I've been aware of D&D for years, through satire and parodies and just pop culture in general. But when you live in Bum****, USA you're never really sure if you can find people to play or not. On a whim, I suggested to my circle of friends that we should try playing D&D back in early August, and to my surprise, they were all down. My friend Gage had even already been playing the game for two years, and so offered to DM for us.
He turned out to be a good DM, whipping up a politically-charged homebrew setting, the first session of which took place on September 2nd. During which I decided to play a Tabaxi Wild Magic Sorc who was a former slave. We were all brand new players though, so at the time it was a bit of a cluster**** as we weren't really sure how to play our characters in combat. One player stopped enjoying it and left. But my friend Jackson (another total newbie at the time) came in to replace him, and it was relatively smooth sailing from there as we learned and grew.
Gage and I also joined another campaign, the DM of whom was a friend of someone I knew on the Destroy All Humans! official discord server. At first, this campaign was really enjoyable, but after I think only 3 sessions it went downhill. The DM would hold Session Zero last minute, he was always too focused on playing by the rules and following advice from very specific YouTube experts, and his pacing was... strangely bad, almost as if he was abandoning ideas as we were playing them.
For example, the party ended up playing a magical instrument that teleported to a strange, otherworldly desert of black sand with shrieking volcanoes and oily black worms with porcelain doll heads. The dead were this world's living, and we were perceived as undead. So we picked a direction to avoid coming across any cities trying to find a necromancer, found a city anyway, and ended up getting sent back to our home realm all in the time it took Gage to get a snack.
This DM's PC was also starting to suffer frequent bluescreens, so our sessions ended up going on hiatus quite frequently. Then one day he just decided to abandon this campaign we invested in, and held a sudden Session Zero for some sort of Mad Max meets Water World meets Final Fantasy campaign he'd sprung on us. A few players were... understandably upset. I myself even commissioned art of my Leonin Barbarian because I loved the character that much.
For those weeks this guy's campaign was floundering like a dying fish, my creative juices would be flowing. I'd even lay awake at night, mind like a buzzing hive of angry hornets as idea-after-idea came to me. So I began to write them down.
Thus, in late October, I began to work on my own homebrew campaign setting in earnest. I didn't tell any of my friends at first, simply because it was an intimidating endeavor and I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit yet.
Right about the time AC Valhalla came out, I spent time in between playing that watching very helpful videos from one Mark "Sherlock" Hulmes, the DM for Yogscast's D&D Twitch stream High Rollers DnD, whom I'd found and begun watching through their fantastic Aerois campaign shortly after Gage's campaign with us started. Taking his advice to heart, as well as looking at what did and did not work from previous campaigns I'd played, I'd finally crafted something I was confident people would enjoy playing in.
I took my role as DM quite seriously as well, investing in resources like Inkarnate to make maps, as well as multiple sets of dice, and setting up a virtual tabletop in the form of a discord server, given there was a plague choking the world and Gage lived in a completely different state. I even homebrewed two specific races unique to the setting, the Hynde (anthro deer people) and the Luciprine (anthro wolf people).
So I finally announced that I was going to run my own RP-based D&D campaign, set in my homebrewed world of Vysterion. Gage, Jackson, and my other friend Tasha were immediately keen. James, the best friend of the DM whose campaign didn't work out, also wanted in, especially as he was also miffed about the one campaign put on indefinite hiatus after only 3 sessions. Finally, we got our last player in the form of a nice chap from the UK, England specifically, who had never played himself before but happened to be a High Rollers fan like myself.
Jackson decided to go with a stealthy Luciprine Armorer Artificer named Stjernesjel. (Literally 'Star soul' in Norwegian.)
James went a step beyond and asked me if he could play a cervetaur (literally a deer centaur). There are no words to describe how 'yes' I was for this idea, and he named her Kaseda.
Gage decided to play as a Githyanki Pirate, Swashbuckler Rogue named Ri'a'san.
Tasha went with a High Elf of the Moon Elf variety named Nyana.
My nice UK player chappy, Luke, decided to play as a tiefling rogue of the Inquisitive variety, named Shadow.
Session 1 began with the party aboard a ship of pirates, The Moonscythe, chartering cheap passage to the city-state of Setruna, built entirely across an entire archipelago of large islands connected by bridges. The ship they were aboard captained by a Githyanki named Vessik De'Shan. (Imagine Jack Sparrow as a Githyanki. Also, yes, this NPC was very popular, lol. I even watched the entire movie saga just to get his mannerisms and voice right!)
Half of Vessik's crew stole a smaller ship and rammed it into The Moonscythe, damaging the hull and ensuring the ship couldn't move, before engaging in a mutiny that my players staved off quite well. They had a lot of fun with this, particularly because of Githyanki Jack Sparrow.
Afterward, they landed in Setruna and set out toward small goals. The only problem player at this point was Jackson, who didn't even have his character sheet up on D&D Beyond when I needed him to make checks.
