Tag Archives: DnD

Misadventures in Dungeons & Dragons: Part Three

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today my buffer of reader bounties is so well-stocked that it would be an act of supreme hubris to write any further ahead, so I figured I’d instead check back in on my early adventures in Dungeons & Dragons, and see if we can sift some lessons out of my early mistakes. It’s been over a year since I last published one of these pieces, meaning looking back is only getting more embarrassing as I get more practice – but of course, improvement comes in much greater leaps and bounds early on, when there’s so much more you don’t know, but could easily learn through experience. It’s true of most things, but especially true for the mix of preparation, performance, and improvisation that is DnD: until you’ve actually hosted a live table session, there’s really no way of knowing precisely what you will and won’t need prepped to support you.

That’s the primary divide we’ll today be reaching, as we charge past the end of The Festival of Saint Agatha, and on into The Dreadful Tale of Castle Blackmire. Saint Agatha was my first adventure ever, save precisely one session of guest DMing our prior campaign, and thus I was basically guessing regarding the level of detail I needed to write into every quest. My first takeaway was a clear “need more prep,” meaning Blackmire would include more fully realized expository copy to more easily set scenes, and also more clear mechanical definition for conflicts I had previously, foolishly assumed I could “just figure out on the fly.” I am not a master of swift improvisation; my DnD work demands preparation to come alive, and balancing that level of preparation is something I’m still working on today.

When last we left off with this endeavor, our party of Dante the tiefling sorcerer, Arachne the half-elf/half-spider ranger, Garu the human rogue, and Dylan the crustacean paladin had successfully derailed some kind of sacrificial ritual, preventing the emergence of a dark harvest god and saving their friend Lugdug in the process. With both my main side quests for the town of Nettlebarn resolved, I figured it was time to pull the trigger on the town’s concluding drama, and get the team marching towards the city of Yhaunn, which would ultimately become their home for the trials ahead.

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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 2

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m happy to announce we’re diving back into The Legend of Vox Machina, and continuing our thorough investigation of tabletop gaming’s intersection of narrative and game design, as well as how all that nonsense might be translated back to a linear adapted narrative. It’s a heady stew of variables, and involves basically everything I’m passionate about – storytelling, mechanical design, constructing durable characters, roleplay and performance, and so on. The beauty of DnD is that it can be whatever you choose to bring to it; the stories you build are limited only by your imagination and mechanical ingenuity, as you seek to collectively build a fantasy where you are both authors and audience.

Our last episode pushed the story forward significantly, using the party’s aborted dragon assault to steer them towards a new quest and new ally. Failure can be an excellent teacher, particularly when you don’t want to outright force your party into some course of action; they can always try to attack the final boss at level one, but no one should feel surprised or railroaded when the obvious happens. In fact, that assumption of initial failure is basically the core mechanic of Curse of Strahd, where my current party is in the process of collecting their own quasi-Vestiges in order to be strong enough to fight the vampire Strahd.

“Collect the sacred stones/weapons” is, admittedly, a pretty simplistic and gamified style of fantasy adventure. And when combined with Strahd’s one-note NPCs, our quest leaves little room for character development within the confines of the overt narrative. As I mentioned last time, worlds that adhere to DnD’s traditional moral alignment system are inherently averse to moral complexity or character growth – they frame morality as intrinsic, not something you develop, and there’s not much room for meaningful storytelling there.

As such, we’ve been largely avoiding conversation with NPCs, and instead have been building narratives of personal growth between our party members, through things like letting our noble-hating pirate and foppish son of privilege come to respect each other, all while my put-upon goblin Tilly does her best to keep the peace. It’s been an interesting exercise in carving out dramatic agency within the space directly afforded to players, though at this point, we’re all quite eager to get to something more specifically molded towards our journeys – like, say, how Percy’s lingering insecurities are reflected through the actual character of Anna Ripley! Great transition me, let’s go with that. Onward to the episode!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 1

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am thrilled to announce we are returning to the adapted tabletop adventures of Vox Machina, that unruly band of heroes tasked with saving Tal’Dorei from the draconic Chroma Concave. Their escapades have proven both entertaining stories in their own right, and also persistent vehicles for discussion of tabletop gaming more generally. As someone who came late to tabletop gaming from a background in traditional fiction, I have a voracious appetite for any sort of lessons worth gleaning from the ramblings of Matt Mercer and his players, and have been impatiently awaiting this return to the field.

As for my own DnD adventures, it’s apparently been most of a goddamn year since we last checked in, so yes, I have news to report. The campaign I had at that point been running for around fourteen months came to an end in late winter, with my players battling an avatar of Asmodeus atop the high tower of the ninth circle of hell. It seemed an appropriately bombastic conclusion for my adventure, which followed the classic “the enemy you have been fighting was actually a pawn of the real threat” formula to swerve (with plentiful foreshadowing, mind you) from a pan-Dale civil war to a struggle to prevent hell’s emergence into the mortal realm. Old allies were recalled, grand foes were slain, and our sorcerer used grease to make the princess of hell fall on her ass at least three separate times.

Since then, we’ve begun a new campaign, with one of my campaign’s players DMing us through the on-book Curse of Strahd adventure. This has resulted in a chilling discovery: on-book DnD kinda sucks! It’s basically a sandbox designed for randomized NPC conversations and combat encounters, possessing none of the guided narrative focus and subsequent dramatic payoffs that is DnD as interpreted by groups like Critical Role. Fortunately, my group came prepared for just such a possibility, as this time we’re essentially creating our own wholly player-side character arcs, and doing our best to remain in-character all through our active sessions. I’ve been leading the charge with this, with my experience running a whole pile of NPCs making it easy to slip into the guise of Tilly the Goblin Cleric, who is a little intimidated by the gloomy world of Barovia, but doing her best to keep spirits high and limbs properly attached.

I’ve been further solidifying our player-side development through the creation of Tilly’s Reports, essentially formalized, in-character session notes that help to keep the party on the same general page dramatically. I’d be happy to share those and more news of our ongoing DnD trials later, but for now, it’s past time to get on with the adventures of Vox Machina. Onward!

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