Getting to Play My First D&D Character Again

There's a D&D game my best friend runs at our apartment for co-workers, meaning that usually I can't play with them (the party is often seven or eight people, so I think it's totally reasonable to ask me to sit out - I get to play in other games, and DM one of my own.) However, when attendance is low (the party is massive but they never have everyone there) I've been able to sit in.

Tonight, I took my Great Old One warlock out and got to play him again for the first time in a good long while.

Conrad was the first character I rolled to play (I started as a DM, and it was years before I got to play a PC other than a single-session DMPC in Conrad's earlier incarnation as Alfred) and it just so happens he exists in the same world as this game, so it wasn't that difficult for there to be a crossover.

Anyway, while I've been able to play my Eldritch Knight a lot more recently, I really missed the warlock.

I think that if Warlocks got maybe one or two more spell slots, capping at, say, 6 (which would admittedly be pretty crazy when those slots are all 5th level) I'd have no problems with the class. The only real downside with them is that spell slots are so precious that you don't want to use them outside of combat.

Typically, I've used Hex and Armor of Agathys, though as our fight tonight allowed me to hang out by a window above the alley in which we were fighting a swashbuckler sent to kill the party's druid, I forwent the defensive spell and finally got to cast something I've had since level 1: dissonant whispers.

For each of his spells, I have a kind of casting animation I describe (at least the first time I use it in combat) and it was great to be able to use the one for dissonant whispers. The character's patron is either an extradimensional tower that is constantly falling apart but never actually completing its collapse or it's some entity that lives inside that tower (Great Old Ones, to my mind, should always be mysterious and sort of incomprehensible) and so my verbal component has him whisper out loud "The Tower stands, the Tower Falls" while using Awakened Mind (the GOO warlock's telepathic ability) to say "The Tower Falls, the Tower Stands," essentially creating such intense cognitive dissonance that the target suffers psychic damage (the spell actually describes the effect as a high-pitched tone, but dude: it's called whispers. Let's make it literally whispers that encapsulate a dissonant idea.)

Anyway, what's fun is that the character is actually a really good guy who plays things very close to the vest and is, well, weird. I managed to weird out the rest of the party in various ways that kept them guessing, and finally someone rolled a natural 20 on an insight check and got the following (accurate) description from the DM: "Yeah, you get the sense that he's a perfectly well-meaning guy, but he seems extremely disoriented."

One of the aspects of his story - that actually makes it very easy for him to drop into other campaigns like tonight - is that he experiences lost time. When I first started playing the character, his recent backstory was that he just kind of came to consciousness in a carriage that stopped in a small town where a room in the local inn had been rented in his name, so he decided to stay there until he figured out what the hell was going on (the other party members were tasked with looking in on the inn's "strange lodger" and that was how I got introduced to the party.)

I love my Eldritch Knight fighter, especially as he embodies the Battlemage concept I've wanted for over a decade, but I do have a very soft spot for my very friendly and kind, but ultimately batshit crazy warlock.