The frustrating thing with him is (brutal honesty here) he's a pothead who is obsessed with wolves and Dragon Ball, and even though he had weeks in advance to do so it was clear he didn't read any of the house rules, setting lore, or racial background info for his character. Where everyone else was familiar with the setting, their characters, abilities, and such, he was struggling, constantly having to stop and look stuff up. He later straight up told me that reading a lot 'gave him a headache.'
(Disclaimer: I don't mind him smoking recreationally at all, but it does very noticeably change his behavior and mannerisms. For the worst, most of the time.)
It was clear he was still in a video game mindset because he also wanted to go up to a guard and try to bribe him 1k gp and then promise him another 15k gp. The rest of us were flabbergasted. I asked him if he even had 1k gp on him, which was when we found out he didn't even have his character sheet up. Once he got it open? He only had 20 gp from his Urban Bounty Hunter background and choice of Wealthy Lifestyle.
Plus he hit me up a couple of days later, having learned about the Wish spell (which artificers will never even get unless they find a scroll and are of the appropriate level to use it) and started making up hypotheticals trying to metagame and find cheap ways to cheese any and every situation, so I made sure to make him aware of the balancing for Wish and that there was a chance that he'd never be able to cast it again even if he could cast it.
When I asked him if he understood he said 'Yeah... The DM controls everything and it's impossible to win against the DM...'
And I was just like "No, no no no no no no NO. Dude, the game isn't about 'beating the DM.' You're not playing a COD match against me specifically. It's a ROLE-PLAYING game. ROLE PLAY! The point is not to just win my encounters by any means necessary, as DM I create a world and I bind it by rules. Those rules apply to ALL of us, the DM included. NPCs, monsters, and even the BBEG are bound by the exact same rules you are. I make the same rolls for them you make for your character. It is balanced that way to be fun for everyone."
I also made certain to explain to him to try not to metagame but to treat it like he's actually his character in this world as if he were acting. "You're not Johnny Depp, you're Jack Sparrow. Jack Sparrow doesn't know what hit points and d20s and spell slots are, neither would your character, right?"
Aside from Jackson being a half-baked doofus though, everyone genuinely had fun and I didn't have any complaints! Gage even complimented me on my pacing, worldbuilding, and NPCs, which honestly floored me as I wasn't expecting it to go so well. I became more confident in my ability to DM, but I also kept myself grounded in reality for the inevitability of screwing up at least once.
I was not ready for how bad Session 2 went.
Dec. 22nd, 2020 - Jackson got high just before the session, breaking one of my Session Zero rules to be clear-headed for the game. (That's six hours max a day, one day a week. It really isn't a big ask, I want my players present at the table and capable of saying their own name.)
He frequently interrupted other players' roleplay, basically tried to force scenarios on me in character that made zero sense, waffled on and ruined the pacing, he would over-explain what he wanted to do and be completely redundant ("I want to walk up and talk to him. That's all I wanna do, just walk up and talk to him. Okay? I juuust wanna talk to him. That's it. I just want to talk to him.").
He would refer to characters like Ardyn from FFXV just to explain how his character bows and tips his hat, he drew comparative analysis to everything I described (he even tried comparing a warforged to a plant-type Pokemon!), and he was frequently glory-hounding, trying to interject his character in every other character's moments, even if he was miles away from them.
James had to leave early during Session 1, so I intended to start Session 2 off by catching up his character. Kaseda, his cervetaur girl, went to the Grand Temple to seek counsel on the issue of a blight ravaging her hermitage.
The high priestess had her imbibe a strong incense which gave her a vision of my world's goddess of the earth. In describing the setting of the vision, literally an idyllic meadow glade with a pond, he derailed the scene to compare it to 'Hircine's Hunting Grounds from Skyrim.'
To which I replied 'not even close,' and then immediately got the reply "Oh yeah, no, so it's like Fenrir's hunting grounds in Norse mythology?" ... I was just like "...Yeah, sure." If only to placate him and keep the scene moving. What should have only taken 20 minutes took up an hour, because of constant interruptions.
Not to mention the abject confusion he caused. While investigating the site of a large explosion, he asked the lead investigator what the guards whose remains were at the blast site were doing there, as if she was omniscient and would know. So I invented a magitek crystal that acts like a two-way radio on the spot and had her contact the Captain of the Guard, who revealed the guard patrol reported in about a 'strange metal man' (a Warforged).
So, in character (or I think he was at least), he mentions that he thinks this explosion may have had something to do with his character's brother (whom it had been established in Session 1 was captured and currently in the custody of a guild of self-righteous anti-thief zealots). The NPC became confused and asked him if his brother was made of metal, after which he clarified that he thought whoever caused the explosion might be trying to get away with his brother right then and there...
James' character Kaseda finally got the pacing back on track by passing an investigation check and finding a trail to follow. Only then to have Jackson want to go back to the crater and look for more clues, despite the fact they all literally had a trail to follow now. Upon following the trail, they found a portal, which Jackson's character wanted to travel all the way back across town just to report it to the lead investigator.
