I mentioned earlier this year that there was a possibility that I would I would be enlisted to run a short introductory D&D session for a friend and his son. I’m pleased to report that I did so! Unfortunately, the session was several months ago, and seems like it might be more of a one-shot scenario than anything ongoing. Such is life these days, it seems—occasional isolated sessions with months of downtime in between. Nevertheless, it was nice to roll the dice again.
I don’t know if there’s really too much to report about the summer intro session, but I’ll attempt a quick summary. I had two players: my friend and his son (who I think is… 10 years old?). They had made a go of learning the D&D Starter Set a few weeks prior, but after hitting some roadblocks (neither was familiar with any pen & paper RPGs), they asked me to help show them the ropes. So, we didn’t do anything too fancy—we just ran the first encounter or two of Lost Mines of Phandelver, and I think it went alright. Dad picked the halfling rogue pre-gen, and Son opted for the elven wizard. It’s probably not a spoiler to say the adventure begins with some goblins ambushing a caravan road, and they did pretty well for their first time! Since I only had two players, I simplified things a little, and just had them ambushed by three goblins so they could get a feel for the general mechanics of the game. I made a deliberate choice to try to avoid “talking about rules” in any kind of abstract way, so we just hit the ground running and I didn’t try to explain things like AC or saving throws until they came up situationally. It’s D&D after all—folks want to swing an axe or shoot lighting, not go through a pre-session Driver’s Ed class about the meaning of every little box and number on their character sheet!
Things went pretty well. They quickly figured out some tactics, and realized that they could avoid getting riddled with arrows by taking cover behind the dead horse in the road. The rogue was nearly killed, but they got though it, assisted by a couple fortunate lucky fumbles on the part of the goblins, who had a bowstring break, and short sword get dropped at inopportune times. They also managed to track the goblins back to their hideout, where they ambushed the sentries at the mouth of a cave. It was right about then that our short session ended when the players had to adjourn to attend a BBQ, so who knows what they might’ve found inside?
It sounds like it was a fun time for them, which was the ultimate goal of the session for me. I didn’t want to scare them off by giving them too much of the “tedious” side of D&D, like encumbrance, movement rates, or wasting five minutes to flip around the rule book looking for the grapple rules. I wanted to demonstrate it’s foremost a game about imagination, not strict adherence to the rules, so there were a few times I was pretty open about saying something to the effect of “there’s probably a rule for that somewhere, but let’s roll a d6 and say there’s a 50/50 chance [crazy scheme] succeeds. We can look it up later.” I think one of the misconceptions about learning to play D&D (or any other roleplaying game) is a sense that you’re supposed to read and internalize “the rulebook” before you’re allowed to play, and that can seem like an intimidating barrier to entry. Yes, there are times when a strict adherence to game rules is necessary or proper (a competitive tournament setting, for example), but when it’s just a first session you should probably focus on the fun, especially when one of your players is a kid at “prime D&D age.”
I hope we’ll have another session sometime in the future, but life has been busy for all of us lately, with returns to school, new jobs, and other Big Stuff, so I’m not sure if it will be any time soon. But I’m pleased to hear it was a pleasant experience for my new players!
Impressions of 5e
That session was also my first “on the table” experience with the current 5th edition of D&D. I have to admit I’ve been a bit ambivalent about 5th edition since even the earliest playtest days of “D&D Next.” I’m not sure why that is… I definitely felt a little jilted about the abrupt abandonment of 4th edition, since, despite its flaws, that was the game that got me back into RPGs, and I had a lot of fun playing it. But, being grumpy about a new edition is pretty much an RPG tradition. Heck, I was skeptical of 4th when I first encountered it, since it wasn’t my old familiar 3rd edition, but I discovered I really enjoyed it, and appreciated things like the “block-like” construction of encounters using monsters, traps, or terrain as “elements” (although I confess I don’t think I have the time, patience, or inclination to carefully build “balanced” encounters these days—I think I’ve become much more improvisational!).
Because the development of D&D Next seemed to be so focused on looking backwards at “historic D&D,” I started looking backwards too, and decided that there didn’t really seem to be any reason to play a game “like” First edition or “like” Third edition when those games were already on the shelf. This was somewhat confirmed for me once Fifth edition actually came out. Flipping through the Player’s Guide, it struck me as a notionally tidied-up Third edition, but with some of the same baggage (feats), as well as some new frills (background and… heritage? Or something?). Perhaps most off-putting, I was fundamentally uninterested in the Forgotten Realms, and not impressed by the art, which struck me as competent but bland. It seemed, in short, like a very corporate product: something designed by committee with inoffensive trade dress intended to appeal to the Broadest Market Segment Possible. That’s all very subjective, of course—I’m sure “corporate product” has been derisively applied to every D&D edition after the Little Brown Books. But I guess all this is to say that Fifth edition is Fine. But because it’s Fine, it just doesn’t speak to me.
Having now played it a little bit, I can report that… it’s Fine. I’ll happily run some more sessions of it. I’ll even be a player in a campaign, if it’s a group of folks I want a pretense to spend time with. But it just doesn’t occupy a niche in my heart that isn’t fulfilled by something else. It doesn’t make me curious or inspired; it’s not what my “next game” will be. I’m happy lots of people like it, and that it’s expanding the hobby. But, I guess my main criticism of it is that it’s vanilla ice cream, when my own inclinations are more toward chocolate chip mint, huckleberry, or moose tracks. Vanilla ice cream is great, and there’s nothing wrong with it! But when I’m looking in the freezer at the grocery store with all the various options, it’s just not what I go for. There’s a part of me that wishes I could get into the current edition—I get the impression 5th edition games aren’t scarce in the way a Symbaroum group might be. Anyway, that’s my “hot take” on an edition that’s been out for about seven years now.
I hope my apathy about the current D&D edition isn’t a sign of some kind of mid-life encroaching curmudgeonliness. I worry this disposition of encountering the “new hotness” with a lack of enthusiasm might mean I’m preemptively closing myself off to new experiences… but at the same time I’m no longer part of an objectively desirable marketing demographic, so most things quite literally “aren’t for me” these days. I suppose musing further about this topic might be a whole other post for another time.
But you know what I am excited about? There’s a whole batch of new LotFP releases out there, just waiting for me to find some extra cash to import a bunch of weird books from Finland!