Another wonderful session has come and gone with my players in The Magical Millennium. While we seem to be skipping every-other-session due to holidays, that’s about what I expected (so much so that I did zero preparation for the last session we skipped since I was all but absolutely certain that we would wind up canceling) and I’m very hopeful about things picking up in the new year. We’ll see, of course, but I think we’re finally going to be making some forward progress again. As much as I love all the stuff we’re doing and seeing in this endless Lock-In (which has been going on since October), I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Still, we’ve had a lot of fun in this school-event-turned-adventurous-teen-corral so far and that pattern shows no signs of changing after our latest session. This time around, we had an amazing set of rolls that started off the final match of the dodgeball tournament we began in our previous session, an unexpected downbeat as the time I’d set aside for a drawn-out final match was unexpectedly free that one of my players managed to put to EXCELLENT use, and then our first dungeon! It’s a virtual reality dungeon/escape room adventure experience, but my players took the gentle suggestion that this one would be competitive to absolutely dive in with a level of focus and teamwork that I’ve never seen in them for ANYTHING ever. Seriously. Every time these kids are stuck together, something happens to make them hate each other or deepen the existing fractures in this group and they threw that all aside so they could absolutely wreck this competition. It’s amazing and I’m so excited to continue our game in the new year!
Continue readingTTRPGs
Building A Dungeon All My Own
For the first time in what feels like YEARS (and is definitely at least “years” if not “YEARS”), I started running an actual dungeon in one of my Dungeons and Dragons games. For a long while now, as I’ve tried to explore more expansive storytelling and dealt with groups more interested in narrative than mechanics, I’ve avoided putting my players in what one might consider a stereotypical dungeon. I’ve had some dungeons, sure! I had my players run through a dungeon-esque wizard’s tower that was actually a testing site for traps and puzzles to be used in other dungeons. I trapped my players in a nightmare realm where they had an “ever-renewing” eighteen hour period to solve the puzzle of this time-and-space-locked demiplane. I’ve even made proper dungeons that wound up not getting explored by my players because they chose a different route forward. I think the last time I had a proper dungeon was back in 2019 or 2020, the last time I had a “classic” Dungeons and Dragons group with a “classic” mix of characters played by players who were interested in what it meant to be a D&D Party and to play their classes, specifically. Which is a bit funny to admit because, once upon a time, I loved nothing more than a good dungeon. I was scattering those things every which way. You’d think that would have still happened even in my more expansive play style now, if it was something I cared about, right?
Continue readingThe Magical Millennium Plays Dodgeball
Another weekend down, another session of The Magical Millennium in the bag! As we have been for the last few sessions, we’re still in the middle of the Lock-In at school. This past session covered almost two hours of time, which would mean we’re actually picking up the pace if it weren’t for the fact that we weren’t able to finish up the final match of the dodgeball tournament and so didn’t REALLY get through a whole two-hour period. In the time we did cover, though, we got to see everyone except the Cleric run off to sign up for the “random party” Adventurer Escape Room activity. Only one player got randomly selected for a time slot they’d chosen, unfortunately, but that just means that everyone else will feel a bit more ready when they go to compete in the time trial version with their established party after the dodgeball tournament. We got a little bit of conversation between the Artificer and the Bard, a pair we don’t see much, saw the Cleric almost have a panic attack as they sought out some peace and quiet, and saw a fated confrontation between the Barbarian and Group B’s fighter on the dodgeball court (well, we saw the start of what the Barbarian’s player is describing as a fated confrontation with her character’s foil. I’m pretty sure it’s just some jock-on-jock competition, but we’ll have to see how it goes). After that, we managed to actually end on time since one of the players had to leave right away. Now, we’re looking at some potential scheduling woes as we approach the winter holiday season and must face up to the reality that skipping even one session means going a long time without getting to meet up again.
Continue readingPlaying The Adults In A Campaign About Teens In The Magical Millennium
For the first time in maybe the whole campaign, we had an extended roleplaying scene between one of the player characters, the party’s Artificer, and one of the teachers at the magical high school (Adak’s Academy Of Magic). This happened a couple hours into the lock-in, as the rest of the party sifted through the aftermath of their previous encounter with the brother of one of the other player characters (the party’s Bard) and then moved to join the screening of Shrek. Rather than join them in doing something they felt was pointless, the Artificer snuck off to work on a personal project in one of the magic item fabrication labs and was found out by a teacher who proved to be more sympathetic and understanding than maybe the Artificer had expected. Once the two of them had talked it out, the Artificer rejoined the rest of the players in the gym since the party had left the Shrek-themed movie room when Shrek had finished to playing volleyball against some of their classmates in the open gym. They played another game of volleyball and we wrapped up our session with a bit of chitchat afterwards. Other notable events include a quick but momentous B-plot during the “catch the Artificer up on what had happened during the previous session and then talk about the revelation that the Bard’s brother had been part of the group that had accidentally started the growing anti-magic movement” segment, a quick hack of volleyball rules that wound up taking much longer than expected, and a long post-game discussion of whether or not the Group B party was there to play the part of character-opposites that the party (Group A) would need to eventually kill. It was a pretty great game and the first time I felt like I was absolutely at the top of my game since early August. In short, it was another great session with this group.
Continue readingThe End Of Friends At The Table Season 8: Palisade – Making Good On An Old Threat
Spoiler Warning for the mid-season peak of Friends at the Table Season 8: Palisade.
