This past Sunday, we held our second session of the Dungeons & Dragons game I’ve titled The Magical Millennium. This is the modern fantasy D&D game I’ve mentioned previously, featuring high school students in a bit of a genre mash-up I’ve taken to describing as “slice-of-life but with fantasy tensions,” and so far our first two 3+ hour sessions have involved going through the first four periods of the first day of school in a new year. Last time, we covered character introductions, a few notable NPCs, terminology they’d all need to know, and establishing some of the background drama the second-year students were coming into the game with. It was a lot of fun, especially as it ended with a Illusory/virtual reality fight the players absolutely dominated. This time, since the fight I’d planned to start with had been unceremoniously ended by a hefty expenditure of limited resources, we focused on what the students did with the latter half of their homeroom period, a bit of background on how magic works in the world, their class schedules, and how classes were going to be formatted through their days. Also when they had lunch period, which wound up being the battleground for our first social encounter when a bit of incredibly forward flirting was misinterpreted by an NPC. We got to go all-in on new systems and high school drama, which felt like a lot of fun to me, even if we only made it through another two and a half periods of their eight-period day.

Getting into the social encounter felt a little weirder than I’d like, and only partly because I immediately found a couple gaps in my rules. As it turns out, most social interactions don’t necessarily have sides as clearly as a lot of violent encounters will, and the malleable nature of relationships and intentions means that a (social) fight might start between two characters but actually end between two others. Plus, there’s a difficult line to draw in why things damage a character’s social Hit Points and how they do so, since attempting to de-escalate a tense situation is just as effective a method of resolving a conflict as sending someone away in tears due to your hurtful words. Plus, there’s plenty of situations where the thing you’re saying could hurt multiple people or where the things you’re saying could be more focused on defending yourself than about attacking the other person. I think the bones of the system I came up with are good, but I really need to figure out some heavier rules since I didn’t have enough laid out beforehand for everyone to be prepared for how I was calling the shots and adjudicating the back-and-forth of the social battle. Plus, I might need altered rules for situations in front of a crowd and in private, since the outcomes can be vastly different. After all, if you lose an argument in front of a cafeteria full of high school students, that’s going to alter how your relationship with the winner changes versus if that same argument had happened in private, all without mentioning how winning or losing might impact your social standing in the eyes of your uninvolved peers. I think I understand the dynamics enough to continue calling the shots as they come up, but I’d really like to get something down on paper so my players are more prepared for this stuff when it comes up.

I also ran into the difficulty that I’ve been dreading this entire time: all the NPCs. I think I’m pretty good at producing names if I’ve got enough time to work through some ideas, but I’m just not great at coming up with them on the spot. I’ve prepared name documents in the past to help myself prepare for moments like this, but most of them don’t work for a modern fantasy setting that’s supposed to basically be our world but what if elves and orcs and whatnot were real the whole time and magic just reentered the world at the turn of the millennium to everyone’s surprise. I spent all of my preparation time before the first session just working out the necessary worldbuilding and local structures to make sure I could get a session run without massive problems and then lost most of my preparation time after that to the whole Automattic (WordPress’ owner) debacle, so I haven’t had the time or energy to start writing up more names. I managed to pull out enough that would fit to make it through the session, but it was difficult at times since they were just names and no characteristics. I’ve since gone back and filled in the gaps a bit more, come up with my minimum number of names for the part of the school we’ll be focusing on the most, but there’s still plenty more work to do so that the school can be staffed, all the player-adjacent NPCs can have necessary names, and I can have a stable of names to pull from for spur-of-the-moment characters that spring up to fill in gaps in my worldbuilding as my players roam far and wide.

We’ve still got half the school day to go, including another lunch period and then a full afternoon of much more specialized and specific classes, but I’m hopeful that this next session will at least get us to the end of our school day. Everyone’s having a great time roleplaying and I’m content to, for the most part, let my players spin up a story between themselves and the NPCs, but I do want to start moving on to the actual fantasy tension of the campaign. However much there winds up being, anyway. I am fully prepared to run a fairly normal school experience for my players with them advancing slowly as they complete classes and take tests, but I think they all want a bit more out of the game than that alone. Only time will tell how much more they want out of it, but I’m prepared for whatever way things wind up going. After all, I’m here to put things in front of them and wait to see how they react. I don’t have a plot line I’m currently workshopping. I don’t have goals to reach or statements I’m trying to make. I just have some vague ideas for how NPCs might develop in the future based on what happens in the world and a whole lot of silly little systems and jokes to pad things out until my players indicate what they’re looking for. That’s all I need to have a good time.