I intended for the session to last six hours maximum, as Luke is from the UK and is 5 hours ahead of the rest of us. His constant nonsense dragged the session out to eight and a half hours, and all but one other player got frustrated and left before I could give out XP at the end.
I also caught him cheating. He frequently told me he had a +6 in multiple skills. The highest number he had across all skills was at most a 4, and that was with proficiency. He told me he had a +6 in persuasion, when I checked his character sheet on D&D Beyond persuasion was only a +2. He never rolled any lower than a 15 either, and probably got at least 6 nat 20s...
By the time the session ended, the player who was left besides him (Gage) pulled me aside to basically just vent, and I had to send apologies to the rest. Needless to say, he got a big talking to afterward, and I filled up an entirely new server channel full of rules addressing ALL of that.
Funnily enough, the thing that really broke me and made me straight up confront him? A day after the session, he called me on messenger and told me that he wanted me to just make up an NPC who was irrationally afraid of his character just so he could make an easy intimidation check so his character could find his missing wife. (Which is literally his character's entire goal for the campaign.)
I decided to enforce my no-mind-altering-substances rule, and he insisted that he be able to smoke weed, that it didn't make him high, and that CBD made him puke. When I wouldn't relent, he ragequit the game after trying to guilt trip and manipulate me into letting him get high.
On the bright side, we immediately filled his player slot within an hour, and he did call me after the session and apologize to me.
And I'm pleased to report the third time is in fact the charm! With my problem player... err, problem, sorted out, the other players had a lot of fun, and I as a DM had fun as well! Session 3 went damn-near flawlessly, as a matter of fact! So my confidence is certainly back.
I decided to keep Jackson's Lupricine character Stjernesjel around as an NPC, played off the events of Session 2 as him getting drunk of his ass on wine, and took a much more serious tone with the character to set up for some potentially cool stuff in the future.
Gage's Githyanki pirate started getting ready to get his own ship to ferry the rest of the players around on.
We introduced our new player's (we'll call him John) character, a changeling wizard who's a bit of a quirky chef. (He would literally just offer everyone he met an omelet and a cabbage.) Tasha's Moon Elf Paladin and James' cervetaur druid Kaseda teamed up to help rescue the high priestess from the same guild that had Stjernesjel's brother. The entire party worked to save the brother, before then working with said brother to plan a heist on the city-state's treasury to recover artifacts and gold stolen from the priestess.
During the rescue mission, the party found an evil-looking book wrapped in chains in the problem guild's HQ. Gage's Gith pirate tried to lockpick the lock securing the chain, only for the heat the book was radiating to turn the pick molten in his hand. He then found a scroll of Protection from Evil and Good before then reattempting to unlock the book, and succeeding. That released some form of evil power into the world, so that was fun. Cackles in DM
They found the anthro wolf brother in the torture chamber, having his memories drained out of his mind through his eyes (blinding him in the process) by a scary magitek machine and stored in a huge crystal ball. After rescuing the brother and priestess, Gage's pirate decided to deny this guild the memories of the poor wolfman, and so opted to shatter it... Which destabilized and cause it to build up to an explosion.
It was pretty clutch as the base exploded as they crossed the rope bridge connecting the karst the base was built into to one of the archipelago's main islands. They got lucky, caught the bridge ropes and swung on them Indiana-Jones style to safety before climbing up the island's cliff face and then GTFOing to a place that didn't just 'splode bigly, with even the old priestess NPC making a good roll or two and getting in on the adventurous shenanigans.
Session 4 was particularly well-loved by my players. It had no combat. My players participated in the heist, working together to not get spotted. Though they did trigger a magic alarm as they raided the vault, and the escape got a bit clutch until the druid created an ice storm and caused all the guards to slip-up Looney Toons. As they prepared to leave on a ship Gage's pirate bought with the heist bounty, the BBEG warped in on a giant fantasy magitek airship and laid siege to Setruna.
Working together and thinking on their feet they managed to escape by using wind magic to fill the ship's sails, getting out of range before they could be fired upon. They traveled for weeks to Nyana and Kaseda's homeland, The Glimmerwood. There they met Nyana's mother and brother on the dock, learning her father had fallen ill with a sickness, later revealed to be the same blight plaguing Kaseda's hermitage.
They went to meet Nyana's father only to find his condition worsened and comatose, and tried to help to no avail before he turned to stone. They decided to try checking the food and water for poison, but before they could head out a magical explosive flew in through a window and landed at Nyana's feet. The session ended there.
And there you have it; the story of how I became a DM shortly after starting to play, and how my best friend's emotional addiction to pot caused him to ruin my second ever session of D&D as a DM. Fortunately, this one at least has a happy enough ending, and there are no lingering grudges or ill will. Definitely not a bad way to transition into 2021, I'm taking that as a good sign!
Awesome. Your days will be filled with blood, sweat, tears, bloody sweaty tears...
But in the end you will have a huge load of fun.
Welcome to the club.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale