It took a little while, but we finally had another session of The Rotten Labyrinth. This session included none of the original players from the campaign since they were all busy with other things, but I’m trying to find ways to have these games happen more often than we skip them, so I ran with half the crew and figured that would be good enough. Which it was! I had to tweak a couple encounters a bit to suit the group, but I was able to do that without too much of a problem. It’s much easier than usual, given how many of them have similar defense and hit point values and how even the “weakest” among them is still pretty tough. And they’re all level two now, so I could go a bit harder on them without as much of a concern. Which I should be doing anyway, considering that they opted for the high-risk, high-reward entrance to the labyrinth. So, with just three players, they set out to fill in more of the map, ran into some traps, got some cool loot, literally disarmed a trap, and then fought a single creature that wound up giving them all a rougher time than I expected. Technically, everyone is still alive. At least so far as most people would define “alive” even if there’s some room for interpretation. That said, we all had a lot of fun, were frequently busting up as a joke made it through the entire session while still being funny, and even the unfortunate events of that final fight weren’t enough to dampen the group’s spirits.
Continue readingTabletop Gaming
Choosing Joy While Listening To NADDPod
One of the podcasts I listen to regularly, NADDPod (AKA, Not Another D&D Podcast), recently started their fourth season (or main campaign, I guess? Though they have talked about changing up the format to do fewer long campaigns and more shorter ones, which really kind of muddies the waters). After all these years of games–main campaigns, side games, mini-arcs, and one-shots–the final member of the group has taken the lead and run not just a one-shot or a mini-arc like most of the others have, but stepped up to run the next main campaign for group. The one guy in the group who hasn’t technically sworn to never run a campaign but has expressed extreme trepidation about it and about not knowing the game well enough to run things has finally stepped out from behind the character sheet and taken a seat behind the GM’s screen. This guy, Jake Herwitz, has always been funny and a great performer (and is, in fact, one of the original founders of the podcast company that NADDPod is a part of), but I was a bit nervous at the thought of him taking over. After all, I hadn’t really seen any of his independent creative work, or anything he’d done outside of the podcast. I had no idea what it was that he would bring to the show that the others didn’t do just as well if not better. Having listened to a few episodes, though, I am happy to say that all of my fears were completely wrong and he’s doing a better job than I ever imagined he could. He might even wind up being my favorite GM for this group, in fact, if he manages to stay the course for his entire run.
Continue readingTaking A Day Of Rest From The Magical Millennium
Skipping a session is a pretty common occurrence in both of the tabletop games I’m running these days, but rarely do we still meet up only for met to cancel the session half an hour in. The exhaustion I’ve been dealing with hasn’t diminished much and the advent of Daylight Saving Time has teamed up with it to render me constantly exhausted. So much so that, during the first day of their teamwork, I was fighting the urge to doze off WHILE running the session, mid-sentence! In my own defence, it was going to be an abbreviated session since one of the players was out sick and another one had, just that day, told the rest of the group about their decision to withdraw from the campaign due to scheduling conflicts. I just planned to do a bit more work fleshing out some details, maybe give my players the chance to expand a little bit on the time skip we’d spent the previous section abbreviating, but I ran out of steam after doing some magic item work and answering a few questions that came up in the time between sessions. It was rough, admitting that I didn’t have it in me to even do what I’d said I wanted to just half an hour earlier, but all my players are very considerate and I was more frustrated with how tired I felt than self-conscious about needing to bring up my inability to run the game.
