I recently started a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. We had our session 0 three weeks ago, session 1 a single week again, and unfortunately had to skip the session 2 we’d planned for just a couple days ago. This is my current Sunday group, which consists of three regular players, one occasional (perhaps only Honey Heist) player, and one enigma who may never show up or may begin attending regularly. Whatever their heart demands, I guess. Still, it’s a solid group of players and they all made really fun characters for our 2-4 session introductory D&D campaign. The idea is that we’ll do this short campaign as a way to do a bit of world development (I get to have their characters as NPCs once we’re done) and to get everyone a bit more comfortable with each other. After this is done, we’ll be moving on to testing out Blades in the Dark for a similar amount of time, and then move from there to other games (the specific order is TBD). Once we’ve given most of them a try, we’ll wrap back around and decide what we want to play longer-term.

Even though I’m super excited to try any of the new games, I’m also super excited to tell this story we’ve begun with these characters. I’ve got so many fun ideas and a lot of interesting tools to use around a standard D&D campaign that can flesh the world out in interesting ways. I’m also super interested to pick up the story from after where we’ll leave it, after some additional time has passed, of course, since my players all made such interesting, nuanced, and deep characters. Even though we’re starting such a limited-run game, they still went all-out. They’re all so devoted to playing deeply and broadly. Honestly, even if we never played another game despite my fervent desire to play things other than D&D, I think I could be happy.

Which, you know, is the point of setting up things as I have. I’m a player at this table, too, and I need to have fun. The game won’t last very long if I don’t make sure I’m enjoying myself, as I’ve learned from experience in my early days as a GM. New and different can be exciting, and telling stories in new ways is always fun for me, but I recognize that not everyone has my desire to play these games. After all, I found most of them by listening to Friend at the Table, so I am super excited to try out the cool games my favorite tabletop gaming podcast has played, but I understand that’s a “me.” thing. I think my players will come around as well, but I understand their hesitance to commit to more than merely trying things out.

I don’t know if this group will go the distance, either. We’re still relatively new and I’d love to have a fifth regular participant if I can find one, but we’re already running into scheduling issues with just the four of us and I doubt adding anyone else into the mix will improve things. Plus, I’m very protective of my group dynamics and I don’t want to just toss any old person into this group. They’d need to get along with the collective mix of powerbuilding, heavy roleplaying, and embracing of chaos that exists within each us. That’s one of the reasons I think this group is going to do well together, beyond just our amazing first experience as a group playing Honey Heist. We’re all more or less on the same page and, though we may be a bit reserved or shy around new people, we all recognize kindred spirits. I am not worried about this core four of us exploding now that we’ve got some experience under our belt. If anything brings us down, it will be scheduling and the stressful lives of individual players.

I really want to write more about the fun we had playing D&D (they’re legendary heroes at the head of a rebellion against a cruel, malicious king who has holed himself up in his castle behind his army), but I have to wait a bit. At least one of my players in this group sometimes reads this blog and I don’t want to reveal anything. I don’t even want to talk about why because my players are very clever. I keep deleting sentences that talk around things, so I think this is probably a good place to end this post. I’m excited, everything seems super fun, and I can’t wait to keep playing games with them, no matter what game we eventually land on.