I’ve been running permutations of a Dungeons and Dragons
campaign for almost two years now. I’ve
been doing it on graph paper, doing it drunk, and doing it with groups of
people who, by geography or lifestyle, have trouble meeting up regularly. This last bit is arguably the single greatest
bar to running a successful D&D game: if your players aren’t coming to the
table week after week they aren’t going to progress through a story. My campaign in Portland ended after three
sessions, with the final session just edging into the meat of the campaign –
the first big reveal, that of the actual threat, came up and the party I put
together began to explore the dungeon that formed the centerpiece of the
campaign.
It wasn’t that the campaign went poorly. Only one of the sessions I’ve run has gone
badly so far, and that was a perfect storm of stupid shit that combined to make
one of the ugliest D&D games I’ve ever played. It’s just that I’m not good at organizing
things, and bringing people to a table to put symbols on graph paper while I
illustrate scenes with my word-hole is a draw, but it’s a draw that asks for a
big initial investment from players.
Dungeons and Dragons has an interesting appeal. Players are promised immersion in a fantasy
world if they choose to give themselves up for a time. But they’re always meeting you half-way intellectually. Some DMs run their games with immersive
narratives and flamboyantly acted characters to bridge this gap. Some DMs dress up in costume and clutch
replica fantasy weapons while they make people roll dice. Some DMs use little plastic figures to
represent play so that players have something visual to hold on to.
All of these tactics require one kind of investment or
another, the latter two a substantial financial one. I’ve just sunk over a hundred bucks into
miniatures in an effort to create a game that players can immediately be drawn
into.
I’m not sure how this will go. Not everyone who might play is necessarily
interested in D&D. And the minis I
ordered to represent players, the last fifty dollars worth of miniatures, have
been misrouted by the post office and, at this point, might never arrive at
all. But I’m still optimistic, for two
reasons. First, minis look cool. Even the dumb ones look cool in passing,
giving life and shape to characters who might otherwise lay flat on graph
paper, represented by nothing more than a letter. The other, more attractive upside of using
minis is that players won’t have to erase pencil marks whenever they want to
make a move. That means the maps won’t
end up dirty and smudge covered, and that moves won’t involve tedious erasing
and re-drawing. It means that players
will be able to complete their turns much, much more quickly and that the
physicality of their movements and actions will be considerably more
recognizable.
But the minis I ordered haven’t actually arrived yet. In fact, it doesn’t seem like they’ll arrive
at all. I had planned to get them before
I headed to my friend’s bachelor party, where I planned to run a D&D
game. So we’re filling the missing
Dungeons and Dragons figures in with Legos and pieces from my underused copy of
Last Night on Earth. I hope these minis
will still facilitate some sort of engagement, even if it’s not the kind I want
them to.
Even without the missing minis there are still a lot of bars
to actually playing this game, and it might not even happen. But there’s something worthwhile in simply
trying. Dungeons and Dragons is distinct
among games in that it’s often defined not by its successes (remember that time
the campaign went exactly as planned?) but in its failures (remember that time
that Glenn ran into a room full of spiders and we found his corpse a week and a
half later?). This isn’t something that
everyone’s interested in, and it’s definitely not something all of my friends
are into. They play board games to
win. Last time we played a trivia board
game, one of them became incredibly upset that other people were getting
questions he could answer. It’s shit
like that that makes me believe Dungeons and Dragons might be a bad fit for
this group: this is a game where dying is meant to be a hilarious, dramatic
experience.
Last game I ran with this particular group, one of them
nearly died out of the gate, wading into battle with a spritely priest and
trying to play him like a solid Tank. He
collapsed under the assault of four or five goblins and most of the rest of the battle was spent
trying to resurrect him. Instead of
being a hilarious moment in the career of Grog Rockpounder, this was a moment
where he decided to stop playing.
Fourth Edition is, in a sense, designed with this sort of
player in mind. The kind who wants to
win, not the kind who doesn’t understand game mechanics and combat roles. It’s still a game about manipulating odds,
but it’s a game about manipulating odds in a relatively predictable, rules-based
way. There are tricks to playing classes
that players can use to maximize their chances for success. Rogues can use combat advantage to deal bonus
damage and get deep, powerful hits in on their enemies. Warlords can sweep across the battlefield,
pushing and pulling their enemies to and fro or steeling their allies against
assault.
The pieces, in a sense, present a submission to the ethos of
the boardgame behind the core ruleset of Fourth Edition. They’re a nod to the fact that this is a game
with a grid-based set of rules and that you, as a player, are intended to live
or die by those rules. They’re also a
nod to object permanence: the hero you rolled isn’t just there to die, it’s
there to remain throughout an adventure.
You spent a few bucks on a piece of plastic, after all, you wouldn’t
just throw that away after one encounter.
So on maps, on physical spaces with physical pieces, I run a
Dungeons and Dragons game. In defiance
of imagination, I present my players with objects to represent their play. The miniatures that haven’t arrived yet? We’ll fill those in as best we can.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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