Continue readingRandom Encounters And Slightly Less Random Treasure In The Rotten Labyrinth
Another week, another Tabletop RPG session! Last weekend, we got five of the six players together for The Rotting Labyrinth and started diving deeper into said labyrinth. We talked quickly through what was going to be the format for the group now that we’ve got so many players, caught the players who’d missed the last session up on who everyone was, and then I sent them on their way, deeper into the labyrinthine depths, in search of more treasure. After they spent a little time figuring out what direction to explore next, they eventually worked their way through three different little events. In one, they find a Non-Magical?/Magical? Tent Kit, in another they find a pair of curiosities with small tidbits of information about the purpose of the labyrinth and what might be at its center, and in the final one they find some kind of fake treasure that was supposed to distract them from the secret room–which they also found immediately–so that the undead spellcaster inside could bust out, trap people on the other sides of the door, and force everyone to fight some kind of ghostie creatures in close quarters. The party’s bad luck with rolls continued, but the monsters in this fight also had terrible luck so the fight dragged on for quite a while as both parties occasionally chipped away at each other. All of which made for a very full day of adventuring.
Continue readingFlashing Forward With The Magical Millennium
FINALLY, after nearly a year of actual real-world time, we’ve made it to our first time jump. We wrapped up the lingering moments of the previous session’s lock-in, tackled through what a time skip would mean for the player characters, and then started skipping forward. We tackled about what everyone got up to during the four weeks we skipped, who they spent their time with, and dipped into little scenes here or there as we went, taking up almost the entire session’s allotted time even with only four of the group’s normal set of five players. It was a lot of fun even if it did really drive home the point that we’re never going to do anything quickly with this group. That’s not a bad thing, of course. I love my roleplayers and how enthusiastic they are to talk to each other and play in the world we’ve made. I just really need to work on pacing and plotting on my side of things so I can meeting my players where they’re at. I don’t think I’ve ever once accurately guessed how long something was going to take to start, wrap up, or do in its entirety. I’ve been so far off every single time that I might just give up trying to figure out how much stuff I need to have prepped for every session and just make sure I’m enough steps ahead that I can’t run out. Which probably won’t ever be a problem given that we have only ever taken more time than I expected, not less.
Continue readingIt’s Party Time In The Rotten’s Labyrinth
After a month away, mostly due to burnout on my part (our last session was scheduled for the weekend I wound up working and I just did NOT have it in me to run a game), The Rotten finally met again and we got to introduce three new players, their characters, and a pair of NPC siblings. Unfortunately, only one of the original players could make it and he wasn’t the talkative one in the group, so I wound up doing a lot of talking to myself when introducing the core party to the group of two new PCs and their NPC companions. When it came time to introduce the final PC, she rolled really poorly on her “phase of the moon check” and the resulting lucky/unlucky check, ultimately revealing her lycanthropy in the one and only party of the labyrinth that has access to the night sky during what turned out to be the full moon. Thankfully, despite being tossed to the extremely-not-literal wolves (this character is a wereboar rather than a werewolf, after all), the party was able to subdue the lycanthrope enough that she was able to recover her senses, retreat from the moonlight, and take some precautions against potentially losing control of herself for the remainder of the night. After that, this group of now eight people talked about how to handle the fact that they’d wound up in one of the most dangerous parts of the first floor of the labyrinth while still exploring for treasure and came up with a plan that will allow players to come and go more easily from one session to the next as our rather large group of players deals with people who aren’t available to play every time. All-in-all, it was a successful session even if there wasn’t much forward progress made.
Continue readingFinishing The First (Virtual) Dungeon In The Magical Millennium
After what feels like months (because it has been three months since we first started, given that we’ve played about once a month due to holidays and scheduling issues), my The Magical Millennium campaign finally cleared our first dungeon! They even did it without anyone dying or staying unconscious for very long! It was great! There were some close calls and a lot of bad conveyor belt related rolls, but they managed to clear it all in the end. We started the session with a check-in to remind everyone of how much time had passed (and a bit of frantic scrambling from me because D&D Beyond didn’t save the state of my encounter from last session), the party proceeded to kill the remaining clouds of energy, the Paladin beefed it on the conveyor belts repeatedly, the characters emerged from the virtual realm to get some notes from the person overseeing their game, and then they all settled down to sleep for the night before we wrapped up the session a couple hours early. It was nice to be able to bring the dungeon to a close, even if we didn’t play a full session (mostly due to the Super Bowl being that day), so we can hopefully start fresh in a brand new week when we all play again. Our next session will start with a bit of a time skip and a quick conversation about the highlights of what each character did during that time skip, but we’ll be moving on pretty quickly from there. My hope is we’ll be able to start off with homecoming week right away, since that’s a big day for high school students, and I want to get moving a little bit faster than we have been. We’ve been playing for a year now (or will have been, at the time of our next session), and we’ve only covered two in-game weeks! We’re moving so slowly!
