As I can snatch a couple minutes here or there, I’ve been spending my spare time and brain power on gearing up for another Dungeons and dragons campaign. Apparently, that’s all anyone–aside from one of my players, anyway–wants to play these days and as much as I want to play different games, I’d rather play D&D than nothing. It’s not like I can’t enjoy this, after all. I’m here for the stories. I just wish I had the opportunity to tell different stories and to play with a group of people more interested in the broad range of stories I want to tell. I already need to keep this one a little more limited than I’d like, focused on story elements that aren’t analogous to problems we face in the real world since one of my players has specifically requested that, along with no more fighting the personification of abstract and awful concepts, like capitalism. Not because it didn’t work out the last time I did it, but because this friend doesn’t want to encounter a real-world problem we can’t actually fight in the real world. Which is a huge limitation since there’s tons of interesting story ideas that allow people in a D&D game to fight something we, in the real world, can’t fight. I get this player’s meaning, though, so I’ll do what I can to comply, but there will be some amount of real-world issues involved because I can’t imagine running a game for very long that DOESN’T have some kind of real-world analog.
Continue readingTabletop Gaming
Party Plot Twists In The Magical Millennium
After a month that felt so much longer than a month, we’re finally back to playing The Magical Millennium! I’ve missed this group a lot, even though I’ve managed to find ways to stay busy, so I’m glad we had enough people still available to meet. One player, a doctoral student in the middle of probably the busiest part of her doctoral program, hasn’t been able to make it for the last two sessions, but I mostly just feel bad that she’s so busy and swamped with her work that she doesn’t have the time to relax and do things like playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m sure she’ll free up eventually, but I definitely missed her presence during the last two games. We’ll have to figure out what her character was up to at the party while everyone else handled their first party of the year with what has mostly amounted to success. Sure, there were some flubbed rolls in there, but I’m always looking for ways to let my players fail forward and it was pretty easy to do here. This time, my players tried to sneakily follow some of their peers, jumped off a roof into a pool, made some friends, and even had a fun mix of inter-team conflict and bonding. It was a really great session, even setting aside how happy I was just to be back playing this game again.
Continue readingThe Longest D&D Campaign I’ve Ever Played In Has Ended
My occasional Thursday night Dungeons and Dragons game has finally come to an end. A weird end, if I’m being honest, but an end. Which feels pretty fitting, all things considered, given the basic premise of the campaign, the way we rarely had consistent players, and how quickly things devolved on the mechanical side of the game despite the Dungeons Master’s attempts to use a ruleset he’d found online to better balance out the way the game is built against the way we were playing it. Our campaign of battles ended not with a final climactic fight against some supreme foe but with a solved puzzle that ended a glorious battle that wound up being a bit of a pushover once we all committed to fighting it during the two hours of our three-hour session time since we solved the puzzle in the first half hour of actual play and decided just to do an “alternate ending” where we fought everything just to use up all the time we’d scheduled.
Continue readingBringing An Old D&D Character Back For A New Shot At Life
It will be at least another week yet before I start playing in a new (to me) Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign. I thought we might start last week (the day I wrote this), but one of the players wound up being busy and the fact that this game is specifically a campaign wrap-up means that we really can’t play without someone. I mean, they could probably play without me since my character is being introduced pretty late into the campaign (as part of the game’s revival and conclusion), but I don’t think they will. Not after inviting me to join them and everything. Luckily, thanks to an early pandemic game that didn’t last very long, I had a character who already existed in the game’s world so I could just level him up, kit him out, and then work with the Dungeon Master to figure out where he existed in this world a little bit further down the timeline. It even works out thematically because the campaign in which this character first appeared was about slaying a dragon that had its own cult and this campaign wrap-up is about a campaign of dragon slayers who accidentally let part of the soul of an evil undead dragon escape from the magic crystal they’d been trying to protect. As it turned out, not all natural twenties are good things, especially when it comes to the targeted application of a Dispel Magic spell. A natural twenty on that could do a lot more than you intended.
Continue readingThe Descent Into The Rotting Heart Ends With A Slow Fade
Last night, after several months, many delays, and little bit of ad hoc scheduling, my remaining two players and I wrapped up our campaign of Heart: The City Beneath. Both remaining players hit their zeniths, we wrapped up the last trailing bits of story, and then did a post mortem since the player whose character had died/zenithed-out last session was around and available. It was a long night for all of us since we moved back our planned start time an hour, used up the the entire hour and a half of game time we’d set aside, and then wound up talking through the end of the game and what we’re going to do next for another hour. I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of all that and still am a full day later. Still, I’m glad we got to do it and I’m looking forward to a relatively quiet weekend without needing to run any games (though I will be playing in one, most likely, and doing some preparations to play in yet another game). I could use a bit of a break this weekend, after the last few weeks I’ve had, especially because I’ve got a new game to start preparing.
