On Dungeons and Dragons

Discovering Magic Amongst the Ruins

I love pen and paper role playing games. Always have. And like many rpg players, my very first role playing game book had the words Dungeons & Dragons in strong, bold letters on the cover. I say book but the copy of D&D basic that I had was more like a large pamphlet to be honest. But there were fighters and sneaks and magicians confronting some of the weirdest monsters to ever spring forth from human imagination and in the tradition of many kids before me, I loved every second of it.

I devoured every D&D book that I could find. I still have every role playing game book that I’ve ever managed to acquire, including D&D basic, AD&D and various original adventure modules by Gygax himself. Looking back at it now I was pretty lucky to get any RPG books at all back then. They weren’t popular, which meant they simply weren’t available in any brick and mortar stores in my area. Worse still the term ‘brick and mortar store’ wasn’t really in the vernacular since the internet barely even existed. So how do you buy something that isn’t available for retail? Op shops. Many, many op shops.

Op shops, AKA opportunity shops, are basically junk shops wherein all presented stock has been donated or otherwise acquired by the store owner for practically nothing. Primarily these types of stores exist for clothing people who are dirt poor, which is why our family frequented them constantly and to the exclusion of all other stores (besides the cheapest local grocery store). Most people, when writing about their own impoverished childhoods, say that they didn’t really know they were poor at the time. They say ‘we were just kids and we loved our families and didn’t realise that other people lived differently’. I understand why that’s such a common statement. Back then I was pretty happy and focused on whatever toy I was playing with at the time. But I if I’m being honest; I always knew we were poor as shit.

I guess though, as a kid, you just don’t care that you’re poor. Sure you see cool toys and other dumb shit on TV and you ask your parents to buy it for you. But you want your parents to buy you fifty new things a day. You don’t actually expect them to buy every single one. In fact as a poor kid you probably wouldn’t even ask them, since you know they get barely enough money to put food in your mouth, but you just haven’t developed that sense of self hatred that kicks in when you are an adult that tells you not to get excited at every colourful thing that you see. I think part of the job of being a poor, single parent is trying to pick out the cheapest things that your kid seems excited about so that you can provide them the same feelings as other kids, just not the same material possessions.

I wish I could say that I remember the exact moment that I found each original D&D book that I own buried deep in some pile of National Geographic magazines and huge sun-bleached cook books from the 50s and 60s at our local Saint Vincent De Paul store. I wish that I remembered the exact cute-little-kid phrasing that I used to persuade my mother to actually buy the things for me. But unfortunately another thing that comes with having a poor childhood is that you go through a phase, somewhere around the age of 20 for me, where you decide that your life will no longer be what it once was and you actively try to focus on the future and forget the past.

Even more though I wish I could remember the first time I cracked the books open with my little kiddie friends and played our first adventure, eventually losing the game to Gygaxian monsters and puzzles. But in that case the problem isn’t repression or the gradual fading of memories. In that case I simply never did. That’s not to say that even though I own all these books I’ve never played them. I’ve played every D&D system that has been made, besides the latest one which I’m sure I will get around to trying out at some point. (This is barring 4th edition, which I did test out a little but seemed horrible in its own right in addition to coming out just as I made the realisation that I would never play D&D again if I could help it. I still might play it for real one day just so I don’t have to make this addendum in the future.)

My first real experiences with D&D came about when I was about ten years old. I had managed to scrape together enough of these magical tomes from random finds in bargain basements that I actually had enough information to run a game. No one I knew had ever played D&D, which seemed like a problem, but I was still reading the books over and over and over again. So much so that, even at that age, I would have made a pretty decent Dungeon Master. As most people know, even those who’ve never tasted the crack-flavoured-magic-candy that is a pen and paper role playing game, the Dungeon Master is the person in charge of a D&D game. The Dungeon Master controls the monsters, the story (assuming there is one) and basically everything else one might find in a Tolkien novel besides the main characters. It’s everyone else at the table who gets control of the main characters. And here is where most people find the first major problem with role playing systems like Dungeons and Dragons.

