If You Build It They Will Play: A Simple Start

A few months back I put our Tuesday Deadlands game on pause and started a Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition game with mostly the same players.

I chose 5E because two of my players hadn't really had much of a chance to try it, DnD Beyond is a HUGE time saver, and if I'd run B/X or ADnD I'd have used a fair number of house rules to make it somewhat closer to 5E.

I decided having a good introductory adventure to get things moving worked really well with Deadlands so I looked for something similar for 5E. With DL I used a sandbox setting but I feel more comfortable with DnD fantasy so something simple would just fine. We were starting at Level 3 and I chose the 4th Level adventure A Deep and Creeping Darkness from Candlekeep Mysteries because two of my players had play tested the 3rd Level adventure before. 

Without going into too many details the adventure gave me two locations the town of Maerin and the abandoned village of Vermeillon. Additionally, I know that I will be dealing with the Feywild and the Far Realm. I cut the part about Candlekeep and have the Players being hired by an older woman who is looking to return her Mother's ring to enhance the dowry of her great-grandaughter.

I'm going to take a step back and share that some goals this campaign: I want this campaign to be 99% player drive and since I have some very active players they make this easy for me to accomplish.; I'm not looking to make the Big Damn Heroes who have to save the world; the rules are far less important than fun -- again, my players have all kinds of ideas if sounds good why not do it? For example: our wizard had an idea to distract an enemy and while he knew Color Spray he didn't have it prepared, so I let him make an Arcana check and since he succeeded he was able to cast it. I think there should be some extra incentives for utility spells that might get overlooked and I've enhanced this process by giving him a magic item with several utility spells he can cast once per day.

We are couple sessions into this campaign and I've been sketching out the setting as the Craglands. There is something sinister trying to turn a nature portal into the Feywild into a hole to the Far Realms and they have met someone from 50 years in the future of Vermeillon whose exposure to the aberrant energies of the Far Realm have twisted him physically and impaired him mentally and there has been some concern about Hill Giants making deep forays from their mountain strongholds.

More soon.

2021: The Year in Review

2021 was better than 2020 overall but once we hit October it sure has flown by. My family has been blessed and we have shelter, food, creature comforts, and are in good financial shape. I'm very thankful for all of that.

I was able to play online with two friends that I don't get to see very often but my crazy schedule kept us playing roughly once a month and I kept changing the game which included CEPHEUS engine, 5E, a Western RPG game based on Dungeon Crawl Classics, and a Star Wars game using a RuneQuest 6/Mythras hack.

I played in a DnD 5E Descent to Avernus game which was really great and after my Sun Cleric died in the first session I managed to keep my Divine Soul Sorcerer, Clete, alive through the rest of the game. It was an amazing game and I am lucky to have a group with multiple talented Game Masters.

I've been running a playtest of Shadows of the Weird Wizard and we are enjoying that, although Numenera has been calling to me with its siren song.

I find that I am more interested in testing mechanics than running a campaign and I'm really trying to fix that, to move on from it. Its always been a problem and I'm sure it is connected to my Anxiety, I think my previous medication helped with it a great deal more than my current one. I'm trying to figure out how to work on it because the moment I choose a game to run, which is harder than it should be, I immediately start noticing other games I'd like to try out and instead of focusing on the campaign I keep brainstorming ways to change to another system for the campaign. Its stressful and I'm just trying to look at the problem and work on it. Our group is taking a break at Christmas and New Year's so I'm hoping to use that time to just push through it.

I did run "one-shots" of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Hyperborea (2nd edition). I thoroughly enjoyed the adventures Death, Frost, Doom for LotFP and Rats in the Walls for Hyperborea.

In the last several years I've used modules almost exclusively and its something else I'm looking at. Until 5E I always ran adventures of my own design and I'm trying to get back to that. 

As a GM I find myself looking at fights differently than I used too and I think its mostly because of modern DnD and its "adventuring day". Since 5E is designed for multiple encounters and certain classes have a mix of short rests vs long rests I've found myself getting frustrated with X number of fights per day. I might be a fossil but I prefer meaningful fights with real stakes against Big Bads but I don't know if I can make that work with the 5E math, especially when I'm designing encounters to just drain resources. I think this is one of the reasons I daydream about running an OSR game because, in my head,  D&D editions before 3.X didn't have this requirement. Understand, this could just be me thinking the grass is greener the other side  of editions prior to 3.X

We will see what next year brings.

Dungeon Mastering 101: The Eureka Moment

This week we went back to DnD 5th Edition from Deadlands. As much as I enjoyed Savage Worlds, it wasn't as fast or fun as I had hoped.

