After over a year, I finally ran a session of Dungeons and Dragons 5e again. Two, actually, in quick succession (which in this case means one on Sunday and one on Monday). It was like settling back into an old, familiar chair that, despite feeling exactly the way you remember it, is sitting in a room that only looks like the place it used to be. It was familiar and everything worked exactly how I thought it would, but everything also felt a little off. Like there was some detail that I was missing that would explain why the desk was slightly further from the chair than I thought and that the sunlight was in my eyes more than it used to be. Which can pretty much be chalked up to that year being my longest break from running some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game since I started playing it in 2010, coupled with my still-settling feelings about returning to a game that has as troubled a history as D&D does thanks to the shit Hasbro has tried to pull as the owners of Wizards of the Coast. Still, I was able to work through those feelings and, despite the frenetic pace of my prep during the forty-eight hours prior to the first of the aforementioned games and the twelve hours prior to the second of said games, run what felt like a pair of good sessions.

The first of these, and my focus for today’s post, was the beginning of the “slice-of-life but with some fantasy-style tensions” game that I’m calling “The Magical Millennium.” We met our heroes on their first day of a new school year, met some foil-type NPCs that may or may not become important, were introduced to the school as a whole, met a couple teachers, learned a bit about how the game is going to work as we play through a bunch of high school students progressing through their teens, and went to everyone’s first class. It was a busy first session with plenty of asides to get some one-on-one time with our characters during their first periods/First Year assembly and plenty of pauses to talk through rules, the world at large, and what our characters know about the world. It went right up to the end of our four-hour time period and could have easily gone over if one of the players didn’t have a hard out that I was trying to wrap things up by. I’d originally planned to just roll initiative and then start the next session with the little VR battle I’d built (featuring a made up creature called a “Gritlin” that was a 3-foot tall version of the Sports Mascot Gritty, the first of many similar creatures the party will fight so they can have something to just kill without a moral quandary in this fantasy game), but they convinced me to do one round of combat and then absolutely destroyed their enemies in the first round (partially motivated to do so by their visceral reaction to six squat Gritty images on the map), so I let them wrap up the fight in the last couple minutes of the session. It was a pretty great moment where everyone got to do something pretty bad-ass. Sure, not everyone got a kill, but everyone’s attacks hit and everyone got to show off what they could do in a fight.

Unfortunately for all of them, that was period two (their first class of the day on this odd first week of school) of an eight-period day. They’ve all used up some limited resources and there’s plenty of events left to go before they can get to a long rest. This is a game about being high school students, after all, so I’ve got plenty planned for their set of classes. I haven’t named all the classes yet since I planned to do that last week and got completely side-tracked for three and a half days, but I’ve got at least a rough idea of what they’ll all be doing during their once-a-week set of Magical Ability (which is what the game’s world calls the set of abilities a character in D&D 5e gets from their character class and subclass) classes. The other four days of their week will be fairly mundane stuff, consisting of the normal things most high schoolers learn based on the classes they’ve chosen, so I’ll probably wind up covering those days of school in broad strokes. This game would take forever if we played every single day of their high school careers with the level of granularity and specificity that I’m planning to give to their magical classes.

There’s still a lot of worldbuilding to do, of course, in addition to the in-session game time. I’ve had a few interesting problems to tackle in this game that don’t typically come up when playing Dungeons and Dragons, but I’ve gotten most of the important or trickier ones solved already. First and foremost is the “Magical Ability” term from above. Since we were going to be talking about high school classes and going to class and all that a bunch, I spent some times coming up with a way this magically modern world would talk about what we call “Character Classes” in D&D. Since one piece of worldbuilding we’d picked during our Session 0 was that everyone’s Character Class powers are fueled by the magic now present in the world of the game, I decided to call the various Character Classes “Magical Ability Types” (or “MATs” for short) since that way we could talk about their MATs classes (aka, the classes they take in school that teach them to control and use their abilities) without having to double up on the word “class” all the time. I’ve removed most in-game and meta references to Character Class, too, using some form of the “Magical Ability ________” terminology so that we can avoid any similar confusion. That was probably the easiest problem to solve once I spent some time thinking through it, since all I needed was a set of terms that I could apply broadly.

Far trickier was coming up with a method to handle non-violent encounters within the school. While the students can, and probably will, duke it out physically with their fellow students (whose MAT classes are sorted into different rankings based on the power of each student’s Magical Abilities (aka their Character Level)) since the prohibition against using their powers against someone is only present on the main school grounds, I wanted methods for resolving the other types of conflicts that emerge in a high school. It took a while, but thanks to a bit of research and some inspiration from a post I saw on Cohost (which suggested a hack to D&D 5e that used 2d10 instead of 1d20 for the game’s standard rolls), I was able to come up with systems to handle social encounters (such as arguments in the cafeteria that won’t ever escalate to violence but still result in real hurt and changes in social status within the school) and academic encounters (which will maybe impact the characters’ progression through their various years of school, academic classes, and even their MAT classes). I’m incredibly excited to use those systems eventually and, once we’ve playtested them enough that I’m satisfied with their rules, I’ll post about them here.

We’re still very much in the early stages of this game and it’ll be slow-going to get out of them since we play every-other-week, but I’m still optimistic that this group can go the distance. Everyone seemed like they were having fun and we, so far, seem to all be on the same page in regards to what we want and what level of roleplaying we’re doing. It is impossible to predict how things will go in the future, but I genuinely don’t think I’ve had a more solid start to a tabletop game than this one. Everyone was comfortable, everyone knew what they wanted, everyone was ready to play in the space (both their individual spaces and the group space), and everyone has plenty of personal drama stacked and ready in their character’s background. Hell, I only had to make up a few foil NPCs for the party since most of them came with someone in mind or with suggestions for what they’re looking for. So much so that I’m actually looking into making a rival party of NPCs for the main group to play off as they both go through school. Everyone loves a rival and I’m excited to see if this rivalry develops into mutual respect and friendship or catty disdain and enmity. I’m happy with whatever the result may be and I’m just excited to see what they do.