Despite most of the group either being uncommunicative or more vocally unable to attend the session, I ran another game of The Demigods of Daelen. I’ve told my players from the beginning that one of my goals for this game was to run it in such a way that we’d be able to play with only two players available. That was one of the reasons I bent D&D 5e in the ways I did: so there would be a plethora of class abilities present that would, hopefully, allow two players to fill the gaps made when four or more weren’t available. After all, 5e is build around not just a strict action economy and bounded accuracy, but the availability of a wind-range of class features to meet the general needs of a campaign. If every player character has two classes, that makes it much more likely that the party will have the skills and abilities they need available even if only two players are present. Throw in tweaking the action economy to fit with only two player characters and it solves every probably not already handled by my changes to the “bounded accuracy.” Which means that two of my players handled the climb up the strange “sphere” just fine, were able to make their way through it’s interior with all parties still alive (some only barely), and even got most of the way through dealing with the cult as they tried to shut the sphere down. The third player showed up right around then, which threw a couple wrinkles into the session since there was a lot of subtext and context that the she was missing, but I think some small alterations to how we play is will help prevent the frustrations of that moment from repeating in the future.
Continue readingDivinity
Catching Up With The Demigods Of Daelen
Slowly, as I continue to recover from months of constant exhaustion, withdrawal, and pain (not necessarily in that order), I’m getting back into my various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. This past weekend, it was time to get back into The Demigods of Daelen, my sorta-hack of Dungeons and Dragons 5e to make the numbers big and the storytelling potential just as big (don’t have to worry about the variability of a d20 as much if your bonuses to rolls are huge). Sometimes it feels more like I’ve hacked Roll20 rather than the Dungeons and Dragons system, but given that I’ve consciously and carefully taken the “bounded accuracy” core of D&D 5e and dramatically shifted it to work in a different way, I think I could probably call this a hack. One I’ll probably never write up and formalize in any way because you could probably get this effect much more easily using a different game system, but one that works for my crew of players who seem to prefer playing something that at least resembles Dungeons and Dragons over trying any new game system long enough to really get a feel for it. Anyway, this time we spent a good forty-five minutes catching up and then another forty-five minutes getting a player’s character finished. After that, we unified our players ahead of their upcoming mission, had a fun chit-chat-in-a-bar scene, and then promptly moved on to the main challenge the party will be facing for the first adventure of this campaing: a massive, orb-like mechanical contrapation that is very slowly but inexorably rolling its way towards a large-ish town that it will absolutely crush, slowly and painfully, if it is not somehow stopped. The session came to an end right as the party dealt with the first challenge pertaining to this strange almost-orb, as they were preparing to enter it, and I’m excited to see how the party deals with the challenge I’ve brewed up for them.
Continue readingStarting Something New: The Magical Millennium Is On Hiatus
After a hiatus following the departure of a player (though not caused by the departure of said player), four of the remaining five of us met up to play and quickly discovered we did not have it in us to play our usual game. Live’s been a chaotic mess for all of us and we lost quite a bit of momentum because of when our break arrived. It cut us off from any opportunity to build energy or establish story because we spent the previous full session going through a time skip and our last partial session doing some maintenance and upkeep, so there weren’t any existing strands of story or character to use to pull us into the game again. Additionally, due to some decisions I made while creating this game and building out the world, I’ve been struggling to feel excited about this part of the game we’re in. Some of the NPCs I’d made had begun to take up too much space in my mind because their real-world analogues have become dramatically more prominent in my mind as a result of how the world has changed in the year or so since I spun the bones of this story up. It stopped being fun for me to explore the ideas associated with them and while there was still space for me to shift things and make changes in order to avoid building the association any more than I already had, I was also struggling with how close the world was to our own. Which, it turns out, was also a bit of a struggle for some of my players as well. It’s difficult to enjoy fantasy escapism when we’re not actually departing from the world we are already familiar with. So, as our chatter peetered out and it looked like we’d be just departing rather than pushing ourselves to play a game we weren’t in the mood to play, I pitched an idea for a game I’d had just the day before.
Continue reading