As I grow older and my free time for my entertainment dwindles, I’ve started reading books about my favorite hobbies. I’m currently reading Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt. It recounts the history of the classic tabletop roleplaying game as well as the author’s regular sessions. He plays in a custom setting where vampires have overrun earth and his merry band is fighting for humanity’s future.
I love hearing his campaign told as a narrative. It takes me back to my late teenage years to reflect on my own role playing heydey and my shortcomings as a Dungeon Master (DM).
Growing up in a small town,I had limited exposure to tabletop roleplaying games. Our local gaming store, Steve’s World, was primarily a movie and game rental store. Steve sold comics, collectibles and some gaming stuff, but not roleplaying games. The store was my gateway to Mage Knight and the timeless classic, Raw Deal. These games captured my paychecks, but never my imagination like D&D eventually would. None of my closest friends played role playing games in spite of our general interest in Fantasy narratives.
Eventually my friend Dan and I took the plunge. We drove an hour to a Northern suburb of the Twin Cities and bought a copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. We thought we were all set. We had no idea it was a rulebook for running campaigns, not playing in them. We figured I would be the DM and it was everything we needed. We had no idea we would need the Player’s Handbook as well.
We told some mutual friends and while the nerdiest among them laughed at us with disdain, we were invited to play our first game of D&D. It was a mostly disastrous session, my wizard had low constitution so he was limited to a single hit point. If anything hit him it would be a potentially fatal blow. My very supportive friends used this as ammunition to subdue me and threatened to withhold my share of the loot with physical violence. In retrospect, perhaps I should have sought out better friends, but you do the best you can in a small town.
There was another downside to purchasing the guide – they were about to release a third edition of the game. I didn’t worry about it too much, I assumed it would be easy enough to carry our characters and story forward. It wasn’t, but we never actually played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons again anyways. With the new edition, Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, I knew that I needed a Players Handbook to play the game, a Dungeon Master’s Guide to run the game and a Monster Manual to create interesting encounters. As I graduated high school in spring of 2000 and prepared to go to college, I was armed with my new reference books and a can-do cool-kid attitude.
Over the summer of 2000 we launched our first and grandest campaign, unofficially known as Tom Realm. I didn’t know that pre-printed campaigns were available, so I just started making up my own world. The campaign focused on Pat’s elven character, Tyrone Michael Schumaker (Ty My Shoe) and Dan’s gnomish wizard, Ralston. Other players and characters filtered in and out, but it was mostly the two of them with whoever else we could scrounge up.
The adventure started off innocuously enough. Ty and Ralson were at the local tavern. They wanted to go on an adventure and bought a map from a stranger. Sometime shortly after, Ralston was attempting to steal gold and Ty got arrested and put in jail. He was sentenced to be executed. Throughout his imprisonment he maintained that he had done nothing wrong. When a non-player character (NPC) showed up to spring him from jail, he refused to leave because it would be an admission of guilt. He believed that he would not be punished for a crime he didn’t commit. Eventually, he was hung for the crime and the NPC had to complete a daring rescue, shooting the rope with an arrow to save Ty’s life, a la Robin Hood Prince of Thieves:
The party was saved and the narrative moved forward.
Eventually the duo discovered a cave in the woods, cleared out the local baddies and established a base of operations. We were all having a good time and I got to work on my improvisational skills. I planned the early sessions with just enough monsters for the party to level up. What I didn’t foresee was the party’s desire to sometimes avoid combat. If they didn’t take down these four kobold guards on patrol, they wouldn’t level up at the end of the session, so I would keep bringing the enemy formation back again and again until the players got the idea and fought the monsters.
As the adventure continued I grew less rigid, on another night I had an adventure all planned out and the party immediately went in another direction. The particulars escape me – it’s funny how a random all-night gaming session gets fuzzy 20 years later – but it stood out as one of the high points in my time as a DM. I managed to keep the action going and the group had a good time with whatever I made up on the fly. I believe Ralston spent the night hiding in a barrel in a tavern while guards searched the town. Good times.
While my ability to keep the game moving grew, I still struggled in other aspects of running a campaign. I didn’t know how to handle character death. The party wiped (everyone died) in our first session. As the players asked me if they needed to role new characters in a frustrated and accusatory tone, I just brought them back to life.Their money was gone, but they could continue the adventure. I used the NPC that had saved Ty’s life earlier in the campaign as a narrative explanation. To the players, it meant he stole their gold. He became an enemy of the group, even though I viewed him as a hero of the story.
Having the players hate their primary contact to the world around them had some advantages. They thought they could cheat death by hiding their gold and valuables in a tree stump. They died, woke up in the inn and had no money. They went to their hiding spot and the NPC – Stocker Dovein – was sitting on an empty cache.
As we played more the group got more powerful. This was greatly aided by the extremely powerful magic weapons they found lying around. Ty found a +3 magic sword that made it easier to hit enemies, did more damage and made him immune to fire damage. As he mowed through everything I set before the group, I realized I had a problem.
I was trying to empower my players so they didn’t feel like hapless weaklings and instead overpowered them. In order to plan encounters that were strong enough to threaten Ty’s melee might, any of the other party members would get shredded if the monsters hit them. I had to get those GD weapons back.
I decided to go nuclear. I would have a cataclysmic world event, and we would start over in Tom Realm 2.0. If everything went according to plan, the characters would all survive at the cost of their overpowered gear. I had kept Dragons hidden to this point and on this day they poured from the sky. They rained death and destruction on the land.
In a singular heroic action Stocker Dovein told Ty, “Give me that fire sword, so I can save the world.”
“No.”
“What?” Stocker asked as their companions burnt to ash around them.
“I’m not giving you my sword,” Ty replied dryly. “It makes me immune to fire and there is fire everywhere.”
Stocker stood there aghast for a moment, before a dragon swooped down and bit him in half. The world was destroyed but Ty survived with his magic sword. He had despised humans since the first adventure when he had been falsely accused and sentenced to death. That day he had his revenge.
That small exchange is a microcosm for why I have always loved D&D. A good DM can have meticulous plans laid out for a group only to see them crumble in an instant. It’s their duty to keep the game going and keep it fun for the players. I had many shortcomings as a Dungeon Master but I did a good job keeping the game moving and making it fun for my friends. Cheers to all the DMs and all the work they put into their campaigns.
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