I however resolved that although I accepted my nerdom, I wasn't yet a geek. After moving to San Diego, I realized I was a lot more normal than most of the people I met at church. I will admit that people do rub off on you the more time you spend with them. It was not long before I found a gaming store where you can play and buy games. I was able to play Mechs vs Minions, Firefly Adventures, Munchkin Panic and Mysterium. A lot of these games that I was playing with my friends were fun. I had another friend that was very much into anime. I already owned a lot of Studio Ghibli but my friends introduced me to lot of new shows that are awesome: Cowboy Bebop, Hunter x Hunter, Grimgar: Ashes and Illusions, Akame Ga Kill, Boku No Hero Academia, Your Name, A Silent Voice and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? And yes, you read that last anime's title correctly... It was a weird time in my life.
With that being the setting, I want to say that with all these different forms of entertainment I truly enjoyed them. The difference between all of these nerdy and geeky habits and what comes next is that I joined the cult called Dungeons & Dragons. I never really understood what it was and there is still absolutely no way that I will wear a costume or cosplay when I am playing. I have standards. The amazing aspect of D&D is your imagination makes the experience whatever you want it to be. You can try to do anything. All you have to do is roll to see if it is a glorious success or "falling on your face" type of failure. D&D at its core is a tabletop game where you roll dice and have stats that influence your rolls based on strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. The other aspect of D&D is roleplaying. The true difference between everything else and D&D is fundamentally, you are watching or interacting within built worlds. You are passive observers. In D&D, you are creating a character or a world with its own backstory, motive and style. The dungeon master is the main narrator for the adventure or campaign. He is responsible for weaving your stories together and giving you obstacles that will become the foundation to your character's legendary tale.
I started D&D by playing a tiefling rogue assassin. Tieflings are the spawns of devils with horns and a tail and solid colored eyes. My character has Mauri facial tattoos that would remind people of Darth Maul. He was raised as a mercenary in the Thieves Guild so he has an insatiable curiosity about his infernal heritage and the Underdark. The more I played, the more fun it became as we survived many sessions as our adventure continued to grow. Some of our group left to go back to school but wanted to keep playing. Our DM didn't want to mess with Skype but I was open to the idea so I decided I would try my hand at being a DM. This was the birth of our second campaign. I had many questions about how to start so I ended up getting a few manuals and started watching a bunch of YouTube videos and eventually found my own way or style as a brand new player and DM. The only negative ramification was that I also saw how much I was missing out in my experience due to the group that I was playing with. I wrote an email to a prominent DM named Matt Mercer and I feel like it explains it the best, rather than trying to rehash it:
--------------------------------------------------------------
Matt,
I am currently stuck between a rock and a hard place with my D&D group. I only started playing around 3 months ago and fell in love with the storytelling and the opportunity to create your own sandbox and make something that you as a player love or you as a DM experience with your players together. I began playing with a few friends and as they moved to different places, I started a separate campaign with them, myself as DM. Our original DM didn't want to make the effort involved in digital DM-ing which I completely now recognize and respect his decision after doing it for about a month.
I started our campaign by not having them create their characters until we had discussed the world at large so they understood what I was willing to do story-wise and generally what to expect. That helped them to then develop some amazing backstories and connections between PCs that has been awesome to use.
I had a lot of questions so when I asked our original DM, he referenced me to Critical Role. I started watching your show, Critical Role, from the beginning and it has been pretty epic.
The root problem I am facing personally being brand new to both D&D and DM-ing is that the majority of my PCs are still relatively new to D&D as well and it is a large group - 5 in person and 2 Skyping in from another state. I struggle instructing/engaging my PCs in the communal nature of the story. I feel like I always have to ask what they want to do and they immediately reach for their dice when I am hoping to engage with them or they engage each other socially. They struggle to roleplay and dictate what they want to do and it has been taking away from my perceived notion or expectation of how much more this experience can be:
I am looking more for what you describe the role of a DM to be. He/She is to have a story and give it to the party so they can make something new with it and give it back to you - many times as something you don't expect - asking for what's next... My group simply looks at the story I have crafted and instead of interacting with it, they hand it back to me full of arrows and covered with spell scorch marks, as if I was manning the throwing arm of a bucket of clay pigeons for them to take aim at all ready to go. As a DM I feel like I am being robbed in my experience and that the world I have created is simply being transformed into being full of punching bags or target dummies.
