It would have been fifth or sixth grade when I first learned about Dungeons & Dragons. It was during recess and I went up to a couple of classmates curious at what they were doing with weirdly shaped dice and pieces of paper with unfamiliar writing. Something about it spurred my imagination and I asked my dad to pick up the Basic and Advanced versions of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) sets for me later that week. I still remember the dice that were molded from crude plastic that made it hard to read the numbers on them (I used a crayon to fill in the numbers for the sake of visibility).
I didn’t quite understand D&D at first but something about it stuck with me and even though I never pursued playing or running a campaign during my late childhood or early adulthood, I always had a passing interest in it.
Fast forward to the autumn of 2019. I had been listening to “The Adventure Zone”, a podcast created by Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy and Clint McElroy. In the podcast they play out a campaign using 5th Edition D&D rules and I was inspired by it and its sweeping adventure that I decided to run a campaign.
I decided to run the first D&D campaign from The Adventure Zone (known as “Balance”) with my wife and a couple of my friends.
I bought the base books and as I stared at them a looming realization came over me: I had absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Not that any thoughts like that have stopped me before, but I decided to watch a bunch of Youtube videos on how to be a Dungeon Master.
For those uninitiated, a Dungeon Master (DM) is the person who runs the adventure and moves the story along, while the other players (Player Characters, or PCs), interact with the world with characters the Dungeon Master controls (known as NPCs or Non Player Characters).
I must have watched several hours of videos – and then re-watched some of them again so I could understand what I was about to do. It mostly made sense but I had to put what I learned into practice. So, I setup a session and started getting experience as a new DM. This was it – all the hours looking over the books and videos were culminating into this moment.
Boy, did I suck.
To be fair it was my first time and I can’t be too hard on myself (oh boy, do I try to be though) and luckily the friends that were playing with me had played previous editions of D&D so they were able to help me along. I am getting better and I don’t follow the rules super religiously (I don’t keep track of quivers of arrows left or other minutia like that, I’m concentrating more on telling an engaging story and having fun.
So far – it seems to be working.
Written by Chris Murdock
