My Players Creating Their Characters

The funniest moment so far and one of the things that amazes me about D&D came from one of my new players. In a text message she wrote: "My person just took a turn in her personally I didn't see coming." This is from the person creating her!

Ok, on with the post:

As you may know, if you've read any of my other posts or seen a tweet or two, my campaign launch is getting close. As a relatively inexperienced player and new DM, I am not used to the character development side of the process except for the fact that I was just involved with it for the fist time as a PC this past Fall. I had no idea what I was doing then so I went back story concept first (I didn't even have a PHB yet!) and then looked at how I could possible pull that off with what was in the PHB. I found a couple options that with the help of my DM I could have pulled off. When I spoke to him, he was supportive and offered some hints but I ultimately went with a 3rd idea that I built from the PHB-out just because I thought it would be cool to be able to wildshape. So far I'm really enjoying that.

What does all that have to do with the title of this article? Now that I'm seeing it from the other side, it has been a very interesting process. There are 2 main factions that are approaching it in completely opposite ways.

The newer players... They are going on more of a whim. The Barbarian from the game I PC in who started the same time as me has decided to play a Bard. This would have really surprised me based on his general personality except for the fact that I see him wanting to do more than his Barbarian allows him to do sometimes (And he's pretty amused by Scanlan on Critical Role). His friend who is brand new went fighter to keep things free and easy. I have a feeling he will be the "loose cannon" of the group. The 3rd new player was bouncing between the Ranger she made to try the game out with her boyfriend or something new. We went back and forth a few times her asking a question or two, me asking her a few. Eventually, she settled on a Druid. I'm so happy :) Mostly because I'm a few levels ahead of her and can help her and it'll give me the chance to see one played differently. She's a bit sarcastic IRL and a lot of fun. Not a dippie hippie by any means so I doubt I'll see that stereotype played out. I'm definitely looking forward to what she'll do. (in case you're wondering I didn't go the full hippie route either even though I'm a bit of one IRL sometimes - I did have breakfast with a squirrel a few weeks ago)

The two experienced players... One, my current DM (and Druid's BF), started on a whim. He rolled up a Halfling Warlock that he was going to use in her trial adventure in case she needed an NPC for backup. As he saw what the other players were considering his non-optimal party make up sensors started firing. Although he's always wanted to play a Warlock, he started considering switching to Cleric. I assured him that I could make adjustments so, "play what you want". I'm not sure if he believed me or not. It may just the years of "there has to be a Cleric" mentality shining thru even though the Druid and Bard have access to healing. The other player went almost exactly the same way. He's was thinking either a Wood Elf Ranger or Gnome Wizard. When hearing the party so far he instantly volunteered to be a Cleric "because of party need". I offered him a hint or two about the campaign because a cleric could be really strong in it and an elf would offer interesting dynamics down the road. He was also worried about his wizard and the warlock being too redundant but I ultimately told him the same thing... "play what you want". he hasn't made up his mind yet but that's fine.

In the end I really hope they all "play what they want", something they can have fun and identify with rather than something that just filled a need. I feel that either way I can challenge them appropriately and if they decided to play a party of all wizards and I didn't adjust, it would be MY fault not theirs for making a "weird" party. It's my job to craft a good story for the party that shows up. But funny thing is, the experienced players can't seem to believe that. 

Through the whole process, it has been real interesting listening to their opinions about playing certain races or classes as boring/standard. No big surprise, they are all different.

One thing they all have in common? As far as I know not one of them has a name yet :)

-TND

Getting Close!

I've just about done it. Running my first campaign is getting close to being a reality! I have a group of 5 players that are ready to sit around and listen to my bs. A few even seem excited about it. 

I've been casually world building for a few months and that alone has already been fun and I'm really looking forward to filling in more details. (There is sooo much left to do!) A lot of what isn't done yet deals with stuff I still have to learn about the game but I'm confident that those details won't be needed from the start anyway. The ideas for this world and campaign came from a couple text adventures I improvised for other players in my game. That game where I'm a PC is real spotty so I figured there'd be room for another game and my current DM would get a chance to be a PC too.

