That First Session.

My first session DMing D&D was before I had read the rules, without a determined quest and it was with 8-10 players. (Without knowing how insane that is)

I had played three sessions myself. I understood the vague framework. I didn’t have time to roll up characters for everyone. So I got everyone to write the attributes and figured out a way to make some of the numbers different. I asked them for a name, a job and any one thing.

And for context, we lived in a house with 100 people. They were from all over the world in town for 3 months – 10 years. Most of them had not played many

computer RPGs.

We went around the circle sat at this pair of tables in the middle of our weird dining room.

“I want a dire wolf”

Someone had just watched game of thrones.

“I want a fat horse” etc.

Mostly normal things. And then the last girl. Courtney was her name. A genius.

“I want a twin”

I said what?

“I want a twin. But… the other twin is crazy”

I laughed, and instantly found it such a great decision for a story game.

“And you get to choose how crazy she is” Said to me.

Boom. The quest was on.

Now of course with 8-10 players, you had the loud ones, who knew what they were doing – Fat horse and crazy twin were amongst them. And you had the quiet ones who just wanted to be involved. Which was good because 8-10 big personalities would have been an extra nightmare.

The story went along and battle was annoying because it took forever, but without knowing the rules, and fudging over some mechanically impossible events, we completed the quest. They all wanted to play again. And I spent the next few days trying to find a quest to run and figure out how to uninvite half the players.

It was an eye opening for a few reasons.

One – 4 players is the sweet spot. Hoping that two of them are big personalities and two are quiet creative geniuses. 6 is uncomfortable. 10 will be never again unless it doesn’t include battle, and everyone knows each other.

Two – Prewritten quests are great but totally unnecessary. For the next month I ran the quest called “The missing cartographer” eleven times with different groups. And it was always different. One ended up with regicide, another ended up running away and meeting giant spiders in a forest, one befriended a cyclops. You get it. It is nice to have a framework, but some of us are way better at improvising and interacting with the players than reading and knowing all the details.

Three – People may scoff at TTRPGs, but, most will happily try it, and enjoy it.

I loved that crazy twin. She started roleplaying the crazy twin perfectly, she was always figuring out ways to stop the party from doing what they wanted, but then would also increase the speed at which they solved other things. After three sessions we had our first death, and it shocked everyone. And I think that also brought home that the story needs to include death and tension but a warning or a disclaimer could be quite helpful. The player whose character died, quit the game and never returned.

I am grateful for Mikas and Cookie for asking me to DM. It has changed my life.