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 32
I’ve been thinking about the stories that video games tell, the ones you find within them, and the way that some games lack any kind of storytelling in favor of simulating a person’s ability to choose to do whatever they want. All of these kinds of games have their own places in the broad field that is “video games,” but I was preparing myself to write about why I prefer games with stories to tell and had to set that blog post aside because I’m too worn down by life and everything to really get my thoughts together like that. I figured I’d write a Tired and Sad post instead and realized, as I dug around for a topic, that the game I’ve maybe written the most about is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which prompted the thought that maybe I prefer emergent storytelling since that game has almost no story to tell you. Not because you have the ability to choose things (well, you’ve got the ability to choose to do them or not, which is maybe the easiest choice to give to players), but because the whole game is so focused on creating little nuggets of story that only emerge as you play and explore and find them for yourself.
Continue readingGetting Caught Up In Virtual Reality In The Magical Millennium
After a couple lengthy breaks for the holidays, The Magical Millennium finally met up again! This time, we spent the entire session running through a virtual reality “escape room” type adventuring experience. The party’s goal was to find the four employees stuck in a factory where all the magitech machinery had gone haywire and then safely guide them out of the building. They had gone through a few rounds in the previous session where, thanks to their decision to split up and cover as much ground as possible, they’d found the first three employees AND a safe route to the front of the building. This time, they got an unconscious employee back on his feat, convinced the three employees they’d found that they knew a safe route out through the front door, found the fourth employee, found and fought an electric ghost, lost more faith in adults by uncovering the secrets of the cost-and-safety cutting manager, discovered they could have been shutting down the dangerous machines this whole time, and managed to get all of that done in a touch less than two in-game minutes. It was a pretty wild, busy session as I did my best to ride herd on the group, striking a careful balance between ushering people along and letting everyone have fun since I realized fairly quickly that we probably weren’t going to finish the rest of the virtual reality dungeon in this single session. I think I did a pretty good job of that, getting through twenty busy rounds of a dungeon while keeping the information flowing as the group solved the mysteries of why the factory was going haywire and briefly touched on the last secret of this gamified experience that would let them go wild in the VR Dungeon Sim they were trying to win. After all, this is a timed competition! They need to finish in first place so they can show up all their rivals and haters. At this point, I mostly just hope that they don’t overextend themselves and lose as a result of taking too many risks. They’ve got the time to be careful!
Continue readingFinding Our First Clues In The Rotten’s Labyrinth
After a bit of a break from sessions, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns have finally begun to happen again. This past weekend (as I’m writing this and two weekends ago as you’re reading it), the campaign I’ve been calling The Rotten came together to do a little more labyrinth exploration, which involved making their way into their first proper hallways, finding some faded text carved into some large stone tiles, finding more faded text carved into smaller stone tiles, avoiding a few traps, fighting some undead that had been animated by the ambient magic just outside this part of the labyrinth, fighting some local raiders who were half-starved but who still nearly took down the party, AND discovered signs pointing them toward some long-forgotten religion! What a fun little session it was! We also talked about adding a few more players to the game–to help pad things out a bit when people can’t make it to a session–started inviting people, got three immediate “yes” responses, and then talked about what it would look like to have three more players. I’m still fairly confident that we’ll rarely have six players at the same time, but it’s bound to happen a few times, other than our next session when I’m hoping to bring them together to handle new character introductions and whatnot. If it happens too often, it might be difficult for some people to participate, what with all the extra faces and voices, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ve got a lot of experience running a bigger group, so I have some ideas to help keep people engaged and interacting if it comes to that.
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