I've had it in my mind that I wanted to start the campaign late summer/early fall and it looks like we'll hit that easily or even a little early. I'm just waiting on characters from 2 players and some names and backstories. Once I have those, I plan on running short one-offs for my players to role play out their back story a bit and introduce each to the starting circumstances of the main story. 

Here's the cliche laden :) campaign outline I sent to my new players.

Seem like a good start? 

Hopefully running a game will give me more to talk about here over the coming months
Happy Gaming
-TND

Epic Fail - 3rd Session Wrap

Well, now that I've had about a week to digest what happened... It's clear the party failed. Horribly. We had a fairly straight forward objective but we got sidetracked by a trick. Our main objective took longer and as a result met someone who set us up to basically kill the tavern owner we were working for and set the entire town on fire. One our way back, we were given a box to bring to the owner (as far as we knew). It didn't look right, showed magical properties etc. On our return, our cleric let another character talk him out of keeping the box out of town. I was around back of the tavern trying to tend to an NPC that had been injured so I couldn't put my two cents in.

I also didn't originally trust the person that gave us the box but my character has made some very rash decisions and decided to let another lead the way. I don't want to even get into what we did during the side quest... It wasn't pretty. We kind of succeeded there but I have a feeling we created a more powerful foe that will be a problem later on. We also learned the hard way that our party hasn't been very detail oriented so far. Hopefully that improves.

Our first night in town, we had a quick skirmish that raised questions from the local authorities. Adding the events from this session, I have a feeling we are going to be in some serious trouble. I'm kind of dreading what I will hear what will happen next time. By "dreading" I mean anxiously waiting with a big grin on my face because oh, boy! It'll be a challenge :) Carric's (my character) levels of disbelief, confusion, and anger are swirling, his sense of vengeance is swelling. The primal nature that he taps into to assume the form of beasts is raging.


Will the wild boar lash out?

Or will he be able to steady himself and let wisdom be the solution?...

I'm a DM Now?

In the very short time I've been playing D&D I've played live 3 times. The first two times as a PC. I've wrote about them already. It has been tough going so far to coordinate our very busy lives to get regular dates set. In the meantime I ran a couple solo text adventures for my fellow adventurers. They were supposed to be quick encounters to break the waiting and give us an excuse to roll dice even though it wasn't a real game. The first one lasted several hours when the Barbarian in the party yelled back down the alley and told the damsel in distress to "shut up!" So instead of a quick run down an alley, kill a couple goblins get on with your day, I got to improvise a small story line. It was fun!

The next text adventure I did was an idea I had for our cleric. That one lasted over parts of almost 2 days (with long breaks in between). It was a little more set up than the previous but was largely improvised as well but with the time in between responses it was easy to plan a couple moves ahead. Even with that he managed to surprise me which was very cool and made the story so much better.

Last weekend I tried my hand at officially sitting behind the screen and running a one off. One player was our Barbarian who is completely obsessed with the game now and the other was our friend from our regular gaming group who wanted to give D&D a try. It was different to say the least.

 I ran  "Bandit's Nest" by Dan Coleman. It is a really cool adventure that was perfect for a one off. I won't go into spoilers just in case. Good creatures and layout. I really liked the encounter and glad I found it.

How did it go? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure. They both seemed to enjoy it. We bogged on rules once or twice, but not enough to crash the game. I kind of expected that anyway since we are all still so green. I was extremely disappointed that they didn't go into one location. It would have been soooo cool. I had special music for that one and everything. I think it would have scared the ... out of them :)

The biggest difference that I noticed while running this vs. the two text adventures that were my own story is that I was having trouble getting a good flow putting the info out there since it wasn't "my story". I had reviewed and read through the material several times but still had to refer to the hard copies a little too much. I'm sure that would have worked easier if I was using/inserting this as part of a larger campaign. The upside? I didn't have to design the encounters within the story.