Jack of all Dungeons, Master of None

Because I was falling in love with D&D I wanted to share that love with the world. That meant getting a game going. This is a trickier proposition than you might think. Especially if you are aiming for a regular group of people who you can count on to show up and be ready to contribute to something creatively. In fact this is especially tricky when you are ten years old. But back then I wasn’t aiming that high. All I wanted was two hours of time wherein at least four people sat down and played a game with me. I had about that many good friends and maybe a couple of acquaintances or friends of friends who could be leveraged as needed and two hours didn’t sound like a long time to a bunch of kids in an era before smartphones. (I honestly think ‘being born too early’ is a phrase my generation’s psychologists must hear all the damn time).

We had pens, paper and the D&D books themselves. We didn’t have polyhedral dice back then but we had plenty of plain old six sided ones and that was good enough for basic D&D (the d20 system came later on and I have just as much love/hate for that as for D&D itself which I will explain below). The problem that we had, and I imagine the problem many new players have (especially kids), was that no one wanted to be the Dungeon Master.

In reading this story, if you have any familiarity with role playing games, you probably have come to the conclusion that I myself should have been the DM. And that is a fair assessment I guess. I was the one who was becoming obsessed with reading and memorising every book. Thus I was the one who would know the rules the best and thus should be the one to administer them. And eventually that is what ended up happening, but not until I was well into my teenage years. However at ten years of age all I wanted to do was be a player. I didn’t want to write the story; I wanted to read the story. I wanted to explore this magical new world and make my mark on it. And so did everyone else.

We rolled plenty of characters, coming up with crazy names and backstories for them. If I’m honest this was perhaps more ‘me’ than ‘we’ since I used to make characters all the time back then. But I do remember getting people together and rolling characters a number of times but not getting much further. I think every person who really gets into rpgs will sit around and roll characters they will never use at some (or many) point(s) in their lives. It’s a weird activity that straddles some intangible border between super fun and mega depressing. Fun, because making things up that are cool is always fun. Depressing, because you are wishing that there were other people around who would play the game with you. But instead you are just sitting by yourself pouring over creative endeavours that will likely never be seen by any other human being.

I tried again and again to convince different people to be the DM so that I could play in this new found world. But most of my friends were just as poor as I was so they didn’t own the books (probably because we all shopped in the same places but I had the advantage of going to these shops far more often and digging through their stock far more obsessively). So I always ended up knowing the rules better than everyone else. Which meant that on the rare occasion when someone would agree to the idea and take on the mantle of being in charge of a bunch of rowdy ten year old Australian males, they would always defer to me on issues of rules contention.

This is not too much of a problem. Well at least until the subject of contention is my own characters’ fate. At which point I basically get the choice of being labelled a cheater, told that I was making up the rules or killing off my character and just becoming the DMs rules lawyer for the rest of the session. (To be clear these accusations were morally correct in my opinion. Or as morally correct as ten year old boys have the capacity to be anyway. Games that have DMs have them for a reason, even if it is a reason I don’t agree with).

My friends and I were largely invested in the Scouts at this time, so we loved the idea of heading off into the woods to seek adventure and fortune, which was a sentiment exactly mirrored by the early D&D modules. But whenever we would get time to try to play the game we always ended up in a shit fight. Be it about rules, or unfair character death, or personal disputes that carried over into the game. Now D&D of course can’t be held responsible if the players themselves are doing things that ruin their own fun, but a lot of these issues arise in D&D because of systemic problems that could easily be addressed in my opinion.

When you decide to play a game that sounds fun with your friends, but then discover you won’t actually be playing, just administering the rules, you end up feeling pretty ripped off. How can you be expected to be a good DM in that position? Even when I did finally bite the bullet and start DMing instead of trying to find other people to do it, this problem prevailed. Whoever was DMing, me or anyone else, didn’t really want to be. We all wanted to be powerful adventurers roaming the land, not human dictionaries of rules who were basically just reading a complicated story to everyone else.

At this point people who have been a part of successful D&D campaigns in the past or present may start to think I am just whining. The obvious comment at this point is: find a good DM! And sure, I agree. There are people out there who love DMing and do it very well. And if you find one of these unicorns, yes, D&D will be an extremely enjoyable experience for you. But it isn’t always this simple. And in my opinion it should be simple. It should be VERY simple. Simple enough that ten year olds can manage it on their own without fists flying.

