Last night, I sat down with the remaining players from my almost three-year-old Dungeons and Dragons campaign to talk through the end of the campaign. Though we struggled to have more than 1.5 sessions a month for most of that time, we got pretty deep into the paint. This was a world I created back in 2019 and have been running a weekly/weekly-adjacent game in ever since. It has a customized magic system (not THAT customized, but still tweaked a bit), an entire set of pantheons, complex geopolitical and economic systems, and was my attempt to create a “young world” for roleplaying games. I planned to carry the world through many campaigns, playing out its entire history with my friends as we progressed from one campaign to another. Now, as we move toward other systems and science-fiction themes instead of fantasy themes, I am revealing everything I’ve spent so long creating and saying my own farewells to this world as my players and I say farewell to the story we’ve spent time over the past three years telling.
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Disinterest and Burnout: The Slow Death of a D&D Campaign
It turns out that not every single one of my tabletop groups is excited about the idea of playing something new. One group, now that Wizards of the Coast has walked back some of their fuckery, is not very interested in playing other games. At least one person in the group found a reason to be disinterested in everything I suggested and while they said they’re willing to consider some stuff if I give them a bunch of information and some time to think about it, I’m not exactly expecting them to embrace anything new at this point. I’ve been running a game for this group for a few years now and I’ve known them for even longer, so I feel pretty confident when I say that they’re not exactly the most flexible group. Historically, they’re one of my most draining groups to run for. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy our time, just that I feel like I have to do a lot of work to keep the game going.
Continue readingWizards of the Coast Took a Step Toward Restoration
Just when I thought we had time to breathe before anything else happened, I got knocked upside the head by perhaps the biggest surprise of them all. After weeks of controversery and a lot of absolutely fucking up their response multiple times, the person representing Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons and Dragons to the Tabletop Roleplaying Game community announced that they were cutting feedback short. In only one week, over 15,000 people responded to the survey they put out about the latest proposed changes to the OGL (this one was version 1.2) and almost ninety percent of responses said they should just go back to the original OGL (that has stood for some twenty-plus years). As a result, rather than continue to let negative sentiment build, they announced they’re not attempting to revoke the OGL, not releasing a new version of it, and are even releasing a bunch of content from their current version of Fifth Edition (titled 5.1 as they work to incorporate a decade of material and prepare it for compatibility with their next major version of the game) under a creative commons license.
Continue readingWizards of the Coast Delved Too Greedily And Too Deep
One of the things in the background of my life last week (mostly because I didn’t have the time or emotional capacity for it to be anything else until last Friday) was the on-going destruction of the reputation of Wizards of the Coast in the tabletop gaming community. For those of you unaware, you can read the full context here. In short, though, Wizards of the Coast was planning to replace something called the Open Gaming License (or OGL) with an updated version full of incredibly shitty terms. In addition to disallowing anything like a Virtual TableTop (VTT) or most media related to Dungeons and Dragons (like podcasts or youtube videos), this verion also laid claim to anything produced by a 3rd party and 25% of any revenue produced over $750,000 (which would bankrupt most companies in that position). The version that existed for over two decades, that has allowed so many people to make a career out of third party content creation, was going to be replaced by what was a shameless cashgrab by people only interested in increasing their own company’s revenue rather than continuing to foster the tabletop gaming communities that exist in and around Dungeons and Dragons.
Continue readingTime Loops, Battle Strategy, and Lateral Thinking
One thing I’ve learned, watching my players work their way through a time-looped demi-planar prison of some being they haven’t quite grasped yet, is that even knowing that you can just try again should you die in battle doesn’t remove the sting of defeat. Whether because of bad luck, a few difficult choices, or a lack of the proper strategic application of strengths, it still sucks to lose a fight you probably could have won. There were a few lucky natural-20s, a few unlucky natural-20s, a lot of low rolls, a great deal of below-average damage rolls, and the revelation that enemy spellcasters can cast spells to bring their allies back from the brink of death just like the player characters can. Or, well, just like they could before the main healer left the party to do something only his player and I know about, so I’m not going to reveal where he went or why he went, just that he left and now there’s no one whose primary focus is keeping people alive.
Continue readingNew Games, New Gaming Group, and All Kinds of Fun.
I recently started a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. We had our session 0 three weeks ago, session 1 a single week again, and unfortunately had to skip the session 2 we’d planned for just a couple days ago. This is my current Sunday group, which consists of three regular players, one occasional (perhaps only Honey Heist) player, and one enigma who may never show up or may begin attending regularly. Whatever their heart demands, I guess. Still, it’s a solid group of players and they all made really fun characters for our 2-4 session introductory D&D campaign. The idea is that we’ll do this short campaign as a way to do a bit of world development (I get to have their characters as NPCs once we’re done) and to get everyone a bit more comfortable with each other. After this is done, we’ll be moving on to testing out Blades in the Dark for a similar amount of time, and then move from there to other games (the specific order is TBD). Once we’ve given most of them a try, we’ll wrap back around and decide what we want to play longer-term.
Continue readingThe Dice Gods Are More Real Than Probability Seems To Be
Probability is a bunch of bullshit. I’m sure that, in the broad pools of data and the sort of large swath approach of the various social sciences and anything that else that makes use of statistical analysis, probability is a much more reliable reference for how things will play out most of the time. When it comes to dice rolling and the sorts of things that happen as a result of dice rolling, it really does seem like the dice are trying to tell a story or that the incredibly unlikely thing happens way more often than not. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve created various tables for random outcomes, done my prep work on the ones that are statistically most-likely, and then told myself that the Infinitesimal option I added for what amounts to shits and giggles is not something I need to prepare for, only for my players to immediately roll that exact one thing during our next session.
Continue readingPicking Through Spelljammer Like A Content Vulture
Just as I was getting to the point in my Science-Fantasy D&D campaign that might include fantasy-flavored space stuff, the long-awaited Spelljammer expansion to Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition came out. For the entire time I’ve been playing fifth edition, I’ve seen people posting comments on every Wizards of the Coast announcement that amount to “Spelljammer when?” and, frankly, I’m pretty happy for that to finally be done. I bet it’ll continue in some capacity, of course, because that’s how people are, but I’m glad to finally have this out so I can inject some fun space-themed fantasy bullshit into my science-fantasy game and so people will finally shut up about it. I am a complex, multi-faceted being and I can enjoy things for multiple reasons.
Continue readingSustainable Characters and Short D&D Campaigns
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing (as a player, not the Dungeon Master) in a Dungeons and Dragons game. It was conceptualized as a sort of “last stand” type adventure, with four characters taken after the moment of their deaths by some powerful, godly figure, to see how long they could last against various challenges. Restored to the peak of their power (20th level) and given only mundane, non-magical gear, they are thrown together with no warning or preparation time and bounced from one scenario and battle to another, with only two instant-use short rests to allow them to recover. It has been a lot of fun to play a powerful character with no need to manage magic items or a vision for the future beyond how to mechanically apply my abilities and limited recovery from one fight to another.
Continue readingDungeons & Dragons Campaigns Can Last For Years Longer Than You Think They Would
As much as I love my big, ambitious Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, I have so many fun ideas that I want to try out that I’m confident I’ll never do them all. Even with a campaign for every day of the week, I’d probably die before I ran out of ideas. It can be a little frustrating to know I’ll never get to even a quarter of them, because so many of them just seem so interesting and fun to explore. As someone who has been running a weekly game at the same time for the better part of a decade (at least over five years, maybe six? Or seven? It is about six and a half years if I’m doing my math right), I can tell you that even a weekly game can take a long time to play out since very few weekly Tabletop Roleplaying Game campaign actually happen every week.
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