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| A surprisingly intimidating spot to be sat when it's been 22 years :D |
I'm kind of lucky in that I've DMed pretty much the same couple of dozen folks in essentially two different communities in the past, and we all very much had evolved to have the same expectations of how the game was going to work. Even my play-by-email party[1] was a mix of people I'd played with before, either by email or face-to-face. So, to a degree I wasn't really conscious of the concept: certainly for my various Cambridge groups it was "who's DMing for this stretch, what level is it, where in which world is it set, what night are we playing, do we start after Dr. Who[2] or not :D?"
Coming back to things after 20 some years it was a bit different: I know all my players - one's a colleague of my wife, one is my wife, and the other four are friends from Peterborough Wargames Club, all of whom I've gamed with for a goodly while. But only Anne (my wife) knows the world, all bar one haven't played D&D 5E before and for half of them its only their second or third RPG.
I sort of had a session zero, I guess. A lot of it happened by email, and by me sharing around notes on the setting on Google Docs. Each player came separately to generate their character, each got 300-1000 words of background, depending on what they'd told me about what they wanted to play. Basically, we discussed the kind of character they wanted in terms of class and abilities, and then we'd kind of bounce around ideas for backstory and where in the world their character was from. Ambar, the city the campaign is set in, is one of the two biggest ports on the Meral Sea (the big inland sea on the map you can see in the photo top right), and is a real cultural melting pot, so pretty much anything and everything was possible, with the caveat that my world of Altrion is pretty humano-centric. As it turned out, all bar one of the PCs are in fact human.
As I said, each got a chunk of backstory, part prose, part notes, that we bounced around a little more - this usefully allowed me to work in some long-term campaign lore and plot that various of them know bits of. (It also allowed me ask Anne to play the party cleric, since she helped create the world and the Nine gods most of the PCs worship, and isn't fumbling to know what she knows and what she shouldn't know, even after two decades :D)
That usefully got me, more by accident than design, to a point where S and B had probably met in the Temple infirmary with the cleric C, S had travelled to Ambar with K, probably as short-term protection for a caravan owned by B's boss. A has been looking for work as a hired sword and L is an ice mage who, since he arrived, has been a useful resource for merchants in temperate Ambar who need to keep things fresh.
It was thus pretty easy to have them all bar C meet up with B's employer, and be introduced to C and her high Priest, who needed their help. Didn't feel stretched or railroaded in any way, although of course it helps that the players are all willing to be a little bit accommodating to say 'sure, why wouldn't I hire on with this merchant as opposed to any other'.
So, off we went. I'm, by my own admission, not an expert on 5E, but hey, it's just like learning another wargames rule set, helped by S's player who DMs her own 5E campaign, and to whom I gave carte blanche to remind me when I forgot or didn't know stuff. The session broke up into about 45 mins of meta stuff, introductions and the like, about the same of discussing the request from C's high Priest, maybe 30 mins of investigation, a 10 min break, an hour's combat (which I really wanted to get into the first session) and a very entertaining half hour moral and practical debate among the party of what they did with the three surviving cultists! And left them with a teaser, namely a piece of paper with writing none of them can translate. Yet.
Takeways?
- I was meaning to do spell and special ability/feat cards for everyone: definitely need to before next time;
- I may also provide everyone with a combat actions QRS card;
- an initiative/hits manager app is really handy. I'm using ProDND Initiative Tracker, at least for now, which seems to do everything I want.
We actually went further than I planned, but since my planning consisted of about 2000 words of deep background and 4 lines of notes... I seem to (still, fortunately) work best when I plan the highspots and improv the rest as we go.
Next session Jan 4th.
[1] OK, OK, it is up online. Go do a Google Groups search for "Midnight's Bane" in the Usenet[3] group rec.games.frp.archive
[2] The original series[3] - Sylvester McCoy in this case
[3] ask someone older :D
I keep a stack of cut up index cards handy for dealing with initiative. I fold them in half. On the back (GM facing side) I write the character/monster name. On the front I write the name (for a PC) or draw some terrible art of the monster. Then I line them up along the top of my GM screen and as the turn goes on I slide them from the "Not yet acted side" to the "Acted side". It makes it nice and visible where everyone is in the turn order.
ReplyDeleteDead monster cards get given the players as trophies.
Cute. I may borrow that :D My wife seems to have decided that tracking damage with micro dice next to the figure works, too.
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