How I Game Now

It finally happened.

For the longest time my friend and I wanted to run a D&D game of some iteration here in town. Finding players and finding time were all an issue.Well, with summer upon us we have done both. Although everyone we thought to ask said no, we still managed to find seven or eight players, including one of my grad school teachers. She’d never played before and upon starting had this to say:

“Holy shit! You’re making all this up. Cool!”

And she’s come back – and brought fresh baked fudge brownies with her too! So it’s all good.

For the grognards among you, we’re using Beyond the Wall as our skeleton system with skills being more story-gamish than crunchy. While everyone likes the BtW character gen mini-game it doesn’t quite suit the campaign, which is Ghostbusters of Lankhmar. Actually, maybe it does suit the campaign: young heroes go to the big city, where misfortune happens to them and no one cares that they were the village hero.

Anyway, since we’re all old and playing on work nights, my goal’s to have an adventure that we can get through and finish in three hours. This means rethinking some things.

1. No megadungeons. At most a dungeon will have 12 rooms or encounters.

2. No exploration phase. Kill me if I ever have to say or listen to, “you walk into an empty 10×10 room” again. Give the players a map, maybe not the exact map, but something where they have a general overview of where they’re going. And to hell with 10′ poles. I know we all grew up with this style of play, but nowadays it just brings me down.

3. Bonus XP. Your character drank three unmarked potions and survived. You said something funny. You drew a post-game picture. You brought rum-soaked dark chocolate cherries to the table. Bonus XP.

4. Adventure seeds. I give the players 5 adventure seeds (here’s what’s happening in town…), they tell me which one they want to follow up on. I make the adventure. Simple. Some remain from week to week. Some don’t.

5. Empty dungeons that “activate” once the party is in the middle of them. Getting in is easy. Getting out is hard.

And I wrote 5 more things but they were lame and obvious. You get the point. Overall the adventures have been fun and the players have come back from week to week and try to get their friends to come to, so that’s all cool.