After an incredibly long time (not that I’m complaining about the length, of course: I love a long podcast), the eighth season of Friends at the Table, Palisade, has come to an end. Even the post-mortem has finished up. By the time you’re seeing this, the audio version of the post mortem stream should be up on the main podcast feed and you’ll have probably either settled in to listen all the way through it, have already listened to it, or have made plans to listen to its five-star runtime over the weekend (the stream was just over five hours long, so I’m sure the audio will be a similar length). If one of those three things does NOT apply to you, then there will be nothing for you in this post (or there was a in the podcast episode going up which, you know, happens). If you’re uncertain about committing to Friends at the Table but like a good audio story or enjoy a good tabletop gaming podcast, you should absolutely start listening to it (it’s also available in any podcatcher you might use, on Spotify, and, of course, iTunes). It’s got thousands of hours of entertainment, amazing science fiction and fantasy work, and a great general vibe that shifts from relaxed and fun storytelling between friends to tense and emotional storytelling between friends. I have easily listened to more hours of Friends at the Table than any other podcast and I would not be surprised to learn that I’ve listened to more Friends at the Table than all my other podcasts put together. It’s really good stuff, there’s so much of it out there, and now I’m going to need to fill my idle audio hours with something else while they take a break following the monumental undertaking that was this latest season.
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 readingMy Bittersweet Return to Dungeons & Dragons
As I sat down to run what I was ninety-five percent certain was going to be the Session 0 of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I had to take a few minutes to put aside the misgivings and constant internal debate about whether or not I was making the right choice. I had spent most of the day already, and a lot of idle time in the weeks leading up to said day, trying to figure out how I felt about returning to a hobby I had so firmly turned my back on just over a year prior. It was a difficult time, back then, as the company that owned my most-played tabletop game tried to destroy the hobby in order to make a little more money, and it wasn’t a decision I’d made lightly. I’d been running some form of D&D game ostensibly weekly (up to four times a week, during the first year and a half of the pandemic), except for a year off after I moved away from my college town to the city in which I still live, since the summer of 2010. There were other gaps in there, but no more than a few months at most. My entire tabletop history had been built around the game and I still felt compelled to turn away, to withhold my money from the company that seemed to be actively trying to drive it into the dirt. I was the sort of person who bought every book as they came out, who owned physical copies and digital copies online, through DNDBeyond, who ran tons of games and could not only run a game reference free, but quickly homebrew up something custom for my players that almost always hit my desired balance of “overpowered but in a way that’s fun for everyone.” And I still cut all ties.
Continue readingFinding The Right Game To Run
I’ve been working on putting together a modern fantasy setting for a new game I’m going to start in a couple weeks. We’re planning to play Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition since I’ve already got a ton of books for that and I’ve yet to find another system that feels as comfortable and malleable as D&D 5e does (most other things I’ve looked at feel a little too rules-light for the game my players and I want to play). Sure, there’s a lot of other much more open games where the only limitation is your imagination, but I’ve learned from trying to get people to play those games that a lot of people will freeze up if they’re presented with tasks or choices that seem too open-ended. Not everyone has the improvisational experience required to enjoy those kinds of games and a lot of people just want to play a game they already know so they can relax and enjoy themselves. Plus, I kind of miss it. D&D 5e, I mean. I’m still not planning to give Wizards anymore money, though I’ll admit that I’m running into a few problems with having all of my digital access to the 5e books I bought prior to last year’s debacle locked into one website since, unless I pay them money every year, I can’t share that access with anyone else. If I’d bought PDFs instead of digital access, I’d be able to share those with my players easily, but I honestly never thought I’d end my subscription to DnDBeyond and yet, here I am, subscription-less and trying to figure out how to make sure all my players have access to the same information I do.
Continue readingWorldbuiling Without Building Anything
One of my favorite parts of preparing for the start of a new tabletop game is the moment when everything crystallizes. Whatever errrant thought, subtle influence, or bright flash of inspiration you needed arrives and suddenly it all makes sense. You can see the strings the world dances upon and understand the way everything moves within it. It is the moment when you go from wondering what might be and pondering unknowns to knowing what is and looking for what might change. In the world I ran in a few Dungeons and Dragons campaigns starting back in 2019, this moment came as I was taking a break from my then-panicked preparations to do something fun and relaxing. I was watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on Blu-ray not long after it was finally available for purchase and the whole campaign setting crystalized around the idea of missing heroes. It was a fairly simple idea, but that last piece of information fitting into the puzzle meant everything else clicked into place as well. Suddenly, I knew what was going on and what everyone was motivated by. It was a relevatory moment and something I’ve enjoyed every time something like it has come up any time I’m considering a story, be it something I’m writing, a tabletop game I’m putting together, or even just a video game I’m playing.
Continue readingEnhancing Your Games By Stealing Ideas From Other Game Systems
I was listening to some old Friends at the Table Patreon content (it is so much easier to access now that I’ve got an RSS feed to pull from and am using an actual podcast app to pull it instead of flipping through patreon posts like I just assumed I had to for every podcast I’ve supported prior to March of 2023) and I heard one of the players talk about some of the lessons he has learned over the years from his experience playing tabletop games and taking comedy classes. He said that some of the best advice he’s ever heard was that, after you spend a bunch of time mastering a creative skill, that you should go do anything else for a few months so you’ve got things to pull from when you return to the improvisational or creative skill you’ve learned. The broader context that this came up in was about preventing yourself from becoming too focused on one type of game or play experience. Play a lot of different things and then, when you return to the thing you want to spend a lot of time on, you will be better at it for having enriched yourself with other experiences. This is something I’ve always felt was true of pretty much every form of creative work. Spend some time honing your chosen craft and then spend time learning about a lot of other things so you have information to pull from when creating things. This is why I’ve spent so much time reading about various bits of history, different occupations, and generally learning about how the world works and why it works that way. Everything informs my writing, so the better I understand anything other than writing, the better my writing will get.
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