One of my first attempts to get a couple of my friends interested in “proper” Dungeons and Dragons did not go well.  It was a standard basic-set adventure involving a dungeon for a dark wizard’s salt mine that started the players in a prison cell and was meant to lead them to an exit that turned out to be a lost city, or something along those lines. 

The two players in question only made it to room number two before killing each other following a dispute about what to do with an unconscious hobgoblin that they were dragging along behind them.

The warning bells for this scenario were probably starting to warm up around about the time the characters were rolled up and given the names “Keith” and “Derek”, the former being a thief, the latter a cleric.  I’ll admit that this primitive version of Dungeons and Dragons was a little low on character customisation, (with Dwarf and Elf being a class as opposed to a race), but in terms of fleshed out characters, Keith and Derek were particularly poorly dressed skeletons.  Of course, this didn’t register as a problem, as after all, these were pretty much new players to the game, and it was probably best just to get on with the adventure and let them work out their characters from there.

What followed is probably more likely my fault than theirs, as I proceeded to allow things that a more seasoned DM would work around.  Keith and Derek, with the help of burly NPC Axel, tricked their hobgoblin gaoler, Jerj (who I consistently mispronounced as “Jerry”), and broke from their bondage.  However, being without any equipment other than the soiled rags they were wearing, they were keen to keep a set of manacles that happened to be in their cell.  Not only this, but they then decided to fill the manacles with an unconscious hobgoblin gaoler.  Now the warning bells were starting to warm up.  I allowed it, regretted it, and then decided that I would have the hobgoblin regain consciousness slowly, leaving them plenty of time to leave him behind.

Dragging their captive along behind them, for whatever reason not even they fully comprehended, once the hobgoblin started stirring into consciousness, they entered a discussion about what to do with it.  In a reversal of what you would expect, the thief thought it would be immoral to slit the creatures throat whilst it was out cold, whereas the cleric practically had the knife to its throat before anyone could think.  I can’t quite remember what happened immediately following this, but either Keith killed Derek, or Derek killed Keith, or Keith and Derek somehow accidentally killed each other with some unfortunate rolling of dice (the Killer Dice principleä).

Taking a few things away from this misadventure, I learnt some fairly useful lessons.

1)                 Don’t always let players have their own way.

2)                 Learn to fudge the dice.

3)                 Don’t always let players have their own way.

4)                 Make sure your players actually want to play.  A bit of a no brainer, but I have suspicions that Derek and Keith were less than keen.

5)                 Don’t always let players have their own way (but not at the expense of point number 4).

If anyone out there recognises the adventure I’m talking about (something along the lines of “Escape from Zanzer’s Dungeon) and has actually played all the way through, drop me a comment, because I’m convinced nobody actually made it.  It seemed to go on forever, and so in many ways, I’m glad Keith and Derek never made it past room two.

Getting in to Role Playing Games is probably a profound experience if one is old enough to appreciate the absurdity of sitting around a table top pretending to be mighty warriors, elven wizards or space pirates, but for the rest of us we don’t really notice it.  I, like many other players, fell into RPGs when I was still young enough to be running around at lunch time playing various rules-free versions, involving space men, the police, King Arthur, velocoraptors, and on particularly inspired days, a mixture of all four.  With this in mind, it was therefore only a small matter of adding die rolls so that you could tell when someone actually hit you with a ray-gun and a modicum of structure before we were able to achieve the necessary abstract thought process required for Dungeons and Dragons.

From personal experience, I’ve found it very difficult to maintain an interest in the game for any sustained length of time.  I played when I was about 10 years old in the school playground for a while, then a few years later attempting to use the actual published rules in full.  I then found myself playing a lot of Games Workshop war games with friends and only later rediscovered role playing when stumbling across GURPS, which I stripped down a little in order to run an impromptu one-shot sci-fi session during a lull in conversation that ended up snowballing into a campaign lasting months.  In fact, I’m sure if I somehow managed to get those players together again, they’d take off from where they left it without much prompting.  Now I have somewhat come full circle and stand on the precipice of running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with primarily new players and my interest seems to be back to where it was thirteen years ago.

          Inevitably, there is some sort of dissatisfaction that comes with the territory of role playing.  I’ve never really experienced players that have to be ejected from the group as many gamers have, because my groups have always been of friends, or people I knew, or people that knew the people that I knew and could be vouched for.  I also got remarkably adept at shuffling player characters in and out of sessions during the long running sci-fi campaign and have therefore never really had a problem with actual real life people issues.  There are however always moments when things don’t go quite according to plan, such as forgetting to mention something that you mean to rely on later in the campaign, or accidentally leading players into a railroad plot, or something just not being as amazing as you envisaged in your head.  I always find myself driven to bouts of inarticulate sentences half way through gaming sessions as I slip through puddles of half completed notes, and find things in my notebook where I’ve written “must finish this later…” and just occasionally entirely stumped when someone suggests something entirely plausible and sensible that I just hadn’t thought of.  Sometimes combat is a drag, sometimes the role playing is a drag, and sometimes the game just feels like too much of a grind.

          Despite all of this, I still find myself in somewhat of a cycle with this game.  I’m sure the campaign I’m planning will disappoint me endlessly, and all the amazing stuff I plan won’t be discovered and all of my areas of minimal preparation will be scrutinised by near obsessive compulsive players, but I’m still excited and eager to play again.  Who knows, in another 5 years time, maybe I’ll be getting back into GURPS with a fresh sci-fi campaign to try out and maybe 5 years after that, I’ll be back to Dungeons and Dragons.  All in all though, I’m growing ever more aware that this probably isn’t something I’m going to “grow out of” as I expected and for that I am eternally grateful.

          From a neutral perspective, RPGs are very childish concepts.  I tried to explain them to a colleague who could only respond with “I think you need to get out more” which is a common response that I can sympathise with, but as a childish venture goes, it has a very enduring pull that I can’t ignore.  It doesn’t matter how we get into them, what’s noticeable is the fact that many of us find we can never get out.

I really hate introductions.  It always seems so false, fake and forced, which I suppose it is.  For those of you not interested in this, skip this post and go on to the next one and you can pick it up from there.

By way of introduction, I am Ding, a DM or GM of moderate experience with a deep interest, if not knowledge, in RPGs that started at the age of about 10.  I initially played a stripped down version of the basic Dungeons and Dragons set (which I inexplicably called “Quest”) when I couldn’t quite work out or explain the rules to my players, and I’ve taken a similar philosophy in my games following that by being notoriously “rules-light”.

My most successful campaign has been a Science Fiction campaign loosely based around the GURPS rules that started with me trying to explain the concept of a tabletop role playing game during a power cut and never quite finished, lasting many months after that ill fated afternoon.  It was during this campaign that I learnt that you can never trust a player to do what you expect, and that you will never expect some of the things a player will do.  I’m still bitter that they shot my favourite NPC ally in the head. 

I have also run some brief Dungeons and Dragons sessions and am about to start a campaign using a homebrew setting and 3.5 edition rules which I hope to share with you in the near future, maybe even in the form of a PDF download when it becomes fully fleshed out as I hope it will.

Also in the pipeline is the system of “Dungeons and Drinking”, a game system that I am pioneering for when sobriety is no longer an option at the table.