D&D 5e Lessons Learned 1 - Starting a New Group

 I do not know about you, but I had an excellent weekend. The weather was pretty nice, in the 60s and 70s for the most part, which was great considering we were in the 90s for most of the previous week. And of course the big one for a gaming geek blog - I started up my new D&D 5e campaign. Finally! As you have read here, I have been trying for months, MONTHS!, to get my own schedule open enough to start a campaign, enough interested folks to come together who could meet on the appointed day and time, and surprisingly, repair enough of our dining room chairs that we could seat everyone at the table. Yes, my campaign was being held up by carpentry and upholstery, of all things. I mean, look at this gorgeous fabric the wife and I had lying around (we used to be medieval recreators, and had bought this fabric many years ago for that hobby, and it has been laying around, unused, ever since) and I love the chainmail rings pattern it has (yes, that is European 4-in-1), thought it would be perfect for medieval fantasy gamers to sit upon. My Cyberpunk Red and Savage Worlds groups will just have to suffer with non-setting appropriate upholstery.

But we had our first session! I was excited and impatient all last week, and the appointed hour finally rolled around... and everything went well. I have two of the six players from my last D&D campaign in this one, one who has been playing for the past couple of years a variety of systems, and another one who had never played until they joined my last game. At 10th level no less, he got thrown into the deep end, but rolled well with it, and is enjoying the instructional nature of this new adventure I am currently running (more on that in a second). We also have three folks who have been a part of my Team Yankee 6mm Escalation League, one gentleman who has been playing and GM'ing D&D and various other RPGs for about as long as I have, another gentleman who has tried D&D a few times in the past but most of his experience is with tabletop wargames, and a lady that has never played any tabletop RPGs ever. Last to the group is someone I had never met before, but had responded to a plea for players for the new game, and while he does not have as much experience as I do, it is still a pretty impressive history with the game and various others. I was hoping that we would get some newer players in, as I have been feeling a bit rusty and have a great intro adventure that is great for newer players and DMs, or for us more experienced players to knock off the rust. But I got a few new players and some more experienced players. {shrug} You take what you can get and run with it. Oh, and not only was one of the chairs sporting the very appropriate chainmail pattern, I made sure to be wearing my "I'm such a D&D nerd" shirt I got from Shirt WOOT!, and the shirt was appreciated as well. Now I just have to reupholster five other chairs. 

Anyway, the game, as I am sure you did not stop by to hear me brag about my awesome chair upholstery or shirts. We did not have a Session Zero, as we were playing through a fantastic intro adventure that came with pregenerated characters, and it is aimed at being instructional, so we jumped straight in. I got this adventure from my favorite game blogger, the Angry GM (his blog can be found over there on the upper left of this page), and had even helped fund it when I backed his gaming instruction manual Kickstarter, the book Game Angry and have been itching to use it ever since it came out. The adventure module is The Fall of Silverpine Watch, which is how I think you should teach folks how to play D&D - it starts with the roleplaying aspects of the game, gets them invested in the setting and the world, then introduces them to the crunchier aspects of the game, slowly. While I love D&D for its tactical combat (yes, we used 15mm minis on a 1/2" gridded board), this is first and foremost a game about telling stories and the players interacting with each other as their characters. And the adventure is a good adventure by itself, it has an interesting story with clues for the players to find to reveal what occurred before the characters arrived on the scene. Seriously, if you have newer players or are a newer GM yourself, run this adventure (it's free! no, really, those of us who bought the book put in enough in the Kickstarter this is free to everyone, not some illegal download from the darkest reaches of the internet), you will thank me later for it.