I've been struggling with focus and inspiration for the last few months and I've been analyzing what I've been doing and what I'd like to improve.

One thing I did prior to this past session was spend more time on prep and focused less on detailing the rooms as the players entered them. When running a campaign the size of Dungeon of the Mad Mage I found myself spending more time reading the room to the players and acting as a narrator than a DM. That's on me and I think the added prep time helped me overcome that. 

My eureka moment came while simply observing the players decide how best to sneak past two sleeping chimeras to get to their treasture: I'd been spending most of the last few months focusing on combats and less time on exploration and role-playing. I sat back and watched my players enjoy flexing their role-playing muscles and took notes on what they wanted to accomplish for future plots and less time thinking about the current scene as an "encounter".

I'm not sure how I became so fixated on combat, but it happened. Which is fine, every DM, session, and group is different. But for me, right now, I need to react to the players goals and less on the action of the fight.

We happened to have an entire session without combat. I'm not saying combat is bad and should be avoided, but in my current process, it was just what I needed. I found it to be a good session and energized me going forward, something that hadn't been happening lately.

Dungeon Mastering 101: Laughter is the Best Medicine

As a gamer and as a DM, I've gone through several distinct phases as a role player. The phase I'm in now is all about everyone at the table having fun, rolling dice, and zero drama.

To that end, laughter, for me as a DM, is the confirmation that things are going well.

That's not to say that we don't have tense moments in the game or that danger and death aren't real consequences in the story. It just means that, in the end, we're all taking a night away from our commitments to hang out and have fun for 2-3 hours. And if we can laugh, truly, heartily laugh, then I think we are doing things right for us.

Understand, I don't think there is any right way to play DnD. I know what I seek as a DM and what I feel like the players at my table share those goals.

One of the things we always go over at the beginning of the session is how are weeks have gone. What I've come to enjoy about these moments is that, for all of us, our session is a haven from the challenges the week brings. That makes me feel like we've built something special. Something that adds to our lives, which isn't something gaming has always done for me.

Dungeon Mastering 101: Staying On Track

I have been a DM for close to 26 years (damn, I'm old) and for most of that time I've run my own adventures. It's only been in the last four years that I've been using published adventures.

What I'm going to talk about in this article is keeping the game moving. I'm going to be honest here, my players have reached level 8 in my Shadow of the Demon Lord game and I'm really having trouble doing that. It's not that I don't have any ideas, its that the ideas I have aren't always clicking for me, I'll go into a session with a roadmap, but I don't feel comfortable with it. This campaign is a bit different, because as a group we decided we wanted a break from world or multiverse-shattering threats. This is a more personal tale, about a village and it's inhabitants. I'm not sure if that is what is causing me problems or not.

I'm a very improvisation GM and I've been lucky that weird and strange turns within a game have often worked out later as said game evolves. Sadly, over the last month or two, that's not really been the case. I'm filled with uncertainty on how to proceed, in fact, endgame scenarios and even antagonists have been shifting as the game unfolds. I'm uncertain what's going on, I can't tell if I'm grown accustomed to running published adventures and that is why I'm floundering or if maybe it's a bit of burnout. 

I do know one issue is a consequence that I'm uncertain to introduce. Have you ever had a situation in-game that you are afraid to introduce? That, I think, is part of my problem. I want this to be a character-driven game, and my gut tells me to beat these character up pretty bad, but is that always the right direction? 

I'm curious if I'm alone in this struggle? Any advice or tips on how to pull through it?

Dungeon Mastering 101: Good Ideas Should Be Carried Over

I've been running DnD 5E for about 7 years now (when you count the playtest) and one of the ideas it brought to my attention was using average damage for antagonists. It's less math at the table, less time, it's just cool.

However, when I run other games, I don't import this idea. Why not? It's serviceable, I enjoy it, it's a win-win. I'm sure other DMs are smarter than me and have already thought about this and did it, but it was a EUREKA moment for me this morning.

Currently, I'm running Shadow of the Demon Lord, another game I love, and as I was going over last night's combat, I started wandering why I wasn't using average damage? In many ways it's even easer than DnD, because you generally don't add anything to damage in SotDL. 

Then it occurred to me, that the only reason I don't is because the rulebook didn't spell it out. That's sad. I've been a DM for over three decades and I shouldn't need that spelled out.

If you happen to be like me and enjoy a rule from a game your currently running, go ahead and try importing it. I give you and myself permission to do so.