What I most enjoy about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons is the stories, so when my group was looking for a new DM, I put myself forward. The group is made up of a couple of expert players, who used our initial long campaign in part as a way to introduce us to the rules and the world, as well as a few newbies like myself who were feeling their way through it. I picked up on the general gist pretty well, and w💛ith the experts keen to play rather than shepherd us through the trials and tribulations, DMing fell to me. Last weekend was my first session as DM, and I can see the game in a whole new light.
We decided to start with Candlekeep Mysteries, and ahead of Session 0, I read through the first adventure to familiarise myself with it. All basically made sense, a couple of decent characters, some combat, a map, you know - it's D&D. Then we decided that we'd skip the first two adventures so we could start at level three instead. All was going fine until I read the level three adventure the next day to prep and did not understand a word of it. Maybe I was out of my depth. Maybe I wasn't cut out to be a DM after all. I frantically searched the adventure online, and it turns out nobody understood it. The first page of results were all players complaining that the party would never be able to unravel the plot, that it was just a series of intriguing images with nothing linking it together, that there was nothing to do at all. Panic over, I rewrote the adventure.
I kept the layout of the house and the final combat arena, but changed the story, the riddles, the ending, and the combat itself. I retwisted the narrative's big twist to be something that would land with my group, invented encounters along the journey, threw in some new characters and stripped others out and, most importantly, added in a troupe of haunted dolls. It was invigorating to no longer be the player pushing the edges of the world, but to be the master of it, ripping it to shreds and assembling it in a way I knew my group would enjoy. I didn't dilute it to make it simpler; I kept the open spaces of the existing story, and several times the party behaved unexpectedly and there was room for them to push the boundaries of the world the way I once did.
I'm already in the process of tweaking the level four adventure, though thankfully this one seems a lot stronger in the book anyway, so I only need to add in the extra details the book already encourages and make some plans for when the party goes off track. Having previously been the one to just show up and derail us accidentally, it's fascinating to see it from this perspective, but it makes me wonder how I'll play when I'm back as a party member not the DM.
In some ways I was the perfect Dungeons & Dragons player, which is not to brag. There are many ways in which I'm imperfect - my characters lean towards reckless, I apply brute force over tactics in combat, I'm not the best role-player in my group, nor the most curious explorer, nor do I know the most about any of the stats, lore, or rules. But I'm good at improv, know practically nothing that is going on, and eager to push forward the story. But I feel as if I'm at a tipping point with the game where I'm about to fall into a pit of knowledge that will mark a clear before and after of my time with the game. I will be a better DM but no longer the perfect - at least to me - player I once was. The longer I play, the more I'll learn, and the less the game may surprise me. That rate of learning rises exponentially when I'm DMing and using a mixture of existing creatures and stories with my own homebrew elements.
On the last adventure we played, our DM was explaining a creature obscured by shadows, and as soon as they mentioned it being red, another player jumped up and said "Oh it's a Wimmy Wimwam Wozzle!". Not that, but something like that. I had no idea what was going on, the whole world was still a secret to me, every creature a surprise. Now I'm learning about the Wimmy Wimwam Wozzles, and I'm gaining a better appreciation for the game and all it entails, but there's a part of that joyously clueless passenger that has been lost.
Improv was always a strength when I was playing (sometimes a little too much for a new player pushing the limits of how the world reacts), and I'm a fast learner, so I'm looking forward to seeing where it all goes from here. I've even written a second adventure entirely from scratch, again with a range of narrative quirks and some homebrew enemies, with classics sprinkled in there. I'm looking forward to guiding my current group through all of the connected one-shots Candlekeep has in store for us, so I might need to force another group into playing through my freshly written adventure in the meantime (TheGamer editors reading this, you are now legally obliged to play D&D with me).
When I started Dungeons & Dragons, I was interested in it as a concept but unsure of how it would work in practice. Overtime, I became engrossed in the world it presented, the freedom it offered, and the magical chaos of the dice. Sitting on the other side of the dungeon master screen has demystified it, but also deepened my affection for the game. I'm not sure I want to give it up, and by the time I do, I have no idea what sort of player I'll be.