Do you have any suggestions on how to better connect with newer players to help them understand the collaborative nature of D&D instead of just having a DM providing you targets to use your spells and make attacks on? I am trying to create A WORLD for us to play in, when I feel like all they want is a gun range.
In the original campaign, we still struggle with balancing our party, being a mix of characters where some want to investigate and interact with the world and others that are clearly just a bunch of murder hobos. In my campaign where I am DM, the party still has the same issue of always wanting to steal from people or to kill without a second thought of developing the story - which if they were willing to do, would make it less of a burden on me as the DM and more fun for everyone as a whole.
I even went so far as to try and inception this concept into the PCs by allowing for them to use the downtime activities between actual sessions to improve their characters and earn some gold. When they wanted to research things that were pertinent to them and their backstory, I would dive into D&D cannon to find related lore that I could weave their individual motives together to build more of their bond as a party. As they adventure more and face villains, they would realize all of this affected each of their individual backgrounds. I went so far as to tell them that if they shared their information openly it would benefit everyone.
Still, they ask to go off and do their own things instead of moving together as a party and won't work together even when I prompt them that it would be for their mutual best interest to do so. Instead of solving the problem of them not having personal backstories, now they are missing the fact that they all exist in this world together and by working together, all of their desires will be resolved over time as a TEAM. One of the characters as a level 5 wizard wanted to take on a paladin boss and his hunting party by himself and another character wanted to steal a ship from a group of 15 armed smugglers that were providing them passage by initiating a surprise attack on their captain below deck - both situations would have obviously ended with their characters dead. I stopped the game briefly to explain that combat benefits the larger party early on in the game because you have less health and only have one turn to attack compared to all of their attack rolls.
Is it wrong to kill their characters now that they are finally invested in them to illustrate the point that this isn't Diablo or a FPS where you do it all by yourself? How do you help players get into character or illustrate the benefits of working as a team? The biggest struggle is to get them to roleplay period and have social interactions that would create those beautifully hilarious and amazing moments that only come from conversations between PCs or between PCs and NPCs.
Any suggestions or ideas would be extremely helpful because I am at the point where I almost want to quit DM-ing and just go back to simply being a player because it can be overwhelming and I am not getting the "mutual" aspect of the storytelling back that I am looking for. It feels fruitless creating a gift that is being shot at until it is full of holes. It almost feels like I should just write the book instead of playing with my friends because they just don't get it. It's not that I want to railroad them into MY STORY, it is that I want to railroad them into ANY STORY. They are missing the major component that D&D is storytelling and there is supposed to be dialogue and not just dice and spells and weapons and stealing.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Again, I felt relatively justified in writing to Matt because my experience did lack the social and storytelling aspects. After a few more sessions, I was able to coax a few of my players to roleplay a bit more when I began treating their characters as breaking the fourth wall or as crazy by my non-player character that they would interact with. There were some players though that lost interest and wanted to change their character and instead of talking to me and working with me to write them out peacefully, they chose to commit suicide mid-game. I think this partially reflected poorly on me but more it reflected a lot on their connection to their character as well as the other people at the table. Nowhere in D&D does it actually say in the manuals that it is a roleplaying game. It by its very nature is simply a dice game to resolve interactions, both physical and social.
The reason I wanted to write about D&D was not to say that I am a nerd or a geek. I came to terms with that and that's okay. It was to say that I was going through a really hard time in my life and the power of creating a world and scenarios and reacting to situations with friends was something that helped lighten the situation. It kept me waking up with a smile on my face because of the adventures that I had crafted or experienced. It was a way that I could do that for my friends. I now live in a different part of the country and I find myself trying to make a new friend group but I can still create things using the building blocks left from these adventures. I am probably going to write a short book series using our characters and their adventures to save the world and it is going to be amazing. Happiness is an emotion that you experience through choice not circumstance. I was creating my own happiness through my imagination and shared experiences with friends just hanging out, laughing and making memories together. We were new so there were growing periods as well but I finally realized why so many people love this game. If you haven't tried it before, all you need is some dice and a good storyteller for a DM and a character sheet and you are off and running. Tolkien said the following when it came to fantasy, "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!" This is my invitation to you to escape and create your own happiness.
No comments:
Post a Comment