced in a single session, losing that corpse remains one of the most upsetting moments of my twenty-five years with the game. For one thing, it was a complete shock. I had no idea the stump was a trap, let alone that it led to a subterranean cavernous maze filled with much higher-level mobs.

I survived the fall and tried to find my way back to the surface but being level 7 I was immediately killed by the roaming gnolls, all of whom conned deep red to me. I had no idea how I was going to get my corpse back and in fact I never did. I know I tried asking for help - I think it would have still have been during the time I had most chat channels switched off because they weren't "in character" enough - but I did have /shout on so I would have used that. No-one replied.

I died a couple more times trying to get back down there then finally gave up, swearing I'd never play the stupid game again. I suppose I might have kept that promise if I hadn't had to share the one and only PC in the house with Mrs Bhagpuss, who happily kept on playing. 

Before you ask, she couldn't come help me herself because when I created Raiffe I'd done it on a different server - Brell Serillis - which at the time was the self-elected RP server, not that I ever saw much sign of any role-playing there. Mrs Bhagpuss was still on Prexus, where I'd started.

A couple of evenings watching Mrs Bhagpuss having a great time broke my resolve but when I came back I somehow wasn't feeling the love for playing a Ranger any more, even though it had been going pretty well for me until the fatal fall. 

Once again I decided to re-roll. Something different this time. Playing good characters didn't seem to be working for me. Maybe it was time to switch to the dark side...