GM Commentary: off to a rough start

The first session felt a little rough to me. I was very rusty at game mastering, and despite the significant amount of work I put into it I was still under prepared. We had nine players that first night, which was the largest group I had ever tried to run, and it was a bit daunting, especially having half of them be brand new to the game, and the rest unfamiliar with 3.5 edition rules.

I'd rolled up eleven 3rd level characters, one for each of the basic class types, so that everyone could choose a character of their liking. A few people already knew what they wanted to play, the rest had to sift through the leftovers. The ranger and druid options were left behind, ripe for reuse as NPCs as needed down the road.

In retrospect I was overly ambitious when writing the backstory for this campaign. The whole campaign started with a request from Kat to play D&D on her birthday, and I said that I could put together something small that would probably just be a one or two session game. Of course, once I got the GM juices flowing I couldn't be satisfied with just a simple dungeon crawl.

I threw together some ideas from various Dungeon Magazine articles, d20 Open Gaming License content online, and some themes from my favorite novels. In particular I drew heavily from the George R.R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire series, with it's deep political intrigue and war-torn landscapes. Fans of Martin's work will recognize the intelligent ravens baring messages, Sir Grim as a sort of mix between the Clegane brothers, and his reavers as an homage to the Bloody Mummers. Countess Vandra started off as a nod to the Red Witch. Also I drew on my love of the Cadfael mysteries for the character of Annocs. I like really that mystery solving veteran warrior turned herbalist monk. At one point I considered basing the entire campaign on the Runebound boardgame. I'm still considering doing something like that, but maybe I'll make a Neverwinter Nights module instead.

Do you like how I created a bunch of characters in the backstory and then immediately killed them all off? Ragvar, Aeron I II and III, Merinda, Garrund, Benron, and Trogdor all make brief appearances in the backstory and then die or disappear. That must have been very confusing for people trying to follow along.

I have trouble with picking unfortunate names for my NPCs and locations. Prince Hadron quickly became known as "Prince Hard-on", and Vandra became "Princess Vagasil". Much later an NPC named Randyl was mercilessly teased as having a nerdy name. Luptonia and Jaredise are obvious lampoons of Chris and Jared respectively. Trogdor I just had to include for Kat's sake. It was either that or Malevolax, which I still may use one of these days. I've since learned to just let my players name the characters in the world. The biggest hits so far have been "Eeyore", "Kang", and "Bon Jovi".

I started the first session off by reading the backstory to everyone and then setting them loose on the world. The players were left to their own devises as to pursue their fortunes, which in hindsight was probably not the best approach. Having an open-ended campaign might work well with a close-knit and experienced group, but not when you're just starting off. The group spent a ton of time that first night just trying to get oriented and decide on a direction. It was interesting to see who tried to take the reins of command.

It became painfully obvious to me that I'd constructed the game backwards, I'd spent all my time planning the climactic end battle and equipping the nemesis characters but had hardly spent any time at all on the stuff that would happen leading up to it. I had a rough sketch of the surrounding areas and cities, and some ideas for various encounters but it was all very loose. When asked about the name of a town I basically pulled it out of my ass, that's where Halfwayton, Castleton, Norwood, Portyngton, and Khirbat came into being. The only places I'd decided on having specific scenes in were Blackpool and Higate.

I attempted to have a rules-light game, since many people were unfamiliar with the rules, and planned on running most of the numbers crunching through PCGen, a new tool I'd found online for generating characters, purchasing equipment, running combat, taking notes, random name generation, and granting experience. I also used the Pen Paper & Pixel site for generating monster lists, and encounter xp. For quick rules lookup and spell descriptions I used the online d20 resources. I even found some tools online for randomly generating treasure and town descriptions. I leaned heavily on the random name, town, encounter, and treasure generation tools during the first couple sessions.

Most everything worked, although I ended up abandoning the PCGen tools for running combat which quickly became crunchy and unwieldy. Eventually I converted combat stats into a custom spreadsheet, which had certain advantages over PCGen, but still suffered from slow setup time. I've since switched to a combination of dry-erase board for managing initiative, wound counters, and status updates and quick reference flashcards for NPC stats. It seems to be the best low-tech approach to combat.

I think what I was surprised the most about was that all but one player wanted to keep going after that first game. I truly expected it to be a one time thing or that we'd trim down to maybe three or four people who wanted to keep playing. Instead we still have seven of the original nine coming back for more and I suspect the game will wrap itself up in just a couple more sessions.