Reflections on Tabletop RPGs and My Life

Its been nearly a decade since I started playing table top roleplaying games, and they've had a big impact on my life. My closest friend, Ben, recently finished up his fourth one-to-twenty campaign in Dungeons and Dragons 5e, which led to me recommending he write a memoir of his experience with the hobby. Then, I realized I've been playing longer than he has, so why not write my own as well?

This is going to be a mix of various thoughts. I'm going to present this mainly as a chronology, from my intro with the hobby, to the present day. I'm going to discuss the concrete things that happened, as well as my thoughts and opinions. This is going to involve specific discussion of my campaigns and settings, which... Is about as boring as someone describing their dream or an acid trip to someone else. Intensely meaningful to me, just another whacky fantasy knock-off to someone else. Still, I'll be discussing these in details if only so I can write down my inspirations as well, as an attempt to document and resurrect what was going on in my mind at the time. My main desire is to discuss techniques, because I feel techniques are sorely underdiscussed when compared to plot and setting. Which is ironic, since I'll also be discussing the setting and etc. in detail as well, making myself guilty of the sin I'm describing. Alas!

Start

I always wanted to play tabletop games, ever since reading about them online at a young age. I had first made some attempts to play Labyrinth Lord as a teenager, with some friends I met in highschool. It must have been 2012 or 2013. I picked Labyrinth Lord because it was free-as-in-speech. I took a flash drive to the library and printed off the two hundred or so pages of content it had. I don't even think we played a successful session. To memory, I offered to GM, and three friends made characters. We played in my basement, around an old table I would eventually go on to inherit as my dining room table. In fact, I'm writing this section on it now! I didn't know how to GM, so mostly just fumbled with improv, while not knowing how to prompt the players for rolls or how to challenge them on, well, anything. We gave up on that quickly.

Later, in 2015, I enrolled in Lakeland Community College. I met a guy there, Tyler Legg, who asked me "if I felt like a creative person," as an awkward segue into inviting me to play Dungeons and Dragons 5e with him and some other friends. I accepted the invite, and joined my first competent group! Tyler led me through character creation, as well as the rules. I was joined by a bunch of other twenty-somethings, and we played a sandbox campaign, roughly from levels one to eight. Tyler was the game master, and I was joined as a player by Matt and John Talbot, and Will. We played for a few months, and the campaign eventually fizzled out due to lack of direction. I learned a ton from Tyler, who continues to be an inspiration in my GMing to this day, even if we're no longer friends. He eventually showed me Call of Cthulhu, through a duet of one-shots. The first one was a nine-hour marathon session with one pizza break, and plenty of player deaths. The second one was an eleven-man session, while I was visiting from college.

College

I had made some good friends after moving to Columbus, OH to attend the Ohio State University. Naturally, this was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Tyler and the Talbots, simply due to distance. However, I made fast friends with Ben L., David H., Tommy S., and Nick T., and while shooting the shit walking through campus, we all mentioned some interest in D&D. Ben had played before, and I was adept at the rules, so we agreed to start a campaign, with Ben GMing and me helping teach the others the rules and spot-check Ben's rulings. The campaign started at level 2 and went all the way to level 20, and was an Evil campaign, with us playing as various types of baddy, but nonetheless saving the world from Elementals and Demons and flamboyant tiger college-deans. It was a good time among friends, with plenty of injokes made and laughs shared. Notably, Ben organized the campaign into character arcs, where every player got a ten-to-fifteen session spotlight on them, and their backstory plot. The campaign ended joyously, to much celebration as well to the monumental feat of running a happy 1-20 on the first attempt GMing.

At some point along the way, I brought David home to meet Tyler and play in that eleven-man game. It was here where I suddenly learned just how vital soft-skills are to GMing. Mastery over rules, ability to improv, and a richly decorated world mean nothing if you can't wrangle all eleven players to stay on-task, which Tyler was expertly able to pull off. He used a bell and chimed it whenever he needed everyone's attention at once. While it might seem silly, it was very effective. The fact that I can remember it so clearly is a testament to how formative this session was towards my journey understanding the art of GMing.