In some ways I feel like maybe I am not giving ten year olds enough credit here. And to be fair younger humans probably have an easier job of getting their friends in a room ready to play a game than the rest of us do. To further diminish my own arguments; we are currently living during the first time in human history in which a young new D&D player is more likely to be taught how to play by their own parents than by their peers. So in all likelihood the argument of kids not wanting or knowing how to be good DMs is looking pretty fossilized since they probably don’t even need to anymore. But personally I think there are problems with the concept of the Dungeon Master that run deep as bone and aren’t limited to the experiences of younger players.

For the Love of the Folders

By this point in my life the only real problem that I had run into with D&D was trying to find a good DM. That all changed dramatically a few years later when I was around fourteen. Highschool brought with it many things that I would rather forget, of course, but one thing that came into my life because of it was an abundance of like-minded people. People who were, maybe, just a little bit, interested in roleplaying games. What they weren’t interested in as it turned out was reading. Or rules. Well not to the level that the d20 system needed them to be, in order to play.

The d20 system is a huge set of rules that most versions of D&D (and many other rpgs) have been based on since it first came out. It’s called d20 because that is shorthand notation referring to a twenty sided die, which is the most often used one in the system. What was of particular interest to me about the system at the time was that I could obtain it, in its entirety (it’s no small chook), for exactly zero dollars. This was because it was released under an open license. This was a blessing to a poor kid but it was also a little hollow.

See the distinction here is that I could get all of the rules, the parts that you need to actually play the game, for free. But they were stripped of any thematic niceties that came with the actual D&D books. On the upside this meant that, now more than ever, I had everything I needed to actually play the game (I have no memory of when or how but somewhere along the way I had managed to pick up a pack of ‘blue ice cream’ polyhedral dice). But in order to get it in my hands I had to download the Rich Text Format files from the internet and then print them out using our library’s printer at something like 20c per page. So I guess saying that it was ‘exactly zero dollars’ was a bit of a lie. I did manage to steal many a ream of paper for this purpose though so it still managed to be pretty cheap. (What? I was a poor kid. Sue me.)

This whole process was more work than I can really explain. What I ended up with was about 15 very thick plastic-sleeve folders filled with rules, game systems, loot tables, huge lists of monsters and many, many other things. I printed them with the smallest readable font possible and the smallest print margins I could get away with dependant on the exact machine that I was dealing with that day so that I could fit it on as few pages, and thus in as few folders as possible. It took more time than I am willing to admit just to print and sleeve this stuff but it took even more time trying to get another human being to read, understand, and want to administer it. Eventually I did pull it off, but it lasted maybe one session before it crumbled.

I can’t remember the exact argument we were having but I do remember it had to do with how to handle something catching fire within our game world. For those of you who have never delved into the depths of one of these older, rules heavy systems I should explain that they basically had a rule for everything. And anything they didn’t have a rule for some player somewhere had made up a rule for. And all of those rules were now in my giant stack of folders. The DM I had secured wanted to know how to handle the fiery situation and as always I was the guy who knew where to look in the books to find the relevant ruling.

I know I wasn’t happy about the fire but I can’t remember much more than that. My hazy memory tells me it was a person that was on fire, but it could just as easily have been some important object or building. When I did eventually find the rule (it wasn’t even one of those times where you search and search but can’t find it, it just took ages due to the sheer mass of identical folders I had to sort through) the rule itself was so convoluted and contradictory to the way the rest of the system worked that the DM made the right call and house-ruled it to be simpler. But that didn’t go over well at all. People literally got up and left because the DM made the right call. Not everyone left though. And since there were around eleven players at the time (another questionable idea in itself) those that remained did keep going with the session.

And despite the craziness of the situation I had a blast! As did many of the other players. But the fact that people had quit in a huff put a strain on the fragile social relationships of a bunch of nerdy high school age kids. We were already so terrible at social relationships we really didn’t need any more bullshit in that department. And so, not for the first or last time, my RPG group dissolved. And I got sad. Super sad.

But wait, you scream! Didn’t you say that in highschool you worked it all out and became the DM yourself? I did say that. But that took place a of couple years later on. At this point I was just back to reading my books and updating my d20 system folders and wishing people would play with me. In the time between this and the next phase of my roleplaying career I did try DMing a number of times without much success though. What I found in these trial runs was that I could do it pretty well if I never had to lookup a rule in the folders that I had spent so much damn time creating. Most people blamed the folders for this, but they were innocent I tell you! (I loved those damn folders.)

