building a world with my friends

08 Mar, 2024

this blog is alternatively titled: a year’s worth of life lessons from being an amateur dungeon master, but i’m committed to the -ing title bit and also i think that's too long.

i’ve loved dungeons & dragons for almost forever. (this is a lie, but it’s radically changed my life enough that it feels like the truth. it’s only been 6 or 7 years.) my cousin¹ introduced it to me through critical role – which i feel like is a common starting point for many. i’d go on to watch the adventure zone, friends at the table, dimension 20, naddpod, etc. and amass an army of my own characters who would never see the light of play.²

so when my closest friends started expressing interest in it, and with no dungeon master in sight, i knew that i had to at least try.

fast forward and about a week from now (march 14th) marks the one year anniversary of the first campaign i’ve ever run.³ before this, i’d been dm for my friends on two other occasions. both were with premade adventures; they were some oneshots i found online, written by people with much more experience than me. to my delusional brain, that’s all that separated me from the other dms of the world, including beloved matthew mercer and brennan lee mulligan: time and practice.

it’s a long-running gag in the community that every group has scheduling issues because members are always busy with their own lives. it’s bittersweet that this doesn’t apply to us. we always have the time, but i don’t always have the mind for it. whether we play or not typically depends on if my brain & body cooperate with me. our discord server’s announcements channel is full of me finding different ways to say “sorry, i’m too sad right now. can we reschedule?”. it’s almost like a thesaurus in its own right. still, my party unfailingly responds with kindness & patience even our campaign gods couldn’t emulate.

when i am feeling feisty, i host 2 sessions a month in what my friends fondly refer to as the brimsverse. our campaign revolves around bartholomew brimlock’s boarding school for the brilliant, brave, and extremely gifted, a prestigious institution at the heart of the city of pronto. their party of students has joined the headmaster’s attempt to revive the college’s old adventuring division. they’ve since been tasked with various missions along the coast: finding lost heirlooms, mediating between old forgotten gods, and even running a bake stand. meanwhile, the tensions between brim’s & cadogan’s college for courageous and capable adventurers seem to be escalating in the background.⁴

so in honor of our anniversary and 22.5 sessions run, here’s what being a dungeon master has taught me so far.

1. write everything down

any dungeon master (even the newbies) can tell you that planning is key to a good session! me included. a well outlined page full of encounters, conditionals, npcs, monsters, clues and secrets brings me some feeling of security. anything that remains unused in a session can always be recycled for another. this backlog of ideas has saved me too many times to count.

but i also think that how you plan is the most important thing, not necessarily how much. it takes time to find the flow that works for you.

this flow doesn’t even always have to be an active process. in my experience, a lot of my session preparation happens by chance. sometimes i’ll be struck with a good idea while i’m feeding my cats, taking a shower, or not paying attention in mass. but later, when i finally sit down to put it to paper, i discover i’ve blanked and forgotten all the cool details.

i’ve taken to carrying around a plain, pocket-sized notebook that my friend carmen gifted me as a souvenir from taiwan. i write down whatever i think of, even the trivial/frivolous stuff: cool name ideas, phrases, an interesting noun or descriptive adjective, character motivations, tie-ins, anything at all. i can always build on them later or i can scrap them. it doesn’t matter. the process of collecting and archiving it all has become important to me, even beyond d&d. it’s more self-indulgence than self-preservation. hands are for holding — the mind is not as good at it.

2. take the road less traveled

recently, the party broke into the records room of their school, hoping to find clues that would lead them to the person that had orchestrated a mimic attack during their annual club fair. while searching, they discovered a manila folder concealed behind a false panel in one of the filing cabinets. but it was trapped. once triggered, the files turned into an origami dragon⁵ that was intended to shred itself. its attacks, as well as any attempts to attack it risked destroying vital evidence.

it was a difficult situation to put them in. and i’ll be honest: they were never meant to recover the full dossier, especially after the transformation had occurred. i hadn’t planned for it because i hadn’t designed a solution for it either. i couldn’t think of one myself. i had deemed something “impossible” in my silly fictional world.

but gabby’s character, a water genasi rogue named haitao, had the create water spell.

create water: you create up to 10 gallons of clean water within range in an open container. alternatively, the water falls as rain in a 30-foot cube within range, extinguishing exposed flames in the area.

and they had the brilliant idea of using it to “kill” the dragon without ruining the paperwork it was made of. unfortunately, due to a bad roll, it didn’t work.

(still, i couldn't let a creative idea go unrewarded. the water that had spilled out onto the floor allowed enna’s character, a shifter artificer named aspen, to discover a set of watery footprints. someone invisible had been in the room alongside them the entire time.)

it’s a long-winded way to say that it’s so easy to fall into familiar grooves and patterns of thinking. when you grow up one way, you forget to try others. even water takes the path of least resistance towards the ocean.⁶ it’s a rut i didn’t even know i was somehow digging myself into. it was wrong for me to treat that dragon as an “unsolvable” riddle because i didn’t know the answer myself.

now i realize that if i present my party with a locked door, each of them will think of different ways to open it: something true to themselves and something true to the character they’re playing. often, it will be something i had never even considered. when i started actively seeking out new roads, i found them in other people. and that has made all the difference.

3. let go

if it wasn’t abundantly clear, the brimsverse is messy and chaotic. regardless of how much i plan, how well i plan, or how many of my players’ decisions i try to take into account, things never go the way i want them to. how was i supposed to know that they were going to ask for a full house tour from an npc they just met (and then absolutely body the charisma check with a good roll?). i’m always blindsided by what they want to do and what the dice lets them do. whatever i write changes drastically when we play. you’d think it’d be easy to control a party of three. it’s not. it’s much worse to try to wrangle five.

both d&d and the real world are governed by laws, like the 5e handbook and thermodynamics (or something). but they’re also both limitless. i can’t fathom the infinite expanse of space any more than i can try to understand my friends’ brains & imaginations. all these worlds are incomprehensibly big. sometimes you just have to concede.

most of the time, it’s worth it. my favorite moments in our campaign have come from unquestioning surrender. (yes, camille you can try to seduce the barghest. yes, misha you can try to invite gayson on your quest. yes, carmen you can make an insight check on the duck. etc.) i can play guide and arbiter, but not god. i can pave the way with brick and cobble but my party will make their own desire paths. this world is bigger than just me, because my friends and i live in it together. it's full of the life we gave it. it would not be the way it is now if anyone else had settled into it.

i still have a lot more to learn.

special thanks to enna for talking to me about this post-session last week! a special thanks in general to all of my party members, i hope you know the joy you've brought me. i'll see you on sunday.

#being #d&d #rambling