on D&D

So a hundred encounters in old school hack seems a bit much. I got about 5 down on paper, uploaded 1 or 2. Maybe I'll upload the rest and put the monsters I created in the bestiary. But what I've found that I'm looking for is a return to the D&D world that I had so much fun and so much pain running. I'd like to recapture that feeling, and I think I've finally found the way.

Play D&D.

I quit because I was spending too much effort and putting too much of myself into preparing the game, only for sessions to feel flat and lieless. I blamed the mechanics, but for the first half of the campaign, where I stuck to the rules for the most part, we had fun. Things went downhill when I tried to halfass some mass combat rules for the invasion. How cool i could have made the invasion, with ballista bolts and cannonballs hurtling through the air, the PCs sent by Admiral Browncott on special operations to cut off or disable key points in the invasion force! But no, I split up the party and had them adjust to new rules and they were bad ones too. I don't think they game truly ever recovered.

But I've got off on a tangent. The point is, maybe I was doing it wrong. Maybe the encounter creation, and monsters, and all that stuff IS how you're supposed to play, and in my effort to force the game into my specific vision of good, I ruined how it worked and ended up creating too much work for myself fixing it. Maybe just running D&D as written can be fun, intriguing, full of action and suspense and interesting characters.

So now I'm challenging myself. Read the the DMs guide. Use monsters from the monster manual (but get the new ones with the updated stats.) Maybe buy an adventure, but make sure it's not too grindy. Run a game how it's supposed to be run.

Now that I think about it, most of my adjustments were to make the game less combat centric so that my players (Tommy, Jessie, Mark, Ariel, and Kendra) would have fun. They didn't seem too interested in combat, getting bored when fights dragged on too long and pissed when enemies dealt too much damage. (Who can forget the moment Kendra's character was knocked unconscious, only for me to realize that I was calculating damage wrong and her character was fine? I still can feel the pen hitting me in the forehead.) I can live with adjusting combat slightly, to include easier-to-hit foes that dealt more damage but died quicker. I might even break out the half HP for all monsters rule if we start going and it's bad. But I'd like to start again, and go by the book this time.

That'll require reading the book throroughly. But it'll also require player buy in. I'm not gonna run a tactical game where everyone's supposed to know their role in combat if all everyone wants to do is deal craptons of damage. Or maybe I should, and teach them the meaning of tactics.

But the tactics are only half the problem. My narration is missing details. I don't describe what's going on so much as summarize it. I feel self-conscious trying to describe a scene as if I can see it, hoping to build a similar image in the player's minds. But if I don't do that, everyone will have a different, vague image. The world won't seem real, and interactions will not be as meaningful. I have to learn to describe the situation, the people, the environment. I should start by giving everything a history and an appearance in my notes.

No. I've done that before, and it never comes out right. Maybe I should still have a history, but ask on RPG.net what they think.

Though part of my distrust of D&D 4e is from RPG.net. Maybe I should stay away from there. If I spent all the time I do reading about new techniques on writing adventure bits, I could have something very useful to running a game. The trick is to prepare more content, rather than build up the one path I've got in mind. This way, some get used and some doesn't, but I have lots of different things the players can do. I'll try creating an adventure this way, preparing lots of different kinds of encounters and characters.

After reading through the DM's guide.