The problem in my opinion was the rules themselves. They were inconsistent and more than anything else laborious. If the party of adventures were being creative and doing things other than simply swinging swords at things then a single fight against the easiest monsters that could be brought forth could take hours if played exactly by this rule set. As soon as things started catching fire, or the fight took on movement (as in fighting from on top of a moving wagon for example), or if weather became a factor, or basically anything beyond basic attack rolls, things slowed to a crawl.

Thankfully, due to my obsession with the system, I could manage to keep huge portions of these rules in my head at the same time. It became very rare that I would need to look anything up. This is a great growth point for any budding DM and the start of running adventures that are really enjoyable for everyone involved. I still harboured a slight resentment about just wanting to be a player rather than a DM but I was starting to enjoy the DMs role more and more. This was probably because I could do it very well, and the basic rule of thumb is; if the DM is good, the game will be good. And having a good role playing session is one of those addictive things that just gets better and better as time goes on. Like drugs. I mean not like real drugs, which are horrible, but like the drugs you see in Seth Rogan movies where everyone is having the best time ever and everything is made more hilarious because of it.

Eventually I made a tough decision. It was hard because of the tremendous attachment I had built up around these folders and also the D&D brand itself. But I had just had enough of the crappier parts of the system and the endless rules upon rules. So I did away with it completely. Luckily, since now we are talking about a time when I was basically an adult, (I moved out of home maybe a year or so after this at the age of sixteen), I actually remember this part pretty well!

Time to Scratch the Itch

Throwing away the D&D rule system wasn’t really a choice I made intentionally. It came about on the spur of the moment. It was in year nine or ten I believe and it was in that time of the Australian school year, somewhere around November I’d say, when you start to wonder why you are even turning up to school at all. All your assignments have been marked off, you know you’ve passed. The teachers are just putting dumb movies on instead of teaching you anything. This is right when a striking, yet oddly mellow, feeling of complete boredom begins to set in. I remember I was sitting with a bunch of mates somewhere quiet just talking and trying to come up with something to do. When it happened.

One of my best mates Toby, (who I’d managed to get to DM a couple times and who actually enjoyed it a bit if I remember correctly), asked if there was some way we could play D&D at school. In that moment something coalesced inside of me and I announced that we should play a Scratch Game! ‘Scratch Game’ was not a term I had ever heard before but I don’t profess to be original enough to have coined it. A quick google suggests that at this time it isn’t a popular term so who knows, maybe other people don’t do this. But, by my own impromptu teenage declaration, a Scratch Game of D&D is one that is completely made up on the fly. Might sound odd, but so far I’ve only had a handful of rpg campaigns in my life that came close to how awesome our Scratch Game ended up being.

We used only standard six sided dice (primarily because we were at school and that was all we could scrounge up), a roll of four or higher was a success. I only made people roll for things that would be directly contested, like an attack, a defence, or something that some character in the story might want to stop them from doing. They all made up characters by just writing down what they wanted their characters to be like, and adding in what gear said heroes might have on them. The story was as stock standard as a D&D story can get; They met at a tavern and introduced themselves, the townsfolk were afraid of a local underground lair wherein lay unspeakable horrors and they set off and destroyed evil as they went.

The setup for the game took barely thirty minutes from ‘yeah let’s play’ to ‘ you meet in a tavern’ which meant the next 5 or so hours of school were dedicated to the adventure. That sounds pretty weird as I write it down. It raises the question of ‘how the hell did we get away not doing school work’? But at the time, and at that school, the last few weeks of the year were always pretty random and casual affairs. We weren’t even breaking the rules spending our whole day playing my Scratch Game of D&D since we actually got teacher permission to have a whole classroom to ourselves for just this purpose. Admittedly this was a nerdy teacher who, I think, had a soft spot for us. Maybe they pulled some strings for us? But we wouldn’t have noticed or cared at the time. We were way too into it.

It amazes me looking back, and probably amazed the guys and gals who played this random game at the time, just how prepared I was for it. The years and years of reading through every piece of role playing game errata I could get my hands on meant that making up my own system for things right on the fly was actually pretty easy. I was able to simplify so many things that had always been so complicated before. I was able to tie various rules together to make things feel more organic and interesting. It was all really fluid and I never gave myself time to think about it or write the rules down, which was half the point really I guess, but I still regret not recording it in that way. Regrets aside, this game was all about having fun, rules be damned. If something sounded cool; it happened. End of story. No bad rolls could ruin any truly awesome ideas the players came up with. And that made it fun. Super fun.