Continue readingStarting To Party With The Party In The Magical Millennium
After two skipped sessions, we finally returned to playing The Magical Millennium. When last we left our beleaguered students, it was their first day of magical classes and they’d survived a harrowing encounter in the lunchroom. They’d breezed through their first day of classes–aside from that one disastrous lunch period–even earning a commendation from the teacher of their Adventuring Class for a stellar performance, and then went their separate ways at the end of the day, united by their experiences, the assignment that they perform as a party, and the single group chat one of them put together. It took three sessions, but we’d finally finished the first day of school!
Continue readingConcluding The Second Arc of The Leeching Wastes
After five sessions, which feels like both more and less time than I expected, we’ve wrapped up the second arc of my The Leeching Wastes campaign. The first arc involved fleeing from a home that was directly in the path of a horrible monster in hope of finding a new, safer place to call home and the second arc has been all about settling into this new home while dealing with some of the consequences of people’s actions as that integration occurred. In the last session, one of the player characters was brought under the influence of the monster sealed within the heart of the tree that made up the center of The Grove and given the command to free it. The party failed to stop her despite the emotional price they were paying in their attempts, but the unnamed goddess (connected to her by a bargain said goddess made with the player character’s former lover who had sacrificed herself to save the player character) had one last trick up her sleeve that she’d been holding off since it could easily kill that player character. In order to save everyone, the player character risked her life and ultimately survived, but only just barely. The session ended with the remaining members of the party–two NPC allies in tow–settling down to rest while they waited for their tied-up friend to regain consciousness so they could figure out what the hell had just happened. It was a very draining session that lasted less than an hour and a half and quite a place to pick back up from this week as we went through the arc’s denouement and moved forward in time.
Continue readingWant To Be A Better GM Or Player? Play Widely.
One of the best pieces of advice to give someone who wants to improve their writing skills is to read widely. The idea is that you will be exposed to more and more writing in a wider variety of forms, including those outside of whatever genres you might choose to focus on, all of which is useful to you as a writer because it will give you more tools to use in your own creative work. After all, the various writing tricks authors use, their various stylistic quirks and so on, aren’t limited to a genre. If you see something cool and interesting in a science fiction story, you can figure out how to incorporate it into a fantasy story. Or if you find a particularly interesting way of phrasing an idea in a piece of nonfiction, you can find ways to do similar things in your own fictional works. The more you’re exposed to, the more you’ve learned and can incorporate consciously and unconsciously. Which is also true of running tabletop games (and storytelling as a whole, but you can pretty much extend any of this advice into any type of storytelling with enough abstract thinking, so I’m going to stay focused). The more games you play or run, the better you are. This is fairly self-evident to most people since that tends to fall under the “experience makes you better at things” bit of wisdom. I’d suggest taking it a step further, though, and suggest that you play a wide variety of games rather than just sticking to the ones your prefer.
Continue readingThe Penultimate Session Of The Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One more session of Heart: The City Beneath behind us and now we’re down to the last two players of a group that originally had six. One fell by the wayside immediately, before we even began the second session of our worldbuilding game. The second left after she realized this game was not for her and that she needed more time in her weeks. The third left when her character died a single session after the second left and she decided to reclaim some time for herself rather than carry on. The fourth has now stepped aside, one more session later, as his character finished a transformation that has been brewing since that first worldbuilding game. The final two players are both on the cusp of their own ends, each carrying a Zenith move they have either already used and are seeing play out or are saving to use at the right moment, whatever that might look like. Things are coming to a head and every single roll holds the potential to spell the end for each character, as it did for the fourth player’s character. Still, the story holds us all bound and determined to see it through and. at the very latest, in just another week from when this post does up, I will be writing about how it all came to an end.
Continue readingA Situation So Bad It’s Good In The Leeching Wastes
My now-Wednesday group, currently playing The Leeching Wastes, has now met four times in a row! What a record! This time, what was supposed to be a short ritual turned into a whole-session activity that was incredibly emotionally fraught. The cliff-hanger from last time, an abysmal saving throw result, wound up snowballing first into a bit of confusion about the reason the party was there at all, grew further into a bit of inter-party misdirection, and then finally landed as a combat encounter that I didn’t expect to go as poorly as it did. I mean, I know I say this a lot, but I really don’t expect quite so many unlikely things to happen in the tabletop games I’m running despite apparently being a magnet for this kind of improbability. Nothing useful for winning the lottery or having a fortunate life. No. I just attract incredibly unlikely but still possible outcomes but only in tabletop games I’m running. I’m going to avoid speculating about how that’s reflected in my life (I already talk to my therapist about that more than enough), but it really was staggering how a part of the session I expected would take half an hour wound up taking the full hour and forty-five minutes we played (we got another later start since I was finishing up dinner and we were still chitchatting for the first half an hour). I was absolutely mechanically prepared for things to go horribly wrong since a game like this needs stakes for the victories to mean as much as they do, but I was not emotionally prepared. I was not mentally prepared. I had to pause quite a few times to figure out how to proceed or, at the very least, where to find my notes about how to proceed since we have once again taken something I expected to come up later and dropped it onto third level characters.
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