Bumping our record to three out of three scheduled Dungeons & Dragons sessions for the first time in years, my group playing The Leeching Wastes met for our third session following the revival of the campaign. Last time, I revealed that their characters were caught in a time loop situation and that there was something going on with the moon thanks to a (relatively) young god performing her first miracle, finally living out my dream of bringing Majora’s Mask to my D&D table. This time, the party reviewed their plans, ran through a short scene that turned into a long scene (which is my favorite way that a short scene can go) between two characters, decided to wait until they could start fresh with a new loop, and one of them even turned into a weretiger. We also talked through the mechanics of the time loop and how they weren’t designed to be punishing since they’re only third level character, talked about how the checkpoints worked in case they needed to try again, and then they absolutely aced it on their first full attempt to get through, all without using the skills of the NPC I’d created to fill in some of the somewhat alarming gaps in the party’s abilities (suffice it to say that there are no terribly cerebral characters in the group). They just strolled right through it, arrived at the boss fight, and even learned a little bit about everyone’s favorite cute, little NPC that they were guiding to a central point in The Grove so she could perform a druidic ritual to help The Grove’s balance be restored. A good, fulfilling session where everyone got to have a good character moment or two, where everyone got to show off their stuff in combat, and where the paladin obliterated half of the two-monster boss fight in a single critical hit thanks to some hefty damage rolls and a damage type vulnerability. Good times, all around.

Now, as I wrote in my last post about this campaign (linked above), the introduction of the time loop was not popular with one of the players. The other two took it in stride and seemed interested to push their characters through it, but I was correct to read one of them as upset about what they felt was wasted time. Now, I’m not super interested in wasting people’s time or making my players repeat challenges over and over again. I’m interested in the story we’re telling and the ways I can get the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons to serve the story, further the story, or even provide some amount of commentary on the story–such as the way that a lot of character builds in my The Magical Millennium campaign are built for combat despite the game being largely about school life and the way that this feels like an oversight from a player perspective being a stand-in for how people with those abilities feel living in a normal-adjacent society. In The Leeching Wastes, I had no intention of making my players repeat all the skill challenges from one time loop to the next. One they’d succeeded, either by simply rolling well enough, expending resources to automatically pass, or expending resources that made it essentially impossible to fail (since they’re level three characters, the targets they were rolling for weren’t super high), I’d let them automatically move the game forward to that point unless they specifically wanted to try something different on a new pass, so long as they agreed to expend those resources again. I even started to say as much at the end of the last session, but we were in the middle of wrapping up for the night (mostly because I was exhausted at that point and didn’t have it in me to work through all the logistics of the next loop when I could tell one of the players was frustrated with the loop) so I didn’t really press the point home.

What I’m taking away from this is that, with this group especially, I need to be more explicit about the mechanics of stuff like this. And maybe that I need to be more cognizant of how I’m ending a session. While I don’t need to completely avoid them, I should probably be more judicious in my application of end-of-session teasers. Which will be difficult to do since I love it when I get a chance to slip one in and this incredible Character-Drama-filled game is just rife with opportunities for it in a way no other game I’ve run ever has been. Wrapping the game up with a vague note following a bad role or a portentous revelation is just so delightful. Yes, I’m entering my Machiavellian villain era, but it’s just so much fun to be a mustache-twirling, cackling, hand-rubbing Game Master ending each session just as my players are reacting to some little tidbit of information I’ve let slip. Plus, it’s pretty fitting given the scale of the problems the party is facing and the absolute sociopath that they’re going to need to deal with at some point. That guy, Martok, is so much fun to play since I get to absolutely cut loose with clever wording, cunning inference, and honesty without a lick of truth in it. All of the assholery I do my best to avoid in real life due to my love of words and wordplay can come out in this character and I don’t even have to worry about accidentally coming off as an asshole because this guy actually is one! He’s supposed to be awful! It will be a little bit before he comes up again, now that the party has moved outside of even his indirect spheres of influence, but I’ll be able to keep myself sharp with some attentive wording as the narrator and more discrimination use of cliffhangers.

The only odd part of this section of the campaign is just how many of the larger plot points and ideas I’d banked for later suddenly moved forward in line. Some of them are stuff that came up through the game of The Ground Itself that our group played in 2022, before the campaign paused for a year and a quarter, but some of them are things that I’ve been thinking about since I built the characters. Things so old and indelibly planted in the background that I was worried the players would have forgotten them after all this time. Thankfully, one of the players brought one forward and even improvised a few details that perfectly fit in with something else I’d had in mind to do already, to advance a slow-burn character plot that used to be a much more active thing until another one got pushed to the foreground. I’m incredibly excited to see it play out and find out what happens next in our upcoming session–in six days from when you’re reading this but thirteen for me as I’m writing it. Which is an excruciatingly long time, especially given that half my games between now and then have already been canceled due to missing players.

Anyway, I know I was incredibly vague about the plot details in the last paragraph, but I learned at the outset of the last session that my players actually read these blog posts as reminders about what happened in the last session, so I can’t get too specific about future stuff. Or even present stuff, since a lot of that is still up in the air, such as what the party will find when they enter into the cavern in the center of the tree they’re trying to save or why one of the players had to roll a saving throw as their character entered into the tree. Those ones, at least, will probably have advanced enough to talk about in my next post about The Leeching Wastes, but at least some of the things I’ve very excited to see play out (and therefore really want to write about) will take a while longer to bear fruit, if they ever do. After all, there’s no telling how long a game will continue. I hope we’ll get to it all, though. All my players made such interesting characters and I’d love to see them all go through their arcs. Develop and come out the other side or tragically burn out. This IS a heroic tragedy game, after all. Lots of heroism, but all of their efforts might come to nothing. Or maybe they’ll actually win out in the end. That’s why we’re playing with dice, after all. To see what happens rather than decide ourselves.