Even as prepared as I was to make up an rpg system on the fly, what I wasn’t prepared for was the idea that people would enjoy the game so much that we would play it every day for the next three weeks. Even on the weekends we went over to each others houses and kept playing. That was a big thing at the time since this was a pretty loose group of friends. I got to hang out really closely with people who I had only been barely acquainted with before hand. In fact the part of this idea that ended up surprising me the most was the fact that, after watching me lead them on a fun ride, flying by the seat of my pants and making everything up as I went along, most of the group decided that it looked pretty easy and wanted to give DMing a go.

Because of this, after the first couple sessions we started rotating DM’s. Each session a new player had a go at being the person in charge. Since they didn’t have to read any huge rule books, and since they had now become accustomed to the very simple rules that I had made up, no one seemed to have any trouble in making up a fun adventure for us all to go on and making up the rules for it as they went. It was about as fun, creative and inclusive an activity as high school kids could manage and we all seemed to love it. Of course, since as a group we were now all ‘into D&D’ we did start playing by the actual rules eventually. And not long after that the group dissolved as quickly as the fun did.

Now I don’t blame the actual D&D ruleset we adopted for breaking up the group, by that time we had basically just burnt out on it since we were playing every day for weeks. But I do think that getting rid of most of those rules was what made the game fun in the first place. I can say for sure that this was the first time that I had an inkling that there must be something out there better than D&D. Some role playing system must exist that focused on all the elements of D&D that I and all my Scratch Game buddies loved, but minimised all the entry barriers that D&D itself always had. I did eventually find a few systems that fit this bill, but not before throwing myself into the fire of the d20 system a few more times.

In Order to Change We Must Find the Path

The next story I will tell in this behemoth of a blog post has to do with a game that is entirely D&D but called something a little different; Pathfinder. Remember how I mentioned that the d20 system was an ‘open’ system? Well that has meant that people other than the company that made D&D can make their own role playing games that use exactly the same system as D&D. For a long time that didn’t add up to much, most derivative products were little add-ons that just gave you some new class or race to play with (usually those weren’t balanced in the least) or some other small change to the system.

I’m sure Pathfinder isn’t the only full blown role playing game to come out of the d20 systems openness but it is by far the most popular and well recognised. While it is praised for many reasons, the one that attracted me to it was that people were saying that it fixed many of the questionable rules that D&D 3rd edition had created. (Though many had already been fixed up in D&D 3.5 edition, Pathfinder took those changes further, hence many refer to it as D&D 3.X) .

This idea peaked my curiosity. Every time I had played D&D since my old high school scratch game I had felt weighed down by the rules. I just wanted to be creative and make up cool stories and go on adventures! So if Pathfinder would let me do that, and the rules were going to be consistent and easy to implement at least, I wanted to give it a try. Eventually, by extension of my regular board games group at the time, I got my chance to try it out. This is going to be a fairly large jump in time for this story so bear with me.

By the time I tried Pathfinder I was well into adulthood. Well to be honest, I feel like I didn’t change that much as a person during this time leap. Maybe I was now a bit less of an angsty teen and a bit more of a ‘work sucks’ twenty something, but overall I was basically the same guy. While my state of mind hadn’t changed all that much, my state of affairs changed dramatically. I had moved out of home not long after the era of those scratch games at the age of sixteen and moved to a different state where I had no support network or family.

To begin with that was a pretty tumultuous thing, as you can probably imagine. Even though I could probably talk about how difficult it was and what a huge struggle it was, looking back, all that matters is that it was a genesis moment. I felt the call; leave everything else behind you and seek your destiny. I suppose I could be poetic and say I didn’t play pen and paper rpgs all that much in that time because I was living out my own adventure in real life. But I did play them, though not that often.

This general lack of rpgs in my life was basically due to how long it takes to rebuild enough personal relationships to get a good role playing game going after you say goodbye to everyone you know (or in my case up and leave without saying much of anything). It took a fairly long time for my life to settle back down and have some form of rhythm or rhyme. And when it finally did I had a decent job and a lovely life-partner who I’ve now been with for around eleven years.