Overall, I liked the experience. I have started building the framework and feel of a world, a basic story line and studying up. Once I clear up some time after finishing Pandemic Legacy, I think it'll be time to officially dive in and do it for real!

Don't be ashamed!

It may sound strange to say in this day and age since it seems like "Geek Culture" is in now but depending on how your social circles overlap, it could still be common to be in a situation where you may feel like you should hide your hobbies for the possibility of getting made fun of or ridiculed etc. Don't be ashamed!

Before we get started, this isn't another one of those "you're a special little snowflake" article that encourages you to not fear for anything "because you are awesome!". Don't get me wrong. I'm not putting those down. They have their place but I don't feel that they are overly realistic at times (especially when you don't feel very awesome and people are going out of their way to reinforce that) But, if they help even one person pick themselves up and move through a shitty day, GREAT! If they help the overall mental health of someone, great!

So, now that's been said, what is this article about? Simple. Something cool happened to me the other day and I thought I'd share. In retrospect little things like this have been happening to me more and more lately but this one stood out.

I'm sitting at work and there are 4 of us in one good size office - people I've been friends with for years. One has been my best friend for about 20 years, another we both met that later came to work with us and another that has been in our office for only a couple years. None of my coworkers are gamers. My best friend sees games as a waste of time for people that cant "F or fight" but he's an artist and despite his bravado, people's quirks, hobbies and obsessions intrigue and amuse him in a mostly nonjudgmental way. My next oldest friend likes to "laugh with people". That is her kind of guilty way of justifying making fun of people she doesn't understand. Even though I tend to be one of those people, I know that she has a heart of gold so I usually easily dismiss it, take a dig back at her and move on.  I bet by now you're still wondering where this is all going...

Time to time, she sees a group of LARPers at a public park near her mother's house. This usually causes laughter from my coworkers. They'll look at me and ask me what my costume is even though they know I don't LARP but they do know I tried D&D way back in the day and usually slip into the stereotypical jokes about it. My best friend looks at me and asks completely seriously. "you only played once or twice back in the day but you play now right?"

My answer was simple... "Yup". Unapologetic, unfazed and so matter of fact that there were no jokes, and  I didn't get made fun of. Instead they looked at me, paused and asked a couple serious questions about what it actually was. How it was played etc... Now they aren't angels and we were listening to "Hello from the Magic Tavern" (it was an accent heavy episode) and the jokester did chuckle and ask me if we talked like that. (fair enough) I explained that my group is pretty new to it so no, no one is doing voices yet, not sure if anyone will. She said "oh.", the conversation ended and we went about our business.

Even at my age and my increasingly I really don't give a fuck what someone thinks about me attitude, old social insecurities and feeling still sneak in but it was nice to have this one go as it should because I simply owned something, made no apologies for something I really enjoy and in the end, because of that, didn't allow them to make me or one of my hobbies a farce. 

If you do something, anything... Own it! No one can take that from you. If they try, just handling it that way on your side will make you more resolute and not really care. It's kinda nice.

Stay Awesome!
-TND

What Do I Like the Most About D&D?

After our first D&D session I saw one of my friends from the group (one of the experienced players). He had overheard me telling our DM that I had a blast. He asked me what I liked the most about it. Funny thing,... I had a hard time answering him. It may have been because we had barely scratched the surface. It may have been because most of us hardly had a clue what we were doing. I basically mentioned a couple quick elements of the game that were fun but I knew it wasn't a complete answer. Throughout the rest of the night and since, I have pondered the question.

I wondered if I merely liked the fact that the game had happened at all. I knew I liked the fact that I had friends sitting around the table doing anything as a group. It's a group of guys that I really enjoy the company of. I liked that we managed to find some combat, established a small quest for the next session and started some role playing in the process. Even after all this, I still didn't have a good answer for my friend on what I liked the best about it, but I had my suspicions.

After two get togethers, I think I may actually be able to answer him and it is not as simple as "combat" or "adventuring/exploring" etc.