Because we ran Silverpine Watch and pre-gens, we did not have a Session Zero. I am not as in love with Session Zero as a lot of modern gamers are, but they do have their uses. I am going to be frank and honest here - I played for a couple of decades and while we had Session Zeroes from time to time, we never called them that, we were just talking about the game we wanted to play. We definitely did not talk about our "safety tools" or creating a "safe space" where we listed out our "trigger words" beforehand to make sure we did not offend anybody, yet in many players' minds, that is what a Session Zero is for. You want to virtue signal to the Woke nation, have a "biggest victim" contest amongst your snowflakes, go ahead, it is your game. My game, I am not going to pander to anyone's phobias or kinks, we are going to act like adults, and if you act the asshole and offend me or another player, I am going to call you on your shit. Anyway, we did not have a Session Zero because we did not need one. I do suggest you have one in your own group, if for nothing else then to let your players talk amongst themselves while they roll up new characters, let them figure out how the party got together in the first place. For us DMs, use your Session Zero to relay to the players what your upcoming campaign is going to be, is this a funny campaign full of slapstick and bard songs about naughty sex acts (yes, I'm looking at you, Legends of Vox Machina, you funny effing cartoon) or is this a super serious affair? Are you going to do lots of talky-talky, with intrigue and well-rounded NPCs, or is it going to be combat-combat-combat-FRAY-FRAY-FRAY!! What house rules do you have? What setting are you using? That kind of thing, not whatever the hell the snowflakes have decided a Session Zero should entail. I will say if you are worried someone will break your precious "social contract", this is the time to lay out what exactly that document contains so no one is left guessing on where the boundaries are.

We did have a few lessons we all picked up. Our wargame experienced yet new-to-RPGs player figured out very quickly that outside of combat, RPGs are all about interacting as your character with everyone else's characters or the NPCs. The experienced players at the table had quickly established their characters' personalities and were interacting, which was a good example for this newer player of what to expect during the adventure. My lesson is that, especially in an intro adventure like Fall of Silverpine Watch, you want to slow down and take as much time as possible whenever you roll dice. Oh, there is a tree across the road, what do you do? Do you Help your fellow PC? Are you adding a skill into that roll? What skills are applicable? How does Advantage (from the aforementioned Help) work? In other situations, how does Disadvantage work? How do opposed checks work? Especially in combat, you as the DM need to take as much time as possible with your new players so they can learn all the nuances of 5e combat - Movement, Action, Reaction, Bonus Action. Advantage/Disadvantage. Spellcasting. Initiative. 

One funny occurrence - our newest player, at least to the group, had to leave early and had not brought his dice or PHB, and when I asked for a roll, he looked a little lost. I immediately offered a bag of d20s, and he declined, thinking I was offering my personal dice, a huge taboo amongst many players - YOU DO NOT TOUCH SOMEONE ELSE'S DICE!! At least, that is the belief, personal dice are sacrosanct and not to be shared, touched by anyone else, or even looked at funny, else all the Luck contained therein shall scamper off into the Feylands, never to be seen again. I cannot say truthfully that I do not believe in this at all, as I literally changed my dice in recent tabletop wargame when the first set rolled multiple 1s, and I do not even DM D&D with my personal playing dice. Instead, I have purchased multiple sets of dice and a Chessex Pound-O-Dice that I use as my DM dice and loaners to my players. Anyway, after explaining that these were not my personal dice and merely my DM dice that are for sharing as well as my DM rolls, this player happily grabbed a die out and rolled. 

Okay, enough ranting on that. Some lessons being learned on everyone's part, and lots and lots of rust getting knocked off. Next session we will finish up the intro adventure, and then I think we will slide into a mini Session Zero and let everyone make up characters for Lost Mine of Phandelver, the original 5e official intro adventure. I got the Starter Set at Walmart of all places, could not pass it up when I ran across it, and I want to play it some time. If nothing else, it will be a great learning tool for these new players on how to create a character from scratch, as I will not be using the pre-gens included with the set. Plus, I do not want to dump this group, new as they are, straight into my Eberron campaign. Nor myself, just so many moving parts to consider and keep track of, and I am not talking about the combat. As I described it to a friend recently, Eberron is to medieval fantasy as Futurama meets Cyberpunk is to science fiction - nigh dystopic setting with an almost universal apathy from everyone who resides in the world. Usually in medieval fantasy, where the general populace is very invested in the outcomes of your average adventuring party's latest delve, in Eberron, the general populace kind of glance over to see that indeed there is a horrible mess going on, and once they have verified that there is no easy money to be made from the kerfuffle, shrug and go back to their lives. This makes for a very complex social setting, as even in Sharn, deep in Breland, there are so many factions operating in the city, with interests both inside and outside the nation. I do not want my players, old hands and new players alike, to be overwhelmed by both the rules of the game and complex setting we are going into. But we will see after our next session where the party stands and I will decide at that point if we are going into LMoP or straight into Eberron. Until then, I hope you get the chance to join up with your friends and roll some dice.