So; In my new role as ‘guy with job who does adult stuff’, at some point, I found the opportunity to put together a regular board games group. This came about in part due to a love of board games that I had been fostering ever since getting what is still one of my all-time favourite games, Cosmic Encounter, as a birthday present. And in other-part due to the absolutely excellent show TableTop that started exposing the world to just how magical board games could be around that time.

Ever since leaving school I had become entirely obsessed with video games, leaving face to face gaming by the wayside. This went all the way to the point of doing four years (so far) of rather expensive schooling dedicated to creating the things. So by this point in my life it seemed that it had been far too long since I had had the joy of playing games socially with people I could actually see in front of me.

This next group did dissolve like they all seem to for me eventually, but while it lasted we played board games about once a week, sometimes more often. We played all kinds of games, though mostly the ones that we had seen and liked on TableTop. As a group we had pretty diverse tastes but oddly enough we all got sucked in, right to the point of obsession, with a game called Lords of Waterdeep. Which, of course, was a D&D product. D&D hadn’t come up in my life for a fairly long time at this point. I had played a few games here and there. But personally I had moved on from D&D as a brand.

I was still obsessed with reading roleplaying game books, but since now I could make my own money, I had discovered an entire world full of different roleplaying options. So many, in fact, that D&D basically seemed like the ‘vanilla ice cream’ of roleplaying games. Vanilla is fine, but I was too excited to bother with it when there were so many new experiences on offer. Sadly enough for me, I have since learned that for most people at least, when it comes to roleplaying games, vanilla is as adventurous as they are willing to get.

I suppose it seems like a natural transition now that I have hindsight but at the time I was genuinely surprised when the whole group decided that what would be awesome was to no longer play board games, but play a role playing game instead. I made a few suggestions as to what kind of rpg I personally would like to play but the group ultimately wanted to play D&D. The best I could manage was to steer them in the direction of Pathfinder, since on the one hand it was basically just D&D rebranded, but on the other, at least to me, it was something a little new and flavourful.

The other main point here is that still to this day and certainly at this time, I was not excited about the idea of being a Dungeon Master. Or as it is usually called outside of the D&D system, Game Master. I was pretty good at it, and I knew that. But I just preferred, and still do prefer, playing the game to administering it. I do enjoy a lot of what being a GM allows me to do. But it gets very tiring when you add in all the parts that I don’t enjoy as much and then multiply that by the fact that I don’t get the sense of wonder or release that a player will usually get. Because of this lingering feeling I imposed a rule on the group that we rotate GMs. Meaning we would each take a turn as GM so that no one person would get burned out on not getting to play the game.

This solution worked very well. Up to a point. See my thinking was; since we had a four player group, having one person GM each session at the rate of one session per week would allow each of us about one month to work on the adventure that we would present to the other players. This would mean that each session would have an awesome, well thought out adventure and as an added bonus since there were four different people creating them they shouldn’t get too samey or formulaic. And this thought proved to be correct. Until it wasn’t anymore.

The plan worked so well, and the games were of such high quality and were so enjoyable, that we ended up wanting to play all the damn time. And we basically did. At the peak of this campaign we were playing around four games a week. Sometimes more. Each game would run from as soon as we could all get off work or whatever our other obligations were until one or two in the morning. Remember here we were working adults. The amount of our lives this game took up for the couple of months that we played it was significant to say the least.

None of the group had children, (they would have ended up malnourished if we did), but we still had a lot of other things on our plates. Dedicating that much time to a game was pretty intense for all of us. The only thing I can attribute this crazy idea to is simply the addictive nature of rpgs in general. When you get a good group going, and the story you all are creating is compelling, and you are having tons of fun, and you get long stretches of time where you feel powerful and the problems in your life no longer matter, you don’t stop. You want to live in that world all the time. And this is not a bad thing. It’s fucking awesome. This story isn’t going to turn into a cautionary tale. RPG addiction is like coffee addiction; there is basically no downside or reason to not just keep fuelling it. It’s the best and nothing bad can happen at all. So chill.

This campaign was super fun and I feel like I should stress this point here; I do actually enjoy roleplaying games. Pathfinder and D&D included. So far this story has probably sounded like I just don’t like them anymore. That isn’t the case. I do. There are just a few elements of these and similar systems which annoy me to seemingly no end. But I can barely remember those problems coming up in this campaign.

