Tabletop

You read that right. Everyone’s favorite egotistical narcissist is admitting he was wrong. Well, not completely. Allow me this modicum of clickbait so that I may bask in my own humility.

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Alright, now that that’s done, this is my blistering hot take: I used to hate battlemaps, and now I don’t. But to really explain this incredible shift in my belief as a DM, I have to go into detail. A lot of detail. Context is important, so we’re gonna go through it, point by point. Oh, and as an aside, more than half of this post can be disregarded if the comparison is for pre-made adventures, as there’s an expectation of railroading and the battlemaps would obviously fit the situation already, if you can find them.

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Yeah, it’s over. A campaign that had its first session on April 10, 2018 (with plenty of prep beforehand) and ended on January 13, 2020. In a world I’ve been working on since about 2011. With characters I’ve been fine-tuning and changing and re-writing since 2015. With inspirations from music spanning every decade from the 70’s onward. A total of 98 sessions that circled this main narrative. And around 600 hours of play-time, if we are so inclined as to include prep time for players.

So, the first question, I suppose, would be something like “was it worth it?” The answer, of course, is yes. I would do it again. I would start over right now, and go through all of the same hardships. The same highs. The same lows. It would all be worth it.

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I’ve written about this before, but I think it bears a bit of repeating already: I had no intention of this campaign I’ve been running going as long as it has, but the characters and story were good, and then great, and I loved everything about it. So here we are. What was initially planned for a shorter-term story grew into something bigger, and I penciled in a rough end date of August 2018. And then everyone started shuffling around their schedules, making sure it’d keep working, and we’ve continued on our more-than-once-a-week pace since then.

So now, as the calendar turns over and a new decade begins, before I can truly plan for the future campaign, I need to end this one. From August of 2018, delayed once and story rearranged, then again with a rough end date of ‘summer 2019’, and then finally the . And now here we are, the home stretch, the bottom of the 9th, the heroes are down, but not out just yet. One final rally, and one last baseball metaphor, and just maybe these next few weeks will be a walkoff.

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As I begin to write this, I can say with the utmost confidence that a campaign I’ve been running for over 18 months is barreling towards an ending. I’m not sure if it’s the ending the players will want– hell, I’m not sure if it’s an ending I want, but it certainly is getting there. As I write this, I have ran 94 sessions, the first of which began on April 10, 2018. There were ups and downs, emotionally draining days and ones where none of us could stop laughing; there were times when someone was miserable and wanted to be anywhere else, but for those 4-6 hours on what was probably a Tuesday or Saturday night, we all tuned out the world and told a story together.

Because that’s what D&D is, isn’t it? The amount of calculations and interactive details you can get in a video game today won’t be topped with a few dice. No amount of words I can conjure will give as vivid an image as the rendering of wounds from the latest AAA game. But the one thing D&D does, that no video game can, is tell a story. Games have limits. Worlds have limits. Writers must eventually stop writing a script, and send it for editing. But when you run a game of D&D for a few friends in a campaign of your own design, those limits don’t exist. Instead, what you have, wholly unique to the tabletop genre of gaming, is cooperative storytelling. And it can be weird, but when it’s good with a few friends– it’s so very, very good.

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