What do I really like the best about D&D right now?

I love the fact that the adventure is it’s own fluid entity. It’s not a completely set-in-stone narrative that we are just drifting through like a video game. Now, I know what you’re thinking… It is since the DM has designed the story, setting, quests, adventures, NPCs and monsters etc. I’ll even agree that you have a point but so far, the adventure feels more like something that is unfolding for all of us including the DM. Even though he has done the set up, there are 6 more minds driving the story and contributing actions. Add the fact that we are all at the whim of the dice, it really feels like none of us, not even the DM, has any real control over what happens. It’s a very strange, but interesting concept for me to get my head around and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Of course, you may just be saying "Well duh! That's what a role playing game is" but hey, I am a noob so... :)

Happy Gaming
-TND

2nd Session wrap up

Another session is in the books and my enthusiasm hasn't waned at all. I would have been surprised if it had of course. I was not nervous heading into this week like I had been about the first session which was cool. I hosted the first session and started everyone off with a shot of whiskey to celebrate the kick off of the campaign (and keep things loose) and it must have worked since the host this week did the same asking if that would be a tradition for us. Everyone seemed to like that idea so we have that going for us :)

Right from the start, it seemed like everyone was getting up to speed and into character quickly. No one has put on an accent but they started using the mannerisms, speech patterns and actions that their character's race, background and personalities would dictate. It was really fun to see that develop and increase over the course of the day.

There was some quick RP at the start to pick up where we left off after the last session. Our first battle was over. We were getting some heat from the local guard (who we were drinking with earlier in the night) for killing what now looked like halflings but were goblins when we killed them. We took care of that misunderstanding with a 20 from one of the party that was dealing with the guards. We couldn't do much more that night. None of us could do anything about the fire that the bad guys had started so we dispersed agreeing to meet back at the pub in the morning for our first full mission/adventure to get to the brewery to restock the pub of the "good stuff" since their last delivery failed thanks to a broken cart (part of a story hook for my character that caught my ear and got me to drunkenly agree to the job to continue the party the next night) After week one and thinking about that set up, it seemed slightly reminiscent of an episode of Titansgrave but I won't go back and watch it until we are done to see for sure.

Battle Time!

Once on the road for our mission, closing in on the cart that we bought supplies to fix, we heard a call for help. When we cleared a hill in the road, we saw two humans down with arrows sticking out of them. I rushed forward (major trigger for my character) with our cleric close behind and made my first newbie mistake... Figuring my character would instantly try to save them, I burned one of my two spell slots on cure wounds instead of just checking them first. Big surprise, it was a trap. Goblins! Battle number 2 of our short career. You can see the map left. (our DM forgot his battle map so I improvised those as he was setting up. The clear plastic is the cart we needed to fix. the D6s were the bad guys. The other dice and minis were us. The big dopey wooden player piece is me. I had an extra piece and some sharpies so I figure that'll do until I can find a good mini. More goblins would come out of the woods but we made fairly quick work of them except for 2 that tried to bug out. I managed to capture one of them and interrogate it which revealed a little side quest that we are still in the middle of. It is one of the DMs favorite quests from back in the day and it seems fun so far. After burning through a protective thorny barrier (getting charmed and losing a couple weapons), we found some kind of goblin home/area in the woods that's kind of psychedelic with two big mushrooms that you definitely shouldn't try to jump through a window of as our barbarian tried... It didn't go well but it was funny. We killed a couple giant spiders and our cleric was almost taken out and that is where we ended for the day.

This post is going on a little too long so I'll just say, it was a fun day. We're still getting used to this whole thing but if we keep going at the pace we are, we should all be truly down rabbit hole soon and I'm real interested to see how that goes. I'm looking forward to everyone getting more involved, less tentative. Most of all, I'm really looking forward to learning everyone's back stories. We've kept them close to the vest so we'll have some things to figure out via RP and to allow some people that wanted to develop them as we figure out what the heck we're doing.

-TND