Since we had four very different players all taking turns being the GM we had so many different awesome experiences. My partner Jessica delivered amazingly detailed adventures even though it was her first full on role playing game. She prepared excellent grid maps, stories with fun twists and most awesomely of all super cool looking props! The most memorable of which came during a story in which the party had decided to enter a one-on-one physical combat tournament. We were all given aged paper with wax seals that we were asked to sign. They were contracts ensuring that the establishment wasn’t liable for any personal injury or death that we might suffer as a result of entering the tournament. They looked amazing.

We also had a player, Sascha, who was an old hand with D&D. He prepared all kinds of handcrafted puzzles for us. Even better, whenever he would GM we would be treated to excellent voice acting for his story characters. (People who can do good voices are super fun rpg buddies). Our last player Tyson was pretty new to roleplaying games but he didn’t let that stop him from creating some amazingly tense and long combat encounters for us. If he was the GM that week, we all knew we would be fighting some kind of toweringly large creature that wanted to devour us and crush our bones! In other words; we were going to have super-duper fun times!

It would be far too egotistical for me to talk up my own GMing for this campaign but I think for context’s sake I will explain what I think I did well. So; I was the first GM of the campaign, setting the tone for the adventure and laying in some early foreshadowing of my eventual plan to unleash hordes of giant zombies upon the other players. I think that sort of story-work is my main strength as a GM, ensuring that there is some kind of narrative structure and doing cool things with it. The session that we planned to have next, but never got to run due to this-and-that coming up and then eventually the group just dissolving, was one I was going to GM. And I had a pretty cool plan for it.

Creativity is the Thing

The group had been doing odd jobs here and there but all the while they had been investigating the growing concern of more and more sightings of the undead. There were rumours of an ancient plague that had long ago erased entire races from the face of the globe and the group suspected that recent happenings might suggest a resurgence. My character was particularly disturbed by this as he was a member of an ancient society that was tasked with ensuring that the plague never reared its ugly head again. He led the group to see his master, one of the few remaining frost giants in the world and the man who taught him guncraft. They were going to present their evidence to him and hope against hope that it wasn’t a resurgence of the plague.

Of course it was a resurgence. The main rule with rpg stories in my opinion is as follows; If you face a choice between something interesting happening and nothing happening, or something boring happening, then the interesting thing happens!

So the plan I had for that session was to have the frost giant gunslinger sit the group down and tell the tale of what had happened all those hundreds of years ago. That of course sounds pretty boring since it would just be me telling a story to the players, which isn’t very interactive. So to liven things up I was going to hand out character sheets for very high level characters and have the group play through the ancient heroes last stand against the undead hordes. Of course the current band of heroes were also related to these ancient heroes and yadda yadda yadda tie everything together so it seems like the world has a history etc.

It would have been super fun for a bunch of low level players to have a super powered encounter one shot like that and essentially get the opportunity to actively shape the past of their game world. But it didn’t come to pass. Mostly because the group dissolved around this time. But also because, to set up such an encounter was an enormous amount of work and not something I could pull off in less than a week. If we were playing once a week and thus I had had a month to plan it all out it would have been amazing. But given the amount of rules and tables and synergies involved with the system we were playing it simply wasn’t something I could whip up on the fly.

Less rules = more narrative. Usually.

It was only later that I thought about this idea in the context of a scratch game. If we were playing by looser, or at least simpler, rules I probably could have done that encounter without much effort. I would have just had everyone get out some new paper, come up with a cool name for their historical character and write them down as being basically a much stronger version of their current characters. Then I would have come up with some of the undead guys and thrown them into the story I had in my head.

I really wish D&D type games could be simpler so that this kind of stuff could be done with less work involved. I want to keep the magic, keep the fun, keep the addictiveness but lose all the hoops we have to jump through. And thankfully I’m not the only one who thinks this, as I will explain in my next rpg related post.

It was about this time in my life I made a personal vow. One I hope I can keep. I vowed that the next pen and paper roleplaying game that I put that much effort into would have to reward me for that effort by being simple. By being easy to play with little to no preparation. By being more focused on awesome stories and epic moments than dice rolls and loot tables. By finally giving me the wheel and getting out of my damn way. And, thank fuck, the next time I get this deep into an rpg I know it will. Because I have discovered Fate Core. And I’m never going back. (I hope).