Today, I join the ranks of blogs dedicated to a hobby that demands the rare combination of literary prowess, improvisational acting, and number crunching: tabletop role-playing games. The word 'table-top' is a bit of a misnomer, however, as the majority of the games I both play and DM are done by play-by-post. Dungeons and Dragons has always been my game of choice, so the majority of this blog will be discussing the latest iteration of that long, and storied rpg. Because I tend to DM far more often than play, a lot of this blog will be a behind the screen look at what is happening in my games and my thoughts on DMing. It will be part advice column, part travelogue, and partly a way to note the things I learn as I run games.
In fact, I am currently in the middle of a bit of an experiment. Wizards of the Coast has long had a program called D&D Encounters. The idea is that every Wednesday night, your friendly local game store hosts a game where anyone can walk in off the sheet, pick up a character, and have an hour of adventure with random strangers. It is a great way to evangelize the hobby (something that is surprisingly easy as geek becomes more chic) and a fun way to teach new players the game. I was attracted to the hour-long format of the sessions. Each encounter was a session built around a set piece combat, surrounded by role-playing and story. You could get in, roll some dice, rp a little, and get out without a huge time commitment. The encounters string together like episodes in a TV series, ending with a climactic season finale. I've always wanted to play in one but WotC kept the adventures exclusive to the stores running the program.
Until now. As of Dungeon issue 211, WotC has begun to release their encounter seasons to DDI subscribers, starting with Beyond the Crystal Cave. This module is based on an old British tournament module from the OD&D days that focused on problem solving and role-playing. I read through it and was instantly attracted to the whimsy and fairy-tale ambiance of the story.
One of the problems with my irl gaming group is scheduling. Four of my group have young kids at home, which provide their own host of scheduling issues, and one of them is working on a PhD on top of that. There simply isn't time to for the weekly, four hour gaming sessions of yesteryear. (If only we'd known how good we had it in college!)
This is what makes the D&D Encounters format so appealing. Instead of marathon sessions, we could get together on the weekends for small, 2 hour, episodic games. I recruited my friends and soon we'd had our first session. The second session went off fairly smoothly too, though one of our players was unable to make it at the last minute...
I have already done most of the prep work for running this game, so I decided that I would also offer to run it online at RPGCrossing. This is a play-by-post site where I have been DMing and playing for quite some time. I put up an advertisement for a date 3 weeks in the future, asking for adventurers. 9 answered the call within the deadline, and I decided, in the spirit of D&D evangelism, to accept them all. I created two parallel games, with a party of 4 and a party of 5, and am running them concurrently.
So I find myself DMing 4 games at the same time. Three of them are the same adventure, two by play-by-post and one in person. I am interested to see how they diverge. Though the story is fairly streamlined, any veteran DM knows that the you never run the same adventure twice, thanks to the diversity and creativity of the players.
In fact, I am currently in the middle of a bit of an experiment. Wizards of the Coast has long had a program called D&D Encounters. The idea is that every Wednesday night, your friendly local game store hosts a game where anyone can walk in off the sheet, pick up a character, and have an hour of adventure with random strangers. It is a great way to evangelize the hobby (something that is surprisingly easy as geek becomes more chic) and a fun way to teach new players the game. I was attracted to the hour-long format of the sessions. Each encounter was a session built around a set piece combat, surrounded by role-playing and story. You could get in, roll some dice, rp a little, and get out without a huge time commitment. The encounters string together like episodes in a TV series, ending with a climactic season finale. I've always wanted to play in one but WotC kept the adventures exclusive to the stores running the program.
Until now. As of Dungeon issue 211, WotC has begun to release their encounter seasons to DDI subscribers, starting with Beyond the Crystal Cave. This module is based on an old British tournament module from the OD&D days that focused on problem solving and role-playing. I read through it and was instantly attracted to the whimsy and fairy-tale ambiance of the story.
One of the problems with my irl gaming group is scheduling. Four of my group have young kids at home, which provide their own host of scheduling issues, and one of them is working on a PhD on top of that. There simply isn't time to for the weekly, four hour gaming sessions of yesteryear. (If only we'd known how good we had it in college!)
This is what makes the D&D Encounters format so appealing. Instead of marathon sessions, we could get together on the weekends for small, 2 hour, episodic games. I recruited my friends and soon we'd had our first session. The second session went off fairly smoothly too, though one of our players was unable to make it at the last minute...
I have already done most of the prep work for running this game, so I decided that I would also offer to run it online at RPGCrossing. This is a play-by-post site where I have been DMing and playing for quite some time. I put up an advertisement for a date 3 weeks in the future, asking for adventurers. 9 answered the call within the deadline, and I decided, in the spirit of D&D evangelism, to accept them all. I created two parallel games, with a party of 4 and a party of 5, and am running them concurrently.
So I find myself DMing 4 games at the same time. Three of them are the same adventure, two by play-by-post and one in person. I am interested to see how they diverge. Though the story is fairly streamlined, any veteran DM knows that the you never run the same adventure twice, thanks to the diversity and creativity of the players.
