Renaissance

Twelve years after his last TTRPG session, and two or three or four editions of Dungeons & Dragons later, depending on how you count, the old man’s best friend says, “Hey, I want to play a weekend of D&D for my forty-sixth birthday at my cabin. We’ve got five people total: a lawyer, an IT guy, and someone I play FIFA with; you know the lawyer, we played basketball with him in ‘94. We can either use this new system (Fifth Edition) or maybe Pathfinder.” The old man looks up 5E and Pathfinder, and finds the new Dungeons & Dragons elegant and interesting. Mathfinder, no thanks. He is underemployed and the (first) Trump presidency is just under a year old. It’s pretty nebulous who is even going to DM this roleplaying extravaganza. The old man digs into his old plans for the last failed campaign, works for four days straight to really understand the magic system of 5E, compile several rough ideas for encounters and a dungeon, and write up a setting document that is about 1500 words long, loosely based on a fantasy East Africa (ca. 15th-19th centuries). He has scrapped the initial negadungeon and concocts an opening scenario faintly related to a Ming Dynasty military-diplomatic incident. He emails the worldbuilding and a map of the coast to the other four, and it is obvious who is DMing the weekend session. The best friend visits during the old man’s birthday, and gives him the 5E DMG. The old man has already purchased the 5E PHB. The old man has dug out his official Ral Partha Dragonlance set that he bought in the late ‘nineties, his only miniatures, and purchased several new minis, and a couple dozen bottles of paint. He has not purchased glasses which he needed to actually see the minis to paint them well.

Digital photos do not disguise flaws

Via email, the old man helps the players sculpt three-paragraph backstories to fit their characters into his world, although FIFA writes but two short sentences, one of them ignoring the setting. The old man uses a work printer to generate the sheets of his own shorthand of the very long 5E monster statblocks. The old man’s scenario is a bit railroady, but the PCs nearly always take the readily offered bait to the most detailed set-ups. There’s a bar fight (unavoidable), a caravan trip, an ambush, a tracking, a short forest crawl, and a dungeon. Battlesystem chits serve for many of the “minis,” the first time they’ve been deployed in decades. For some insane reason the old man’s scenario involves two armies battling in a system that he is new to running and is not made for mass combat; he does, luckily, chunk the battlefield. The dungeon is inadvertently Jaquaysed, to good effect. The party leaps into a teleportal to finish the weekend, not knowing where their characters are going to end up, or even if they’ll be played again. 

Reconstructed on the fly

Not all the minis were official product

But they will be. Another weekend is scheduled, months later. To concretize the tale of the party’s exploits, the old man “novelizes” the events of the first weekend, and distributes the narrative (8000 words) before the second set of sessions. From this practice flows a habit. His miniature and paint collection begins to grow, even though the face-to-face games are rare.

The old man and this crew play for a few years bi- or tri-annually, and add in another game, DMed by the lawyer, “Mines of Phandelver” and then Strahd, done with a face-to-face-VTT mix. The old man is no longer forever DM. The group adds a sixth old man to the crew, to both campaigns. The pandemic puts everything online for a while. At the peak, this club runs three campaigns simultaneously, playing twice a week online most weeks, though Strahd peters out (DM burnout) and is replaced by IT guy’s Rime of the Frostmaiden, and then sixth man's very small homemade scenarios, followed by G1 and G2, which the old man and the best friend only remember vaguely at this point. “Forge of Fury” (lawyer) and “Willowby Hall” (old man) are “short shots” run for the group. The face-to-face weekends now feature two DMs taking turns. All of these are done with Fifth Edition. 

The old man starts up a second version of his main campaign with three of the cousins from the old days. This is online, as they live now in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Florida, and California, and the campaign will last for three years, a meeting run almost without fail every other week, even with the inauspicious event of a power outage shutting down the very first session early. There's a guest appearance by the best friend and his main character. The cousins' semi-railroad sometimes takes different tracks, though the worldbuilding that each set of characters do ends up having an effect on the other group.

The old man begins running the second table in his inner city high school’s D&D club, and by the end of the year, his is the only table, as the other three teachers who DM eventually have other obligations, and the one twelfth-grader DM abandons the game for a new girlfriend. These campaigns are all done with 5E. At one point, the old man remembers mocking the era of torches and ten-foot poles, thinking that the elegant combat game that has replaced the dungeon-crawling one is superior. But he also is frustrated explaining the elaborate 5E rules to neophytes, as well as by the interminable character creation process, with far too many choice points for teens raised on video games.

Why, yes he did fall in the pit with the gelatinous cube

The old man begins running “Phandelver” for his older child and the older niece and nephew. Their murder-hoboing gets their PCs in trouble. A subsequent session revolves mostly around the kids’ PCs preserving a bear’s life in a side mission from Princes of the Apocalypse, which nobody ever lists on their favorite Campaign module. Eventually, the nephew plays solo, “Thief’s Challenge” (HHQ3), but the pressure of being the only decision-maker turns out to be too much for him, and that “campaign” peters out. The younger niece gets interested, she is given a starter box (“Icespire”), and her brother, the older nephew, and the old man’s younger child run through one of its adventures. There is a pair of memorable deaths. (Two years later, the brother-in-law will run his children through the same dungeon again, the first time he has ever GM’d a game. The old man is unsure whether the kids noticed the re-run.) Teaching the game to ten-year-olds is mostly frustrating, except when the younger daughter finds out she can be a druid linked to the stars.

As the adult campaign characters creep into the higher levels, the old man grows dissatisfied, mainly an artifact of the system. He loathes D&D Beyond spitting out four paragraphs of texts for a single spell into the VTT chat, the super-hero nature of 5E “'toons,” and combats that take an hour to resolve six-seconds of in-game time. The old man has run across OSR stuff, looking for inspiration and setting ideas: Gus L.’s critique of “Lost Mines of Phandelver”; noisms’ Yoon-Suin; Arnold K’s original “Lair of the Lamb”; and a set of Hackmaster rules. Gus puts words to the old man’s dislike of Phandalin’s cliches and crap dungeon construction; noisms’ setting book is a sandboxy backup purchased in case the main campaign ever sailed over the eastern ocean away from the railroad; at first glance, the mudcore “Lamb” seemed an insane "adventure," with nobodies with nothing getting eaten one-by-one, but the old man rereads the dungeon repeatedly; Hackmaster is a fascinating artifact, Pathfinder turned up to 11, but not something the old man would ever want to play. The old man realizes that the layered mysteries of Rime of the Frostmaiden are what he likes as a player, although he hates the anti-telegraphs of the writers, which wasted hours of session-time with debates and rewarded thickheaded play. (The IT DM cancels the Rime campaign in a period of fallow attendance by the crew.) The main campaign is brought to completion, however, after five-and-a-half years, and roughly speaking, about ninety-five sessions, almost all three hours or more. The “novelization” of the campaign clocks in at just under 200,000 words. The penultimate session involves armies battling again, though uses a light rules system designed for that, rather than D&D 5E. The cousins’ campaign concludes not long after, just over three years and seventy-seven sessions in total, its “anthology” (written by all four players contributing in rotation) comprising nearly 100,000 words. The old man swears he will never DM 5E ever again.

It's a good campaign penultimate session, yeah?