Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dungeons and Dragons and Great Success Says Borat!

Dungeons and Dragons happened.  It happened, and it was glorious.

There were problems – any decent D&D game is just rife with problems and solving those problems is where the fun of the game comes from.  Players did unexpected things, they didn’t move with the story the way I’d hoped they would and getting to know the rules of the game took a solid half an hour.  The first encounter took three hours from set up to finish – not unbelievable, considering there were six players, but still pretty heavy, even if t was for a group of, by and large, non-D&D players.

And frankly, the minis?  Made a huge difference.

Even though pieces from Last Night On Earth ended up taking over for D&D minis, players remained raptly focused on the board in the moments where they snapped back from table talk.  The combat was readily trackable and comprehensible and the maps made for a nice, neat playing surface bereft of ugly pencil marks.

The end result was a group that, even when they were distracted or rolled poorly, remained engaged.  They could always come back to the board, pick themselves out of the array of characters and make their next move.  That the group consisted mostly of gamers and that Fourth Edition strongly resembles a tactics game should be mentioned, of course, but the lightest gamers, the most board gamer oriented of the party, were those most engaged.

So the encounter went well.  Very well, actually.  But what really surprised me wasn’t that.  It was that, after the encounter, my group began to get into the actual roleplaying of talking to a tavern keeper.  Granted, we were all drunk, but people who didn’t know Dungeons and Dragons from Settlers of Catan were asking incisive questions, trying to uncover what was going on with the group that had attacked the caravan they were protecting and scoping out the town.  They investigated corpses with aplomb and, when it came to getting back to the caravan, they actually got into questions and rewards.  It ran better than all but one of the sessions I’ve run to date, and if it had continued on a weekly basis, it would’ve continued running well.

I’m convinced the minis hooked the players in, but a lot also has to be said for a group that wants to be playing a game sitting down and just having fun with it.  A group of players who want to get into trophy one upsmanship so that one of them cuts off a kobold head and hangs it from his belt and another wears a bunch of kobold dicks around his neck is going to have some great table chemistry, even if they’re going to get some stares in town.  Occupying the characters and fleshing them out is a huge part of falling into the game.

One of the players, the bachelor boy’s brother, took his character, for example, and invented an entire back story based on his views on what a repressed homosexual rogue might want to do after growing up scrawny and dexterous (gain mass and open up a gym where bros can really be bros).  His character, named by me, actually had the most Jewish name I could think of at the time, so this turned into a fucking hilarious incongruity that made everything his player did hilarious.

Another player, shafted into playing a halfling, jumped on to another player’s shoulders and rode him, through around five or six skill challenges, until he tired of riding his metal steed around.  This let me work in a few extra skill checks during the battle while also giving me an outlet to reward players for creative play, which is possibly the best part of being a DM.  Controlling monsters and telling stories is all good and well, but letting people break the rules for creativity’s sake, coming up with a new way to codify that “violation,” which really constitutes more of an improvement, then giving them bonus experience points and combat advantage for doing unexpected things is a good time for all.

The only real issues came from the long term players who, as before, spent a lot of time playing at PAX events.  Accustomed to GenCon DMing, one of them played rules mongering again, while also metagaming heavily.  He pulled the early move of complaining that rules were being arbitrated incorrectly, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but represents an ethos that doesn’t quite fit Dungeons and Dragons strengths – D&D isn’t about a ruleset so much as about using a ruleset as a frame to promote player interaction.  When he was in the encounter he was engaged, but poor rolls made him turn from excited to sullen quickly, and after the encounter he complained that I spent too much time describing things – most of what a DM does, but a valid complaint in many ways as well: I do talk a lot about each hit and miss and movement.  I want to give my players a story.

In the end a lot of groundwork was laid in a relatively short session, and while everyone needed a break at the end (three hours sitting down is a long fucking time) everyone ended the game with a smile, or Bostonian approximation thereof, on their face.  Even my rulesmongering player seemed happy, more or less, with the encounter and, once he entered the bar, took off his dick necklace and talked to NPCs.

What shocked me most wasn’t that minis helped to address combat disengagement in large games.  That was something I expected.  What shocked me most was that players got into the skill checks and conversations in the game as much as they did with little to no prompting from me.  I had my players rolling checks from the get go, and within three hours they were streetwising it up in the shithole burg they ended up in, making religion checks to uncover the nature of religious symbols they found on corpses and scrying those symbols fruitlessly for magical energy.  The minis did more than just give combat a set of structure and rules: they got players into the meat of a Dungeons and Dragons game: the moments between combat.