I’ve been dming for a year straight, with my campaign now over thirty sessions in. Most of my attempts of dming crashed and burned after the first few attempts, and I gave up on D&D entirely. This blog actually logs that period pretty well.

So what changed? I’ve been wondering as my campaign’s one year mark is drawing closer, and I think I’ve come up with a few answers.

First, I took it way too seriously back then. I kept a whole five sectioned college notebook with a hand written table of contents like a fucking nerd! Not to say others shouldn’t do that, or that it’s a bad way to organize. But that’s not how I organize. It doesn’t work for me, but that’s how I thought the game worked. I tried to change myself to suit the game’s needs.

And that applied to the dming too. I tried to plan everything out in the same amount of excruciating detail, all long before it was even close to mattering. I overwhelmed myself with lore no one cared about, and I found the prep to be a stressful nightmare.

And so it wasn’t interesting, because I didn’t know how to make it interesting, I was too busy approximating the capital of the neighboring country. And so my players weren’t enthused, and so nothing really happened because none of us were really playing.

This time I tried to figure out how I should do it. My first decision was to format my notes like an internet wiki, because I remember absorbing page upon page of information through those and retaining it as a kid. It was how I’d study hyperfixation outside of just rewatching the source material. It’s kind of embarrassing when I say it like that but essentially linking related concepts together in a way that I can easily click through just works better for me than a school textbook.

Also, I prep much more minimally, relying on player feedback and decisions to decide how to prioritize my planning. Steering in the direction that gives the most enthusiastic response from my players usually keeps the story more engaging, and when they’re interest is so invested in the story, I get the motivation to do even more polishing to the story, ironing out details and making something I’m more proud of.

I personalize my writing inspirations too. My main dming inspirations are the Visual Novels of Ryukishi07 and long running shonen anime. Because of this, my campaign kind of seems like a character driven emotional intrigue story, but with shonen fights and the power of friendship. It’s much easier than the more High Fantasy Epics that I taught myself to emulate, and because it’s something I know better, I present it much better than I would something else.

In shonen, a lot of combat is simplified to rule of cool, where the characters featured are more powerful than anyone else by a significant margin. I use a lot of basic shonen logic when blurry on combat mechanics, because I think checking rules during session can drag encounters on. Most of the time I will allow for creative moves in combat with relevant and fair skill checks, sometimes rewarding them for their creativity with a bonus or advantage or something. It encourages them to think about what they’re doing a little more which makes it more engaging and exciting, and my combat descriptions are often lack luster because the math is difficult for me, so having the players describe their own turns and making them sound cool keeps it fun. As for how to keep it balanced when I regularly give them advantages and things that make them op? I make the enemies crazy op too. Shonen laws apply to the bad guys too, those are usually the ones with the most insane powers.

And the the visual novel works of Ryukishi are a major personal inspiration. The idea that a kinetic novel with no interactive elements being treated as a game, as you are genuinely challenged to take notes and put together information and learn is a really fun storytelling style, and the fact that his expertise is in complicated but utterly very human characters who you learn more about as you unravel the mysteries of the game itself, makes it even more powerful and personal. He writes his novels at a slow pace, taking his time with the small moments and the down time, things that help us to see ourselves in the characters, and to understand them, even when they’re not good people. It’s always amazed me about his works, especially considering how small his group was when he started. He created an entire universe because he wanted to tell a story in a game, and thats how it feels sometimes to be a dm, hearing my friends excitedly speculate on what might happen, or what they need to do, like I did as a kid reading those novels. It makes me get why someone could write the same series for 20 years, and keep enthusiastically making more.

So yeah, I basically just wanted to rant that I learned that the hole I fell in as a DM was forgetting to have fun myself, and I created a game where no one had fun. So this time I created a game where I would have a lot of fun, and I was lucky enough to get great players who have fun with me.

Swing batter batter, swing!

“Wow you’re tall!”

A friend’s character, an elf who wants to become a god.

Girl help, I can’t draw anything but Petra

“I guess we’re both contradictions in a way.”

What are you talking about? Of course I’m human

Sometimes trouble finds you