Warning! Gaming nerdity ahead.
Back in early December 2024 I reconnected with an old friend from college. We were reminiscing about the good old old days when we gamed all night on the weekends.
“You should start up a game!” my friend quipped. “I know some guys who would play and we could do it online.”
And thus started my return to the DM saddle.
We went back and forth on what we would play over the next month. We ended up settling on a fantasy campaign. It is the most popular genre by far. And given the boost in popularity of the genre by Peter Jackson and his Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, just about everyone on the planet knows the tropes and what to expect out of such a story. That’s not to say you can’t go in different directions with the fantasy genre – there’s cozy (Winnie The Pooh), epic (Lord Of The Rings), low (Conan The Barbarian), high (King Arthur), urban (The Dresden Files), dark (Elric), grimdark (Game of Thrones) and fairy tale (The Chronicles of Narnia).
Next up we needed to decide on the game engine we were going to use for playing the game. My preference would have been using Worlds Without Number as the game engine but ultimately we ended up going with Dungeons and Dragos 5th Edition. D&D 5E is considered to be ‘the world’s most popular role-playing game’. And for the most part, that’s true. But that is only because it started the RPG industry and has had the most media attention (much of it negative, which only made it more popular). There are TONS of other rulesets and settings out there covering just about any type of scenario you would want to play. Sci-fi (Traveller), western (Boot Hill), pulp (Two-Fisted Tales), post-apocalyptic (Fallout), espionage (Mission Impawsible), soap operas (Pasión de las Pasiones), even one about the TV show Dallas.
No matter what type of story you’re into there is a game engine / setting out there for it.
Things moved along for a few more months, which brings us up to tonight. We gathered other players and finally had a ‘Session Zero’ this evening. Session Zero is when the players and Dungeon Master (or DM – that would be me) sit down and create characters and discuss the campaign. We get a group consensus of what type of character each person wants to play and how well their characters fit in the group. You’d like a group of characters with different abilities ad skills, as defined by the game engine, to over lots of different situations during the campaign.
For instance, going back to Lord Of The Rings, the Fellowship that forms to help Frodo take the One Ring to Mount Doom so he ca toss it in is diverse. You have Aragorn, a king, Boromir, a fighter (both human), Legolas, an elf, Gimli a dwarf, Frodo, Sam, Merry ad Pippin (all hobbits) and Gandalf, a wizard. Each one has different skills they bring to the tale. The story would have been quite different if it had been just a group of human fighters.
We also cover things that are ‘out of game’ that the players want or don’t want showing up in the campaign. One thing the players don’t want are for their characters to deal with puzzles. There may be others that come up before we get started.
Anyway, I’m the Dungeon Master for the campaign, which means I’m the guy who runs the game. I create the world, and everything in it. I populate it with characters for the players to interact with. I place all the flora and fauna in the setting, along with any monsters. I set up the situations they will encounter. I set the traps to spring on the players.
It’s a lot of effort and responsibility. You hope that you run a memorable game that all the players enjoy. You hope you collectively end up creating a story that will last in the memories of the players as much as any movie or novel. But more than any of that, you hope it is fun.
It has been several decades since I’ve been the DM. I may be a little rusty and I haven’t run D&D 5E before. Several of the players have been the DM of their own campaigns, and rarely get to be players. I want this to be an enjoyable experience for them.
No pressure, right?
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