A beginning is a delicate time: Summer D&D sessions 0 and 1

I was quite surprised when an old high school friend texted me a few weeks into the summer asking for help with a tabletop game of Hunter: the Reckoning. What followed was a few hours hanging out with friends I had hardly talked to in two years (good--the hanging out part, not the two years part) and reading through the Hunter manual the following day (not so much bad as ugly). Since none of the others had ever so much as played a tabletop RPG and I had just finished DMing a game of D&D 4E, they trusted my judgment when I said the Hunter manual was a mess and D&D would actually be easier for everyone. (They figured Hunter was something like "D&D lite", and it certainly has less rules, but that also means less structure, which is generally a bad thing for new players.)

Session 0

Our first session was simply character creation; since I didn't even know what game we were playing until a few hours before, I had no real preparation at all and simply brought four blank character sheets and a laptop with the official Character Builder on it (an extremely useful tool, though not without its quirks). After character creation, though, the players asked me to start the game . . . so I put it back on the players: how do you meet? Beginners, of course, need a bit more guidance than that and had no real ideas (my own fault for not coming with some kind of hook/basic intro prepared, but understandable given the circumstances I hope), but luckily one of my players had a bit more knowledge and suggested we go with the cliche and start in a tavern. After each player spun a bit of backstory for their characters--two, to my surprise and delight, connecting themselves prior to the official start--we were off, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, through a brief bar fight and theft. Then we adjourned for the night and my players decided on our next playing time--the following evening.

Theme Theory

My first recognition was that this campaign would be very, very different from the one I had run previously. My last (and first) campaign was built on around a world and narrative arc I had been contemplating and slowly evolving for almost a year before the campaign itself started (far before I had any idea of who my players would be or what characters they might play); thus I had a good idea of where I was going from the beginning but left little room for nonlinear exploration or character development. My players were also all as experienced as myself with the game; perhaps not always as encyclopedically knowledgeable about the system, but they understood the rules and all of their own characters' abilities (and indeed all of them had DMed a game of their own at one point or another). The campaign had a strong rooting in my personal thematic concerns toward D&D: it was in many ways an intentional deconstruction of many traditional D&D trends, notably the entire basic conceit of the players as powerful characters who nobly decide the fate of the world. (As one of my players said after its conclusion: "We didn't actually accomplish anything . . .")

This summer campaign had to be different, obviously. While I had toyed with ideas for another campaign towards the end of my first, they were all founded on 4E's paragon tier and meant to continue my deconstructive tendencies--not a framework that would work well with all new players, who clearly were best started at first level in a more traditional D&D adventure (as I had myself started). And so I essentially began from scratch--but with only one day to plan before the first true session, I didn't make everything anew. Instead I looked to the official D&D adventures--the first time I ever really considered substantially borrowing from others' material. I took the village from the (now free) first 4E adventure module (Keep on the Shadowfell), Winterhaven, and began plotting a short first adventure involving an ancient ruined Keep--which also became the basis of my first genuine dungeon crawl (excluding a short cave run in my first campaign which had only one actual combat encounter).

While I couldn't use many of the themes or plots I had considered for a second campaign and I was borrowing liberally from official D&D adventures, I did set out to follow another aspect of my thoughts for a follow-up campaign: increased player agency. My primary dissatisfaction with my first campaign was its linearity and the lack of influence my players had on its outcome--while some of this was the point (they weren't the ones to save the world), I wanted them to be able to influence their personal stakes, which also necessitated their personal stakes be a much bigger part of the campaign. I haven't quite gotten to this yet in the summer campaign's actual play, but it is a major consideration of my plans for the future.

I also want to cater to my players' desires more, and this I have been able to do more quickly: during character creation one of my players looked through the Monster Manual and found the "frog monsters" (bullywugs) hilarious; I noted this and made the first true enemy the party faced on the way to the Keep a tribe of savage bullywugs. (The player on figuring out what was attacking him: "Are these those frog things?!") My players seemed particularly amused by the idea of monstrous gnomes as well, which led to my deciding that the ancient wizard whose laboratory they would find in the ruins of the Keep would be a gnome.

Session 1

Due to my limited time I didn't get the power cards (an almost necessary tool for 4E, in my experience) finished before the session; therefore I simply brought index cards, made a few examples, and gave them to my players to do themselves. This I think was actually helpful (despite my replacing them next session with better printed ones) because it forced my players to actually read each of their powers all the way through, and although they still didn't have a complete grasp on the rules and terminology and thus what each power actually did mechanically, they did get a better idea of their capabilities. (One of my players picked up on his chosen encounter power being an immediate reaction and asked if he could use it in our first combat when he was attacked; I hadn't even remembered he had it.)

Not so successful a mistake was my lack of planning for player eventualities; for some reason I have a tendency to come up with a plot or way for things to play out (itself not a very good habit as a DM) and then not develop the necessary justification for it to players. (I just tell myself that's a small thing I'll get to in time--and then rarely do.) This is the realm, of course, of hooks; how to get players to bite on the adventure you've prepared. Coming off an extremely linear campaign in which there was rarely alternative courses of action (in a way that mattered to the general plot of the campaign, at least), I'm still rather inept at making hooks work well, especially in the more open world I'm trying to present. Nonetheless, players generally make up for such DMing ineptitude by recognizing a plot hook when they see it (even if they haven't gotten enough justification for their characters to pursue it) and eventually biting just because they realize there's nothing else for them to do (which is helpful for the DM but obviously quite damaging for player immersion).

Once on the quest, however, the path became linear and things proceeded more smoothly. I tried to gradually introduce the aspects of 4E combat through the first encounter (with a bloodthorn vine and a group of bullywugs), and while the party rouge would wait until next session to figure out how sneak attack worked, everyone seemed to get a decent handle on how combat worked. I even managed to introduce some of the various types of terrain and obstruction (a favorite toy of mine).

Tools

This is my first time using miniatures; I bought some near the end of the school year simply because they were cool and cheap, and I only use them for player characters (or otherwise important characters that I don't have a token prepared for, such as the wizard's summoned fire warrior in the second session). I'm still somewhat split on the idea of minis: obviously they're cool-looking, but since there's intrinsically less choice than with custom tokens (especially when you have as few as I do) I worry that their image will overcome the internal image of the characters in a way that custom tokens don't. So far, however, this doesn't seem to be a problem, even with my players having barely experienced role-playing before.

I've continued to use custom tokens for enemies and NPCs. These are simply 1" wide washers (at their outside; washers are measured by the diameter of their interior hole, however, so buy accordingly) with images formatted with RPtools's Token Tool pasted on top. This time I've also added a second image on the bottom with a red ring to represent bloodied, which is both a nice visual reminder and a reward for players who enjoy flipping over the token when they bloody a monster. The images are also glued using liquid Elmer's Glue instead of a glue stick this time, which is much stronger (no more problems with images always falling off as we did with my first campaign) but also can cause warping and/or strange discolorations (my set of tokens for the second session all somehow ended up color-shifted green after gluing).

My combat maps are drawn on vellum graph paper left over from an old school project; the sheets are 11" by 17", marked off in one-inch squares, which is generally sizable enough for any normal arena and when folded in half fits neatly into a standard file folder. I generally create a general layout of a map on the computer with a tool such as Ye Olde Map Maker (an online flash program) and then transfer it to the paper pap and draw in details with pencil. For this campaign I've also begun retracing the pencil in pen and then erasing the pencil to make a cleaner look and maps that I can if necessary draw notes on in combat and not worry about erasing the underlying terrain.