I ran a silly one-shot for Ben, David, Tommy, Nick, and Bailey, Ben's girlfriend at the time. It was set in a world inspired by The Way of Kings, specifically the Parshendi lands. The players got to work under the eye of Duke Legg, and fight over some forgotten piece of badland, where something powerful was hidden. I got to employ my first and favorite tactic for the fight -- open air approach, with enough space for adversaries to trade words before trying to kill each other. I also took inspiration from The Way of King's shardblades, having the enemy bruiser materialize a sword-sledgehammer to start hacking away into the ground, down into a buried city where the central macguffin was buried. This got the players to panic and was what forced them to approach the villains, which I think was a successful attempt at throwing them off their plan.

Speaking of throwing them off their plan... Does that sound a little adversarial? Well, perhaps it is. There's a few ideas here -- if the players form a team, does that mean the GM forms the opposing team? For my first campaign I certainly conceptualized of the game like this. With fair play and balance in mind, I'd always try to play hardball with my players. Putting them in situations where fighting their way out wouldn't win, putting them in awkward situations. Putting the hidden fiction first, the fiction that I had preplanned, with intended solutions for them to (fail to) find.

Starting to GM

I graduated college in 2018. I got a job doing software, and started planning a campaign. I moved in with David around this time.

My first campaign, I had Ben, David, and Bailey as players. I didn't have a great relationship with Bailey, which led to some struggles planning content to suit her. But nevertheless, I tried to compromise, and I think the content was worse for it. Ben would say that the campaign was good, but I don't look back upon it so favorably. I went into it with the grand design to match Ben's achievement, doing a proper 1-20, in a fully-custom world. However, I wasn't a huge fan of characters arcs, so I made the world a bit more an open ended sandbox, with an undead theme and a big demon badguy, with no obvious way to kill him. The idea was to get them to level fifteen or eighteen or so and rally enough forces in the meanwhile. I didn't give any clear directions, but did give plenty of plot hooks and interesting, well-realized characters. The lack of direction started to really hurt by level nine, and we ended the campaign prematurely at level twelve, sprinting to the end and just fighting the BBEG in a straightforward fight. COVID split the campaign up, and during COVID, we all moved in together as roommates, and started experiencing some cohabitation woes. Maybe in a perfect world it would've gone better.

That said, I am still proud of many things, it being my first campaign and all. I got really good at putting the players in dire straits. The highlight was probably at level five, when the Cleric encountered a slave in a cage, staring at him hungrily in a capitol city's bazaar. The slave ended up being a cleric of Ballos, the BBEG demon guy, who broke out of prison started eating everyone. The demon was essentially Kitava from Path of Exile, with the name Ballos coming both from Cave Story's hidden boss, as well as the power word from Castle In the Sky that destroys the island. With the players caught in the city, the enemy priest caught the whole place on fire, which led to some of the best set-dressing I think I've come up with to this day. Flaming zombies, lakes of blood, the walls trapping everyone in, the noble Orcs doing their best to evacuate the rest, the Cleric confronting the rival priest and being so woefully outmatched. A running theme from then on would be 'my best content is when everything is on fire.' Each player character had an associated character from their backstory. When they eventually revisited the flaming city of Tetaco, each player got to play as their alter-ego in a one shot, whose plot was concurrent with their main characters also revisiting the city, which was just a crazy every-friend-and-every-foe crossover event. My players and myself particularly enjoyed my portrayal of the Feywild, the Plane of Ice, and the Plane of Earth. It was here where I first developed my internal world, which I've used in varying forms ever since.

Another technique which, today, I'm somewhat middling on, was the character of Thomas, and the idea that the players can simply fail to get what they want from someone or something. A somewhat shady assassin, clearly very good at what he does. Friendly yet reserved. Not divulging more than he needs to. An obvious liar. A liar who knows you know he's lying. What is the party supposed to do about that...? You can roll as many Insight checks as you want to figure out, yes, he's lying to your face and isn't even trying to hide it. I can't imagine talking to a brick wall is the most fun. But damn was it great running that character. Him being so impenetrable, alongside my philosophy of 'there is a world here, unchanging, and it is your job to navigate it,' likely led to very frustrating experiences. The character isn't helping you learn the world. The world isn't really helping you learn it. You basically have to play a shittier version of Mastermind to get any progress done -- guess what the GM already cooked up, and maybe employ some prying and probing techniques to get further information; iterate.