One of my favorite parts of my The Magical Millennium campaign is that all of my players are willing to go all-in on roleplaying in a way that I can rarely predict. Sometimes people escalate when I didn’t expect to provoke a response or wind up digging into something I assumed was going to be passed over quickly, and I absolutely love the feeling of needing to scramble in order to continue the scene without breaking stride. This last session, as the party started the Lock-In they’d been planning as they dealt with the local emergency in the background (they all kept their cell phones since the barrier around the Hellmouth broke and while all the parents absolutely agreed that keeping all of their burgeoning adventurer children under close supervision by much more powerful adventurers and trained educators was a great idea, they still wanted to be able to get ahold of them if something else happened. Which means these teens also have access to outside information and that’s definitely never going to come up even a little bit), I got to see my players in fine form.

Sure, we spent an hour dealing with level-up stuff as they’d finally hit level 2 and we had some homebrew stuff to deal with (and one of my players trying to sneak in some D&D 2024 stuff into my D&D 2014 campaign before I’ve had the time or mental wherewithal to read through it), but we still got three hours of excellent roleplaying in after that as we walked through the start of the lock-in, what everyone brought to the lock-in, how the teachers/chaperones were handling the lock-in, and just barely start some arts and crafts before drama broke out in the form of the sibling of one of the player characters doing his level best to discredit his sister’s party despite how easy it would be to prove him wrong. Just absolutely trying to burn the field despite standing in it himself. After that, as the player characters talked through what had happened and the night’s final natural 20 (there were a lot that night, despite rolling relatively few dice) revealed why things were bad between those two siblings, we learned a little more about the second party and called it quits shortly after our scheduled ending time. There was a lot of excited buzz during the post-session wind-down chat and I had to practically pry the group out of the discord call so I could go make dinner, but it was really a great energy to have as we wrapped up the day.

Since I’m never one to be content with a game as-is, I’ve introduce a Raw Potential mechanic into this D&D game. The idea is that, for each level-up, the players get a point they can spend on something like a tool/weapon/armor proficiency, a couple cantrips, a reasonable number of spells to add to their spell list (or smaller number of spells to add to their spells know), or something similar that has more narrative than mechanical power. The idea is that this reflects their character’s raw potential as a student being molded not only by their class (Magic Ability Type, in world, so we don’t run into a “which class do you mean” issue) but by the things they spend their time on. It’s always supposed to be tied to something the characters have been doing a lot or a class they’ve been taking, but I’m willing to make exceptions. The caveat for these points is that they can also be spent to turn any roll into a natural 20, but then you lose whatever ability you’d gained and can never get it back as this extra bit of training or potential you once held is expended in a moment of unlikely luck. All of which means I had to walk my players through what all of this was and what it meant since it has been multiple months since we made their characters and all they remembered is that they get cool extra abilities that they can give up in exchange for a natural 20 when they feel like they need it. It was a bit of a slow process, but that was fine. I wasn’t in a hurry and one of the players was MIA (though I did find out that he was under the weather, which explains his absence. I can count on one finger the number of times that has happened, which means I’m mostly just hoping he’s alright rather than feeling any kind of way about him missing the session), so I didn’t really try to hurry the discussion up any.

After that, as I mentioned, we dove into the roleplaying. We had a lot of fun opportunities to use some skills, talk through what the player characters had experienced with their peers in a way that made it clear that they were working on a different level from most of their peers who’d had much more mundane weeks, and realize that the party has some common enemies other than each other, which meant there was a lot of fun little opportunities for them to feel like they were on the same side for the first time in a while. I’ll admit to deliberately thumbing the scales in order to make that happen (I suggested I’d be doing as much in the post for the last session), but I mostly just introduced some background details and then riffed off the players as they had inter-party discussions about their day. After all, who teenager wouldn’t be curious and excited about the prospect of their classmates being near a disaster as it unfolded? Who wouldn’t want to hear details that hadn’t made their way into the newspapers yet? Who wouldn’t want to hear all about the severed arm that a fellow teen planned to use as a greatsword in the future? Tons of excitement and tons of opportunities for a pissed-off brother, who felt like his life had been ruined by his sister, to step in and sow some doubt about his sister and her friends. After all, if all you care about is making someone hurt, who cares if it comes back to bite you in the future? If all you want is conflict, who cares if you lose?

It was a lot of fun and while I’m sure my players all have a better idea of who this guy is and what this family conflict means for their fellow player character, I’m reasonably confident they don’t see the whole picture. I even shared his theme song with the group and I’m still not sure they got what I was going for. Which is fine! I’ve got a ton of sessions left to run and PLENTY of time to continue my work. Plenty more petty conflicts and high-stakes nonsense. And that’s just with this one character! This guy, Onyx, is a part of the second party of adventurers, Group B (all named NPCs, now), so I’ve got plenty more characters I can use to get up to some stuff. What makes it the most fun, right now, is that he’s the only member of Group B that doesn’t get along with Group A (the player characters) so far. It was a little bit fated from the start, given the backstory that the sister player character and I cooked up, but the way the rest of the party has come to dislike him through his actions alone has been delightful. I really can’t wait to see where all the player character and non-player character relationships develop.

I’m hoping that I’ll have gotten some more rest by the next session and will feel a bit more alert than I have the past two, but I think I’ll be able to handle it alright even if I still haven’t gotten enough additional sleep. The next handful of sessions will be pretty player-driven, as they navigate the rest of this lock-in, so all I have to do is be coherent enough to referee if needed and play out my parts as the players talk. Which isn’t nothing, mind you. I’ve got plenty of work to do in every session. I just don’t need to do as much table management now that we’ve been playing together for a few months. I wouldn’t say that everyone is entirely comfortable yet, but most people are and everyone else is at least modestly comfortable with the group. The dynamic of the group hasn’t really changed so much as it has more firmly settled into place. Which gives me plenty of space to focus on continuing to slowly advance time, to introduce whatever little bits of drama and plot that I’ve got, and to focus on having fun when I’m so tired that I’m sometimes worried that I might doze off if my players talk for too long without directly involving me. Well, I’m not really worried about that. I’m just concerned it might happen unless I can get a decent night’s sleep a few nights in a row soon.