D&D: DM, part II
Oct. 29th, 2016 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkBad news: so many people cancelled that we didn't continue our normal campaign.
Good news: so we continued with the campaign we started the last time that happened, where I tried out being DM :)
Caveat: I only found out about an hour earlier, so I didn't have that much time to prepare…
It went well though! It only lasted ~3.5 hours, then the players arrived at a point where I felt like I really needed more time to plan the next bit. (Usually our sessions go ~6 hours, suddenly I'm even more impressed by our DM.) But until then I kept up with their unexpected actions, the creation of necessary NPCs etc. pretty well, I though. I got lucky too: for example at one point I thought it would be strange if they rode along one road for several hours without encountering any fork in the road (I had it rain heavily so it wasn't strange that they didn't encounter any people), so I mentioned a small road leading to a forester's hut, forgetting that they'd be tempted to check it out and I hadn't planned anything for it… Fortunately they had NPCs with them who managed to persuade them not to.
I want to make a world with complete gender equality, because it's my world and I say so. However, looking back at the first two sessions:
- named NPCs the players encountered: 2 male, 2 female
- named NPCs the players haven't encountered yet: 2 male, 5 female
- unnamed NPCs the players encountered: 8 male, 3 female, 1 unknown
I did realize it wasn't equal, I hadn't realized I had more than twice as many male unnamed NPCs! I'll have to put more effort into balancing that next time. Maybe it felt different because of the named NPCs the women are generally more powerful than the men? Not an excuse.
I also keep encountering things that I need to research more about. For example the backstory of the dukedom they're in is that five years ago there was a hostile take-over by someone commanding a large group of mages, so I need to figure out how many mages & how powerful they should be to make that plausible. (Fortunately that won't be relevant immediately.) Or I introduced an NPC in a wheelchair that I'm pretty sure will appear again, so now I have to research what kind of prostheses there could be available, why she doesn't have them (probably money, she's not wealthy), and how she could eventually get them. She's a cleric, I might just have her level up in the background if there is a higher-level spell she could use, or maybe her god could grant a miracle for outstanding service? I need to research the gods too, I only spent five minutes on picking one for her and I probably should understand that one better.
At least this time I know what the players want to do next time: go to the adventurers' guild, go on a (small) quest, ideally with a combat encounter. I'm pretty sure I can come up with something like that. Hopefully in the next weeks we can continue with our main campaign, but this is fun too.
Good news: so we continued with the campaign we started the last time that happened, where I tried out being DM :)
Caveat: I only found out about an hour earlier, so I didn't have that much time to prepare…
It went well though! It only lasted ~3.5 hours, then the players arrived at a point where I felt like I really needed more time to plan the next bit. (Usually our sessions go ~6 hours, suddenly I'm even more impressed by our DM.) But until then I kept up with their unexpected actions, the creation of necessary NPCs etc. pretty well, I though. I got lucky too: for example at one point I thought it would be strange if they rode along one road for several hours without encountering any fork in the road (I had it rain heavily so it wasn't strange that they didn't encounter any people), so I mentioned a small road leading to a forester's hut, forgetting that they'd be tempted to check it out and I hadn't planned anything for it… Fortunately they had NPCs with them who managed to persuade them not to.
I want to make a world with complete gender equality, because it's my world and I say so. However, looking back at the first two sessions:
- named NPCs the players encountered: 2 male, 2 female
- named NPCs the players haven't encountered yet: 2 male, 5 female
- unnamed NPCs the players encountered: 8 male, 3 female, 1 unknown
I did realize it wasn't equal, I hadn't realized I had more than twice as many male unnamed NPCs! I'll have to put more effort into balancing that next time. Maybe it felt different because of the named NPCs the women are generally more powerful than the men? Not an excuse.
I also keep encountering things that I need to research more about. For example the backstory of the dukedom they're in is that five years ago there was a hostile take-over by someone commanding a large group of mages, so I need to figure out how many mages & how powerful they should be to make that plausible. (Fortunately that won't be relevant immediately.) Or I introduced an NPC in a wheelchair that I'm pretty sure will appear again, so now I have to research what kind of prostheses there could be available, why she doesn't have them (probably money, she's not wealthy), and how she could eventually get them. She's a cleric, I might just have her level up in the background if there is a higher-level spell she could use, or maybe her god could grant a miracle for outstanding service? I need to research the gods too, I only spent five minutes on picking one for her and I probably should understand that one better.
At least this time I know what the players want to do next time: go to the adventurers' guild, go on a (small) quest, ideally with a combat encounter. I'm pretty sure I can come up with something like that. Hopefully in the next weeks we can continue with our main campaign, but this is fun too.