Last Minute Preparations

Here we are. As I type this, we are under two weeks from my first game of what I am dubbing in my head, the Rotation. The second Saturday from today (again, as I type this), I will sit down and introduce a new group of players to the world of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I cannot tell you how excited I am this is finally happening. And then, at the end of the following month, we are having our Session Zero for Cyberpunk Red.  

It has been a long time since I have DM'd/GM'd any game, looking back on my posts here, it has been almost a full year. But we are almost there. I had a job change that killed all of my extra free time, and while the pay was good, it was not quite good enough to put up with no free time to speak of, and so another job change occurred. There, free time! I can run games as I had been hoping to! Wait, no, another snag - our dining room chairs, veterans of my last weekly campaign, were in dire need of repair and reupholstering. Seriously, carpentry and sewing were holding up my game. Fortunately the repairs to the chairs were not too difficult and well within the scope of the tools I possess and skills I have attained. The chairs that need repairing have been repaired, and reupholstering has begun, but that does not need to be completed in its entirety, and can be done in between sessions. The repairs did need to be done, as some of the chairs were literally falling apart and not safe to sit in. Strange what has kept me from starting a campaign back up, but sometimes you have no control over what decides whether you can do something or not.

Speaking of, my other major problem was having enough players. I have found that scheduling, the reason my last D&D campaign folded, is still a major issue, to the point that even going to a one session a month schedule that three out of six from that last group are completely unable to join in and a fourth that is still on the fence on if he wants to give up one weekend afternoon a month or not. Out of six previous players, only two of them have committed to one or more of the games in the Rotation, where all six had professed an interest in playing something with me as the GM again. But this just shows why that group perished - when I decided what days and times worked for me, and would not budge, three players were no longer interested. Gosh, I wonder why that last campaign crumbled? I get it, other things come first, as this is just a hobby, but if you are not paying your game master and your schedules are too far away from each other, you are just going to have to find a new table to play at. Would I like to get that last group back together? Yes, but as many scheduling conflicts as we had in that group, and no one is willing to change their own situation even now, that tells me that group will never exist as it once did. 

So I went to the Book of Faces, and posted on many local RPG, nerdy, and tabletop wargaming groups what I was doing and got responses. Oh, I had a few friends here and there that were interested in getting into one or more of my games, but definitely not enough for what I wanted to do. Luckily, I managed to catch a few interested folks who could meet on the established day and time, enough to max out my D&D game at six, and enough to get my CPRed to the minimum of four to get it rolling. Yes, I want just five in any RPG I am running, but six is better, as inevitably someone has to bow out of the session come game day, and so I get the optimal five I wanted in the first place. And I am okay with just four for CPRed, this campaign will eventually roll into a long term arc, but for the beginning, to get everyone (including me!) used to the rules and the world. It also allows for other players to join at later points and not feel like they have missed out on much. Very nice.

The third game in the Rotation, Savage Worlds, is still shy a few players, but as you cannot find the core rulebook in print, and only one of the three settings I want to play (a rotation inside the Rotation) are currently in print, I am not in a huge hurry to get it rolling. It will be my least accessory intensive game, because while I am an admitted tactical combat junkie, with maps and all the minis, I recently decided my SW games were going to be the true palate cleanser for me and my players - theater of the mind, beer and pretzels, sitting on the couch instead of at a table, and just enjoying a relaxing game once a month. Yes, I am sticking with 15mm miniatures and and my patented (okay, stolen idea) grid under plexiglass map for both D&D and CPRed, I already have some wonderful minis (body bags!!!) and found so many more out there. I wish I was a better mini painter as there are so many fantastic sculpts out there that deserve better attention than what I can give them.

I almost have everything ready. Binders are almost done - I splurge and get 3- ring binders for each player and fill it with handy info, character sheets, blank paper for note taking, even graph paper for mapping out those dungeons (I am an admitted old school kind of DM) or abandoned warehouses deep in the combat zone - got most of the minis I need for the first session ready, I am tidying up a few other details... running RPG campaigns is as hard as a real job. But here we are, not too long now and I will be back to describing musty holes in the ground and slinging duce. This is the fun stuff.