LARPers

LARPers. Listed under fair use by Google Image Search. | Ralf Huels


So, this has crept up on me in the last year-and-change: I’ve been running a pretty successful, pretty fun, pretty interesting Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign with mostly the same group of players since April of 2016. The anniversary came and went without me even remarking upon it. Our game sessions have been somewhat infrequent – usually once per month for just two hours a session if we can at all manage it, with the occasional missed month due to my propensity for travel and my day job’s propensity to suck during busy parts of the summer. And, amazingly, we’ve been doing this entirely over Roll20.net, which is a very good online tabletop application which you should totally get to know if that’s your jam.

I say “amazingly” because the main impediments to me getting into campaigns in the past have been pretty much what I’ve just exactly described: A new system (in this case 5th, which I am DMing with for the first time here), vast stretches of time in between sessions that allow my addled interest to flag and thus for me to stop caring about creating the adventures, lack of face-to-face interaction around a physical table, shorter-than-average sessions that make a longer dungeon crawl – the true meat of D&D – challenging to manage. Yet, this campaign and the great group of folks I’ve played with have proven mightier than these usual stumbling blocks, and our adventures continue onward. We’ve gone from Level 1 rookies to Level 6 heroes who are rolling with tough abilities and fantastical magic items.

So what makes a good group, and a good adventure? I’ve been participating in tabletop games now for more than a decade, and I’ve learned several things that work for me and groups I run or participate in. I gave it some thought today after we had another really fun session Monday evening, and, well:
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